Tell HN: Apple Broke Fitts' Law in Tahoe | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: Apple Broke Fitts' Law in Tahoe

38 pointsdmd21 comments

In every MacOS version - all the way back to the Lisa, even - items on the menu bar could be reached by clicking on the very first row of pixels on the screen. ("Rule of the infinite edges". - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law )

In Tahoe, they broke that for 3rd party menu bar icons (and some Apple ones) See video: https://shot.3e.org/ss-20250918_074040.mp4

This worked fine until Tahoe.

It gets stranger, though - this is only broken if the menu bar is light-colored. That means it's broken if Reduce Transparency is turned on - OR if it's off, but you're using a very light (white or light gray) colored desktop background.

This isn't just the canary in a coal mine. The miners are dead. The mine has collapsed.

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Pedantry time: Fitts' Law is a law in the same sense as Newton's Law. Fitts' Law is an established model for understanding how humans interact with objects. If you're jumping on a trampoline, you aren't breaking the law of gravity, but you're certainly using it to some effect.

Similarly, if you decide that your button positioned at the edge of the screen actually shouldn't be an infinitely long click target, you aren't breaking Fitts' Law. You might be doing it with Fitts' Law in mind, or not, but Paul Fitts' ghost isn't waiting in the shadows to prosecute small buttons. Some actions should be difficult!

With that said, they definitely screwed up here, but I don't like when we're like "but Fitts' Law" and act like that proves our point on its own. If they wanted, they could "Fitts' Law" right back at you.

Fortunately, humans don't follow linguistic "laws" like you seem to do, and literally everyone understood what I meant.

I've been an Apple user since the 1990s – Tahoe broke my willingness to keep using their desktop OS.

There are too many aggressive regressions for power users over recent versions of Apple software, and now Tahoe is broken in every way.

I miss the days of System 7, but Apple didn't really lose it until sometime around iWork 13. Looking at what they had in iWork 09 and what came as a release 4 years later was shocking and it hasn't changed directions since.

I don't believe that a lot of the people designing Liquid Glass even know what Fitt's Law is, or why it matters, or why it should be respected.

About infinite edges, on Windows I can mindlessly drag cursor to the top-right of the screen and click to close current window. Bottom-right edge means minimize all windows. Bottom-left click opens menu if you left the Windows button there).

This reduces cognitive load when operating the mouse. I miss that on macOS.

As a long time Windows user and part Linux user, I recently switched to Mac.

I absolutely love the machine. It’s by far the best hardware I’ve used and it makes up for everything and then some. But I’ve got to say the OS really sucks.

macOS has certainly fallen pretty far, but if we’re going to compare them, Windows is and has been a complete tire fire for well over a decade at this point.

Why do you say that?

Because I have used all three OSes extensively, and this is pretty incontrovertible?

Settings have been half-assed so many times that random options require going back three or four generations back into the control panel. Modal confirmation boxes that must be dealt with before you can do anything else with your computer are a constant occurrence. Everyone feels the need to completely redesign their own UI chrome. Updating drivers requires remembering going to a dozen separate vendors and manually fetching them (not to mention knowing where to go in the first place). It's filled to the brim with ads that need to be disabled across five or six different places, that need to be re-disabled every upgrade. Every developer, including Microsoft itself, spams notifications for absolutely inane things. And on and on and on.

macOS isn't perfect by any means. But the level of abject disdain for users going on in the Windows ecosystem these days is impossible to ignore.

> incontrovertible.

I don't think so. I use all 3 OSs and they all have their strengths. macOS major strength for me is the hardware that comes with it. But the OS is so unbearable that I hardly use it.

Linux is better in a lot of ways way than Windows and macOS since you can customize it. But the catch is that it takes a bit of constant work and knowledge to tame it.

It's pretty clear how many sharp edges macOS has because there's an entire market of tools to fix it.

Window management: Windows > Linux > macOS.

Games: Windows > Linux Proton > macOS.

Battery (partly because of hardware): macOS > Windows > Linux

Performance (laptops): macOS > Linux > Windows

> Settings have been half-assed

Whenever I see someone complain about windows setting I know they barely use it, or use it in a non-power user way because when I need to access a setting, I just press Windows key and type part of the word I need to access. It searched settings from there. Only grandma navigates settings with a cursor.

> Modal confirmation boxes that must be dealt with before you can do anything else with your computer

If the operation will permit changing system files, yes, and that is good. In my experience I get one or 2 of these per day. Some days none.

> Updating drivers requires remembering going to a dozen separate vendors.

For some hardware perhaps. And that's because Windows runs in almost all PCs that are not macs. But for popular hardware, windows updates also downloads drivers. I think I only installed NVidia driver and that's because I wanted to keep it at a fixed version.

> that need to be re-disabled every upgrade

Not my experience but maybe because I use Windows Pro version.

I’m pretty much with you on all these points. I’ll add that I don’t care that drivers break on Windows because at least it works with all my 3rd party hardware.

All this being said, I still prefer my Mac. The battery life, screen, speed — basically the hardware — is so good that it makes up for all of the shittyness in the OS.

> If the operation will permit changing system files, yes, and that is good. In my experience I get one or 2 of these per day. Some days none.

You're thinking of UAC popups, on which I agree with you.

However, I've frequently turned on Windows PCs to see a full-screen dialog telling me to sign into a Microsoft account or install Office or whatever new thing MS is pushing.

And to add insult to injury, these aren't YES/NO dialogs, and often require multiple clicks to dismiss, and have no option to say "Never show this", only "Remind me in 3 days".

True, so many small annoyances. The swapped ctrl and alt button. the fact that you can't dock windows side by side, no alt tab with a different item for each window. Everything feels like you need to do it the apple way, otherwise macos will fight you every step of the way.

> on Windows I can mindlessly drag cursor to the top-right of the screen and click to close current window. ...

Try that with GOG Galaxy (it's app-dependent).

Great example. I'm talking about the default behaviour of apps in the OS.

GOG Galaxy is an app that redraws everything from scratch with bad UI.

It's funny because they use floating controls with excessive spacing, just like Apple's new theme. And that was the culprit in their case: https://i.imgur.com/dsey4c3.png

I would file a bug if I worked there as QA.

Not sure what the name pf the law is, but OS X and later broke the UI for anyone with a working spatial memory.

I’m not surprised they’ve also broken the pointer for anyone using a trackpad or mouse.

I switched my iPhone and iPad to iOS 26. Talk about amateur hour. They took something which was refined and industry leading and turned it into... meh.

Of course the competition is the folks who made the logo for their OS a trash can and are oblivious to what that means. That's how they can get away with it.

> Of course the competition is the folks who made the logo for their OS a trash can

What do you mean? I honestly have no idea.

I assume the Android logo?

Yep. To be fair, R2D2 was rip off of

https://yamato.fandom.com/wiki/Analyzer_(OS)

and he looks like a half-walking, half-rolling trash can. (All of Star Wars was a rip-off of Space Battleship Yamato)

Liquid Glass is butt ass ugly true enough. But the iPad finally having real windows after 15 years is a god send.

It is the first OS version that made my iPad Air 3 (released in 2019 with an A12 processor) feel slightly sluggish. But I could see using it with a Bluetooth key used and mouse without hating myself.

I’m waiting for my wife to get back to see how it feels on her current generation M3 13 inch iPad Air.

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