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Comment by nnwright | Hacker News Reader

Mac OS's UX design has been in free fall the last 5-10 years (ever since the "iOS-ify everything" zeitgeist took root). Sincerely hope that they one day revert back, because the current UX is just godawful for any usecase I can imagine.

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In hindsight, 90s through 2000s, I think we were coming up in an era of consistent UX refinement and improvement that we took for granted, and that improvement got nailed by mobile transitions (first to phone then to pad and now to AR). MS missed the web, then missed the phone. Apple surpassed them on the desktop but they also made the golden goose (iPhone), pulling focus and consistency away.

I assume it’ll rectify in the vast future, but it’s weird to see regressions in core areas because the new hotness has made it so that these gigantic-corps can’t walk and chew gum at the same time.

I really hope they roll back some of the more obnoxious and pointless aspects of "Liquid Glass" in macOS 27. And the super-rounded window corners are high up on my list. Looks childish, wastes screen space, causes so many little annoyances...

I wish too but they can't just back up, that would be a very bad sign for investors.

Why? What happened to the magic bar? There are many things Apple changed their minds on.

I won’t be surprised if there is a rollback in 27 (i’m hoping there will be - else going to buy a retro mac with a magic bar upon no tahoe runs).

No need for a retro Mac. macOS Sequoia runs great on all but the very newest Macs, and is still getting maintenance updates. And unlike with iPhones, it's perfectly possible to downgrade Macs back to older macOS versions if you want.

They can't frame it as a rollback at least. Have to sync it up with a new OS release or something as the "new" best thing

They'll just come up with round displays. Like on PDP-1.

finally, we can run SPACEWAR on macOS as it was always intended to be run.

"In 2015, Dye became the head of Apple's user interface design team"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Dye

"Dye also contributed greatly to the design language of iOS 7 in 2013. In 2015, Dye became the head of Apple's user interface design team. In 2022, he played an integral role in the creation of the Dynamic Island, a feature on iPhones and then in 2025, he led the design of Liquid Glass."

Left for Meta in Dec 2025. Hopefully things normalize a bit? Wishful thinking, I suppose.

I imagine it will take a while to turn a ship this big, even if they are willing (yet to be seen).

> ever since the "iOS-ify everything" zeitgeist took root

That started in 2010, a bit more than 5-10 years.

IMHO it started with iOS 7 [1] - year 2013.

Uber flat, you don't know what's a button, what's a text. I dunno if I just adjusted to it or it actually somewhat got better up to iOS/macOS 15. Though with iOS/macOS 26 - it's iOS 7 moment yet again.

NB: not sure about Liquid Glass - though I was recently (and weirdly) recommended to watch iOS 7 trailer on youtube[2]. Comments are overwhelmingly positive. Dunno if it's just people who were kids/teens looking through rose tinted glasses. Though I am not sure anymore, maybe people actually like such designs and it's just HN bubble complaining (IMHO complains here are 110% valid) about nothing. Maybe in 10+ years ordinary guy will praise iOS/macOS 26.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_7

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xzLr7xSr-g

  > Comments are overwhelmingly positive. Dunno if it's just people who were kids/teens looking through rose tinted glasses.

idk, its a trailer so lots of beauty shots and also selection bias at work... i think also the previous ui though wasnt gods gift to ux either (thinking about that "oompaloompa skin" [0] calendar app lol) so there is a lot of "refreshness" that does look good (again that new calendar app looked slick). that being said also after release i remember everyone blasting it for super thin fonts and low contrast so im inclined to say rose-colored glasses....

as an aside: personally (and at $work in user tests) very flat design seems to lead to cognitive load increase and difficultly discerning interactive vs non interactive elements so i'd say we have one step forwards two steps backwards for sure...

[0] https://osxdaily.com/2011/07/23/change-ical-leather-interfac...

How dare you remind me how old I am ;)

They just might do that, and sell it as revolutionary progress.

What is godawful about it? Tahoe is great. Spotlight shortcuts, LLM actions. “Design is how it works.”

Because Spotlight now rarely finds your applications in search so you can't just quick launch anything.... from a launcher widget

They finally managed to get feature parity with the Windows start menu :)

For around a decade typing "word"+return into the windows start menu search box usually opened Edge with a search result of "ord". Recently it opens Word most of the time.

Love it when it forgets the Mac apps exist, and launches Maps or Calendar in phone mirroring. I use mirroring a fair bit, but never for anything where I have the Mac app installed.

I hide my Dock completely and used to rely entirely on Spotlight for launching. After it failing to work so often, I found Raycast which has not failed me once. I can't see how they don't decide an indexing method/schedule based on a user's Spotlight settings.

This. Spotlight has gotten awful under Tahoe. I was forced to upgrade at work but in my humble opinion, it's best not to update MacOS unless I really need to. Things get worse, things get better, but overall the experience is diminished.

My Spotlight was shit. I disabled types of searches that I never used and rebuilt its index. Now it's working as intended.

I haven’t had a single issue with this. I’m guessing many people had this issue immediately after upgrading while Spotlight was still re-indexing and are just running with it since it’s cool to hate Tahoe right now.

No, if this happened to people 2-3 times right after upgrading this wouldn't be something they bring up because the indexing doesn't take months. It's broken. Spotlight used to work almost perfectly since it was introduced and it's been lagging and somewhat defunct since Tahoe.

My search never recovered but I just didn't care to fix it, too many things to fix and my IDE has its own spotlight. I'm normally a vanilla-don't-touch-settings guy.

When I try to launch system settings through spotlight, it launches system info. They have the same prefix, but that's no excuse. Never happened since Tiger or so.

> What is godawful about it?

I'm specifically commenting on their UX decisions, and in that respect literally everything. Tahoe, like every major upgrade, is iterative. Very few things that bowl a person over. Somethings are good, some things are "meh". But Liquid Glass is an abomination.

"Literally everything" Can you give some examples? "Inconsistent corner radius" isn't UX, it's UI. It affects nothing about the experience.

It impacts the experience when you try to resise a window and can't find the corner lol

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