macOS Tahoe
apple.com
apple.com
There's SO much padding and wasted screen real estate, disjointed looking floating inner panels, window corners that are so rounded you see gaps in full screen apps, inconsistencies everywhere and - well, I could go on.
Basically the vibe I get from it is that they think their users are dumb - they won't care about things like this and that they want everything to look like a preschoolers tablet.
I'll think I'll never update and just keep using Sequoia until I switch to Linux.
But it's going to be the last major OS update for my device, so I won't upgrade. I don't want to be stuck with a half-assed version.
I don’t think the icon situation is enough to keep me off the release, but agree that the design is just kind of a mess and not my taste.
Last time I did this was ... the version that removed 32bit compatibility, I think?
It sucks if you buy a new mac which isn't supported by older macOS releases though, so maybe don't do that for a year or so. I guess you sometimes just have to put your new Apple device in storage for a year until there's functional software.
As someone without an iPhone and who doesn't really use included desktop apps, there are simply never any improvements in the OS for me, only regressions.
/Looking forward to macOS Fresno.
I'll update my phone because iOS jumps are bigger in terms of functionality. But 14 years in, OSX just doesn't have a lot of new bells and whistles that I care about. The last time I updated, I was only excited about getting Sidecar functionality so I could dual-screen onto my iPad. When a minor feature like this is the most memorable, that's saying something.
I think the only thing that would get me to update would be notable AI improvements. But seeing what I've seen of AI on iOS, I'm in no rush.
I installed tahoe in a virtualbuddy VM to see how it was before running on my main system... and.... I will be definitely be keeping Sequoia for a while (at least a year, probably).
If the situation does not improve in the meantime, I will probably switch to a framework laptop running cosmic desktop or something like that.
Do you see anyone that looks like you, doing anything that looks like what you do? I don't and I can't remember the last time I did.
It seems to be a lifestyle brand now for people I have little in common with.
At least with Linux there's the possibility that you can make it your own even if it's not that way right now.
You mean you are not an ethnically interesting person with a head full of colored hair wearing ethically sourced pre-aged linen sipping responsibly grown coffee with a serene smile facetiming even more interesting people without any worry about any real problems in the world?!
1. the way window UI elements float in bubbles on the top over a white background is horrible. It looks amateurish.
2. Icons look low detail and blurry. At first I thought they were using low resolution placeholder icons, but no, the layered diffused glass effect just kind of translates to blurriness on many app icons.
3. The side bar, such as on Finder, just kind of floats there. That is fine and looks kind of neat on the Maps app as you can see some of the maps behind it, but on the Finder it is just a white bubble over top of a white background, which... is a choice.
4. The app launcher is gone, and replaced by Spotlight, which is worse.
I could go on. The point is it is bad and Apple should be embarrassed. I say that as someone who likes Apple products alot.
Do you mean the Launchpad? (I've never used it; but always use Spotlight to launch apps.)
Launching seems easy enough from Finder but you never know about innovation.
So if someone accidentally triggered Launchpad and realized they could see their apps, they might use that forever (not knowing you can put your Applications folder in your Dock and use it as a start menu lol).
I’m surprised to find out it was itself an Apple product; I had always assumed it was a third-party shell, akin to Norton Desktop for Windows 3.1.
Doesn't work for me (Sequoia 15.4)
I use it rarely, but sometimes I'm happy it's there.
If I had this need, it wouldn’t even occur to me to solve it with Launchpad; I would just go to /Applications in Finder and sort by “Date Added”. (Which is a non-default column, but a very helpful one, so the series of gestures to enable it for a given folder is almost reflexive to me now.)
Compared to: 1 - 4-finger pinch, 2 look for the app.
I greatly prefer visual/spatial browsing
For people who never work with things like terminals, sure. For fellow devs, it's an unusual choice unless they routinely cycle through irregularly used apps w/ hard to remember names.
Everyone talks about how CLI is supposedly way more efficient. It is way more efficient to THEM. And now we are stuck in a hell where a good deal of functionality is only accessible if you want and are able to memorize the arcane nonsense that are command names, or the design-by-committee naming choices of moronic PMs who can't stop lapping up whatever bullshit marketing tells them to
Not to invalidate your experience, but you shouldn’t need to memorize too much to use the common command line tools (although it does always help to have more experience using them).
I recommend always keeping a second terminal session open, purely for referencing man pages. You should be able to see most options easily, or be able to grep for the instructions you need.
The tight integration between documentation within the CLI, coupled to the exact software version you have installed, helps immensely when invoking CLI tools.
For the common linux tooling, found in most distros (e.g. coreutils or common busybox ops) the documentation in man pages is quite excellent.
A lot of them also lack sufficient (or any) examples, which are the things I need to see to learn. Making sense of the their sometimes (and seemingly intentionally) obtuse wording when I'm trying to do something I'm not already familiar with makes them a lot harder to parse than they need to be.
And many of the commands are extremely arbitrary. `cd` (change directory) very well could have been `mf` (move folder). `del` in DOS is `rm` in Linux. `move` vs `mv`, `copy` vs `cp`, etc etc. There's no common orthodoxy. If you are not well versed in the history of this stuff its all gobbledygook.
LLMs have been great in this regard, as they can supply those missing examples and then explain to me exactly what it is doing, oftentimes worded more clearly than the original documentation. And they can help me string together whole sequences.
If you only use 'cd', 'mv', 'rm', and 'ln', then really, there is not much to learn. Perhaps the '-rf' option to 'rm', which is how you delete directories (that are not empty). You complained about the naming, but 'mv' requires fewer keystrokes than 'move', and once you know that 'mv' = move, 'rm' = remove, and so on, then what is the issue? It makes sense. DOS had just as "arbitrary" names: 'del' instead of 'rm', for example. The UNIX versions are deliberately short for efficiency, and once you learn them, they are universal.
Man pages are fine. Just press '/' to search by string or regex, and 'n' for next match. They are also consistent: if you want a particular section, you search for it. But it is important to remember that man pages are reference material, not tutorials. If you want quick examples, try https://tldr.sh, https://cheat.sh, or another alternative.
If this is difficult, or you simply do not want to learn it, that is fine: use what works for you. But if you are a programmer, you are going to be learning tools constantly, and the core UNIX utilities are among the simplest. Once learned, they do not change. Personally, I have not had to learn anything new about them since I was 13. I am 31 now. You learn once, and you use forever.
That said, there are real examples of arcane tools. 'ffmpeg' and 'rsync' have some of the most obscure command-line options I have ever seen, which is why I keep bash aliases and functions for the things I do often. That is how you make your life easier as a programmer: learn the fundamentals, then abstract the complexity where it makes sense.
TL;DR: Learning is not optional. Whether it is GNU/POSIX utilities, GUIs, wizards, or even LLMs, you still have to learn them. Man pages are reference material, not tutorials. Learn the basics once, and you are set for life.
These are power tools, meanings they set out to solve one problem quite extensively. They’re not really meant to use as is (just like git), best is to write some alias or functions as a wrapper (or memorize the set of flags you use most).
[0] `brew install tealdeer`, then invoke with e.g. `tldr chown`.
> Man pages are fine. Just press '/' to search by string or regex, and 'n' for next match. They are also consistent: if you want a particular section, you search for it. But it is important to remember that man pages are reference material, not tutorials.
But not everyone gets the chance to do that before they are dropped in a situation where the knowledge is needed. Up until a few years ago (before LLMs) if that was your case and you didnt know how to articulate what you wanted to google (or a teammate), you were fucked.
Like with VI or with emacs. It's sooooooo easy to screw things up in a big way. Better hope you remembered to type shift-colon-Q-exclamation instead of shift-colon-W-Q!
Please, tell me how that makes any sense to anyone without a background in *nix stuff.
I did not grow up in the environment where the above incantations had any context. It was literally a bunch of gobbledygook that made no sense. Why "write" instead of "save"? Why 'quit' instead of 'exit'? In fact I had VI dropped on me quite suddenly for a job, that was a real trial by fire, and I remember this well. (And yes I can operate VI quite fine now, thank you)
I have not worked with many things they require of me either. Before I apply, I either have to learn the very basics, or I will have a hard time, unless they do not mind me not knowing but learning fast.
1. Launchpad filters based on what you type. You don't have to page through things 2. As soon as you type anything, the first hit is selected and the return key launches it 3. Launchpad shows nothing but apps. As an app launcher, it's fantastic.
If Launchpad is gone I'm going to be sad.
I still have an M1 Macbook Pro with touch strip, and my Launchpad touch strip button still works, bringing up Spotlight but with a predicate that makes it search only ./Applications and ~/Applications.
I suppose Spotlight is OK as a substitute: COMMAND-SPACE, then type to filter and return to launch. It's a little more clunky (as the search results take a few milliseconds to be assembled) but it'll work.
Cmd+space to open spotlight already worked and typing was the best option for that use case.
I do like the new spotlight experience but this feels like losing a gesture, and it does not spark joy scrolling through the app list.
also spotlight hogs resources indexing stuff all the time, completely pointless when you just want a list of apps
What if you rely on groupings to remember what you have installed for a given activity?
What if you want a quick visual overview of what is available to you?
What if you like or even prefer launchpad?
What if you install tons of tiny little apps that have a specific, if infrequently used, purpose?
What if you enjoy a little app gardening?
What if you don't like command-prompt style interactions?
What if you see value in having more than one way to do something?
What if you have 20+ years of muscle memory established?
What if the only thing you know prior is how to use your iphone?
And on another note, what is it with tech people lacking the ability to see how other types of people may want to use the hardware they paid for with their hard earned dollars? I am so sick of this awful perspective of, "everybody in the world must be exactly like me"
You don't have to "page through a giant iPhone screen", you can type and select. I used to use it all the time, without ever reaching for the mouse to do so.
Launchpad also let you change the order of app icons and group them into pages and folders; I don't think the new system lets you do any of these things.
Launchpad was focussed on a single task: launching an app. If I need to launch an app, I know I need to 99.9% of the time (I'm hedging; it's probably 100%), so there's no benefit showing me documents, web pages, and god-knows-what-else at the same time.
I nearly forgot: while I was testing Tahoe, I had a situation in which some apps just did not show up when I typed. They were in the list, they just got filtered out incorrectly. I've no idea if this was a bug or not; I'll see when I upgrade to the final release.
Yes, this is what I've been doing during the beta, and it's far less useful than Launchpad IME so far.
> If you want more precision unmodified F4 followed by CMD+1 will allow you to search only apps.
It looks like I had previously done so, and now the setting is 'stuck'. I.e. it's the default view — I can still go 'up' to search across stuff, but F4 takes me to an app launcher by default, so that's one drawback eliminated (thanks).
As an aside, I've learnt just now while testing this that F4 has an awkward asymmetrical input buffer. You can open+close instantly with two quick presses, but the same does not work to close+open. I'm not really complaining so much about this, just mentioning it!
The spotlight apps view is available for binding a keyboard shortcut directly. Maybe yours became bound to the spotlight shortcut?
I always just disabled these from Spotlight. If I want to search for files I use the search bar in Finder.
But, bringing up Spotlight, clicking backspace, then clicking on the Applications icon brings you basically Launchpad.
They've mushed them together, but there seem to be three states: Spotlight with typing pre-filled, Spotlight bare with some additional icon options, and then Launchpad, which is more Spotlight than I remember it being.
Unless there's some weird setting, that's only in Tahoe. At the very least, it's only enforced in Tahoe; I was using F4 to bring up Launchpad in Sequoia, as I have in every version of MacOS for a long time.
https://512pixels.net/2025/06/wwdc25-macos-tahoe-breaks-deca...
It looks ugly, and I have no reason why that sidebar (unlike all other sidebars) is that specific colour. It just makes no sense.
Edit: Oh My God. I just tested installing my own app on Tahoe, and the DMG looks absolutely broken with what used to be solid edges confined inside a window, now being stretched to the window-edges, blurred by the glass-effect making the header on top unreadable.
THANKS APPLE. Jeez.
But somehow the missing App Laucher made me bit sad (well, to the extent software can make one sad :)) - even though I can always switch to Finder to browse apps, App Launcher has some nice visual quality to it that makes it more pleasant to use for me..
Spotlight is way faster than that when you’re at a keyboard. I barely even use the dock, just command space and type in the first few letters of the program I want. Clicking is for people with too much time on their hands.
And okay spotlight can help fill in the blanks on dictionary searches and wikipedia info I GET IT... but my time and my mind are precious to me – if you're forcing me to use Spotlight or making it the way of searching my computer, please PLEASE do not fill my eyes and head with this time-wasting garbage.
And I have a MacBook Pro M3 – it has a camera notch hidden in the black menu bar, the text of which now disappears if my mouse isn't up there, thus giving the appearance that my screen shrinks rather than giving me extra viewing real estate. The text is not some kind of distraction when it's above a tab bar filled with a multitude of jumbled icons and an address bar with text on it. But OH! sweeping left now reveals the camera notch in the middle of a WHITE menu bar.
Just... Apple... for f*cks sake. I'm paying you. Please employ some people with aesthetic taste and judgement rather than the current cohort of yes-people and logistics wizards. Time for Tim Cook to go. The problem is at the top.
Cue "discovery" rant.
Defaults are chosen carefully, but they cannot meet every user's preferences. So, periodically spend a few minutes exploring the enormous software package that is your OS, and be happier for it.
I find this vastly more rewarding than complaining on the Interwebs. YMMV.
In the actual world.
I try to hit command-space on reality in order to find my keys.
Agreed. All of the transparency and liquid glass effects look terrible when they're displayed over a solid color, especially white. That said, they look good over top of something colorful and really AMAZING when displayed over something that's moving (video, whatever).
I imagine that the effect REALLY takes off on a display where EVERYTHING is moving, like on top of the real world on a VisionOS display. It's just out of place on MacOS when uses as a dev workstation.
I see grossly rounded corners in some apps, but I don't see the other stuff like gaps in window corners for full screen apps. I may have some config bit flipped that has disabled those.
Yeah, the new corner radius is ugly but by and large, it's not much different than before, from what I see so far.
this is what I'm seeing with Safari, WhatsApp and Chrome all maximized but with various radius on each corner.
Honestly feels like QA and release qualification are non-existent in so many organisations these days. This can't possibly be the case though, right? Right?
If you draw your own window frame, you're gonna have to update for every OS release.
I believe though that apps which have not been recompiled for macOS 26 operate in a legacy mode, and that includes the older window corner radius.
It's so bad that it's kind of fascinating. Unfortunately, even "Reduce Transparency" doesn't fix the LG update.
I recommend not overcomplicating your life and just staying on the latest macOS.
I think sime people just hate change. I am convinced that some folks complaining here will be complaining when MacOS 28 comes out and changes some OS 26 feature they have grown to like.
Your point would have been much more convincing had you refrained from this sort of pejorative assigning of motives. It wasn't necessary.
I've been running the betas to the final release and there are a number of basic affordances and system improvements that are definitely worthwhile. I will not be going back.
Having said that, while I know they had good intentions with this whole design, and probably really thought they were pursing a winner, what a massive, massive miss. This is such an aesthetic disaster that I'm just in awe. I feel like they had a huge push to do some seemingly substantial change, particularly on the mobile side, given the stumbles in the AI space, so they changed a lot of things maybe without quite enough thought.
Ugly as hell. More dead space. On the mobile side they released an update to iOS just today from the RC a few days ago that removes some of the particularly stupid animations (the app tray did some dumb thing where it expanded and shrank, and that and a few similar things are gone).
Apple has a thing against people with OCD. Or taste.
The thing is horribly wasteful of screen real estate, and as someone who’s been writing a Mac blog for over two decades, I am so happy I started using Fedora two years ago—GNOME has its flaws, but it looks nicer than Tahoe.
If 12px won’t do, try 42
Finding a laptop that works well is annoying, however.
And I run a macOS-like GNOME theme that is pretty great.
That's less expensive than the ASRock NUC BOX-225H I bought... and that was without RAM/NVMe.
Or are you using Fedora on an Intel/AMD laptop?
It doesn't exist at the moment. :\
I would pay 2x the price of a macbook for a linux laptop with the same hardware quality.
The battery life and power/efficiency of my m4 pro is insane. It's so good that it's really hard to justify using anything else right now.
They're coming. Look for AMD Strix Halo chips. They're in the comparably comfortable efficiency range.
Do you happen to know any laptop that has a) equivalent screen quality (retina resolution), b) keyboard, c) trackpad but with full Linux support where all hardware pheripherals just work?
Can't speak for the keyboard, but HP ZBooks/EliteBooks tend to be decent.
I use it for development running Fedora Workstation. My job involves spinning up lots of containers and K8S KIND clusters.
I often reach for it instead of my 14" M4 Macbook. However, I will choose the Macbook Pro when I know I'll be away from a charger for a while. The HP, as great as it is, still has bad battery life.
The ISP driver which will enable the camera to work is in the process of being up-streamed, though. I believe they're targeting early 2025 for mainline Linux support.
Is that a typo?
There’s barely 4 months left in 2025.
People usually buy them for the keyboards and trackpoint, but imo the touchpad is still pretty solid. It is a bit small on account of the trackpoint buttons taking up vertical real estate but its pretty responsive and multi-touch gestures work perfectly in my experience. I believe newer ones have larger trackpads than mine, though still not as large as a similarly sized mac.
And furthermore, Superfish didn’t affect ThinkPads. Only lower end Lenovo models.
The 2.8k panels are overall inferior to Apple's across a number of metrics, but they have a higher pixel density than the Air 13, (and has the S-tier aspect ratio of 3:2).
The FW13 keyboard is objectively pretty decent but not perfect, and is much much better than any keyboard Apple has made in the last decade, could be personal preference but apple has been making some pretty bad keyboards for a while now.
Trackpad on FW13 is OK, no one even comes close to Apple, but it's pretty decent, nothing upsetting if you're comparing it to any non-apple trackpads.
Framework has excellent linux suppport, all hardware bells and whistles generally work out of the box on every Linux distro, but Fedora, Ubuntu, and Bazzite are officially supported by Framework they QA against all three and work with maintainers to resolve issues and you can be totally confident that everything will just work. (At least work as well as it would on Windows!)
The other two downsides relative to a macbook are build quality and support. Although the FW13 is pretty solid in practice, I have dropped mine dozens of times and throw it in my bag and treat it overall rough and it has take on some dings and scratches but everything still works. But the frame is not very rigid, it flexes in lots of places, and it just does not feel as nice and solid as a macbook. And support can be hit-or-miss, like with any small manufacturer.
It's a kind of confusing choice on their part to use cheaper plastic that does this so fast.
Most "business" centric laptops work great with Linux, as long as you use a well supported distro (Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, openSuse). YMMV if you use other distros...
I have one and love it but it's not close to my wife's mac on battery life.
That just means 3024x1964. With other laptops you can either go up a step to 4k or down to OLED 2880xsomething.
Yes, the installer automatically (and reliably) resizes partitions for you. A minimum of about 70 GB for macOS is needed (anything lower is still possible but unsupported).
> You pick it at boot?
There's a default choice that will boot.
> And how “install and just use” it is?
Probably one of the smoothest Linux installs I've had in 10 years or so, since you just run the installer from macOS instead of flashing ISO files to an USB drive.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AsahiLinux/comments/1c2yasr/can_i_b...
When I was first getting my feet wet with Asahi I was using these methods a lot.
I learned that my option, for a well tested and functioning distro is pretty much Fedora Remix. So I guess I won't be able to use Elementary OS sadly. I hope Fedora is or can be made to look and behave like Elementary.
Just one more question: is my mac hardware (and encrypted data) still protected the way it is protected before installing Asahi on it? Like device/theft protection etc.
My limited exploration/search on this topic kinda says in some way Asahi Linux lives inside the bounds of macOS (even all the data is available/readable in macOS which is fine by me). Is that so?
Apple devices probably have the strongest security model offered by any otherwise open consumer device these days, so yeah: Installing Asahi won't degrade security of the macOS installation.
Note that the Linux install itself will have weaker protection, since e.g. the fingerprint sensor is not yet supported. I also think disk encryption would be much harder to set up due to Apple's boot process (if it's even feasible at all currently).
There's a bit of a pain in that I could only get Brave to run Netflix, but all that meant was that I switched to using Brave for all of my browsing.
There's no official Tor build for it, but there is an unofficial one (that I do not use)
The only real pain I have with it is that Facebook's javascript for its reels chews up RAM something horrible, which freezes the OS whilst being processed, and often causes me to reboot it
There are a few other compile/transpile bugs here and there.... but I'm rooting for the it!!! Hopefully they can get sorted out soon.
USB-C output is indeed not working but actively making progress (so actively that some of the related patches have been sent to the kernel mailing list and merged this very week).
https://liliputing.com/asahi-linux-adds-microphone-support-f...
Sound output is garbage. Webcam barely works or straight up doesn't work on some apps. The built in microphone doesn't work with common apps like Google hangouts and Zoom. All on Ubuntu (latest). Certain input ports (like USB C) don't work for certain apps even though they work fine for other Linux users and they work on my other computers.
Oh, and when I was on PopOS, the entire system froze and crashed nonstop (sometimes I would go over a day without a freeze, sometimes it would happen within 30 seconds of booting). This stopped happening for a while after I did a complete system reset, but then it started happening again. The team was completely unable to figure out the issue despite it being fairly widespread. No hardware was damaged or corrupted as they claimed must be the case.
Basically, in my experience, Linux has a ton of issues still.
Do note that the context of my comment was Asahi Linux though.
The linux distro automatically shutdown if I shutdown the VM. I am using swaylock to lock the screen when I am away.
The Framework (Intel 12th Gen) also has the added benefit of heating the house, particularly with graphics "heavy" workloads (lots of windows open in GNOME Mutter, VMs, etc).
Screen I wish was brighter, and while I don't care, it doesn't have as many pixels as retina. The fan is not bad, but louder than a macbook. Battery I have not tested well, it is far away from battery life of a macbook. But the coreboot firmware allows me to set the charging speed (slower is better for battery) and the max charge level (which I keep at 60% when plugged in) Trackpad is great though, and keyboard is fantastic.
And all the parts are replaceable, as much as the Framework laptops. I don't know why they are not more popular.
Spoiler Alert: There really isn't anything that comes close to the macbook (even at 2x price).
How about half the price?
Huawei are probably banned in the USA these days, however, the hardware quality is top notch and everything Linux works just fine out of the box. Not everything is perfect though, it all depends on what you want to do. If you are okay with integrated graphics (so no Blender or other 3D applications) but do need genuine Intel floating point single-thread performance, then give Huawei a go.
I have had plenty of Dell XPS, Lenovo things and much else over the years and all of them have poor thermal management and tend to creak if you use less than four hands to pick them up. The Huawei machines are in a different league.
As for battery life, I think you are right, but I am inanely loyal to genuine Intel and that means plugging in. I don't have problems with that.
People do get triggered by Huawei though, because the dreaded communists will steal your soul and brainwash you into hating the American way of life. So you might want to just cover up the badging lest anyone be offended. Ironically, a Huawei Matebook X Pro running linux is the laptop that is least likely to spy on you because the camera folds down into the keyboard.
The Framework is also excellent, but with different compromises: that sweet display aspect ratio for instance, but no OLED.
Same, and I've been wanting this for 15 years now ...
I'm sure people will chime in and say framework, or other Linux-first vendors but they still make too many compromises.
Speakers suck, or the display sucks, or the microphones suck, or they get too hot, or they are too loud, or battery life sucks in comparison, or the chassis feels like cheap plastic and cracks and breaks easily.
There is no other laptop on the market that beats the Apple silicon macbooks right now.
I continue to tolerate macOS just for this hardware, and the rest of the OEMs seem to have zero intention at all to trying to catch up.
Infuriatingly; I have a macbook because a couple years ago I wanted a laptop that just worked while keeping my familiar tools but it really feels like Linux is trending up in polish and macOS on the down with an intersect possibly happening in a couple years.
Then again, they may not care that much as long as they have the iPhone customer base.
I expect the MacBook to be replaced by the iPad any second now.
In my experience, ThinkPads generally work fine.
NixOS i keep wanting to throw in the bin randomly but i have to admit that when it all works, it's kinda beautiful to own - you can harness a lot of power for comparatively little spent in mental tax
However, one day when I tried to update the Nvidia driver it failed and when I tried to revert back I got a bunch of errors. My computer is foremost a tool to me and I don't particularly enjoy nor have time for stuff like fixing drivers.
Despite apple's flaws it gives me something that just works everyday.
Still got an ASUS netbook though, a market killed by tablets and chrombooks.
Go to any Linux distro subreddit right now and browse for people experiencing stability issues, random hanging, or no video on boot. Sometimes they don't mention it upfront but it almost always turns out they have an Nvidia card.
AMD and Intel GPUs have much better native open source support and (usually!) work out of the box without any effort.
BTRFS I find is a more elegant solution than OSTree for this use case, and it’s got a very minimal and polished happy path.
Silverblue covers way more use cases (not least multiple users), but the setup and secure boot encryption setup is very slick and macOS-esque philosophically.
Finally I hear from real users that the Gnome team has not just reached parity, but has actually exceeded their source of inspiration. (Partly due to the degradation of the latter, but still.)
It's pretty much the same. Click the speaker icon the menubar, bluetooth is one of the options, third click to choose a connection.
There are plenty of excellent extensions if you want something different. I use dash-to-panel to combine the system tray in my dock and not have a pointless menu bar.
> zero windows
Are you not calling the MacOS sound-panel a window? It's the same type of panel you use in Gnome!
I use both everyday and it's MacOS that's buggy, inconsistent and hobbled:
- my speaker doesn't appear in the MacOS sound panel but does appear in the bluetooth section of settings so I have to go there to connect and it works as a speaker. MacOS is literally worse than Gnome at this specific task!
- I also can't use my Mac as a bluetooth speaker but I can use Linux as one. Pretty lame.
When I click on the bluetooth icon in the top bar of MacOS it pops out a little list, and each bluetooth option has a toggle next to it where I can click to toggle.
In my version of Gnome, I click at the top bar to open a menu, then click Bluetooth On (or the name of the currently connected device). That pops out a sub-menu, in which I click Bluetooth Settings. That opens a window that lists the paired Bluetooth devices. I can click on one, which opens another window over the top, where I can click a toggle to connect it. I stare at it waiting for it to connect (it's slightly less reliable at this than the Mac[0], so it's worth watching it) and then I click again to close that window, and finally click again to close the window underneath. Actually 7 clicks!
[0] It could be the Mac is no better at this, but the UI interruption is basically zero to check and re-click, so it at least feels better, and I can do other stuff between checking.
https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1401/bluetooth-quick-...
Recent vanilla gnome has the same type of pop-up as MacOS but it does it does have one more click to expand possible connections if changing connection not just toggling.
You could use no clicks and truly no windows with "bluetoothctl connect ..." :)
> You could use no clicks and truly no windows with "bluetoothctl connect ..." :)
Sadly I change connection between my phone, my work laptop, and my home Ubuntu manually. Otherwise it'd just stay connected!
We, as user should not be beta tester.
I've come to doubt this. Literally anything Apple does gets copied (sometimes even better than Apple's version).
Their window close button with slightly off cross in the red circle was a nightmare to my OCD.
I don’t see the mere fact of having multiple radiuses alone is a good criticism of the UI. If seeing multiple corner radiuses infuriates you, how do you survive in the real world? (https://www.folklore.org/Round_Rects_Are_Everywhere.html)
Or do you think it would look or work better with more consistency in corner radiuses? I would think radiuses look best when (somewhat) scaled to the dimensions of their rectangle (and that’s where, IMO, they may not be doing things the best way. For thin, long rectangles, I think the radius they chose is a tad too large, leaving barely any vertical straight lines)
The Control Center (or however they call the drop down window with quick controls for volume, wifi, brigthness, etc) has floating isolated icons like crap.
Bring back Scott Forstall. Give him a big bonus. Let him fix this shit.
Otherwise, the code changes and actual features are probably fine.
I still have a few devices running iOS 5.x and power them up every now and then just to appreciate how incredible the interface was. Even on modest hardware, stuff felt interactive and was beautiful.
I'll begrudgingly get a couple more years out of this personal M2 Air, but my engineering team is prepping to do upgrades on some older M1 Pros we've had since launch, and after seeing Tahoe, the CTO and I formed a plan to give devs the option of getting either an M4 Pro or a Framework. We haven't launched yet, but I think a solid number of our engineers are going to opt for the Framework, hopefully as high as half.
No idea on macOS, but turn on Reduce Transparency on iOS and there’s tons of padding most of the time, but then sometimes zero padding. And I mean zero. The edges of buttons and text are at the edge of the underlying background. It’s…embarrassing.
Apple have never respected its own guidelines, for example in the early days of MacOSX there were "brushed metal" apps that were supposed to be (according to the guidelines) for small non-resizable windows. Still, there most popular app, iTunes, broke that by being brushed metal despite being a big, resizable window.
I couldn’t watch the WWDC and when I saw the screenshots I thought it was a joke. Giant buttons with weird padding and extreme transparency effects.
This is going to sound harsh but it looks like when “working” from home, Apple engineers outsourced their work to amateurs online.
I simply cannot believe that Apple is shipping an OS this out of touch with elegance.
Steve Jobs said in his inauguration speech that he slept on the floor to take typography classes and later obsessed over having great typefaces on Macs. Steve would’ve burn the place down instead of shipping a crap like this.
Remember in the beforetimes when we decoupled themes from OS updates? Wouldn't it be nice if once again we discovered this lost technology that let different users have different UIs?
1. Apple photos redesign from last year sucks and I’m already frustrated with iCloud abstraction and lack of cross platform friendliness
2. Switch to an alternate cloud photos provider
3. Find out about Liquid Glass, looks like shit, impulse sell my MacBook Pro in favor of a Framework
4. Surprise surprise, it’s actually the year of the Linux desktop. My gaming situation is way better on Linux and it does everything my Mac did. The only compromise is my need to carry a big extra battery around.
Aren’t they/we? :-)
*majority of
Well, hasn’t this been the single biggest reason for their sustained stellar returns year after year where often (or maybe most of the time) the biggest change their devices (like iPhones) used to see was the version number change e.g. iPhone 13 -> 14.
For the rest of their users — they make a noise (which is not even feeble in comparison), bicker around, lament the fact that the other alternative is Google (Windows and the Wild Linux West), and they stay. Rinse, repeat.
I'm contemplating rolling back to Sequoia.
So basically my #1 work tool will no longer work.
That’s a hard deal-breaker right there.
As a longer-term means of escape, what’s the best way to run a «full» Linux desktop on a otherwise managed Mac?
defaults write org.gnu.Emacs NSAutoFillHeuristicControllerEnabled "NO"defaults write org.gnu.Emacs NSAutoFillHeuristicControllerEnabled -bool false
I've been using this for a couple days now. FWIW
- With GNU Emacs, this seems to work just fine. Hurray!
- With Emacs-Mac port, which many people like (including myself): I haven't had any luck so far. In particular, if you (like me) like to compile your own from source, doing this on macOS 26 (with XC26 etc) will compile but the resulting binary will very quickly (in seconds to minutes) become unresponsive. If you use a precompiled binary (including Homebrew cask) compiled on an earlier macOS version, that may be fine (provided you set NSAutoFillHeuristicControllerEnabled as above).
Somehow the combination of the compiler & library (runtime & statically linked) is breaking Emacs-Mac for me. I haven't quite figured out why, and probably don't have time right now to get to the bottom of this...
That seems to be a growing trend ever since "UX designers" started taking over (early 2010s?), to the point that I wonder if they're trying to see how far they can take it.
So: that is Apple's CEO for you.
You think that flunk is smart enough to figure out a keyboard?
It doesn't look or feel modern, its ugly, inconsistent and just all around crap. God knows what they were thinking with this.
Also who on earth green lit these low resolution looking blurry icons everywhere?!
It's really atrocious on macOS though. The new Finder looks so stupid. Preview now has artificially rounded corners in PDFs! What are we even doing here.
Look how far we've fallen.
Apple's software design and quality has been going downhill for a while - but their hardware is fantastic and keeps getting better. I've been putting up with the software because the hardware is worth it, and I guess that's going to be put to the test.
For all the griping, it matters little in the face of money. People won't be replaced until sales suffer.
I mean, how do you even provide constructive feedback to such a pathetic design choice? Not that this company ever deals in feedback (unless it's a strong feedback directly to its wallet).
I do believe they are just exhibiting sheer incompetence and intellectual bankruptcy as a corporation. Is it beginning of an end? I don't know. Do giga corps even die anymore?
I just tried it and maybe I've just been primed by the internet, but by god, I did not like it.
The side-bar design is terrible and lots of application (Maps, Music, etc) always look like they have a window overlapping the current application. So even with a single window open, my desktop already looks messy.
For people like me, with a slight OCD about certain details (don't talk to me about notification-bubbles), this is absolutely infuriating.
I'll disable auto-updates on all iDevices and Macs, and just keep on security-updates for previous gen OS as long as I can.
Eww.
I feel like if you replaced all of the paper in a company's printers with transparency sheets you'd be fired because that's obviously a stupid idea that would never work. But then I guess that's why I'm not a software UI designer.
1. Old bugs are not fixed.
2. New bugs are introduced, and I have to spend hours online figuring out workarounds.
3. Old features I depended on are removed, and I have to spend hours online figuring out how to replace them.
4. New features I don't need are added and they get in my way, and I have to spend hours online figuring out how to disable them.
My workflow productivity takes a months-long hit every time Apple upgrades MacOS. As a result I rarely upgrade MacOS until it's around 3 years old and I have no choice.
It appears that Tahoe is going to be the worst example of this in a long time.
Which is why I'm moving as much of my daily workflow as possible to Linux.
The rest of the laptop was though.
The Touch Bar was awful - except I was able to get a great deal on my former employer’s Touch Bar era laptops they were decommissioning, since nobody wanted them. One of them (2018, fully loaded) is still in active use, although it mostly runs T2Linux now.
These are only a big problem if those bugs bugs are major, and/or widely applicable to different user setups, and/or very annoying.
3) is the worse though, especially when it happens for no good reason, or for novelty value.
4) is not that bad
[1] https://mjtsai.com/blog/2019/10/11/mail-data-loss-in-macos-1...
Thunderbird has the nice advantage of working on both MacOS and Linux with the same UI. It's not quite as nice as Apple Mail's classic UI (which is no longer available -- see (3) above) but it's good enough.
> All your devices, synced
> Mac, Windows, iOS, Android-stay in sync across all platforms.
Does this mean email passes through a server like Spark[1]?
I mean, even if you have no idea what's the cause, you e.g. stuff counters everywhere and when they don't match you send the telemetry with the details. Privacy is preserved and over time you get an idea what to look for.
I admit I have no idea how mail client works, but clearly there must be some way they could pinpoint it, with such large userbase..
Because Apple's (the company's, as a whole) bug -> triage -> engineering -> deployment process is fundamentally broken, and obviously has been for decades at this point.
Say what you want about MS, but at least critical issues that actual customers are experiencing tend to get fixed.
Apple seems to have some weird 'maybe someone will look at it, if they have time, after they get done implementing new features for the next release' process. (Glaring example: daisy chaining DisplayPort support)
Now I understand why plenty of old timers just leave the OS version on the MacBook that it came with. All you ever really need is the security patches.
Unless there is some specific new feature that you absolutely must need or some push factor, don't upgrade.
If Apple would open source some of its OS apps, this would probably be a non-issue, I could see people putting in bugfix PRs the second Apple chooses to open source their core apps.
I don't see them doing this any time soon sadly, but it would make macOS much more stable, and probably secure.
The more I have thought about my views on Open Source vs Commercial software, I strongly feel that infrastructure code (an OS) should be more open source, I dont see Microsoft or Apple open sourcing any time soon, but it would make a world of a difference, imagine a world where Windows XP had been open sourced, and the community took it fully over and maintained its security, you'd have a drastically better version of Windows without all the fluff, or heck even Windows 7, which some argue was the last good version of Windows as well.
I wish ReactOS was drastically more usable.
The best time to do so would have been ~2010, after iTunes revenue provided a clear monetizable carve-out.
The second best time would be today.
The number of people saying 'I love the hardware you sell me, but am switching platforms because your software is trash' should be a flare that even Tim Cook can notice.
And anything that moves MacOS closer to OSS should be welcomed by Apple -- it's their easiest (and most affordable) path to competing with Microsoft (Azure) on desktop.
We can dream.
And it's hard to pick a middle ground once they open up the OS.
At least with apps, there's a clear dividing line between this app and that app.
I use mail.app daily across phone, iPad and Mac - it's "fine" but I'd really love it to get some investment.
If only there were another platform vendor with different thoughts about open source infrastructure code. Alas.
But also, as I stuck with Omarchy, I wanted a more beefier machine, as I work all day on the laptop. So with the new machine, Tuxedo latest version, I don't have any fans anymore too, just because it's much faster and better thermal. I will eventually write these up in a second part of the article.
Now if they could just produce a touchpad as good as a MacBook's, give me 8-10 hours of battery life, and make the construction feel slim and solid, and not like it's going to get crushed in my backpack, and I'd be satisfied.
The only thing from macOS I truly miss when in Linux is JXA/Applescript automation engine. That's the only thing I miss.
I'm fairly serious about photography and spend a lot of time editing and post-processing photos. This is a major shortcoming of my desktop and I may end up getting a MacBook just for this purpose. digiKam is just okay for organizing photos, and RawTherapee is barely okay. I don't mind it's ugly UI, but I'm discovering that even aside from UI considerations it just can't produce the results that Adobe can. Things like noise reduction are just not there.
Wasn’t true when they switched to systemd, or when KDE 4 came out, or when the new Gnome came out, or when the kernel renamed Ethernet interfaces to enps-whatever.
you shouldn't believe everything you read on the internet.
Day to day macOS driving to me is an absolute joy (granted, I'm still on Sonoma).
I do a lot of work in terminals but I also enjoy other apps, where that uniformity of Cocoa comes into play. And if you go deeper into Mach/Darwin, it's extremely powerful. On the userland .. from the launcher to dtrace and dynamic linker tricks and low level hooks. A lot of cool macOS APIs to experiment with, public or private. AppleScript/Automater, private frameworks like SkyLight (nifty!)
Oh and don't get me started on MLX...
To me, as a developer and as a power user, macOS delivers everything - and more.
I know this seems like a down side to you but the person you are replying to notes this as something they love about the platform. It not changing over time "just to change" is the point.
Some developers suddenly realize that X system is old, and then they try to redo it from zero.
And when they do that, they throw decades of feature development down the drain:
- Xorg: Was Wayland worth the 10+ years of manpower needed to catch up?
- Synaptics: Now we have libinput, less configurable and with way fewer features
- Gnome: Something that happens when the devs think "If Apple can, then we can too" but without the money to invest in good UX (Gnome2 had actual UX research done by Sun)
- Systemd: I'll concede that nobody liked SystemV. But we also had OpenRC and strangely got ignored.
Sometimes "developercracy" is terrible, and we spend years arguing if Rust or Not, instead of trying to make good software
1) I am a bonafide systemd hater, and I am bent out of shape about the fact other init systems (more akin to SMF) were (and are) routinely ignored when discussing what was available. But: I feel like Linux desktops are better now for systemd. Even if I can’t tolerate how it spiders into everything personally.
2) Wayland was a “We have pushed X as far as it will go, and now we’re going to have to pay down our tech debt” by the X11 developers themselves.
I know it was “baby with the bathwater”, but in theory we don’t need to do that again for the next 50 years because we have a significantly better baseline for how computers are actually used. The performance ceiling has been lifted because of Wayland; consistent support for multiple monitors and fractional scaling are things we have today because of Wayland.
I won’t argue about security, because honestly most people seem to want as little security as possible if it infringes on software that used to work a certain way, but it should be mentioned at some point that a lack of security posture leads to a pretty terrible experience eventually.
So, yes, Wayland was worth the 10y cost, because the debt was due and with interest. Kicking the can down the road would most likely kill desktop Linux eventually.
Except, they don't. X was device agnostic. Wayland makes some asumptions which will be wrong in 10 years. And being a monolith does not help.
"Wayland makes some assumptions which will be wrong in 10 years."
This is a fair and common criticism. Yes, Wayland assumes a graphics stack that is based on OpenGL/Vulkan and a kernel with a Direct Rendering Manager (DRM). This works well today because modern Linux graphics drivers are built around this model.
However, an X11 advocate might argue that this tight coupling could be a problem if a new, fundamentally different type of display technology or graphics hardware emerges. With its modular design, X11 could theoretically adapt by adding new extensions.
Wayland developers have addressed this by keeping the core protocol simple and extensible. New features, like HDR or adaptive sync, are implemented as extensions to the base protocol. The hope is that this design allows Wayland to evolve without the bloat and complexity that burdened X11. While it's impossible to predict the future, Wayland's developers believe that its modular design is flexible enough to handle future changes in display technology.
Which I think is fair.
Move X [Wayland] into kernel space [provided stability isn't a concern].
It's easy to type that out, of course.
Like visually? I personally don't care much for animations, transitions, rounded corners (this one I actually hate, because you can't even disable them on mac). I'm not a florist, I am programmer. I want efficiency not the looks, bells and whistles. Although I recently started using Hyprland, and oh my, those window animations and transitions are super nice, not to mention that you can completely control every aspect of them.
Your pittance Apple gives you because they refuse to sign CUDA drivers? That MLX?
Point taken, but that is exactly the quality I said I liked about it. I hope that 20 years from now my desktop will be exactly the same. The disjoint UI bothers me to an extent. I mostly use KDE apps or things built with Qt, but you're right that nothing is uniform. That said, I'd take disunity if it means stability. I don't care if the buttons in different apps look different, but don't take them away. Just look at what they did to Mail.app--in 2010 it was beautiful. Last I used it in 2020 it seemed like all the power user features of it were gone or hidden and everything was under a dot dot dot menu instead of out on the toolbar.
I've got my dev environment set up on my new Macbook Pro and everything is working perfectly and I'm very happy.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. What DE are you talking about? Or are you talking about something else?
It's fine. Maybe a bit more of a departure UI wise and not as polished as the previous release but whatever, I don't see how this would cause anyone to throw in the towel on Apple and move to Linux. I've used both for years and would never chose to use Linux exclusively or even primarily.
While Arch might make you safer by virtue of choice, some of the more "beginner friendly" distros aren't immune to changing things seemingly overnight. Ubuntu for instance dropped GNOME for Unity which I still have bad memories of to this day.
You're right. Locking yourself into a distro, especially the more user-friendly ones, can get you into just as much of a dictatorship as macOS.
I use i3 on X11 like a neanderthal and mostly Qt/KDE apps. I'll switch to Sway and Wayland when things stop working.
I tried so hard to find reasons to like macOS, but frankly, if workspaces didn't force Macs, I would've totally chosen to use Linux. The only thing I miss in Linux is JXA/Applescript automation engine and Hammerspoon, nothing else - I don't use their web browser, or their mail app, GarageBand, and other crap like iTunes because frankly, they never felt to me like good solutions to solve specific problems, more like freeware before transitioning to better alternatives. Even the built-in terminal I use only to bootstrap Homebrew. Another good thing I should mention is that macOS really does set a good standard for accessibility features, even though I'm lucky not to have to rely on them, I'm sure many people do.
I honestly don't know how Apple has been getting away with so much crap for years - software developers are probably one of the biggest demographics of Mac users, and Apple keeps screwing them over, yet they stay loyal - partly because businesses force them to use Macs, partly because the alternatives suck even more - Linux ain't perfect and Windows is outright evil (really, I can't even rebind Win+L key on my computer? Fuck you MSFT!).
It is my conviction that very few should go down the Arch route. If you want to sysadmin Linux or learn how to do so, fine. But if you want to do something else with your computer I'd strongly recommend looking into one of the https://universal-blue.org images (I use https://getaurora.dev btw).
These are based on atomic Fedora and my experience is that they offer extreme stability while still staying on the edge of development. Could we call it NixOS for mere mortals? Probably not if you ask the Nix peeps. :)
These were my hopes. Up until a new update introduced something that broke my nvidia drivers "integration".
After a few days I decided to try to update the system once more (which killed the oldest snapshot) and I was left with the system that can only be run in 1024 mode. I've tried every suggestion from the web to no avail.
If you gotta do it, you gotta do it.
I don't think sysadmin is fair, but certainly it's true that a lot of 'how do I do the equivalent of Windows/macOS built-in foobar' questions will have the answer 'well this is a non-exhaustive list of possible things you could install to do that'.
Which is to say that first time around it's almost inevitably going to be a lot of setup. But then it won't change, or when it does it will just be whichever puzzle piece changed - not 'Arch reimagined everything with Liquid Glass'.
Immutable is definitely the future.
To be honest Im new to macos, but after spending years suffering with gnome, that did removed a lot of features, Macos seens like it dosent suffer of this that much.
After the update, I can't even login. Great.
Not that it was working well before. To get the second monitor to even turn on, I had to first power off and then subsequently turn on again the primary monitor.
And that ritual was unique to my M2 Pro Mac mini.
On Windows, or a M1 Pro Macbook, everything just works.
And I'm not the only one with this super annoying external monitor issue. Apple apparently never fixed it. It just sucks.
This is specific to almost every new software.
As jwz said "But that's what happens when there is no incentive for people to do the parts of programming that aren't fun. Fixing bugs isn't fun; going through the bug list isn't fun; but rewriting everything from scratch is fun (because "this time it will be done right", ha ha) and so that's what happens, over and over again. "
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/09/macos-26-tahoe-the-a...
> Sequoia install used 21.6GB and a Tahoe install used 27.4GB, a nearly 6GB increase
It just chugged like madness, the UAC dialogs were slow to fade in (and numerous) and the widgets and moving wallpaper was about 10y too early.
I was distinctly not happy with the control panel changes, but hindsight tells me that I should have been.
Maybe I'm going to jump back to Linux because of this update.
I remember saying so once and got flamed by people online because of course Microsoft didn’t copy this from Linux and of course gksudo was much better.
But the subjective experience I had was the same. IMHO the greatest victory with Electron has been that the OS wars have practically ended.
I kind of think the people making this comparison are doing it off screenshots and not actual experience with the two operating systems.
https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/tahoe...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f2/Apple_US...
But I do not understand how the color-tinted UI/icons ever got shipped. They just look... bad...
I too fell for it.
Sadly, this often applies to Linux as well, so there's no escape. I guess Xfce is still around at least.
Personally, I'm sticking with macOS Sequoia for now, and if macOS 27 goes even more in the less-information-density direction, I'll probably fully move off of macOS, which is a shame as a 20-year Apple user.
The main problem I had with living in a Gnome desktop environment, is with the keyboard. I'm not willing to abandon my use of Emacs control+meta sequences for cursor and editing movements everywhere in the GUI. On macOS, this works because the command (super/Win on Linux/Windows) key is used for common shortcuts and the control key is free for editing shortcuts.
I spent a day or so hacking around with kanata[0], which is a kernel level keyboard remapping tool, that lets you define keyboard mapping layers in a similar way you might with QMK firmware. When I press the 'super/win/cmd' it activates a layer which maps certain sequences to their control equivalents, so I can create tabs, close windows, copy and paste (and many more) like my macOS muscle memory wants to do. Other super key sequences (like Super-L for lock desktop or Super-Tab for window cycling) are unchanged. Furthermore, when I hit the control or meta/alt/option key, it activates a layer where Emacs editing keys are emulated using the Gnome equivalents. For example, C-a and C-e are mapped to home/end, etc.
After doing this, and tweaking my Gnome setup for another day or so, I am just as comfortable on my Linux machine as I am on my Mac.
Tha's been going on for as long as the Mac has been a thing.
Back to Mac OS now due to a change of workplace, and while I'm absolutely blown away by the M3 performance and battery life the OS is something I'm still struggling with a bit.
It was at a certain point revealed that the people creating the new Windows-designs were in fact not using Windows anymore, they were using Macs.
In short they didn’t have to eat their own dogfood.
I’m starting to suspect the same thing have happened to Apple-designers…
You know you don't have to upgrade to it, right? They'll support Sequoia for years, and you could even be running Sonoma if you wanted.
The response to this design is likely to be so overwhelmingly negative that we'll see a lot of subtle retreats in the point releases going forward, and when the macOS 7 version replaces TahoeVista, you can upgrade then.
Here's an example of one such UI regression, that started with Big Sur and now got slightly worse in Tahoe (written by someone who is very knowledgeable about macOS): https://eclecticlight.co/2025/06/15/last-week-on-my-mac-fide...
Is cropping PDFs to rounded corners (without a way to disable it) enough to get someone to switch to another OS? Probably not, but it's still IMO a UI regression regardless.
Unless the app you want doesn't support them anymore. Or the corporate policy forces an upgrade.
Like, it's fun to whine about the imperfection of macOS...versus Windows or Linux? LOL, come on. And just like you and probably everyone else on here, I use macOS, Windows and Linux every single day. Pretending that a couple of aesthetic changes are the big "straw that broke the camel's back" is just so lame.
It is hysterical. It's noisy nonsense. This "fine this is it" tantrum that people pull is such a tired gimmick.
And personally I think the aesthetics of macOS/iOS/iPadOS 26 are terrible. They're inevitably going to start easing down the heinous translucency and will claw back on the stupid round corners. Aside from that the system has a lot of fundamental improvements that will benefit everyone.
But no, no one on Sequoia is going to suddenly be without apps or extensions. When apps start abandoning versions it's usually a couple of versions out.
I don't know what you're picturing, but I promise you, I am not being hysterical, I'm just annoyed. I feel like, when you "its hysterical", you think my mouth is foaming, my face is red, my heart rate is above average... It's definitely not. I'm just looking at CPU benchmarks and Windows ARM compatibility discussions. Honestly, it's kind of fun to have a reason to switch. I used to run hackintoshes, because Apple hardware was overpriced. But now, unfortunately, it is the other way around, and running Windows on M4 seems impossible.
Anyway, I don't think it's a huge deal, but it is definitely a straw that can break many peoples backs in terms of their preferred development environment. I know many people who have switched to Linux from the previous releases too. Un-hysterically, also.
Outside of benchmarks, it's obviously getting much lower than that, but it's pretty much on par with MacBooks.
Vista and 7 rounded things out but they sacrificed very little usable area in the application and could be adjusted to taste. Both Apple and MSFT took the stance that this was too much user control.
I've used and loved macs for decades. This is the first time (maybe the second, if you count early Apple Music) that I've thought they've lost their way.
I doubt I'll switch away from iOS for my phone/watch as I'm reliant on some iOS-specific features. But the Mac has excellent competition, so sadly I'll be a non-Mac user for the first time since the 1990s.
Maybe some people took remote working really seriously and just delegated their work to amateurs online while they traveled the world.
Just saying. There’s no other explanation to how bad this is.
On the few screencaps I saw from external ~100 DPI non-retina displays, everything looks a lot blurrier.
is this an attempt make, users buy bigger screen models ?
My very initial impressions on MacOS:
(1) I like the look of Safari better and the Mail app compared to the prior designs. They both look really nice to me and the Mail app especially looks like a huge improvement in terms of design unification with some of the features like summaries and unsubscribe options that looked bolted on in the past now blending in seamlessly.
(2) I really, really don't like the new icons! Especially so on iOS.
(3) On iOS the app group/folders look terrible to me with the way they distort my wallpaper. Not a fan.
(4) A lot of people are complaining about transparent icons. It's not a valid complaint and is strong evidence whoever is saying that hasn't used the new OS as that is a choice you can make if you want. The default is not transparent.
(5) The increased radii in some places doesn't seem to have any meaningful impact to my information density. A simple comparison of Chrome (old styling) and Safari (with the liquid glass design) shows that Safari has a few pixels fewer in height search + tab bar as a concrete example.
(6) Messages app in MacOS looks like shit. I hate almost everything about it.
(7) Spotlight search has marked improvements! UI is nicer and functionality has expanded greatly (eg clipboard search).
Imagine you no longer have pages with icons on your phone and instead only have a search bar
More room for glanceable, informational widgets that way.
Sadly you can’t swipe left and instantly type into the App Library search - that search bar actually works pretty well.
I can’t be bothered by app icon locations or launchpad. Just CMD+Space and boom its there.
I haven’t had pages of icons on my phone since the App Library was added. Generally the app I want is right there and if not a couple of letters in the search bar and there it is
I use CMD+SPACE 95% of the times I want to open an app. The rest 4% I do it with `open -a` on a terminal with autocomplete (or `/path/to/apps/binary &` for some specific stuff), and 1% going through the `/Applications` directory. I never use launchpad.
Take a look at being able to search an app from Spotlight: CMD + SPC => "Mail" => TAB => then I'm searching all my emails
Like this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/i3prgq/til_you_can_dra...
It’s a strange omission.
Most of the friendly computer interactions are being removed. I presume someone thinks it takes too much effort to replicate. They’re making the computer soulless, just like Windows, they might as well remove the Mac name as well.
CMD + SPC => "Mail" => TAB => then I'm searching all my emails is fantastic. Spotlight really is a huge improvement for me.
As a KDE Plasma dev, I always counted on us getting better, but I didn't expect the competition to get so much worse. We'd be flamed to high and heaven for shipping broken notification popups and rendering glitches like that in a prod release.
What happened internally to cause this, I wonder?
Looking at the screenshots and review videos, I cannot believe how ugly and out of proportion it is. Normally, there would be a consistent design and some people like it while others don’t. But this is simply ugly.
As for what happen at Cupertino: it seems that they replaced people who knew theory and practice, principles of interface design with designers who were told to make a product that looks "fresh" and will diverge attention from Apple's AI failure.
Because why this Liquid Glass now if not as "rattling keys" effect? It's not a technological breakthrough - we've seen translucent plastic/glass/acrylic elements and fancy animations in operating systems before. Hell, even Plasma had that glass stuff in initial line 4 of release. And OSX had Aqua interface, window animations long before Microsoft wasted years for Longhorn finally releasing it as Vista with Aero. Not mention Compiz on Linux around same time.
My partner is already baffled with lack of polish and consistency across the system in this release. In some places it's just a transitional animation added on top of flat style for "wow" effect because hardware nowadays doesn't tax much for that. Tahoe feels like it tries to follow GNOME/Adwaita big interface elements that should stay exclusively on mobile devices, and it does this quite late and also really bad.
My theory is that big companies like to compress salaries. To compress salaries, you hire young and fire old, which means losing historical knowledge.
The other theory is that people who grew up with Kde-look.org are now running the asylum, without ever going through the sort of formal training that the previous generations of UI designers had to experience.
I really wish Asahi Linux had more support, I would have bought a couple M4 Minis.
I'm donating to them and hoping they eventually get those implemented.
In fact, AMD and Nvidia have been the de facto high-performance combination for so long, that I can't remember when it was any different. But prior to that, it was Intel and Nvidia. Apple was never a real high quality hardware competitor. The only thing they ever had to offer were products produced by a production process almost no one replicates.
Razer started used CNC unibodies for their laptops 14 years ago, but they're maybe the only company I can think of that does so other than Apple.
And MSI has shipped high performance laptops for so long that even Apple used their laptops for comparison during the M-series chip releases in the MacBook Pro.
Me too. Just wonder instead of reverse engineer to SOC to get Linux running? Why can we just use the Darwin Kernel (which is suppose to be Open Sourced right? ) and build something like FreeBSD desktop for the M3/M4? Would that be more long term viable than reverse engineering SOC? Is there any project in that direction?
Realistically speaking, they’re not going to rollback anything. They even kept and even double downed on that’s stupid photos app redesign on iOS.
At least the review sites are making some noise this time instead of parroting Apple’s announcements. They all sold us that awful photos app as the great new thing.
What the hell happened to the Apple design guides. Did all the engineers who read them retire.
bold of you to assume they're reading this (and will fix this)
Funny enough, it's the only time period since 1999 that I was apple free for a while. My MBP broke. I've previously had a butterfly keyboard on my work mac, and it got replaced on a regular bases. While unfortunate for a work computer, this was not acceptable as my personal one with no spares)
Thankfully Apple returned to making great products that work, and I bought the next MBP.
Seeing that Apple's returning to it's "design roots"[2], I really hope they do not loose sight of building great products that work well for their customers.
[1] https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Butterfly_keyboard
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-09-14/apple-...
This statement describes pretty much every mouse Apple ever made, from the circular ones to the horrendous magic mouse with charging port underneath.
People love to hate it, but it’s never been a real problem. The ergonomics are bad. The charging isn’t.
The apple mouse is one of the worst mainstream products I've ever had to use. It has no advantages that can even begin to scratch away at the terrible TERRIBLE ergonomics alone.
I use a Magic Trackpad day to day, but back when I worked in an office I would occasionally use a Magic Mouse, and I liked the gestures. (Hated the charging port location, of course.)
Definitely not true for the two MX Masters I have owned - they need charging every couple of weeks. But also I often just leave them plugged in, because, get this, they put the charging port at the back.
Yes, it was the ergonomics I particularly despised. The charging was salt in the wound.
Same here. After the butterfly keyboard era, I spent about 5 years with Windows 10/11 and powershell, then WSL. There's still a lot of annoyance in the Windows space (NTFS is slow due to all the filesystem filters), but Linux package managers are much better than homebrew and WSL does make Windows a pretty reasonable developer system. I'm back on the MacOS now but I wouldn't hate a nice Windows machine.
The NTFS speed thing is kinda amazing. I use cursor on MacOS. My friend has a windows laptop which is likely 2-3x more powerful than my Macbook Air. I can install a new cursor in 2-3s tops, on the Windows machine it takes minutes. Wow. It's all file copying speed.
There's a very important and relevant design quote from Steve Jobs that keeps popping up in my head:
I worked at Apple in the years shortly after his death, and was trying to convince myself this wasn't true, but it is.
Tim should find someone smart and willing to take a real look at the company and ceed power to the next generation.
At this point I'm doubtful that these will be addressed in the 26.X updates, so the wait begins for 27.0...
I ran the whole beta on all my devices. Every new beta I'd ask myself "Surely they fixed 'x' by now, right?" and we advanced, beta after beta, with the same bugs and performance regressions all the way up to launch.
The icons still need to redraw in the settings app and app library. It's overall sluggish. The drop shadows are huge in the finder and other apps top bar. If you turn on always show scrollbars they get cut off at a weird angle due to the excessive corner radius.
My iPhone 16 PM runs hot all the time, even on release now, vs. iOS 18.
I don't mind the transparency or glass effects. I actually like it in some areas. But man does it need some serious polish and bug fixing, and a lot of time and effort spent on consistency.
This should never have went live in this state. I consider .0 just another beta, really. Actual release will probably be .2 or .3
This is good advice for Apple software in general. Always let it burn in for a couple patch releases. Being a guinea pig for Apple is a losing bet.
Fixing this mess will surely take a while but then they use that as PR in future keynotes, saying how hard they were working on it.
For what it’s worth, there where threads here on HN where people complained at length about the bugs and inconsistencies in the previous version of the Apple operating systems.
I might be in the minority on hn, but I’m using iOS 26 for the first time today and am pretty happy with the new design. For one, it’s a lot snappier and faster. I’m glad they finally did something about the slow-ass animations iOS had in a lot of places. Secondly, it has a lot more personality. I enjoy that. Thirdly, they finally moved more basic UI stuff close to the thumbs instead of literally 6 inches away at the top of the screen. Love that. Knowing app designers, my apps are about to get easier to use just by migrating to the new UX concepts Apple is pushing.
The glass look is mostly fine. iOS had contrast issues before, and I don’t think it’s any worse. If anything, it’s more adaptive to different types of backgrounds now.
There are some visual glitches and weird things, but they’re pretty minor and will be resolved with time. The glass panes for, say, folders look nice, and I like it more than the previous blur.
Quick way is to pinch out with two fingers but that is impossible one-handed.
Another is to swipe up (or left/right) on address bar but that often triggers app switching because he indicator is 3mm lower
The “Compact” UI option is complete and utter garbage.
Design is a series of decisions. Those decisions should be rooted in a strong, thoughtful, point of view. It’s a problem when the final product embodies multiple points of view; view options should be the extreme exception, not the norm we now see in phone, mail, safari, etc.
Here’s some of the UX regressions:
- Apple Music: the “next track” button is only visible if the tab bar is expanded. So now we have to scroll or tap, wait for an animation and then click next. - Web views search web for selected text: previously we could highlight, swipe the action menu and then tap the button. Now we have to highlight, tap the small arrow, wait for the horizontal list to animate into a vertical list, tap the button. They removed the ability to swipe the action menu. - Tab bars: since 2007, you could change tabs with one tap. Now it’s one or two taps, depending on whether it’s collapsed or expanded.
Edit: Also, information density is down across the board. Of course.
Transparent UI, with controls sitting on top of arbitrary and changing content can NEVER be legible/discernible. Apple knows this, but fashion was more important than function and they decided, "who cares about disabled people, anyway."
Microsoft learned this lesson back in the Vista era but Apple's charging ahead with this terrible set of changes that will literally disable millions of users, people who will need to visit the accessibility settings to reduce the transparency.
It's a sad day when a company that has often lead in accessibility ships the least accessible OS in modern history. I guess it was a nice run having a Big Tech company to point to as a good example of doing various accessibility things well. Damn.
I've pretty much given up with submitting feedback though.
Absolutely brutal.
It's also a symptom of consumption addiction where there is demand/motivation for drastic, superficial changes that don't really offer any value except to those who are consumed by the need for constant change for change's sake.
Apple used to care more about disabled people because of how the Accessibility APIs worked and were required for most apps.
If you want Apple's hardware you're stuck on their software. If you want access to some professional software, you're stuck on Windows. Etc, etc. This all means that bad ideas or user-hostile behavior are rarely punished in the market. The biggest competitor to Windows is older versions of Windows. The biggest competitor to macOS is older versions of macOS.
Did you enable the relevant accessibility options that are there for this purpose?
I haven't touched Windows for over a decade, does it still have a decent story for disabilities? They've certainly regressed in other areas ...
I'm confused. You're condemning them for not accommodating the disabled, yet admitting they provide an accommodation in the same sentence.
Generally I think the toolbar settings needed more testing, they can be wonky (e.g. in Automator for text+icon it causes the traffic lights to misalign, in Safari toggling the sidebar on and off is janky).
She could read eBooks & emails, listen to audio books, view photos and call her family by herself (iPhone use extends to many uncles/aunties/cousins).
Every few months I would help her recalibrate her iPad as it was a vital life line.
Tahoe is Apple's very own "Windows 8".
I’m not a fan of Windows but I believe that probably the best modern UI design system for desktops right now is probably the flavor of Fluent used in Windows 11. It still retains somewhat desktop-like information density, doesn’t go overboard on radii, and has a touch of depth. I’d like to see more design languages exploring in its general direction.
Apple still has the best "get out of the way, be invisible" UI.
Both are valid ways to approach to a problem, but I like KDE's batteries included, infinitely customizable way better.
I don't customize it heavily either. Move tray, clock and menus to the top, a-la GNOME2, leave taskbar at the bottom, both auto-hidden and narrower than screen.
Add four desktops as a 2x2 grid, re-enable old CTRL+ALT+$ARROW keyboard shortcuts, add a couple of usability effects with custom key combinations and two active corners, and I'm done.
Some applications (Konsole, KATE) get custom fonts and themes, but everything else is bog standard. Setting it up takes 30-ish minutes, and it's the same config for decades now. Probably because of sharpening the same tool and optimizing without knowing.
Then, I can just concentrate and fly on that environment.
Also, they have improved a lot in the small areas where it was lacking. You can use your system without a terminal if you want, plus Baloo works really well.
The only missing piece is "global menu bar" and full-screen applications.
Since I don't use KDE on a mobile system, I don't know how well multi-touch trackpad works, but the rest is almost there.
As I said that I neither need or desire to go that far (my custom layout works like a charm for me more than ~15 years now), but it's not off the left field for KDE.
I guess it still can be done.
How mouse/keys/scrolling behaves, what pointing devices do in what cases are easy cases for KDE. Notification system is also pretty powerful.
The reality is, everything is cross-pollinating from each other. Even if making pixel-perfect copies is not possible, both are pretty interchangeable.
I use both Macs and KDE for more than 15 years now, and can switch from one to other instantly. Both are in front of me during a normal workday, and I just switch without thinking.
"right angled corners again"
I have a feeling you aren't and haven't been a Mac user for a long time. When was the last time Macs had right angled corners!? 30+ years ago?
KDE or Cinnamon (Linux Mint) are good though.
In the coming month will install Fedora+KDE on 5 more machines for family members due to Windows 10 hitting end of life.
The search box did not work for a few minutes after updating, but I assume that was a temporary indexing bug.
Beyond that, if you move your mouse while Spotlight is on-screen, it shows the tabs and tells you the shortcuts as you hover over them.
KDE also can encode entries as QR codes, so you can make URLs transferable to your phone or whatnot.
-- Sent from my MacBook Air.
For KDE Connect, does the phone have to be an Android or ?
Either way, I think it is better to not copy passwords to the clipboard or the selection, but store and transfer them via password-manager/browser/etc APIs.
https://codesearch.debian.net/search?q=x-kde-passwordManager...
Wish it was a protocol-level setting, though, instead of something KDE specific and honored at the application level.
I found out that being able to let go of things relieves a lot of load over one's proverbial and literal shoulders.
How obsolete those apps are depends on you as a user.
It'll be one of the first things I turn off whenever I get around to installing it ~6+ months from now.
And seriously, managers like 1Password clear the clipboard after some time. I would guess that there’s some clipboard API that allows managers to exclude copied passwords from being permanently added to the history.
Still, there are pieces of data that one might not want to store in such unobvious place as clipboard history so it’s good to know about it.
Mad props and three cheers for the Alfred team!
The most useful feature is the fact it uses my display layout + wifi name to figure out where I am and adjusts window locations accordingly.
For the last few years, it is a total gamble of what Spotlight's first suggestion will be when I trigger it and type "Pho"
Often, Photos.app Weirdly, about once a week, Photo Booth.app 80% of the time, it correctly guesses Photoshop.app
So I can't just trigger spotlight, type "pho", and hit return. I have to wait for Spotlight's guess, sometimes arrow to Photoshop, or sometimes just hit enter when it guesses correctly.
So many macOS microFrustrations like this, and now Tahoe looks like it does.
And it's open-source:
https://github.com/apple/container
It's not really supported before Tahoe, presumably due to required hypervisor support.
The only reason I even have to "upgrade" to a higher version number is how quickly app developers (including Apple themselves) drop support for older OS's. My iPhone which is stuck on iOS 15 runs just as well as the day I bought it, but every other app I download tells me (in essence) "LOL your phone is too old and our developers are too lazy to keep our software running on it. Upgrade your OS or get lost loser".
That's literally the only thing motivating me to upgrade anymore: The treadmill of software compatibility. Apple doesn't have to innovate--they just need to make sure the ecosystem is broken after ~5-10 years or so.
Operating systems like Debian is sufficiently boring that I can just upgrade and continue computing. macOS upgrades have become a small gamble, the stuff that I depend on may not continue to work, or at least it will take a good deal of work. There are however no reason to upgrade, so the risk isn't really worth the hassle of upgrading and breaking Java or Python.
Only thing I see on the Apple' what's new that looks interesting is Metal updates. Most of the rest is UI.
Apple actually partially solves this: as a user, if I have EVER downloaded Older Version X of an app, and then go to download it again, they let me. However, if I have never downloaded the old version and go to download it, they just say “this app is not compatible with your device.” and don't give me the chance to get the older, compatible version. I don’t know why they make this distinction.
Worse are the third party apps where the old version still actually runs, but the developer deliberately blocks you with a full-screen “go away” dialog (I’m looking at you, FlightAware).
It’s less of a burden for corporate giants which is why you see much longer support timelines from e.g. Google.
But yeah, I agree with you.
It's all slow incremental updates pretty much.
But the situation now is: No recent apps work on Catalina since it’s considered obsolete (except open-source apps you compile yourself). But Big Sur and higher are ridiculously slow on Intel hardware, to the point where it’s unusable. I now have an otherwise perfectly good 2019 Intel MacBook that has been gathering dust for the past years.
- Terminal.app now supports 24-bit color and powerline glyphs
- Vehicle Motion Cues to reduce motion-sickness when in a moving vehicle
I'd heard from people who were running the betas that it's not ready and they are surprised Tahoe wasn't delayed.
No way I'm upgrading any time soon to Apple's least cared for OS with a change this big (and this untested).
Windows, on the other hand…
There aren't always huge issues or huge time sinks but I'm happy to let other people be on the bleeding edge and I'll upgrade once the Github issues, blog posts, etc have been created/fixed so that when I upgrade I can easily find solutions to any remaining issues I might run into. Especially with Tahoe, I've heard that some apps are just broken, period, unless the developer makes (sometimes significant) changes to get the same functionality working again (that was working fine in Sequoia).
I won't ever touch a .0 macos release again.
<rant> They had an SQL driver bug where, if you turned on record-level security, running a query with one set of credentials, then another query with different credentials without first unloading the driver, you'd get access to things you shouldn't. And their response was "won't fix". </rant>
I was the same way for until one of the upgrades, I forget which, broke resume from suspend about 10-20% of the time for my combination of laptop and monitor. Every morning I’d get a sense of dread when I tried to open the laptop to see if today was a day where I’d get to pick up where I left off or if I was in for a crash and reboot as soon as I tried to use the laptop.
I thought for sure it would be fixed with one of the point updates, but it went on for the better part of a year.
edit: Things are even worse — they already made newer apps much more difficult to read, likely because they have been brought from mobile to desktop. Now fonts are even smaller in System Settings, for example. What are they even thinking?
It's worse on the iPad. They apparently think an iPad is now also a mouse and cursor device because they made touch targets so small, and the fonts in menus shrunk down making them more difficult touch targets as well.
Metal 4 is interesting: https://developer.apple.com/metal/whats-new/
New enterprise-y stuff: https://support.apple.com/en-us/124963
FireWire support is gone, and this is the last macOS release for Intel.
People will get used to it. Apple will refine some things over time.
It will be ok.
It looks like a lot of the hate flowing on HN is just people looking at worst-case screenshots on blogs and piling on. They haven't even used it.
There are a few things I'm not wild about, but for the most part it's a bunch of shoulder-shrugs. This isn't the end-of-the-world scenario that people are making it out to be.
I have a regular non-techie person in the family with a Mac who I think will like the changes. Those are the people who Apple is targeting. Not the tech bros and the wannabe posers who are desperately clutching their 10-year-old iPhones out of some kind of righteous indignation.
Don't understand why. A ~6" phone screen and a 3x1440p setup have little in common regarding what "effective" UX looks like. Unifying them for the sake of consistency risks making both worse.
This isn't unifying anything, but providing the laziest solution possible for MacOS by copy/pasting the visual design of iOS.
Sidenote: Does macOS Control Center even support any shortcut keys? I've honestly never tried, but a cursory search suggests there's no way to map a shortcut key to a Control Center action though you can open it with Fn-C. Again, lazy copy/paste of the iOS UI without adding any of the functionality a desktop power user might expect.
Long-press isn't a macOS convention, which I assume is why there's an "Edit Controls" button at the bottom of Control Center for macOS. Right-clicking controls does show contextual menus as you'd expect.
> …a cursory search suggests there's no way to map a shortcut key to a Control Center action…
Desktop power users can (1) Fn-C and tab through them (as you said), (2) navigate Control Center using macOS's usual keyboard accessibility features, (3) create keyboard-activated Shortcuts, (4) use third-party utilities like Keyboard Maestro and Karabiner-Elements, etc.
I understand that Linux has solved this problem, but it's interesting to see Apple's progress on harmonizing their OS/device experiences over the last decade. I expect that there will always be shitty individual UI details you can pick on if that's your thing, like this detail from macOS 26.0's Calendar: https://imgur.com/a/BYalaa1
Good Afternoon,
Apple released its new operating system today, macOS Tahoe. This is a full version upgrade (26.0) with a new look, feel, and many changes. At this time, I recommend NOT updating to Tahoe for the following reasons:
Stability: Version 26.0 is the first release and, like most “.0” versions, contains glitches that will take time to fix. Later versions (26.1, 26.2, etc.) are expected to address these issues.
Release Cycle: Apple now releases a new macOS every year instead of every two years. These initial yearly releases are often closer to “beta” products, and Apple typically patches problems over the first 6–8 weeks.
There is no real advantage to upgrading right now. It’s best to wait 6–8 weeks until the system stabilizes and then reevaluate.
How to Skip the Upgrade
When prompted, simply do not click “Upgrade Now.” This upgrade may pop up on your machine over the course of the next few days.
Close the upgrade window, or scroll down to select other updates.
For reference, macOS Sequoia (15.x) is now at version 15.7, which means it’s very stable and well-patched.
I might be interested in trying Tahoe if they'd undone whatever the awful policy is that puts a tonne of unwanted apps and desktop pics etc into your desktop that cannot be removed. I don't want Apple News, the clock in the menu bar and even Airplay - I purchased the computer, why can't I have what I want on it without compulsory apps from Apple?
It's little accessibility features like that keep me coming back to macOS everytime I switch to Linux.
It's a nice start but really I'm looking for something that works for the entire screen desktop. I did have a plugin for Gnome that sort of worked (Meta+scroll) but it's very clunky compared to the macOS equivalent.
And in the native apps, such as Terminal, Obsidian, etc., you can just use ctrl++ or ctrl+-. At least that is how i use it. Or what specific apps you need that?
Also these colors make my eyes bleed. And the border radius is ridiculous.
What makes me worried is how much money that they probably spending su supress youtube content creators and the press. Everyone is talking about how Tahoe is good like they are given some sort of script. I have seen a youtuber that talking about the features while the visual glitches are right there in front of him and he was desparetly struggling to not take attention to there.
I'll just stay on Sequoia for the time being, and then switch to Linux.
I'll also miss OneDrive, but I can switch to other providers with Linux support (e.g. Dropbox).
I personally pray for that "MacOS classic" switch... It's sad to enter that decay era for Apple where every next software upgrade for the device feels effectively as a hardware downgrade.
More ways to express yourself with images.
Mix emoji and descriptions to make something brand-new. In Image Playground, discover additional ChatGPT styles. And have even more control when making images inspired by family and friends using Genmoji and Image Playground.
Other than old people that always send gifs on Facebook and children who this is probably one of the only AI art things they have access too, idk who else uses this.
If one tech giant has it then they need to too for feature parity. Not a whole lot of use cases for generative AI for the masses, so if someone comes up with one, gotta copy!
Remember, those of us on HN aren't really the target demographic. They are targeting people who use their device(s) for fun and entertainment.
Most of the new UI is designed almost exclusively for icon only toolbars.
There seems to be some expansion of screen time, finally, but I haven’t been able to figure out what it is yet based on the only *os 26 update I’ve done so far is the public beta on a single Apple TV.
This summary looks acceptable: https://www.computerworld.com/article/4041433/spotlight-is-m...
Spotlight now supports actions, so you can do things directly from Spotlight (kind of like Quicksilver back in the day, or Raycast more currently). Your custom made Shortcuts can also be triggered. It’s also context aware, so you can do things for the app/document you’re in.
Spotlight also integrates clipboard history.
The Terminal gets Powerline glyphs, new themes, and new fonts.
The full list of changes is here:
https://www.apple.com/os/pdf/All_New_Features_macOS_Tahoe_Se...
> With 24-bit color support, your commands now have over 16 million color choices.
I’m not sure if there are new fonts, expanded color support for the fonts, or both.
The day I got my only Apple device, an ipad, only to know they will kill my browser download as soon as I switch to a different app, it became my last. I don't want to pay a company only to be subject to their decision of what I can and cannot run on my machine.
If I vote for that with my wallet, I deserve it.
https://www.apple.com/shop/product/G1FW7LL/A/Refurbished-16-...
I don't want to use "the worst UI thing they've ever done" lightly, but it is hard to think of something that feels this unfinished and hard to use. Why are none of the corner radii consistent? This is literally the sort of thing Apple's entire reputation is built on getting right! It's like an amateur hour Linux skin.
Let that one get under your skin.
Everyone’s different I guess :)
Is there any way to make it black? Like it appears on full screen applications? (apart from enabling the transparency together with a black wallpaper)
Currently even on dark mode it doesn't have a black background while reduce transparency is toggled on.
Overall not pleased. I really did not want to care about the UI changes at all. But having experienced it now, I'm so annoyed I upgraded to iOS 26 and I'm having trouble focusing on the screen. I want WebGPU support, but I'm very hesitant to upgrade to macOS 26 (which is required for WebGPU in Safari).
I don't like transparency - it's flashy but in overwhelming majority of cases is just a gimmick distraction (like transparent terminals on linux)
Sticking to Squoia
So what changed exactly? Change is understandable but this is a full 180. - floating anything was verboten - accessibility was paramount - clarity was prioritized
How did this release come about??
Declining institutional taste and no one at the helm who appreciates or enforces old rules when necessary.
2004: You don't need an iPod that plays videos. 2005: Here's an iPod that plays videos.
Other than that is just windows vista visuals, but not as shit as windows vista.
I took screen shots of a few inconsistencies that bother me, things getting cut off or looking visually messy. The most egregious is the music app showing a dinky progress bar that's almost impossible to mouse over and when you do it blurs everything so you don't see the song name. There was real estate for that whole currently playing section to be bigger so you can start dragging that slider immediately without hovering over it first.
and a few more I forgot
It does not show the current path, no button to go up the file tree, the only text input is behind this search button and it does not understand relative or full paths.
Well, thank god I have a terminal and an IDE at hand.
Text on frosted glass over other text is really hard to read
We need an option to turn these “improvements” off
FWIW my system does feel more snappy and the improvements to Spotlight are nice
Safari with its KHTML underpinnings was also created under his watch, apparently.
https://donmelton.com/2013/01/10/safari-is-released-to-the-w...
And for Apple Maps, I remember reading somewhere that one reason Forstall refused to sign the infamous apology letter was that the initial release was from a team not directly under his supervision, but I can't find the old reference to that...granted, whatever went down was probably a joint failure of everyone involved
https://www.qt.io/blog/qt-on-macos-26-tahoe
That might be a useful stop gap.
AppleScript was never good, but the tooling has been left to rot and other language bindings steadily deprecated. And it seems it has not improved in Tahoe. I know the product manager of scripting for macOS ran it into the ground before being let go, but I've seen no discernible improvements.
For a platform touted as the first choice for technical users, this is a really poor showing.
around 55.7% of Mac users in 2024 are aged 18-34,
macOS has a 29.62% share of the U.S., but only 15.1% of the global PC market
Macs still maintain strong pedigree in graphic design and visual arts
(from https://www.spyhunter.com/shm/macos-stats/)
I'm a software developer as well and I avoid programming on the Mac whenever possible (i.e. developing on Linux and just go to the Mac to build and test). Since the last OS version, you cannot even download and run precompiled open source software without being an expert, and we can expect that Apple will even close the present work-arounds for "security reasons" (what a good justification for all kinds of monopolistic and patronizing business decisions).
Just a joke of a company
Catalina, sure, you can drive a DP 1.4 monitor at 144Hz in HDR10. Big Sur, coinciding with the ProDisplay...? No, that will get you 60Hz HDR10 or 95Hz SDR.
So stupidly that downgrading my monitor (mine would allow you to select advertised support) to DP 1.2 would increase your refresh and HDR options.
And it was never fixed, not in Big Sur, Monterey or Ventura, when I had switched monitors.
People were wondering how Apple made the math work. Simple, by "Fuck you if your monitor isn't our $6,000 flagship".
How is this good design? I have to precisely hover over the puny slider and then it blurs everything? There is enough space to show proper controls for playback. And why are the controls at the bottom.
Sigh.
tell application "System Settings"
activate
end tell
delay 0.1
tell application "System Events"
tell process "System Settings"
click menu item "Trackpad" of menu "View" of menu bar 1
delay 0.25
click radio button 2 of tab group 1 of group 1 of group 2 of splitter group 1 of group 1 of window 1
click checkbox "Natural scrolling" of group 1 of scroll area 1 of group 1 of group 2 of splitter group 1 of group 1 of window 1
tell application "System Settings" to quit
end tell
end tell(I'm not digging through Wikipedia to double check but my previous 2 Macbooks Pro felt like they lasted about as long.)
It'll be interesting to see if they change this with the (presumably cleaner slate) Apple Silicon-based hardware.
It's embarrassing that it took them that long but they have in fact fixed it.
What I want is my single row Safari address+tabbar back - why did they take it out? And where the hell is the newly refreshed Terminal.app?
It will take a bit of getting used to, but there are some design elements that actually do make sense.
The main selling point of a macbook is not a UI with transparency. It's hardware stuff (like ARM processors, battery life, aluminum frames, etc..) and a decent, stable, unix-ish software environment. No one is using macOS for the visual effects, so it is annoying that Apple is revamping the UI everyone is used to in order to add more visual effects.
Seems nuts to me, but I'll be curious to see how this all pans out.
"...all with a whole lot less effort."
Seriously Apple, a whole lot less?
edit: replaced dock with icon, because it affects much more than just dock
I love that the copy was directly copy pasted from iOS copy. I don't think vehicle motion sickness is a big concern with macOS
Other than that I tilt slightly towards the 'like it' side. Really like it on iOS
All I hope is that the design language stays contained in Apple ecosystem and does not spread.
But: 24-bit color support in Terminal.app!
Finally.
(Next year, macOS Ukiah will use Apple Intelligence: just describe the UI you want in Spotlight, and macOS will vibe-code it up for you.)
I like the new feature in tvOS to see incoming calls on the tv.
It just sounds like a shampoo commercial.
The internets suggests the following disables glass effects:
defaults write com.apple.universalaccess reduceTransparency 1Apple…if you’re listening…please fix this.
Tahoe lets you selectively remove app icons from the menu bar. I’m going to try that for a while and see if I can tolerate not using Ice anymore.
Maybe I'm misremembering the video though.
(edit) The linked page seems to hint at it:
> Personalized controls and menu bar. Your display feels even larger with the transparent menu bar. And you have more ways to customize the controls and layout in the menu bar and Control Center, even those from third parties
defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain NSStatusItemSpacing -int 8 defaults -currentHost write -g AppleFontSmoothing -int 0
Eventually that will be gone too, and none will be the wiser except the old who remember the good old days.
I'm starting to think these settings are left there by rogue engineers who fight against the oppression while staying under the radar. It's like a secret cabal that works to maintain sanity while the plebs are left to suffer at the mercy of their own ignorance.
macOS applies something called "font smoothing" (image) which is adding a layer of pixels to your text. The effect is that text is made a little more bold—not "bad" but it isn't exactly as the typeface designers intended.
Here's a good example:
The thing about 4K on macOS is that its sharpest setting will be when you make it "look like 1080p" which means its sized like a 1080p monitor but its 2x sharper. If you make it "look like 1440p" which is what you're used to, macOS will draw a 5K image and scale it down to "look like 1440p" but it doesn't fit the pixels on your display 1:1, so there is a slight blur or its not as sharp as native "looks like 1080p"—but it will still be sharper than your 32-inch 1440p display, so I still recommend you move forward if sharp viewing is a priority. The only sharper alternative is to buy Apple's 27-inch 5K display at $1600 (although $1300 refurb) or a 32-inch 6K display (Dell and Apple make them).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_Strip
Solves this exact issue.
The people who can fix them are not in control. The org must be very top-down. But Steve Jobs had a top down style, so what's the difference? Its: Using and caring about the product.
It's top down direction with the people at the top not using/caring about the product. Presumably they're concerned with other things like efficiency, stocks, clout.
The wrath of Steve was a real thing that people feared.
It seemed to work for Apple/Steve Jobs, but I'm not convinced it would work for everyone.
There are some dedicated apps for that like Say No To Notch.
Two different fonts (Mac vs iOS) for the same data display?
And replacing all humans by AI avatars, to make it easier for spambots to impersonation people?
It's so laggy on the home screen now. Absolutely ruined the poor thing.
They don't have Tahoe support yet, but almost certainly will in the coming months.
I highly recommend doing this instead of throwing away a 5 or 6 year old computer as ewaste!
(Windows and Linux also work on Intel Macs.)
Patching the bootloader in memory seems like a big op-sec no-no.
Last time this came up on Hacker News, someone pointed out that there are new display boards you can buy from China to reuse a 5K's panel as an external display.
I think we're only allowed to run Linux at work on blessed devices. Last I looked, the 5K panel in the iMac was actually presented to the firmware as two smaller displays, which were glued back together in software. Apple does that magic to support its own hardware, but it sounded like Linux doesn't.
Things that are "meh": the "apps" thing that replaces the previous launch pad, the translucency, the "dark" icon theme.
Things I don't like: stop wasting my f'ing screen real estate. Stop it with the unnecessary whitespace and the f'ing thicc menu bar. This is a desktop/laptop and it's for real work. It's also ugly. Speaking of ugly, I count several different window corner radii. Why do Windows need gigantically rounded corners?
All entirely inconsequential -- I've seen nothing yet that will affect my workflows in any way.
Open System Settings right now, do a search, then scroll the view. That’s the least worst you’ll find.
What's the bad thing I'm supposed to be seeing?
- File save dialog has a massively reduced width sidebar. It has a resize handle. But the resize handle does nothing. This is the most infuriating thing for me because all of my sidebar locations are cut off. - M4 Pro Macbook Pro and I'm now experiencing stuttering when scrolling. - Why is everything in Spotlight enormous?! Was it always like this and I just seemingly never noticed?
Otherwise, if you 'reduce transparency' and turn off 'tint window background with wallpaper color' (both of which I had done already anyway), things are decidedly nicer visually.
I'm ok with most of it but let us get rid of the stupid rounded corners. Apple clearly does great HW and it does great systems. OTOH, its UI is faddish.
I might just leave it in perma-Windows Boot Camp.
I don’t think it’s that bad, nothing to get upset over - but yeah sort of like candy iMac aesthetic.
I’ve used both interchangeably for decades and can swap between them without slowing. So much of this comes down to knowledge of and experiences with the quick/er ways for getting around.
For quite sometime using search tools is vastly more efficient for navigation and file movement than Explorer or Finder anyway.
I don’t say that to argue that macOS is better at it, just that I strongly prefer the Mac way as much as you prefer the way Windows does things, and that’s perfectly fine.
The closest I’ve seen is this Apple PDF and I’m not sure it’s what you’re after: https://www.apple.com/os/pdf/All_New_Features_macOS_Tahoe_Se...
When I updated to iOS 18.7, it automatically re-activated iOS updates! Fuck you very much, Apple!
So be warned, if you don't want to update, check your settings.
Hard pass.
It hasn't been able to find anything in years.
It's faster to scroll down in Finder than use the search box to locate anything =)
More than that, I love the new Spotlight features, and the ability to remove apps from the menu bar without installing Ice (or the legacy Bartender).
https://mrmacintosh.com/download-the-new-macos-tahoe-wallpap... has them at the bottom of the link
It reminds me of Cydia Themes
day one upgrade here nothing broke, im very happy so far
m3max mbpro 14
Obviously they aren't going to publicly say that's their intent, but you don't have to be a genius to read between the lines.
As for why... money and power are pretty big motivators.
The evidence is their actions with gatekeeper, app signing, removing the right-click workaround, etc.
I'm sorry, but I can't take this question seriously.
The main evidence is that they haven't. I also believe that it would be quite damaging to an important part of their user base.
Other than that, you're essentially asking me to prove a negative.
They have taken many gradual steps in the direction of locking things down.
> it would be quite damaging to an important part of their user base.
Not as important as we'd hope. Look at iOS.
> Other than that, you're essentially asking me to prove a negative.
They could have said "we won't ever lock down macOS". They haven't.
I'll file this under "mark my words". Like this one :-D
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17363885
(I think it will probably take longer than 7 years though; maybe 15.)
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/08/macos-15-sequoia-mak...
Obviously they can't do it instantly or there would be too much resistance. Microsoft have to go even slower.
Of course you can. What makes you think you couldn't?
Can't wait to write a beamline control application for crystallography on this sumbitch!
P.S. My hot Japanese fiancee thinks you're pathetic too. Her exact words were: チー牛