Last Year on My Mac: Look Back in Disbelief
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Unacceptable for the premium you pay for Apple software. Unacceptable for any software one is paying for. I hope they get their shit together and start fixing before they continue adding new stuff. 26.2 doesn't inspire me that they're on that trajectory.
The thing that amazes me most is that everyone on the teams responsible is probably using their Apple devices and running into these same bugs!
Typing something into Spotlight, having it pull up the right result and highlight it, and me hitting the Enter key, and the search results suddenly updating after and highlighting some new result and then opening that instead.
It’s not just Liquid Glass. It’s bugs like these where I realized Apple software was truly rotten to the core. Whomever is running the show (Craig) can’t do their job.
I’m now noticing the same bug in the latest versions of Windows 11 when I hit the start button and run a search.
This was a solved computer science problem.
To be fair, it's not just macOS, but many webpages which load dynamic content as well.
I haven’t seen browsing this buggy outside weird niche Linux browsers in… 15+ years?
On a related note, maybe one of these days iCloud will have a force sync option that tells the other devices to trash their copies vs having to remove all devices and re-add to get everything coherently synced.
Some designers say that refresh buttons shouldn't exist because the interface should always reflect the current state of reality. They're right, but until the day we get 100% bug-free bidirectional sync with perfect conflict resolution that instantly polls the network whenever it reconnects, refresh buttons are a necessary evil.
Chrome extensions, functionning ad blocking (without having to pay for a stupid Apple blessed extension) and just generally more usefull feature set is the real reason Google is winning.
Apple can't even be bothered to try making a cross platform browser, because he would cost them too much money or whatever (not that the pile of cash they are sitting on is getting a lot of valuable use).
This bug is so blatant that I assumed my would have been fixed by now, but no.
AppKit was developed for the Mac from the ground up. All effort that went into it was to make the Mac as good as possible. Experience from that went into making UIKit, which was made to be as good as possible for iPhone. Focus on iPhone made the Mac suffer somewhat from a lack of resources, but AppKit was still a rock solid foundation.
Swift UI is primarily made for iPhone. It's secondarily made for iPad. I'm willing to bet that almost all the effort that goes into it is focused on making iPhone and iPad apps better. And it is succeeding there, to some degree (though not without its own issues; especially now with iOS 26). Mac support, however, is clearly an afterthought. Yet it's now the foundation of everything in macOS.
It's not too dissimilar from what it would look like if Apple had decided to rewrite large swathes of the system in GTK when the GTK developers only really care about how well GTK works in a GNOME desktop.
> Swift UI is primarily made for iPhone. It's secondarily made for iPad. I'm willing to bet that almost all the effort that goes into it is focused on making iPhone and iPad apps better.
Everyone I know just try to do stuff with them and at some point go find a computer to actually get shit done, frustrated with how backward everything is on those platforms.
Now they want to make the Mac the same. What the fuck.
What does offend me are all the bugs, as you say. It's still utterly broken all these months after the public release. Spotlight is a mess; I've seen it take DAYS before it has made an app in '/Applications' findable through search (even as the app shows up in Spotlight's long scrollable list of apps), and the animation where it comes in as a result of the four finger gesture has so many bugs I won't go through them all here. The most annoying is that it can end up in a state where Spotlight is not on screen, but you need to do the "make Spotlight go away" gesture before the "make Spotlight appear" gesture works again. It also often loads icons slowly; sometimes loading them in one by one over time, sometimes all at once after thinking for a second. It's arguably better from a UX design perspective than Launchpad was, but Launchpad was so much more polished and better performing.
There's also just constant minor graphical glitches. Things which pop in, things which load in with the wrong background color, that sort of stuff. The Settings app sometimes loads in stuff gradually and parts of the app jump around for a second before it settles, like a bad web app. It feels janky.
Mac OS X used to feel like a solid operating system. It has been going downhill for a while, but macOS 26 is the biggest leap in a long time.
I don't care overmuch about the purely cosmetic side of it, but Liquid Glass looks absolutely terrible from an ergonomics point of view. It's just plainly, objectively bad UX.
So very frustrated.
I'm talking, I pull up the camera and try to take literally 4-5 shots quickly and by the 6th there's what feels like seconds of lag between the button press and the photo being taken.
It feels like I'm using an ancient camera phone, or a more modern phone but in extreme heat when the CPU is just throttling everything. But instead, this is a 2 year old iPhone at room temperature.
And Photos. Will it sync? Yes. When? Who the fuck knows? Doesn't matter whether you're on Ethernet or Wifi, gigabit internet. You can quit Photos on both devices, you can then keep Photos open foreground... so what? Photos will sync when it wants to, not what when you want it to.
So I'm guessing you use some default Mac editor (Xcode?)? You don't change your color scheme, you don't change your font, etc?
Aside: Software devs are very weird, they spend all this time crafting their dev setup and but when it comes to their OS they just give up and whatever Tim Cook feeds them their in. Makes no sense. Anyway, off to Linux land. See ya'll!
This is true whether I'm on my laptop running macOS or my desktop running Fedora.
Incidentally, if I was using some native-ish editor like Xcode and a native-ish browser like Safari, I would probably care way more since I'd be interacting with Liquid Glass more as a primary UI. Now it only really touches the stuff surrounding what I care about, while my terminal, editor and browser are all blissfully non-native.
This is frequent, if not constant, on iOS for me. I never witnessed it before the 26 update.
How can it take an entire second or more to display an icon in list in the settings application? It was literally a solved problem for every iOS version I've ever used.
That is how the current chaos feels like.
Regardless of whether the C-suite recognized the problem or made a conscious decision to replace Dye with Lemay, it is likely that this outcome will, indeed, result in improved UI.
In-between not paying attention to general software quality and not voicing concern, Craig Federigi should not get a free pass.
In-between kissing the boots of Kings, and dining with Murderers, and posting AI slop on Twitter, Tim Cook ought to have been more involved.
There is enough blame to pass around at Apple today among the leadership, but the specific shitty UI buck stops with Dye. Dye is putting his signature on it and is the face of the Liquid Glass demo, if he wants the primary fame, he can have the primary blame.
Tim Cook, by all accounts, can be very micromanaging and demanding when it comes to logistics underlings, but has been extremely hands-off with all his other underlings, doesn't insert himself into their loops or require his approval, doesn't decide by decree like Jobs which forces underlings to fight the bureaucracy on their own, leaves them to resolve conflicts among themselves on their own. He treats Apple like a machine or system where his role is to keep things running smoothly.
It's not "the rest of the executives", that's how Cook's Apple is run. Reportedly.
The thing is, when glass was presented the very first to cry in disbelief were designers. It is very much at odds with many industry standards.
So I really have nothing on how this came to pass. At this point, the tinfoil hat view that this design was a resource hogger as a feature for obsolescence sounds reasonable. At least there would be a method to the madness.
> Ive’s focus on visual styling vexed the software design team. Though they obsessed over colors and shapes, they prioritized how people interacted with the phone and often built demonstrations of the software they planned to introduce so they could experience how intuitive it would be for users and adjust as needed. Many of them believed that design was how the software behaved and thought that Ive was myopically focused on how it looked. [...] At Ive’s direction, they shifted from demonstrating how an app worked to making paper printouts that showed how an app looked. They became more like graphic designers than software savants.
The book then details a big talent drain from the design team.
Fast forward to the Liquid Glass release, reportedly many Apple designers hated the direction. Fast forward to last week, John Gruber says Ive hates Liquid Glass and Dye, and heavily implies that he heard this either from Ive himself or a close associate.
When you leave a moron in charge and a chunk of the talent leaves, Liquid Glass is what you get. It's ultimately Cook's fault. Dye was under Jeff Williams (operations, now gone) who was under Cook. Operations dictates everything under Cook, I doubt anyone else could say no to him.
> The book then details a big talent drain from the design team.
https://www.amazon.com/After-Steve-Became-Trillion-Dollar-Co...
I'm always annoyed by random idiots arguing that since Cook made Apple a shit ton of money, he must be good. By the same standard, cartel head drug dealers are extremely good and an asshole who inerhit a business with a captive market and just manages to make more money by raising price is just as good.
Outside of Apple Silicon, much of what Apple has produced in the last 10 years isn't really good. And even Apple Silicon has major tradeoffs that do not look like they'll improve meaningfully.
This is what surprises me the most to be honest. CarPlay seemingly still suffers from a (sometimes deadly) issue of covering the entire map on your dashboard with the avatar/number of the person calling, so if you're actively using it for navigation (since, you know, there is a map there and all) someone calling you is a highly stressful moment and more than not you need to hang up because otherwise the call is in the way.
I've had my iPhone 12 Mini for so many years now, and this is still an issue, the only conclusion I can take from this is that people at Apple actually all have Android phones.
There is also subconscious resistance to create an action that will uncover a bug and then remind of personal failure.
Then once whole teams get used to this, it's not possible to get it fixed as it gets deprioritised always.
If Apple leadership doesn't care about software quality, then Apple engineers can't care about software quality. They use the same buggy crap that we do, because they have no choice.
At least a new Mac doesn’t try to serve you ads in the app launcher.
What are you waiting for?
(big fan of MacOS, and esp. third-party Mac software, the quality of which simply does not exist on any other platform)
(Also, I have huge affection for Linux. I used Linux exclusively for years personally, and any place I could sneak it into my work environment)
It's a weird time when Linux has the best sleep support overall.
I use a ThinkPad P1 Gen 3. My dGPU actually died due to overheating caused by Windows failing to sleep properly. On Windows, the fans were always noisy and temperatures stayed above 60°C.
Since switching to Linux, the fans are very quiet and temperatures sit between 40–50°C. What surprised me most is that sleep mode works much better on Linux than on Windows, where the frequent failures eventually killed my GPU.
https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/sr/all-products...
Generally, it's the Precision workstation and laptop lines, the Pro Max desktops & laptops, and the XPS laptops. They've recently started to offer RHEL on the Precisions, too.
(And all their servers, too, of course)
[1] http://www.catb.org/esr/jargon/html/L/Lumber-Cartel.html
Here's some of the stuff I had to do on my new Dell, from memory:
- Uninstall all the bloatware apps that come installed with Windows 11. They nag and beg you not to uninstall them, but after several prompts, they mostly seem uninstalled?
- Remove the trial offers from the Start menu.
- Remove the third-party stub apps from the Start menu (eg. TikTok).
- Remove the O365 stub apps.
- Remove the McAfee antivirus payware.
- Remove Dell SupportAssist from the laptop.
- Then, just reinstall Windows 11 from scratch, because of all the remaining detritus left after performing the above steps. And uninstalling SupportAssist caused some instability and weird errors upon login.
- Uninstall all the bloatware apps the come installed with Windows 11 again.
- Remove the trial offers from the Start menu.
- Remove the third-party stub apps from the Start menu (eg. TikTok).
- Remove the O365 stub apps.
Compared to on my Mac:
- Remove apps from the Dock
- Go into /Applications and uninstall about 6 Apple apps I don't use.
Or, you know, just format the disk and install Linux.
Or is the default Windows 11 just that full of shite?
It comes with... TikTok?!?
I do, and the fact that it isn't even optional is crazy.
Windows Vista vibes where they first looked at what the could technically pull off on todays' hardware. And mind you: Liquid Glass is very impressive!.
It's just not necessary.
I'm not sure if this reduces the buggy artifacts though.
I don’t particularly like it either — reality is what it is and if I don’t like it that much, there are other phones I can buy when I upgrade.
Apple is quickly becoming a trash company and we're seeing the effects of an industry writ large when you only hire leetcode monkeys.
You don't pay anything for the software, so the quality matches
You pay for it in lots of ways, including an obscene premium on minor hardware upgrades, not to mention you have to buy their hardware to even use the software itself.
Catalyst was an ambitious project, which works… mostly. But in the details, it has a lot of rough cuts. I fully expect Apple to end up rewriting Messages and co completely in SwiftUI eventually, but that will take many years, if they ever do it.
For the rest, most of the time my wild guess would be that Apple is constantly migrating their frameworks, or creating new ones, and the engineers developing apps are using ever moving frameworks. The framework stabilizes at the end of the release cycle (or sometimes even later…), which leaves no time for the front devs to truly finish quality control on their part.
Basically, to summarize, the release cycle is too small. Apple should do releases every two years instead of every year. Or drop the cycle altogether and just release when ready.
Would be funny if devs @Apple were using Surface machines when developing the newest MacOS, just like MS devs were using Apple hardware when developing Windows.
You used to be able to count on the basics working smoothly, but stuff like the camera and messaging are frequently broken for me
Definitely an “to each their own” kind of situation.
Answer: sometimes apps let you swipe right from the left margin, sometimes there may be a left arrow in the upper left, but it may not be visible unless you enable tinted Liquid Glass, but also look in the bottom left, there may be a less-than sign, and some times you have to force-quit the app and restart (like with Libby books borrowed via Kindle…)
That used to drive me nuts especially as they grew the phone to size 5+ inches
This is actually hilarious because Android had all-screen phones with only virtual buttons long before iPhones did :)
I never use the multitasking stuff. Too confusing. I regard the loss of the single physical home button as a tragedy. One of the best UI elements ever created. Not joking. So simple, imposible to confuse because there’s just one, basically nothing about it that requires training, and it acted as the perfect “oh shit, get me back to something normal!” button for the tech-unsavvy, which is one of the things they most-need in a UI. So good.
But I couldn’t get over how bad the ux is compared to my 7 year old phone. Things like highlighting, autocorrect, placing the cursor where you want “just don’t work”, the setup is unintuitive, the hotspot doesn’t work half the time, there are bugs (like email not connecting) that based on my searches are prevalent and have no solution “did you try updating and restarting”. I really couldn’t believe how bad it is.
But evidently people really like them, and I imagine they could find things not to like about my old Samsung, so to each his own I guess.
Hilariously, those things actually did work back in 2017, and Apple has since broken all of them in various OS updates
It seems to be there has been some sort of internal conflict between the need to add basic functionality to be remotely comparable with Android, and the desire to keep everything "simple". The end result being a kind of a worst case of neither being especially featureful nor all that simple. There's a cottage industry of apps that exploit users' lack of understanding of their own device's capabilities (e.g. flashlight apps with ads + in-app purchases).
I still prefer it over iOS due to being able to install stuff outside of the Play Store. If/when Google kills that, I'll be switching to a Linux mobile something. (I'm aware of the verification nonsense, but that isn't in place yet, and it has been shifting a bit)
NA seems to really fixate on the luxury and social significer aspect of having an iphone though. But I think this update is finally ending that for some people. I have many friends who were diehard iPhone users that are now thinking of moving to Android. There's also a growing sense that new gens of most phones are making only marginal advances. Keeping a phone for 3 or more years is much more common and some mid-tier phones are now getting long security and update commitments.
I have yet to experience that. The biggest reason I have mostly stayed with iPhones over the years was because the tight integration with my MBP was useful, and iMessage is way better than SMS.
RCS helps even out the playing field a bunch, but just about the time that went mainstream I hear that it's a regular source of trouble for everyone (Android an iPhone both) because the carriers suck. And Apple did at least finally add some equivalence for one of the Android features I had wanted (call screening).
For some people in the HN social sphere, maybe. My sisters have had iPhones since they were first released in the naughties. They used to make fun of me for using Android and then Windows Phones (I'm on iOS now). The notion that my sisters would ever switch over to Android is risible; they don't care about phones "making advances" or having "security commitments." They care about iMessage, TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat.
There are no other phones that are not iPhones for them. The blue/green gap is real.
The Apple hardware is more consistently premium of course but if you compare the Samsung Galaxy whatever with the iphone they have been pretty close for a while. The entire industry has been in incremental innovation for a long time.
But man, the notifications are a constant thorn in my side. I have missed so many work notifications due to the lack of persistent notification indicator (other than on the lock screen), and the overall weirdness of iOS lockscreen notification panel (segmentation between "old" notifications that can be mass dismissed and "new" notifications that pile up individually-ish). I use an Apple Watch and somehow still miss Teams notifications as they come in, I'm not even sure how that happens...
I'm so close to abandoning the iPhone as my main phone and going back to my S23 Ultra pretty much entirely because of notifications, it's been a disappointment...
This is the only reason I'm using Android when the rest of my family is on iOS. uBlock on Firefox Android is essential.
People say that the faster charging will degrade battery life, but my last phone was a Samsung and battery life was massively degraded after two years without any kind of fast charging. The one I had before that was a Redmi, much faster charging and the battery was fine after a couple of years.
https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job
Thankfully he has now left. Things could hopefully pick up again usability-wise within 2-3 years.
EDIT: though I guess you could also read it as, iOS 26 had come too far to stop it, so they let Dye be the visible face of it so that he'd be the fall guy and the next guy would get the credits for fixing it... I don't know, I guess we don't really have enough info to speculate one way or the other
I believe that's how the designers at Apple came up with Liquid Glass
Maybe it's a good opportunity to consider whether you actually have to keep running on Apple's treadmill.
All of these seem to be fine on my thinkpad (true, I probably have somewhat lower standards for passable display). Battery life sucks a bit, what I can usually fine outlet somewhat to plug into.
Actually now that I think about it, my visceral reaction is one of dread: a feeling the trouble will be more than the benefit of a new computer.
As a fairly typical example, getting Firefox on Linux to actually scroll smoothly takes googling and fiddling with settings. Gesture support is hit or miss. On macOS, Firefox behaves just like any other native app in this regard.
In my case I'd add:
- Chassis that doesn't flex like crazy
- Battery life good enough that I typically don't need to think about AC outlet accessibility
- Can sit in standby for upwards of a week without battery drain forcing it to shut down
- Is inaudible except when maxing out CPU or GPU for several minutes
- Has a screen panel with a resolution that's either 1x or 2x UI scaling native
The number of laptops in the market that check these boxes is disappointingly tiny.
“Never tried a MacBook, my Linux machine trackpad always worked perfectly” is the usual response I get when I press for a response… but without trying Apple (on this one thing) you’ll never understand until you’ve experienced the downgrade.
I don't doubt you find something special about the macOS trackpad experience, but I've used a Mac every day at work for 3 years and I genuinely don't feel any more or less fond of its trackpad than I do the one on my Framework laptop running Linux. They're both trackpads that do trackpad things. Shrug.
One thing you might've missed in the last decade, is Linux relatively recently gained a new click mode that works like macOS does. One finger left click, two finger right click, two finger scrolling, etc.
Since it's Linux, it is very configurable and may not be enabled by default depending on your distro.
https://wayland.freedesktop.org/libinput/doc/latest/clickpad...
https://smarttech101.com/libinput-fix-your-linux-touchpad-us...
However, more user friendly distros will hopefully(!) do that configuration for you or present a nice UI to enable it.
One caveat is that I've never been a power user of trackpad gestures, so if that's central to your workflow I can't say how the platforms compare.
Overall I'm immensly happy about dropping Apple for Linux, it was definitely the right decision. The initial migration takes a bit to work out but the beautiful thing with Linux is that if you don't like something enough you can usually find a way to change or fix it; with Apple you're left screaming into the void.
Something as basic as scrolling feels slightly inconsistent in just about every app and keybindings are all over the place. There’s always the allure of getting the config ”just right” but after a while I swear I start seeing Sisyphus’ reflection in my screen.
But it doesn’t really matter, since the DE doesn’t determine how individual apps behave.
My baseline is OSX from decade ago OSX with native apps where everyone was following the Apple HIG so consistently that using a Java app felt like waking up in the twilight zone. macOS these days have fallen quite a bit from its UX glory days but there’s still quite a bit to go before it hits the level of Ubuntu or Windows.
On Linux it feels to me like every app exists in its own parallell dimension where you never know if even the basic laws of physics still apply.
Anyway sounds like you've already done what I suggested and it didn't out work you. I hope for your sake Apple comes to their senses soon!
Once you're spoiled by a macOS machine's smoothness, it's hard to use anything else, where cursors feel like they're literally lagging behind your trackpad movements and land somewhere imprecise, and scrolling feels like opening a rusty car door as it catches on itself and you feel the friction.
macOS on an Apple Touchpad is like using a well-oiled machine by comparison. These things really matter!
Immediately after spilling tea on it I shut it off, took off the bottom plate, rinsed it with water, and rinsed it again with isopropyl alcohol. I think I waved a heat gun over it for a bit and then left it in front of a fan. This was about 8 months ago and it still works!
The only lingering problem is that when caps lock is off, the light on the key is slightly illuminated. Weird, but I can tolerate that!
TouchID no longer works, Bluetooth reception is shit and various keys feel sticky/crunchy. I’d keep it as-is if it wasn’t my main work machine.
The issue is that they cannot be downgraded to Sequoia. So one has to decide on what’s preferable - a step up for HW but a step down for OS or vice versa?
One would hope that Tahoe improves with time but considering the trajectory of both macOS and iOS I fear that it will take years to resolve the UX and bug issues if it ever happens.
I like to disable SIP and gut my Mac OS but i know that's not a very safe choice
0. https://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/primary/intervie...
Companies need to make it optional until security updates are no longer available for the previous major version.
Even if you will intentionally hide all logos of A.. from A.. products u use, their design is very distinctive and widely known, so even looking on Xiaomi most people will think it is A..
Plus, A.. products usually deep integrated into their infrastructure, I mean A.. Wi-fi router, A.. printer, A.. speakers, A.. interfaces (Lightning), etc.
As soon as Apple released iPhone, the Mac took a back seat.
│ Rails Docs/Search │ Backend Dev │ Music │
├───────────────────────┼────────────────┼────────────┤
│ UIKit Docs/Search │ iOS Dev │ Chat │
├───────────────────────┼────────────────┼────────────┤
│ MDN/Web Dev Search │ Web Dev │ Email/News │
I tend to organize my spaces by projects and then a dumping ground for "everything else" like general browsing and music.
For projects, unique windows are typically: IDE, Browser(s)
For apps I commonly use across spaces, I assign them to "All Desktops" so they follow me, like iTerm2 and Heynote for keeping notes / task lists even if they cover multiple projects.
I suspect that they were rather shaken at how poorly AVP was received.
VR headsets ain’t it but I’m convinced the reason every company is working on them and developing AR stuff for their traditional devices (which are terrible to use for AR) is because they don’t want to still be at the starting line if someone figures out smart glasses.
They never did replace the productivity usecases. They replaced a lot of casual usecases, and created a bunch more usecases, mostly around media consumption.
But if you go to an office anywhere in the world, and you look around, it's not people on their phones. It's a sea of desktop computers, like it's 1995. Even at Apple. Not because everyone is out of the times, but because we did truly find the perfect form factor, and have chosen to refine it.
Apple vision pro wont replace the productivity suite, like the iPhone didn't. And it won't replace the iPhone, because it's way bigger and more inconvenient. So, I'm not sure where that leaves it.
I’m not sure when we’re started dismissing the elderly’s advice as “just complaining because they’re old” but it seems we’re hell bent on reinventing the wheel of misfortune with every generation.
If old people complain about something, maybe they have a point?
ps. I am a grandparent, on the edge of elderly.
It was bound to fail since day one.
How about porting "I Am Rich" to the Vision Pro, and it could just show a glowing red orb floating in front of your face.
But one of my big takeaways from e.g. https://www.tableau.com/blog/exploring-spatial-computing-and... (2024) was that some of the most basic UX research around 3D visualization was left to the market to discover.
> During Tableau Conference 2024 in San Diego, we recruited 22 attendees to help us assess the usability, learnability, and potential utility of Tableau on the visionOS platform, along with broader perspectives on the potential for HMDs to create engaging experiences around data. Participants were tasked with a series of analytical exercises using one of three datasets. These tasks included specifying filter settings, changing data fields, and interpreting trends across various visualizations, such as bar charts, line charts, and a 3D globe. Examples of tasks included identifying the country with the highest CO2 emissions in Asia and determining when poultry production first exceeded beef production in South America.
If you want to launch a $3000 device properly, why are you making Tableau do this themselves?
It’s not as though anything about Liquid Glass makes a meaningful difference in usability.
To move around safely with smart glasses on your face, apps need to be semi transparent from day one. It's not about superficial stylistic similarities this time. And it's not primarily about design either.
This is absolutely about core usability, just not for macOS or iOS.
So I don’t think I necessarily buy that apps have to have any transparency at all. If I’m walking around doing things in the real world with a Vision Pro on my head, that itself beggars belief to me. It’s wildly impractical for that with its 2-hour battery life, super heavy weight, and hilarious appearance, and all those will continue to be true long after the 5-year window when the “26” OS aesthetic will likely persist.
So, might some future glasses or something benefit from transparency? Maybe. But if I find myself walking down the street with a screen on my face, I’d personally prefer to just close the apps that I don’t need, rather than look through them. If the glasses are going to highlight place names, people’s names, etc. they can do that with text floating in midair, like a subtitle.
I don't. I'm just guessing what Apple may have in mind.
>But if I find myself walking down the street with a screen on my face, I’d personally prefer to just close the apps that I don’t need
Of course, but what about the apps you do need? Say you're in a shop, taking notes, browsing the shop's website, scanning barcodes with something like the Yuka app, maybe even keeping an eye on messages at the same time.
I kept wondering what's the point of covering things in this semi-transparent sludge that doesn't actually allow you to see through but still makes the things in the foreground harder to see.
Well, here's your answer. Avoiding collisions and maybe getting a vague idea of where we want to turn next.
Note that I'm not saying this is a good idea. It's just what I think Apple has in mind. I don't think we can know at this point how or if we really want to use smart glasses.
The goal is most likely to unify the experience around iPadOS, so that one codebase ports down the phone and watch and over to the Mac and AVP.
The delta between Mac and iPad UX elements goes down every release. The latest one gave the iPad a menu bar and multi window support.
Looking at it from a certain angle, the iOS codebase is the only one which has a native team for a lot of large companies - they might not even create larger views for an iPad native version, and may instead ship Electron for the macOS release. Apple is trying to recruit the native mobile team to be able to support native releases for the whole ecosystem.
Except Liquid Glass looks nothing at all like visionOS. If they had just taken a carbon copy of the visionOS UI and put it on Mac and iPhone, I doubt there would have been any controversy. Buttons don't look like they hover way higher than the UI. Sidebars and toolbar buttons are indented, they don't scream "LOOK AT ME!".
Dye is just a moron.
1/2 pixel strips everywhere, around tons of elements. Huge rounded corners. Slow showy animations.
This isn’t a UI for adults, this is a UI for a fake computer sequence in a cheap Netflix movie.
At the same time I make Mac apps and I've got to adopt liquid glass to keep my apps looking alive/updated. How to do this without making my apps UI worse?
I would love to see some "how to fix Liquid Glass" type articles. List out the problems, list out potential solutions.
Anyone run across articles like this? Please share relevant links.
For macOS maybe keep original toolbars (instead of the new floating-inside-a-floating-box ones) or make a custom UIView that emulates what's currently on Sequoia. Same for sidebars. Those two alone would IMO make it better than the built in apps on Tahoe.
And a design classic, an inner rounded rectangle should have a smaller corner radius (less rounding) than the outer one AND the inner rectangle should maintain significant margin between itself and the outer rectangle's borders. This is why the new Finder sidebar looks so tacky, they got the first part (corner radiuses) right but since the two elements are so close to each other there's still a visual clash between them. How to avoid it? Use a flat sidebar with a border only on the right.
i really missed snow leopard for about 10 years all the way up to when i moved on from my macbook circa 5 years ago.
But then Gruber said that the HIG was dead and the decline gained more and more momentum...
That's only true for desktop productivity apps and widgets. Apple and 3rd party "creativity" apps never followed the HIG religiously, if at all.
There are so many parts of the os that flagrantly ignore well-established accessibility standards, some of which Apple themselves advocated for
Thank goodness Meta has done Apple the biggest favor of the century by poaching him.
The man had a bad taste for design but bug prevalence is endemic and changing head of design won't fix that.
Stephen Lemay, Dye's replacement, has been at Apple since 1999, yet was passed over for the design lead position multiple times. There's a reason.
This force-upgraded a lot of Macs at work and we lost days of effective work across many engineers. The machines was practically useless for weeks.
They clearly don't care about power users anymore, and haven't for quite some time. It's so sad.
The frustrating part is that even if you take the position that iOS 26 is just as awful, their incentives are so decoupled from what you’d hope they would be, that ruining your product isn’t really bad for the business! After all, Apple can just point to Windows 11’s embedded ads, three or four layers of different generations of overlapping settings panes, and inferior hardware and dare you to switch. Most of the customer base has only those two realistic options.
I want to turn the clock back. It’s not a reflexive opposition to anything new. I thought OS X clearly got better from 10.0 to 10.4. But in the last vie versions it’s been a regression.
How high the bar was back then.
Client-side decorations are for apps that are designed specifically for a certain desktop experience; server-side decorations are for compatibility with the many millions of apps that already exist!! (And for anything cross-platform / cross-DE.)
Apple gets away with it because macOS is largely monolithic, and doesn't really have swappable desktop experiences. GNOME does not get away with it because they're just one competitor in a large landscape of Linux and they should want to be compatible with Linux applications in general, not only GNOME applications.
Fantastic experience all around. KDE Plasma is an excellent window manager and everything just worked out of the box (gaming, wifi, etc).
Linux isn’t ready in 2025. I wish it was, I try it every year, but it just isn’t. And it won’t be until the community recognises it has a problem, but all I see is denial.
SteamOS seems promising though and we may have a saviour there.
Well, that's not fair to the community or yourself. You didn't outline your yearly install process whatsoever, for all we know you're installing Hannah Montana Linux and throwing in the towel. You can get a SteamOS-style environment on whatever Linux device you want, you just need to copy Valve's steps.
Additionally, you have to accept that you're just outlining perspective here. Linux was "ready" for my desktop in 2019. I played 4 hours of Cyberpunk last week with my GPU undervolted by 33%, no crash whatsoever. Your experience certainly doesn't reflect what most people say, so a lot of people will pass this by and say PEBCAK.
You just can’t make this shit up, it’s too hilarious.
If this kind of software trend continues in 2026, it might be the first time I take a serious look at Linux distros on Mac.
While at it, nuked my old MacBook Pro and Air with Mint too - not like they are getting updates anyway.
It can be done, it should be done. These commercial operating systems have enshitified to a critical point and are beyond repair.
Edit: Not to disagree though. I too have a Linux gaming pc and are helping friends do the same.
Sadly it's only a matter of time until everyone copies it because it's cool and it's what Apple does so they must be right!
Not a single update since 2019 has improved the UI more than it regressed it in my opinion. Too much whitespace, too little contrast, too big controls, and now too little readability.
It's almost like their entire UI department is under threat of being fired unless they invent a radical UI update every other year.
Even Vista was a readability zen compared to this and they aren't listening to feedback at all.
So for Apple to start with a level of disrespect for the existing product where the question of whether each change is actually an improvement is effectively off-topic, it's no wonder they made a dog's dinner of Tahoe.
Famously, Jobs' demands pushed engineers to think and work harder to achieve what they think was impossible, which resulted in many of the most iconic designs of personal electronic devices in history.
On the other hand, we have butterfly keyboard and this.
Mac OS X 10.3, 10.4, 10.5, 10.6, and 10.7 all took over 12 months to develop, sometimes much more, and 10.5 was famously delayed out to 30 months.
Jobs may have pushed engineers, but he was more careful about what he pushed out the door to consumers.
It's hugely embarrassing how they've had to perform a screeching U-turn in bringing back Slide Over and dock-launchable Split View with the .1 and .2 updates - lest graphic artists and others who depended upon these features left their platform in droves. This is essentially an admission that iPadOS 26's touch-based UX had precisely zero thought put into it. They do not have a clue what they're doing
There are still many, many more nonsensical UX degradations and bugs that need ironing out
Are you certain that is not already the case? Or do we still truly believe Apple has the capacity, resources and motivation to care about two version of their operating system at one time?
In 2025, the design failed upward to 4000 x 500K users, https://archive.is/gxaYw
> [Apple] is working to simplify the way users navigate and control their devices.. The design is loosely based on the Vision Pro’s software.. will mark the most significant upgrade to the Mac since the Big Sur operating system in 2020.. For the iPhone, it will be the biggest revamp since iOS 7 in 2013... 2 billion devices in use around the world.. when Apple revamped its Photos app last year, legions of users complained. With the entire operating systems changing, the stakes are much higher.
Since 2023 launch, Meta Ray-Ban sold ~4M camera glasses priced below $500.
My personal feeling on it is just "meh." My productivity with my laptop hasn't changed. I'm not a huge fan but it's not a deal breaker. I still find it better than Windows 11 for the most part, and Linux has other issues as a daily driver for me.
IMHO Apple needs a "tick" release where they only polish and fix bugs and usability issues with an almost total feature freeze. I've heard they may be doing that.
Also who uses MacOs beaides developers? Majority are creative prosumers in arts/design and they are even more annoyed by messed up designs. What you are left with are lawyers, writers, students? I guess they might like it.
Students - all of them.
Of the people I know only old folks, gamers and some techies own PCs. A lot of people will however just use whatever wintel laptop their employer provides them with.
But worldwide Chromebooks are more numerous than macs in education.
Chromebooks dominate K12 here so it kinda depends on what you mean by "students". Once people start buying their own computers however my impression is that Macs are quite common of not dominating.
Marketshare of MacOS is like 15% worldwide (curiously declining in US). That's a minor platform.
Also stop with Chromebooks. It might dominate schools in US (often mandatory) and it is popular in specific countries like India. But in majority of the world it's absolutely unknown with global marketshare of like 1%.
And I’m not arguing that Mac’s are the common man’s choice. All I said was that the statement about Macs being seen a luxury environment in every country except the US is plainly false as I know at least a couple of other countries where Mac’s are quite common even among the non-affluent classes.
And I made sure to not bias her with my or HN's opinion about liquid glass. I patiently waited for her initiative to comment on the update.
My partner doesn't like it, and outside of excel she is not a technical person.
I personally sort of like the liquid glass, but it's also kind of a mess in a lot of edge cases. I feel like it was an interesting idea that didn't really pan out fully and should have been scrapped. It's just too controversial for pure eye-candy.
The battery life first: I lost 6 to 8h of battery life EVERY DAY because of iOS 26. The battery life of my macbook is worst too, even after all the updates and a fresh install of macOS 26.2. The interface is very ugly, and not easy to use at all. I am oftenly loston both systems (iOS 26 and macOS 26) because of all those glass interfaces on top of each other. The performance did not improved either, and the gaming ecosystem that I was very optimistic is becoming a mess. Again. To finish, an exceptional high number of annoying bugs that are not solved yet, despite my feedbacks since the first Beta versions. It seems nobody care.
It’s infuriating that I can’t downgrade the OS on both devices. Especially on my mac.
This pushed me to re-try a Linux distro on my old laptop, and re-try Android on an old Google Pixel phone. Both are great for my needs, and the phone has way more battery life than the iPhone (despite the phone has already 5yo).
I did not expected at all that 2025 would be the year of Apple pushing me out of it ecosystem... Very nice job guys.
They managed to break so many things, they even managed to mess up the volume slider. Instead of showing up across the screen now it’s tucked away to the top right. What the hell.
Fuck you, Apple.
It’s sad to be in a time where enshitifcation is the word of the day and things are getting worse as time goes on. There’s nothing on the horizon of tech that excites me anymore. I used to feel joy and excitement for the future of tech. Now I feel profound sadness at this reality.
It is equally aggravating to err on either side: Windows 3.1 clunk to the left, Tahoe's operationally useless (indeed, operationally detrimental) visual fireworks to the right.
Apple needs to hit a sweet spot of crisp, but the priority must be fast, logical interaction that lets me operate at the speed of thought. With Tahoe, Apple tried to gild the lily.
I don't own a computer for the OS, I own it to run the Applications that I find useful.
However, the execution is horrible. Massively inconsistent border radii, a Finder window that reminds me of the Engineers’ ship from Prometheus, laggy performance, illegible fonts due to overlays, and the list goes on. Tahoe is so badly designed that using Windows 11 feels like a breath of fresh air.
Curious if any Apple folk are on HN that could add some insight as to how it happened.
I did buy the M4 Pro 16" 48gb last year, and am incredibly happy with it hardware-wise, so it'll stay on Sequoia as long as I can get away with.
I shouldn’t be surprised given that the mac save as dialog box has a name field that is still hard coded to 32 characters visible. Whenever I bitch about it I get pushback that filenames shouldn’t be longer than that! Um hello - tell me you have never worked in the real world outside your iphone bubble without telling me.
Oh one can dream...
I think the vague plan is to iOSify it more and more until there is no real difference, including the lockdown and mandatory App Store requirement.
Best hardware around, but at this point I might even take W11 over this locked down mess. At least Asahi support is decent these days.
And I'm tired of paying for things that should be stock, such as proper window and mouse management, or reasonable fan control so that the keyboard doesn't burn my fingers under moderate workloads.
> two windows in the same app, both created using SwiftUI, can’t even share a common radius, as shown below
this actually looks correct to me, the smaller 'subordinate' dialog has smaller radius, like nesting dolls
Looks too much like vista to me.
Step 1: company caters to a niche
Step 2: niche loves product, recommends to wider audience
Step 3: wider audience adopts product
Step 4: company switches to targeting the wider audience
Step 5: niche doesn't like product anymore, switches to a competitor
Windows is in step 5 - previously undisputed king of desktop, now an ad-infested boomer legacy system. MacOS is in step 4 - previously pricy but good solution for devs and creatives, now PITA for devs and "I would switch if it weren't for Adobe suite" for creatives, but normies think it looks pretty. Linux is in step 1 - Valve has been consistently investing in making it a viable gaming system. If you told me 10 years ago that Linux actually runs games other than TuxCart, I'd have laughed, but nowadays "does it run on Linux" is a serious question for every new release. It just needs some time to mature, and once gamers switch, other desktop users will slowly follow.
Now it was a while ago I left the Apple ecosystem as it became clear they didn't actually care about UX anymore, but did "strong feedback during beta-testing" ever actually result in any results? I remember doing something similar back in 2012-2013 sometime, and friends having similar feelings across the years, that it makes me think that Apple never really did any changes based on feedback receiving during the beta testing.
Has anyone here ever written something in via the traditional feedback forms/venues and actually had something changed before the final release? I even asked around my circle of acquaintances and even the ones 110% into the Apple ecosystem seem to never have noticed anything changed based on their feedback.
just format and install Sequoia, that's what I did
This was never true, for example, taking this simple criterion of readability:
> would be really helpful if I could read clearly what’s on my display
Look at the device's names at the left-most screenshot - you can't clearly read them even though there is plenty of space wasted on the margins and the "…"
I mean, sure, liquid glass made everything worse, but it doesn't mean all the other decades-old UI sins disappear in the exceptionally fuzzy rearview window
on top of the bug people mention a lot where types are miss-pressed, there's a problem i get where if iOS considers a word misspelled it'll refuse to let me use the space key or otherwise move away from the word or close the keyboard. it's almost like a UI thread lockout. it's extremely frustrating.
There is no true passion in MacOS, and the marketing has come face to face with reality in 2025. It's the neglected step-child of a company distracted by other things.
There's been some impressive engineering done by lower-level folks under the hood of it all, though.
All these recent proclamations of disappointment in Tahoe seem insanely overblown to me. The problem that this post leads with is that thumbnails' corners are too rounded, which "misrepresents" the original? Seriously?
Maybe it's worse now compared to the golden years, I don't know, never owned a Mac. And it's fair to criticize it from that perspective. But I am completely at a loss for how any of these issues could be bad enough to make you switch platforms. Windows and Linux are not exactly usability all-stars! I had to write my own app for decent speech-to-text on Linux which is built in at a system level on Macs.
This feels to me like just the age-old tale of people wanting to (love | hate) brands, when really, things are nuanced. I switched from Android to iOS recently and the experience did not change much. iOS is absolutely not "borderline unusable" like I've seen many claim. If anything it's maybe a 10% nicer experience overall.
Lack of nuance in people's takes makes for less signal in the noise and makes it annoying to figure out the actual pros and cons of different platforms.
Do some searches and you will find a ton of bugs, bad performances and bad battery life for laptops, random crashes, ...
The issue is not only on the lack of good design ideas, but also on the quality of what Apple provides since a few years now.
Seems to me like people in Apple's walls are forgetting that the outside world is not some Garden of Eden. But yeah, I'd have to use it to say for sure.
Maybe it is because you were using Windows all the time and you can't judge outside (no judging), but the quality and the (legendary) reliability of macOS was true. Everything was well engineered, well designed, and had a purpose.
This is not the case anymore, and this is why people are so upset too. People are also upset because all those annoying things have been reported since betas and Apple did not really listened to them (except most absolute valid points).
The example in Photos is absolutely egregious, and as a user of Linux for the past 25 years and recent user of a Mac for work I can’t remember something that bad in a mainstream desktop environment on Linux.
In fact from a usability perspective a modern Gnome desktop seems for more usable and consistent than modern Mac OS and that’s saying something. Font scaling seems to work better in Linux, UI wisgers in Gtk seem to be more consistent. Dark themes have been around on Linux far longer and it shows.
I don’t use the latest Mac OS version; it’s _okay_ from a usability perspective. But this new version seems like a clear downgrade for something where the purpose of paying large sums of money is for higher productivity and comfort.
Does an engineer complaining about a car with hexagonal wheels have “old man yells at cloud” energy? Yeah the car still runs, and might even look cool, but it’s a stupid choice by any professional standards.
What recommendations do people have for good metal-body linux-friendly "ultra books" (or whatever they're called these days)?
Perhaps Apple is willing to accept that most macOS users will enable "reduce transparency" so long as devs implement support for transparency.
But there is another explanation making the rounds, possibly a conspiracy theory. Some people claim that Apple is doing this to make cross-platform technologies look obsolete and hard to implement.
If there's any truth to this, it's a terrible idea that could easily backfire. People could get used to there not being a consistent platform look and feel. Like on Windows, "native" could lose its meaning.
Whatever Apple promotes as "native" could become just another style among many.
Yes? The .msi installer for Live has worked in Wine for more than a decade.
- Menu bar is not visible in windowed mode, can be accessed wth ALT+F and arrow keys
- Program needs to be fullscreen, non fullscreen window cannot be controlled/resized and mouse location data is innacurate
- Multiple Windows are a struggle because the program is fullscreen
- Sometimes the program becomes uncontrollable, even in fullscreen mode, the work around is press ctrl + , to open settings and then close settings, then the fullscreen program becomes controllable again
- Max for live doesn't work or works inconsistently, your millage may vary
-- source: https://github.com/BEEFY-JOE/AbletonLiveOnLinux
Once you run the installer, and have a broken version of live running, you then have to install the Jack bridge to get audio working, after that you can install https://github.com/robbert-vdh/yabridge to try and get some of your plugins working.
Well, they do (what do you think powers the Push 3?) They just choose not to let you make that choice.
> can I run all the audio plugins that only ship windows/mac versions?
Obviously not (though yabridge can go quite a long way). Also note that you cannot run AudioUnit-only plugins on Windows, though there are not many released in only this format.
Fortunately, however, you can run Bitwig on Linux, along with one of a thousand or so 3rd party plugins. If you prefer a FLOSS alternative, those exist too, though the core functionality of Live & Bitwig is still not quite as polished (it is getting there, though).
Your point, however, is well taken. There's a world of software out there beyond the browser, and it is absolutely OS-dependent.
"$OS is wonderful because I can run $myapp"
and
"$OS is terrible because I cannot run $myapp"
are both very narrow (even wrong) assessments of what $OS offers.
Linux is much more than "a terminal and a Web browser" and I think the abundance of software available in Linux should make that obvious to anyone who is actually trying to do more than find satisfaction with $myapp.
back in the day, I used Linux for everything, I spent hours just screwing around with Linux, and then for some reason I switched to MacOS and almost over night I went from just screwing around with settings all the time to actually doing something with the computer.
Is this better Linux in the room with us [1]?
My main gaming computer used to be Windows until this year when Windows has gone completely to shit. So first I ran Omarchy for a few months, and now running CachyOS because it's better for gaming.
Yeah... Even with things going to shit MacOS is still a better proposition (at least I have a working sleep and restore, and the OS remembers which windows need to be open next time you restart/go out of sleep, and in which locations). Though I haven't upgraded to Liquid Ass yet.
[1] Let's count the number of "oh, you chose the wrong distribution" and count the number of different distirbutions people will come up with that are 100% guaranteed to not have issues.
Not only is the issue spread across more than one similar sounding system setting which interact in strange and mysterious ways, but nothing works as designed or described. It's a horrible mess.
Searching for an fix was great: forums were full of sanctimonious "you shouldn't be doing that, it's not secure" and no solution.
I gave up. The average user has no chance with desktop Linux is my experience is any guide.
I think that depends a ton on what your hardware is.
For desktop, I think there's a real arugment to be made for Linux at this point.
For laptop, what laptop running Liunx has comporable hardware quality, battery life, and perfomance to an Apple Silicon mac? AFAIK most people say "Thinkpads!" and then immeidately turn around and say "well, the battery life is worse but I can just plug it in! Or "the trackpad is worse but I don't care!"
The problems with Windows and MacOS are almost all the result of bad incentives, user hostile arrogant design, or just neglect. As such, the presence of these problems feels malcious, and it always feels like I'm pitted against the very company that I'm paying quite a bit of money to. I'm left with very little hope of things actually improving, because these companies seem to have no incentive to actually make their operating systems more useful or aligned with my needs.
On Linux, the problems are almost always just a result of "hey man, I tried my best to make something good and useful, but I either don't have the resources or the skills to get it all the way there." Sometimes things break or are ugly or whatever, but it's not malicious. There's a strong sense that things are rapidly improving, and that I can play a small part in helping those improvements along (via the patches I submit, or with donations or other forms of support). Because of this, I find the problems on Linux so much less frustrating than analogous problems on MacOS or Windows.
I also think a lot of people might not realize just how rapidly things have been improving on Linux. The situation today is pretty different versus even just 3-5 years ago.
Or, since there are few to zero gatekeepers of UI and/or UX on Linux, you and the person who was responsible for the UI/UX in question just don't agree.
On Windows and macOS, at least for components provided by MS or Apple, there's a degree of gatekeeping that means you agree or disagree with one to 10 people. On Linux, not so much.
I will civilly contradict you about both MW11 and about Linux.
MW11 is rather good for usability. The failures at this point are the egregious telemetry, the spyware misfeatures (e.g. Recall), and the AI slop being squeezed into everything including Notepad for pity's sake.
Linux with Wayland is sweet. Gnome and KDE now use Wayland by default and they are celebrated for their usability. I personally have taken a leaner approach by opting for Sway (tiled) and labwc (floating) depending on the current task.
TL;dr _ Get with the times, Linux is great. Windows UX is actually rather good, but the leadership of MSFT continues to be ghoulish.
Unless you want to run KiCAD. Or Ardour. Or any other number of applications that assume X Window functionality that Wayland does not yet (and might never) support.
Yeah, because the rest of the laptop industry seems to be eternally asleep at the wheel, unable to build anything remotely as efficient and premium feeling.
Most developers I know "use" macOS the same way they "use" Linux: you have a browser with a million tabs open, a terminal (or several), and a chat application or two. It's effectively the same experience whether you're using macOS or Linux, but with the former you at least don't feel like you're typing away on some plastic shell that overheats at the drop of a hat.
What I do know for a fact, is that for each error I have on my MacBook, I’ll have ~10 ungoogable errors on any other OS. I rage-sold my last Windows due to losing my Java installation (or just confusing which terminal I installed it in).
Please, crop all thumbnails in the corners, as long as you come pre-installed with just one working terminal.
If you ever attempt to compile software, the shoe instantly hits the other foot. WSL is a godsend, and Apple's "native" terminal environment becomes a confusing liability.
Catering to different audiences, I suppose.