Hide macOS Tahoe's Menu Icons
512pixels.net
512pixels.net
I hope Apple will backtrack on Liquid Glass after Tahoe. Otherwise, I'll just switch to Linux.
Companies like Apple typically don’t make reversals quickly (the butterfly keyboard took years to remedy).
I just hope you could exclude speculative new interfaces and gestures in future macOS that straight-up cannot be done with a mouse. In which case, yeah, the TouchBook would be degrading the experience for me and a huge portion of Mac users, thus making me sad.
> I just hope you could exclude speculative new interfaces and gestures in future macOS that straight-up cannot be done with a mouse
I agree 100%. I'm already annoyed about how some stuff that's easy to do with a touchpad are straight-up broken with a normal mouse.
Plus I have a 2016 MBpro I keep around in case I absolutely need a Mac (rare). Usually it’s an old drive formatted for Mac and I don’t feel like futzing around with software that allows it to read on my main computer.
Any specifics in mind? I, personally, haven't noticed much, beyond the initial difficulty in resizing windows.
They've even doubled down on it, I don't see this going away in the next 2 major OS versions. I expect them to have a lot of WWDC sessions about it again this year.
That said, Apple's own apps are a crazy mixed up mess of different design systems and technologies, so maybe it will all fall apart and something new comes along in ±3 years time.
New head of design, surprise surprise: Apple's new software design chief, Steve Lemay, was "a driving force" behind Liquid Glass and was "deeply involved in its development." https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/15/ios-27-macos-27-no-majo...
[1] I have small rant about this pervasive view here: https://dmitriid.com/the-curious-case-of-alan-dye
There are so many other wonderful reasons to switch beyond “my current OS has a few issues”.
And it’s not as if Linux is without issues either.
I mean if Linux was “SO GREAT” why are you bothering with an inferior OS now. Just switch already.
I think Tahoe looks pretty good all things considered. Maybe fix just a few little minor UI issues and it'd be perfect to me.
I've actually quite enjoyed some design changes in Tahoe, and looking at older versions of MacOS just looks old fashioned once you're used to them.
It's fine. I'm not going to rail about how it's unusable, or say that it makes me want to gouge out my eyes, or whatever. But it's enough to dissuade me from ever wanting to buy another Mac, if I have the option of using a desktop Linux system.
That's a pretty big caveat. But those curved window borders and the rounded widgets in e.g. the settings menu are kind of awful. Not unusable. But every time I open a terminal and I deal with the choice of either having obscene padding around my content or seeing a few pixels of my prompt's corners shaved off, I get just a little more irritated, and a little less likely to pick up my Macbook the next time I'm deciding which device to use.
Tahoe I've been using since it came out and every time I see a screenshot of prior versions I think "wow it used to look so much better"
https://pxlnv.com/blog/window-chrome-of-our-discontent/
The usability of older versions was so much better. Tahoe is a huge regression, making everything look like one big drab.
(Though Big Sur already entered the path of monochromatic toolbar icons, etc.)
It’s a shame, because their hardware has improved significantly since Jony Ive left.
On iOS it's manageable with reduced transparency, but on macOS it's just so awful I won't upgrade.
So I’ve enabled reduced transparency and all the other accessibility settings I can find to remove the terribleness.
The UI is now mono-coloured gray and looks like MacOS back in the days before OS X was a thing - but it’s still better than what Apple “envisioned” with Tahoe.
Not this much, they don’t.
> looking at older versions of MacOS just looks old fashioned
It’s an operating system, not a dress to parade around on a catwalk. I don’t want it to be fashionable and change with the seasons, I want it to be usable and intuitive. And yes, it should look good (which Tahoe doesn’t) but to the extent that it makes usability better, never in detriment of it.
The dock is suppose to look like the icons float in a class panel, but the reflections in the glass look pixilated and the effect isn't there. The dock icons are centred in the dock, but the activity indicator on the "glass" pane make it look like they're not.
In the control panel, and other windows with a left panel, it's clear that the window curve and the panel curve aren't the same and the transparency of the panel makes it even more clear. I don't understand why some panels can be transparent, but other parts of the window isn't. There's no reason for the transparency.
The Tahoe looks like Gnome theme from 2005, it's interesting, sort of pretty, but the details makes it clear that the authors doesn't quite have the skills to perfect it.
Apple have been slacking in the UI quality control department in the past few years. I have similar issues on my iPhone SE, Apple (and app authors) clearly doesn't test on this phone, because UI elements frequently overlap.
Also I'm still annoyed about the control panel being ported over from iOS. You can't find anything and the window can't even be made wider.
(Yes, I know, don’t give them ideas.)
The new guy is very well respected and hopefully back off of glass.
I kind of wonder if this is like overdoing your watch logo stuff like in this article: https://paulgraham.com/brandage.html
To be honest I struggle to notice many changes, my machine was already configured the way I liked it and at work I basically live in only four applications:
Firefox for personal-browsing, chrome for work-browsing, terminal for running terraform, git, etc, and emacs for all development work.
Sure resizing is less good, but I do that once a day, in the morning, when I login. The rest of the changes I just don't notice or care about.
Processing images is always faster than processing text for everyone.
I like it in theory but the execution seems more harmful than helpful so far. If I'm wrong and it's helping some people, that's great.
--- start quote ---
Get a bunch of people in a room, show them menus where the textual labels are gone, and see who can get the most right.
--- end quote ---
Icons won't help you when they are inconsistent, or don't mean anything.
It's impossible to find a suitable visual metaphor for every possible action of every possible app and cram it into a tiny monochrome icon.
For a company that used to pride itself on its clean and consistent UI, this is really shoddy work. It feels like Microsoft now, every app designed by a different team and nobody coordinating together.
And this would have been a really minor job to coordinate properly. It probably would have saved time in fact having predefined icons for common functions. Now theres been 8 designers working on a different icon for the same function. It seems just complete disinterest in consistency. "Just do whatever" is not the apple way.
That was not my experience with Linux in the slightest. I used various distros for many years, and it eventually became just a waste of time. I got fed up with trying to play whack-a-mole with fixing driver issues.
It has been some years though, so maybe things have improved in this regard. However, I felt like using Linux as my daily driver served as an outlet for procrastination when my time would have been better solved working on the tasks I needed the OS for in the first place.
It's hard to justify Tahoe icons
Now that Dye is gone, I still hold out hope that Apple will change direction and start fixing their UI. But that fact that it got this bad in the first place implies things are seriously broken at a senior leadership level.
Result? inner peace. It is so calm here, and everything is so familiar and fast.
And the MBP hardware seems to be getting shittier too :/ have trackpad issues on both my latest personal and work M4 MBPs.
I think Apple is hitting it out of the park (falling behind in many other areas)
Why should OS presentation be tightly coupled to kernel version?
Or why should it even be coupled to the vendor of the hardware?
And you can ask the same question about content filters, app stores, ...
Prior to Apple, I was a senior engineer on the dev tools team at Microsoft. We did the same exact thing wrt full-release testing and vendor hardware.
I'm not saying I agree with the way either company handles coupling, lock-in, etc. but if you don't think that the Windows UI is coupled to ring-0 you don't understand how it works.
I blame apple for making me run an old macOS version because I don't want to look at this ugly mess they've created. I've been running macOS since 2008, and unless they manage to turn things around, my next laptop won't be an apple.
Either Apple is going to turn things around, or I'm done with Apple for good.
Meh. I ran Linux on a PowerBook back in the day, because Apple made the best hardware and behind-the-times software, before deciding that Mac OS X was "Unix with decent office software" and wholesale switching. I'm fine going back to FVWM on a MacBook if macOS 27 is as bad as 26.
Bloom is a fairly cheap one-time purchase and infinitely more capable.
> It makes menus hard to scan
I disagree, I like them, and I'm glad there's an option
With billions of users, it doesn't make sense to offer just one style for everything for everyone, like all the OSes are these days. Hell the Switch and Switch 2 still doesn't have much options beyond Bright/Dark mode.
The only actual solution is customizability; let users fuck themselves up however they want, but always leave a quick "Reset to Defaults" panic button within reach :)
Safari is unusable due to some weird sync that happens whenever I open a new window ( i dont use tabs) and adding bookmarks takes about 10-15 seconds.
Please Apple, help? Apple seem to have lost their cultish drive to satisfy UI obsessive like me who often didn't even know what we wanted until they gave it to us. Now, we know what we want, but Apple can't give it to us.
You can uncheck or drag items around in the menu bar and group some inside of the menu bar control (and even create new menu bar controls).
I wish you could add third party apps to them, maybe that'll be next. But it's nice you can hide any apps icon right there.