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Comment by OGEnthusiast | Hacker News Reader

The reason Liquid Glass on macOS specifically is getting so much blowback is that it isn't just updating the translucency effect with the new glass refraction effect - they've also increased the border radius of most windows, increased paddings in toolbars, sidebars, etc. and overall made the UI much less information-dense, which is wild for a desktop OS. If they had just changed the translucency effect, I think this would be much better received.

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.

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The only thing that really bothers me with the macOS 26 design update is the complete lack of contrast. Everything is white-on-white with super subtle shadows. You can't see what tab is selected in Safari, you can't see what is a button, etc. And it doesn't even look good - it just looks like something is broken, like a texture failed to load.

Tab styling across the board is terrible. I'm struggling to read inactive tab labels in Terminal.

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.

Agreed. I've been a Mac fan even through the dark ages of buying Performas at Sears... but Tahoe is a bridge too far for me.

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.

Border radius on everything on Apple devices has been progressively increasing, eventually I expect everything to be circular. No rectangles allowed.

And then they'll go back to rectangles and call it "innovation", "giving users more space"

Welcome to fashion cycles. Windows 7 has come back around.

7 used rather small border radius and on was done through the added window border/non client area, not chopped out of the window like today's UX. It was also trivially easy to adjust that to make it as tight as XP's 2-3px so if you really didn't care for it they would go away. For buttons in dialogs the radius was the same size as the embossed effect in earlier windows version.

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.

Maybe once it’s round enough, we’ll get a round Apple Watch screen.

I feel like every macOS update has been worse than the last, since like 2015-2018 or so. Still, their only real competition is Windows 11, which isn’t well received either.

Possibly, although I definitely don't recall the macOS Big Sur re-design being as disruptive UI-wise as Tahoe is.

I'm still on Sonoma on my Mac, but I've recently been splitting my time between macOS and Linux and I'm starting to be pretty happy with Linux.

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.

[0]: https://github.com/jtroo/kanata

Oh, apple would have to do much worse for windows 11 to look good.

Yeah me too. I think I liked Mavericks or Yosemite or something and have pretty much hated every upgrade since.

> I feel like every macOS update has been worse than the last, since like 2015-2018 or so.

Tha's been going on for as long as the Mac has been a thing.

I'm not sure what you mean by that. Are you implying that Mac OS 9 was a better OS than 10.4?

Not that OS9 was better - there are thing that I miss, such as drag and drop control panels and system extensions. My point is that people have been complaining about the newer versions of Mac operating systems since there were numbered upgrades.

Snow Leopard was certainly better than Leopard.

Depends on what you're using it for. Windows 11 is the only main stream competition, but for work I've used Pop OS for a few years and was amazed by how stable and usable it is for work.

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.

https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app/

Rectangle

karabiner

Hammerspoon

others but I'm not at my laptop rn

> Still, their only real competition is Windows 11, which isn’t well received either.

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…

If there is an alternative to the m-series that lets me keep the battery life I'd jump ship. The m-series chips are just so good though

I’m using one of the Lenovo Aura editions. It doesn’t match the MacBook, but I also don’t worry about battery at all any more and perf is just fine for my needs. I don’t miss Apple at all. Now, if only there was a Linux phone…

You'd jump ship because of the .0 release of Tahoe? Really? People get a little hysterical about things like this.

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.

It's not just Tahoe though, there have been more and more UX papercuts over the years.

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.

> They'll support Sequoia for years, and you could even be running Sonoma if you wanted.

Unless the app you want doesn't support them anymore. Or the corporate policy forces an upgrade.

It's not really hysterical to want to jump a ship that feels like is turning into a clown cruise. I can use Windows, Linux, and OSX equally well for work, even if I deploy to AWS in the end. However, I love the osx aesthetic and MacBook hardware, since around Snow Leopard, which is when I switched from Linux to OSX. Since then, OSX osx gotten worse with every release, and Tahoe is a very low, new low. At some point, it becomes not worth it. Just like it's not worth staying on the previous release of OSX while random apps and extensions lose compatibility. It's not hysteria, it's just the straw that breaks the camels back. The only thing is, I really like the M4 speed. There is nothing that runs as fast, and as cool, that I am aware of. If I wasn't doing a bunch of processing right now, I would probably switch. Non-hysterically.

Sequoia is absolutely, undeniably better than Sonoma. Sonoma is undeniably better than Ventura. And so on. This notion that it's all downhill is just noisy nonsense as people wave their hands and have a tantrum that they don't like some change. And to be clear, every single macOS release yields this. It's incredibly boring.

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.

In some sense, some releases are always better than the previous version. Of course, Apple developers do some valuable work. However, there are changes that are not "undeniably better". I don't think every Sonoma feature was better. I don't want widgets, I don't want notifications, I don't want pretty much anything they've added in Tahoe. Not a single thing, that I'm aware of. And, now it's ugly as heck, to me.

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.

Except that it's impossible to downgrade to previous MacOS versions on new Mac computers

I don't think you can expect any major UI changes in Tahoe at this point. Maybe the next version of macOS will return to its desktop roots a bit more.

There are now plenty of ARM laptops with Windows (and Linux) support and very similar, if not better, battery life.

Like?

The Surface Laptop 7 gets just under 23 hours of battery life for low intensity usage like video playback. https://mashable.com/review/microsoft-surface-laptop-7

Outside of benchmarks, it's obviously getting much lower than that, but it's pretty much on par with MacBooks.

The huge amount of padding is one of the reasons I hate the official reddit app compared to redreader. There's just such a huge amount of padding between every UI element that it means half the screen is just empty space

its insane to me that apple could feature "liquid glass"... the amount of devs that must of worked on this is probably not insignificant and could have been used on better things...

Is it me or did they also fiddle with the font rendering?

On the few screencaps I saw from external ~100 DPI non-retina displays, everything looks a lot blurrier.

> overall made the UI much less information-dense

is this an attempt make, users buy bigger screen models ?

Just thinking out loud.

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.

This is incompetence on display. Hundreds of people were involved in this from concept, to implementation, to testing. And they all thought this was okay.

I'm pretty sure my previous manager was involved, this smells like his bullshit.

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