I've been running it since the RC and am currently in the process of uninstalling it. The new UI is so incredibly ugly I honestly cannot understand how they thought it was acceptable to even released as a beta let alone an RC and now release.
There's SO much padding and wasted screen real estate, disjointed looking floating inner panels, window corners that are so rounded you see gaps in full screen apps, inconsistencies everywhere and - well, I could go on.
Basically the vibe I get from it is that they think their users are dumb - they won't care about things like this and that they want everything to look like a preschoolers tablet.
I count four different corner radius sizes currently on my screen, which is maddening.
Apple has a thing against people with OCD. Or taste.
The thing is horribly wasteful of screen real estate, and as someone who’s been writing a Mac blog for over two decades, I am so happy I started using Fedora two years ago—GNOME has its flaws, but it looks nicer than Tahoe.
Fedora Silverblue is the closest feeling to the macOS experience I fell in love with that I’ve had on Linux in, well, ever. Very happy with it on my desktop and laptop. It’s not perfect but it is less imperfect than modern macOS has become.
Finding a laptop that works well is annoying, however.
IIRC, there bunch of random things that still don't work -- no USB-C output, webcam, audio and if I've to guess suspend/resume is probably not rock solid either. The only benefit is that you get to use Linux, but then you may lose on actually getting work done without worrying about these issues. The new UI is inferior, but can still get things done.
Asahi Linux doesn't support the M3 or M4. That said, I'd be curious why OP doesn't consider Asahi on M2 to be a good option. AFAIK the only thing missing at this point is Thunderbolt and USB-C display output (HDMI out works fine).
this is a psychotic question but have you actually tried doing that? like using a macbook as a vessel for running linux under parallels as a primary use?
Do you happen to know any laptop that has a) equivalent screen quality (retina resolution), b) keyboard, c) trackpad but with full Linux support where all hardware pheripherals just work?
The ThinkPad X1 series usually have great linux support and you can option them with 2.8k@120Hz OLED panels, which at 14" lands between the Air and the 14" Pro in terms of PPI. I have a couple generations old X1 Yoga and all of the hardware worked out of the box with Manjaro and Debian, including the touchscreen and active stylus.
People usually buy them for the keyboards and trackpoint, but imo the touchpad is still pretty solid. It is a bit small on account of the trackpoint buttons taking up vertical real estate but its pretty responsive and multi-touch gestures work perfectly in my experience. I believe newer ones have larger trackpads than mine, though still not as large as a similarly sized mac.
The HP zbook g1a ultra is as close as you can get with Strix Halo. There are two screen options and the OLED one is high resolution. It's Ubuntu certified as well and can run LLMs nicely. The keyboard, trackpad, etc are all to notch. It's somewhere in between a mac pro and max.
I have one and love it but it's not close to my wife's mac on battery life.
I've yet to understand the point of OLED, if it sits at 400nits. All Apple's devices from iPhone to Studio Display are brighter, some of them are much much brighter even with OLED :/
I'm typing this post on the 395+ 128gb RAM model. IMO, the keyboard is better than the one in the newest Macbook Pro. Just enough travel, and quiet enough so I don't disturb co-workers when I type.
I use it for development running Fedora Workstation. My job involves spinning up lots of containers and K8S KIND clusters.
I often reach for it instead of my 14" M4 Macbook. However, I will choose the Macbook Pro when I know I'll be away from a charger for a while. The HP, as great as it is, still has bad battery life.
The only downside is that the webcam _does not work_ unless you use Ubuntu 20.04 w/ the OEM kernel package.
The ISP driver which will enable the camera to work is in the process of being up-streamed, though. I believe they're targeting early 2025 for mainline Linux support.
Do you feel a difference between Strix Halo and other x86 machines you could lay your hands on to date? I want one, but with an M2 Max macbook pro and Zen2 desktop it feels very hard to justify.
Well, the highest resolution MacBook has less than 4K resolution and there's plenty of 4K laptops out there...
Most "business" centric laptops work great with Linux, as long as you use a well supported distro (Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, openSuse). YMMV if you use other distros...
The 2.8k panels are overall inferior to Apple's across a number of metrics, but they have a higher pixel density than the Air 13, (and has the S-tier aspect ratio of 3:2).
The FW13 keyboard is objectively pretty decent but not perfect, and is much much better than any keyboard Apple has made in the last decade, could be personal preference but apple has been making some pretty bad keyboards for a while now.
Trackpad on FW13 is OK, no one even comes close to Apple, but it's pretty decent, nothing upsetting if you're comparing it to any non-apple trackpads.
Framework has excellent linux suppport, all hardware bells and whistles generally work out of the box on every Linux distro, but Fedora, Ubuntu, and Bazzite are officially supported by Framework they QA against all three and work with maintainers to resolve issues and you can be totally confident that everything will just work. (At least work as well as it would on Windows!)
The other two downsides relative to a macbook are build quality and support. Although the FW13 is pretty solid in practice, I have dropped mine dozens of times and throw it in my bag and treat it overall rough and it has take on some dings and scratches but everything still works. But the frame is not very rigid, it flexes in lots of places, and it just does not feel as nice and solid as a macbook. And support can be hit-or-miss, like with any small manufacturer.
I think you’re talking about Apple’s butterfly keyboards which were only around for 3-4 years of the last decade you’re talking about. Apple’s keyboards have been great for 5+ years now.
Agreed. Only issue is that they wear down really fast. Your fingers sand them down at a mindblowing pace, and soon enough all of them are smooth, with most used keys having shiny blemishes on them
> I would pay 2x the price of a macbook for a linux laptop with the same hardware quality.
How about half the price?
Huawei are probably banned in the USA these days, however, the hardware quality is top notch and everything Linux works just fine out of the box. Not everything is perfect though, it all depends on what you want to do. If you are okay with integrated graphics (so no Blender or other 3D applications) but do need genuine Intel floating point single-thread performance, then give Huawei a go.
I have had plenty of Dell XPS, Lenovo things and much else over the years and all of them have poor thermal management and tend to creak if you use less than four hands to pick them up. The Huawei machines are in a different league.
As for battery life, I think you are right, but I am inanely loyal to genuine Intel and that means plugging in. I don't have problems with that.
People do get triggered by Huawei though, because the dreaded communists will steal your soul and brainwash you into hating the American way of life. So you might want to just cover up the badging lest anyone be offended. Ironically, a Huawei Matebook X Pro running linux is the laptop that is least likely to spy on you because the camera folds down into the keyboard.
Good to know... at that price it almost is. I just want a half way decent Linux laptop that isn't FHD or 5 years old. Carbons are more than I want to pay for something 'for fun'.
That's less expensive than the ASRock NUC BOX-225H I bought... and that was without RAM/NVMe.
Silverblue is great but regular Fedora is worth a look too if you don't want to deal with the teething issues of managing all your dev-tools with Silverblue's immutable setup, granted that was 2 years ago when i tried so thing's might be better now.
Infuriatingly; I have a macbook because a couple years ago I wanted a laptop that just worked while keeping my familiar tools but it really feels like Linux is trending up in polish and macOS on the down with an intersect possibly happening in a couple years.
That Apple would allow this development to happen without any reversal is astounding. If allowed to continue it could seriously damage their MacBook market share.
Then again, they may not care that much as long as they have the iPhone customer base.
If it supported M4 I would be using it on my MacBook, but I am using a ThinkPad P14s gen 6 (AMD) right now. Some issues with suspend that I worked around with a kernel parameter but other than that, everything else worked out of the box
Do you mean corner radiuses on the edge of windows? Because corner radiuses within windows should be different from the edge ones because the same corner radius stacked within itself creates ugly corners.
GNOME does look quite nice and I use it on my desktop everyday. Unfortunately, once I go beyond programming/general productivity (e.g. photography, music recording) there is nothing that comes to MacOS+MacBook combo. Windows usually have ports of these apps, so I'm hoping maybe one day Linux can run those (we are already there with games).
I always thought that Gnome developers are imitating macOS. Not copying blindly, but following the ideas and intents.
Finally I hear from real users that the Gnome team has not just reached parity, but has actually exceeded their source of inspiration. (Partly due to the degradation of the latter, but still.)
When it takes me 5 clicks and two open windows to pick a bluetooth speaker in Gnome, I remember how far behind it is from MacOS's 2 clicks and zero windows.
That's not possible. I saw a video yesterday where Greg Joswiak (SVP worldwide marketing at Apple) assured me that Apple has the best design team in the world.
I have been running the beta from the beginning and they have improved quite a bit, but I am actually shocked they didn't delay Mac OS 26, because the design is so rough around the edges. Some of the larger aesthetic changes, such as the menu bar and the dock look good, but there is so much more that looks objectively awful.
1. the way window UI elements float in bubbles on the top over a white background is horrible. It looks amateurish.
2. Icons look low detail and blurry. At first I thought they were using low resolution placeholder icons, but no, the layered diffused glass effect just kind of translates to blurriness on many app icons.
3. The side bar, such as on Finder, just kind of floats there. That is fine and looks kind of neat on the Maps app as you can see some of the maps behind it, but on the Finder it is just a white bubble over top of a white background, which... is a choice.
4. The app launcher is gone, and replaced by Spotlight, which is worse.
I could go on. The point is it is bad and Apple should be embarrassed. I say that as someone who likes Apple products alot.
The original, updated version of the Finder icon alone should have been enough of a warning that the UX designers at Apple have lost their minds and any aesthetic sense, let alone an ability to design interfaces that are functional, efficient, and well thought-out.
The biggest surprise to me from this whole beta period is that a significant number of people used Launchpad. I have absolutely zero idea why when Spotlight has existed for more than 20 years. Why would you ever want to click and page through a giant iPhone screen on a desktop/laptop computer?
You don't have to click: Launchpad is available via an unmodified F4, so it's a single button press to bring up instantly, no matter what you're doing.
You don't have to "page through a giant iPhone screen", you can type and select. I used to use it all the time, without ever reaching for the mouse to do so.
Launchpad also let you change the order of app icons and group them into pages and folders; I don't think the new system lets you do any of these things.
Launchpad was focussed on a single task: launching an app. If I need to launch an app, I know I need to 99.9% of the time (I'm hedging; it's probably 100%), so there's no benefit showing me documents, web pages, and god-knows-what-else at the same time.
I nearly forgot: while I was testing Tahoe, I had a situation in which some apps just did not show up when I typed. They were in the list, they just got filtered out incorrectly. I've no idea if this was a bug or not; I'll see when I upgrade to the final release.
Interesting. I've never had any issues using Spotlight to search/open apps. For your use case unmodified F4 will bring up Spotlight now where you can type. If you want more precision unmodified F4 followed by CMD+1 will allow you to search only apps.
> For your use case unmodified F4 will bring up Spotlight now where you can type.
Yes, this is what I've been doing during the beta, and it's far less useful than Launchpad IME so far.
> If you want more precision unmodified F4 followed by CMD+1 will allow you to search only apps.
It looks like I had previously done so, and now the setting is 'stuck'. I.e. it's the default view — I can still go 'up' to search across stuff, but F4 takes me to an app launcher by default, so that's one drawback eliminated (thanks).
As an aside, I've learnt just now while testing this that F4 has an awkward asymmetrical input buffer. You can open+close instantly with two quick presses, but the same does not work to close+open. I'm not really complaining so much about this, just mentioning it!
I don't use Launchpad but I can say, for me, Spotlight sucks! It decides at random times not to complete. I have it set to show apps only. I don't want it to find other things. But quite often I'll press Cmd-Space and type something and it won't find it. For example I just tried "pho" and it did not show Photoshop (which is on my system) but did show stuff completely unrelated to apps and I double checked, I only have apps selected in the Spotlight Search Results section in settings.
This is a uniquely new-macOS issue. Spotlight has never worked well since the big redesign in 10.10. In the snow leopard days it was predictable and seemed to be ordered by frequency of use. (There were occasional issues where the entire launchservices DB got messed up, but this can be fixed with an lsregister reset without reindexing all of the files).
If you have multiple ways to do something on a computer/phone, some relatively large percentage of people will fumble around until they figure out a way to do it - and then do it that way forever.
So if someone accidentally triggered Launchpad and realized they could see their apps, they might use that forever (not knowing you can put your Applications folder in your Dock and use it as a start menu lol).
they've had a launch-pad-ey thing forever, I remember when our school lab had Mac IIs and Performas, and there was some simplified UI on top of finder which basically was all your apps in giant rectangular icons. I forget what it was called though.
I remember seeing my work colleague drag the applications folder to the dock for quick access, this was before the modern launchpad, and before I even started using macs.
Because I vaguely remember that one icon I use every other month, but can't recall the name. The icons are also ordered by installation time, so it's easy to jump to the most recent ones.
I use it rarely, but sometimes I'm happy it's there.
> The icons are also ordered by installation time, so it's easy to jump to the most recent ones.
If I had this need, it wouldn’t even occur to me to solve it with Launchpad; I would just go to /Applications in Finder and sort by “Date Added”. (Which is a non-default column, but a very helpful one, so the series of gestures to enable it for a given folder is almost reflexive to me now.)
Because Spotlight seems to fall over regularly and not find files. Earlier this year it stopped finding applications and I had to run some shell command to delete it's cache and recreate it.
1. Launchpad filters based on what you type. You don't have to page through things
2. As soon as you type anything, the first hit is selected and the return key launches it
3. Launchpad shows nothing but apps. As an app launcher, it's fantastic.
Launchpad is not actually gone: it's now a sub-unit of Spotlight.
I still have an M1 Macbook Pro with touch strip, and my Launchpad touch strip button still works, bringing up Spotlight but with a predicate that makes it search only ./Applications and ~/Applications.
Launchpad is an easy gesture with the trackpad (pinch with thumb and three fingers), then type to filter and return to launch. I got used to it for stuff I don't keep in the dock (which is a lot, since I have the dock on the side and only a few things in it).
I suppose Spotlight is OK as a substitute: COMMAND-SPACE, then type to filter and return to launch. It's a little more clunky (as the search results take a few milliseconds to be assembled) but it'll work.
What feels breaking there is when you pinch to open launchpad you are not on home row, so typing to filter is inferior to swiping and clicking large targets.
Cmd+space to open spotlight already worked and typing was the best option for that use case.
I do like the new spotlight experience but this feels like losing a gesture, and it does not spark joy scrolling through the app list.
I always forget that Launchpad even exists. I guess it doesn't now. I suppose it might be helpful if you just know "I need that app that looks like X" and don't actually recall the first two letters of the app's name.
Lol same. Wasn't there something like it in System 7 that also got deprecated. I think back then it was called "Launcher" ... https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Launcher
Launching seems easy enough from Finder but you never know about innovation.
What if you rely on groupings to remember what you have installed for a given activity?
What if you want a quick visual overview of what is available to you?
What if you like or even prefer launchpad?
What if you install tons of tiny little apps that have a specific, if infrequently used, purpose?
What if you enjoy a little app gardening?
What if you don't like command-prompt style interactions?
What if you see value in having more than one way to do something?
What if you have 20+ years of muscle memory established?
What if the only thing you know prior is how to use your iphone?
And on another note, what is it with tech people lacking the ability to see how other types of people may want to use the hardware they paid for with their hard earned dollars? I am so sick of this awful perspective of, "everybody in the world must be exactly like me"
You wouldn't if you are a software engineer or some other power user. The sad fact is Apple knows that the majority of macOS users are accustomed to an iPhone-like workflow, which is swipe-centric, not keyboard-centric.
It's not the mode so much as the comparative efficiency. In a handful of keystrokes you can launch a commonly used app in under a second. Any type of visual browsing mode is going to take an order of magnitude more time/effort.
For people who never work with things like terminals, sure. For fellow devs, it's an unusual choice unless they routinely cycle through irregularly used apps w/ hard to remember names.
I click one icon, then another. It takes say 2s. Typing two letters and pressing enter would take 10x faster, so 0.2s. Given that I delegated work to AI agents, that’s 1.8s less of waiting :))
As a fellow dev, command line shit is a pain in the ass sometimes. I grew up as a Windows kid, visual browsing for stuff is sometimes the only way to fly. I absolutely loathe the amount of brute-force memorization that is required to operate a command-line efficiently. It took YEARS to memorize simple linux shit
Everyone talks about how CLI is supposedly way more efficient. It is way more efficient to THEM. And now we are stuck in a hell where a good deal of functionality is only accessible if you want and are able to memorize the arcane nonsense that are command names, or the design-by-committee naming choices of moronic PMs who can't stop lapping up whatever bullshit marketing tells them to
> I absolutely loathe the amount of brute-force memorization that is required to operate a command-line efficiently. It took YEARS to memorize simple linux shit
Not to invalidate your experience, but you shouldn’t need to memorize too much to use the common command line tools (although it does always help to have more experience using them).
I recommend always keeping a second terminal session open, purely for referencing man pages. You should be able to see most options easily, or be able to grep for the instructions you need.
The tight integration between documentation within the CLI, coupled to the exact software version you have installed, helps immensely when invoking CLI tools.
For the common linux tooling, found in most distros (e.g. coreutils or common busybox ops) the documentation in man pages is quite excellent.
While I think man pages are perfectly fine as documentation, the terminal interface for accessing them is awful (more mysterious keypresses or incantations to memorize if you want to do anything more than scroll), and visually I have always found them very difficult to scan visually, particularly if I wasn't sure of the exact wording for the task I needed, or if I am thinking in a different vocabulary. Plus theres the whole wall-of-text thing that makes me kind of instinctively bounce out.
A lot of them also lack sufficient (or any) examples, which are the things I need to see to learn. Making sense of the their sometimes (and seemingly intentionally) obtuse wording when I'm trying to do something I'm not already familiar with makes them a lot harder to parse than they need to be.
And many of the commands are extremely arbitrary. `cd` (change directory) very well could have been `mf` (move folder). `del` in DOS is `rm` in Linux. `move` vs `mv`, `copy` vs `cp`, etc etc. There's no common orthodoxy. If you are not well versed in the history of this stuff its all gobbledygook.
LLMs have been great in this regard, as they can supply those missing examples and then explain to me exactly what it is doing, oftentimes worded more clearly than the original documentation. And they can help me string together whole sequences.
So a TL;DR of your comment is that you just have to learn / memorize to use things. That applies to everything, not just what you are discussing here.
If you only use 'cd', 'mv', 'rm', and 'ln', then really, there is not much to learn. Perhaps the '-rf' option to 'rm', which is how you delete directories (that are not empty). You complained about the naming, but 'mv' requires fewer keystrokes than 'move', and once you know that 'mv' = move, 'rm' = remove, and so on, then what is the issue? It makes sense. DOS had just as "arbitrary" names: 'del' instead of 'rm', for example. The UNIX versions are deliberately short for efficiency, and once you learn them, they are universal.
Man pages are fine. Just press '/' to search by string or regex, and 'n' for next match. They are also consistent: if you want a particular section, you search for it. But it is important to remember that man pages are reference material, not tutorials. If you want quick examples, try https://tldr.sh, https://cheat.sh, or another alternative.
If this is difficult, or you simply do not want to learn it, that is fine: use what works for you. But if you are a programmer, you are going to be learning tools constantly, and the core UNIX utilities are among the simplest. Once learned, they do not change. Personally, I have not had to learn anything new about them since I was 13. I am 31 now. You learn once, and you use forever.
That said, there are real examples of arcane tools. 'ffmpeg' and 'rsync' have some of the most obscure command-line options I have ever seen, which is why I keep bash aliases and functions for the things I do often. That is how you make your life easier as a programmer: learn the fundamentals, then abstract the complexity where it makes sense.
TL;DR: Learning is not optional. Whether it is GNU/POSIX utilities, GUIs, wizards, or even LLMs, you still have to learn them. Man pages are reference material, not tutorials. Learn the basics once, and you are set for life.
My big issue with the icons-in-menus is that they don't align properly. Each 'row' in a menu is an optional icon with some text to the right of it. But when an icon isn't displayed, the text shifts left into its position, meaning that menu text no longer aligns nicely on the left.
Usually I just go with the flow, because what else I could do :)?
But somehow the missing App Laucher made me bit sad (well, to the extent software can make one sad :)) - even though I can always switch to Finder to browse apps, App Launcher has some nice visual quality to it that makes it more pleasant to use for me..
I agree with a lot of what you said but the app launcher was dumb. It was just the iPhone’s Home Screen ported to Mac.
Spotlight is way faster than that when you’re at a keyboard. I barely even use the dock, just command space and type in the first few letters of the program I want. Clicking is for people with too much time on their hands.
It was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me. After trying out the preview for a month, the writing was on the wall, and I began the process of switching to a Thinkpad with Linux. I am now fully off macOS for the first time in 20 years of being an Apple die hard. I could use a lot of emotionally loaded words to describe how I feel about this release, but the long and short of it is that I am no longer the target audience for Apple.
In the same boat. After like 15 years I had enough. I've started de-Apple'ing my life in 2024. Still run M1 Pro Mac from work, which is great. 2 days ago I've finally ordered all the parts for a Linux PC, high spec. Not for gaming or so, just for compute. I'm soooo looking forward to the freedom that this will bring. The stuff that I already run on Linux, the distros are all great. I love Gnome for how it looks and KDE for how seamless it works. The new PC will let me tinker and try and hop and swap like I could never dream of for so many years.
Similar story here. Loong time Apple fan, but as they say.. "trust arrives walking, but leaves on a horse". I'm real mad!
I installed tahoe in a virtualbuddy VM to see how it was before running on my main system... and.... I will be definitely be keeping Sequoia for a while (at least a year, probably).
If the situation does not improve in the meantime, I will probably switch to a framework laptop running cosmic desktop or something like that.
I have no where to go. I want to move away from iPhone, but Pixel is not available in my place, and Google doesn't seems to care about distribution. Nor does it do enough with its SoC development. There aren't anything come close on Laptop. And Windows or Linux aren't exactly in good shape either. I have no where to run. And I have wished for a third option for a very very long time.
You just move away from them on your computer. Just keep the iphone. It's a minor device. That's what I plan on doing. If I get fed up with my iphone, I also have nowhere to go. so will reduce usage. Sideloading gets more and more difficult everywhere.
Similar story here, but going from Windows to Linux. It seems like Linux is gaining some market share with the OS disasters from both Apple and Microsoft.
The whole "Liquid Glass" UI is by far their worst ever take on a design language. It feels like stepping backwards to web 2.0 but with even bigger accessibility issues.
It doesn't look or feel modern, its ugly, inconsistent and just all around crap. God knows what they were thinking with this.
Also who on earth green lit these low resolution looking blurry icons everywhere?!
I couldn’t watch the WWDC and when I saw the screenshots I thought it was a joke. Giant buttons with weird padding and extreme transparency effects.
This is going to sound harsh but it looks like when “working” from home, Apple engineers outsourced their work to amateurs online.
I simply cannot believe that Apple is shipping an OS this out of touch with elegance.
Steve Jobs said in his inauguration speech that he slept on the floor to take typography classes and later obsessed over having great typefaces on Macs. Steve would’ve burn the place down instead of shipping a crap like this.
I try not to indulge in negativity and scorn, but I agree with these sentiments. This is resoundly a regression. Text overlapping on text, searchboxes that are broken and now just function as text boxes, increased latency throughout the operating system.
It's so bad that it's kind of fascinating. Unfortunately, even "Reduce Transparency" doesn't fix the LG update.
Yeah similar situation here. I've been running it since basically the day after WWDC, and I've just had this sinking feeling that its so bad, they wouldn't be able to fix it before release. Or, they don't even view it as something that needs fixing.
I'll begrudgingly get a couple more years out of this personal M2 Air, but my engineering team is prepping to do upgrades on some older M1 Pros we've had since launch, and after seeing Tahoe, the CTO and I formed a plan to give devs the option of getting either an M4 Pro or a Framework. We haven't launched yet, but I think a solid number of our engineers are going to opt for the Framework, hopefully as high as half.
There are also under-the-hood changes that I found truly upsetting: among other things, all the Emacs versions I've tried (stock GNU Emacs or Mac Port, downloaded binary blobs and compiled on my machine) are either immediately unusable or become so slow after a day that they are almost unusable. Tracing things on Instruments suggests a culprit (the culprit?) is NSAutofillHeuristicController. This is not a new feature, but I'm guessing with them pushing Apple Intelligence it was rewritten. AFAIK no obvious way to disable this "feature". (Turning off Apple Intelligence doesn't seem to do it.)
> among other things, all the Emacs versions I've tried (stock GNU Emacs or Mac Port, downloaded binary blobs and compiled on my machine) are either immediately unusable or become so slow after a day that they are almost unusable.
So basically my #1 work tool will no longer work.
That’s a hard deal-breaker right there.
As a longer-term means of escape, what’s the best way to run a «full» Linux desktop on a otherwise managed Mac?
I was on RC too, for a few days, and also uninstalled. I'm glad I did, the fresh Sequoia install feels much nicher. Even with reduce transparency on, the design was too ugly and the drab gray icon jails for non-squircle icons were downright offensive. First macOS version I'm gonna skip and I've been a day one updater since mountain lion, very sad.
There's SO much padding and wasted screen real estate
That seems to be a growing trend ever since "UX designers" started taking over (early 2010s?), to the point that I wonder if they're trying to see how far they can take it.
I made the mistake of updating my phone, and immediately regretted it. We tried Liquid Glass already, it was called mid-aughts Windows. It sucked then, and it sucks now.
Quite an insult to Windows Vista and Windows 7, where Microsoft actually took care to make things consistent and text readable. Here they didn't even put shadows behind all labels!
It would be one thing if they excessively rounded and padded the windows, but they shipped with a bunch of different padding and border radii. So far I’ve counted 4 different borders, and I’m sure there’s more.
I just counted 5 different radii in Apple’s apps alone. I also discovered they space the window control buttons in all sorts of different spots to, so it’s even more insane than just multiple radii.
I have a Mac M1 that's been on MacOS 14 Sonoma for a couple years at this point - I've not seen anything even remotely interesting in later releases that could incentivize me to roll the dice and upgrade.
My Mac is also on Sonoma. I'm sure there are some incremental features that I would appreciate, but I'm always worried about what's going to break or be worse with the next OS update.
I'll update my phone because iOS jumps are bigger in terms of functionality. But 14 years in, OSX just doesn't have a lot of new bells and whistles that I care about. The last time I updated, I was only excited about getting Sidecar functionality so I could dual-screen onto my iPad. When a minor feature like this is the most memorable, that's saying something.
I think the only thing that would get me to update would be notable AI improvements. But seeing what I've seen of AI on iOS, I'm in no rush.
Waiting an extra year to jump on new macOS releases has been the norm for sane people for quite some time now.
It sucks if you buy a new mac which isn't supported by older macOS releases though, so maybe don't do that for a year or so. I guess you sometimes just have to put your new Apple device in storage for a year until there's functional software.
For me I simply don't upgrade ever until I'm forced to, usually by an app that I want to use.
As someone without an iPhone and who doesn't really use included desktop apps, there are simply never any improvements in the OS for me, only regressions.
Ugh I upgraded excitedly and can't stand the UI - there is no upside to any of it. Also for some reason things are also beachballing and VSCode keeps crashing - new M4 MBP. All the system log errors are present exactly as they were and my USB-C dock with Ethernet port still doesn't work.
No idea on macOS, but turn on Reduce Transparency on iOS and there’s tons of padding most of the time, but then sometimes zero padding. And I mean zero. The edges of buttons and text are at the edge of the underlying background. It’s…embarrassing.
Either Tim Cook does not use a Mac computer or he does not notice/care. I am not saying he should helicopter-parent all the design process but the "finished" product?
Well, hasn’t this been the single biggest reason for their sustained stellar returns year after year where often (or maybe most of the time) the biggest change their devices (like iPhones) used to see was the version number change e.g. iPhone 13 -> 14.
For the rest of their users — they make a noise (which is not even feeble in comparison), bicker around, lament the fact that the other alternative is Google (Windows and the Wild Linux West), and they stay. Rinse, repeat.
That was my experience with liquid glass on mobile. I’d heard it was bad, thought it couldn’t possible be that bad then tried it and was flabbergasted. Really unfortunate.
The Finder looks like shit. The sidebar is like badly retrofited from another program, perhaps from some crappy Gnome theme.
The Control Center (or however they call the drop down window with quick controls for volume, wifi, brigthness, etc) has floating isolated icons like crap.
Bring back Scott Forstall. Give him a big bonus. Let him fix this shit.
Otherwise, the code changes and actual features are probably fine.
I see grossly rounded corners in some apps, but I don't see the other stuff like gaps in window corners for full screen apps. I may have some config bit flipped that has disabled those.
Yeah, the new corner radius is ugly but by and large, it's not much different than before, from what I see so far.
This is like back when a lot of major devs like Adobe just straight up started faking window borders instead of updating their apps to the newer framework and it all looked and felt inconsistent or just obviously way off.
If this were April 1st, it might make sense. But this is a major OS release by a brand that's famous for its design aesthetic. What the actual fuck Apple? Does nobody test anything anymore? How did this get out of the lab? Who exactly is steering this ship? Tim Cook's days at the helm might be winding down.
Honestly feels like QA and release qualification are non-existent in so many organisations these days. This can't possibly be the case though, right? Right?
> There's SO much padding and wasted screen real estate, disjointed looking floating inner panels, window corners that are so rounded you see gaps in full screen apps, inconsistencies everywhere and - well, I could go on.
Remember in the beforetimes when we decoupled themes from OS updates? Wouldn't it be nice if once again we discovered this lost technology that let different users have different UIs?
It took a day of getting used to it, but I have had no issues either. Some of the commentary on this thread seems overly critical to me, but you tend to see that on any Apple thread on HN. There’s stuff I like, some stuff I don’t, but in the end I’ll adapt.
I think sime people just hate change. I am convinced that some folks complaining here will be complaining when MacOS 28 comes out and changes some OS 26 feature they have grown to like.
1. Apple photos redesign from last year sucks and I’m already frustrated with iCloud abstraction and lack of cross platform friendliness
2. Switch to an alternate cloud photos provider
3. Find out about Liquid Glass, looks like shit, impulse sell my MacBook Pro in favor of a Framework
4. Surprise surprise, it’s actually the year of the Linux desktop. My gaming situation is way better on Linux and it does everything my Mac did. The only compromise is my need to carry a big extra battery around.
> Basically the vibe I get from it is that they think their users are dumb
Your point would have been much more convincing had you refrained from this sort of pejorative assigning of motives. It wasn't necessary.
I've been running the betas to the final release and there are a number of basic affordances and system improvements that are definitely worthwhile. I will not be going back.
Having said that, while I know they had good intentions with this whole design, and probably really thought they were pursing a winner, what a massive, massive miss. This is such an aesthetic disaster that I'm just in awe. I feel like they had a huge push to do some seemingly substantial change, particularly on the mobile side, given the stumbles in the AI space, so they changed a lot of things maybe without quite enough thought.
Ugly as hell. More dead space. On the mobile side they released an update to iOS just today from the RC a few days ago that removes some of the particularly stupid animations (the app tray did some dumb thing where it expanded and shrank, and that and a few similar things are gone).
If there are enough OGs, they should recall Windows XP with all those bells and whistles AND those life-saving switch to "Windows Classic" that survived next three generations of Windows.
I personally pray for that "MacOS classic" switch... It's sad to enter that decay era for Apple where every next software upgrade for the device feels effectively as a hardware downgrade.
I swear I don't usually complain about UI styling updates, because it's usually not a big deal - but this looks really, really bad [1]. It's less functional with bizarre transparency choices destroying legibility, and big rounded corners taking up more dead space. And stylistically, the layouts just look unbalanced and amateurish (It reminds me of what happens when I attempt to do CSS layouts). Most Linux desktops unironically look better than this.
It's ironic that Apple makes screen size incredibly expensive for every millimeter - and then designs UI which proceeds to waste that pricey real-estate as well as user time by burying options (or worse, simply removing many advanced user options "because they don't fit").
It’s funny how different people saw things. UAC was hated back then but I was a Linux user primarily and when I bought my laptop I kept the Windows Vista while dual booting. UAC mostly made sense and worked like gksudo.
I remember saying so once and got flamed by people online because of course Microsoft didn’t copy this from Linux and of course gksudo was much better.
But the subjective experience I had was the same. IMHO the greatest victory with Electron has been that the OS wars have practically ended.
Aero didn't have absurd padding. It made good use of texture, colour and shade. It actually looked quite appealing. We've been steadily downhill since.
Have the tabs in Finder always been slow to appear? Right now there is a noticeable delay from when I press cmd+tab to when tab animates itself into existence, reminds me of lag in windows 11.
I do dislike how toy-like the user interface looks, but I really hate how illegible notifications are on iPadOS. I had to turn on the reduce transparency setting so I could read the notification text against my lock screen wallpaper.
I decided to install this and the updated iOS today to see how I felt about it.
My very initial impressions on MacOS:
(1) I like the look of Safari better and the Mail app compared to the prior designs. They both look really nice to me and the Mail app especially looks like a huge improvement in terms of design unification with some of the features like summaries and unsubscribe options that looked bolted on in the past now blending in seamlessly.
(2) I really, really don't like the new icons! Especially so on iOS.
(3) On iOS the app group/folders look terrible to me with the way they distort my wallpaper. Not a fan.
(4) A lot of people are complaining about transparent icons. It's not a valid complaint and is strong evidence whoever is saying that hasn't used the new OS as that is a choice you can make if you want. The default is not transparent.
(5) The increased radii in some places doesn't seem to have any meaningful impact to my information density. A simple comparison of Chrome (old styling) and Safari (with the liquid glass design) shows that Safari has a few pixels fewer in height search + tab bar as a concrete example.
(6) Messages app in MacOS looks like shit. I hate almost everything about it.
(7) Spotlight search has marked improvements! UI is nicer and functionality has expanded greatly (eg clipboard search).
In a phone writing text is not as simple, but I also find looking for the right icon there tedious, so I hope there was a better solution. In contrast, imo it is easier to get muscle memory with a keyboard (cmd+space > "first 3 characters of app name") than with searching for the app icon around. I cannot imagine the case where looking around in the launchpad is better except with some app you use so rarely you do not know the name (but somehow you have muscle memory for where it is there?).
I use CMD+SPACE 95% of the times I want to open an app. The rest 4% I do it with `open -a` on a terminal with autocomplete (or `/path/to/apps/binary &` for some specific stuff), and 1% going through the `/Applications` directory. I never use launchpad.
I have to believe that Apple had anonymized telemetry that told them how many people used Launchpad and acted as justification to nix it. I remember when it came out, and I probably used it more in the first month when it was novel and new than I have since then. I'm sorry a feature that you liked is gone, but I'm sure it wasn't done blindly.
> Imagine you no longer have pages with icons on your phone and instead only have a search bar
I haven’t had pages of icons on my phone since the App Library was added. Generally the app I want is right there and if not a couple of letters in the search bar and there it is
Your “Imagine…” hypothetical is literally how I run my iPhone. I don’t need piles of icons cluttering up my screen. I can pull down and type 1-2 characters and get any app on my phone, easily.
More room for glanceable, informational widgets that way.
Spotlight improvements are one of the only things I actually like about it so far, it's unbelievable how bad messages app looks... we're certainly losing some space in cases where they're doing this weird sidebar container
The poof animation was such a lovely touch. Removing it feels like a crime honestly.
Most of the friendly computer interactions are being removed. I presume someone thinks it takes too much effort to replicate. They’re making the computer soulless, just like Windows, they might as well remove the Mac name as well.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
As a KDE Plasma dev, I always counted on us getting better, but I didn't expect the competition to get so much worse. We'd be flamed to high and heaven for shipping broken notification popups and rendering glitches like that in a prod release.
After years with Xfce and GNOME, I recently switched to distro that by default prefers KDE, and I'm overall satisfied - Qogir theme, little customization and I'm as good as I was with Win7. Plasma 6.4.5 feels way more stable than line 5 that would crash during stupidest things.
As for what happen at Cupertino: it seems that they replaced people who knew theory and practice, principles of interface design with designers who were told to make a product that looks "fresh" and will diverge attention from Apple's AI failure.
Because why this Liquid Glass now if not as "rattling keys" effect? It's not a technological breakthrough - we've seen translucent plastic/glass/acrylic elements and fancy animations in operating systems before. Hell, even Plasma had that glass stuff in initial line 4 of release. And OSX had Aqua interface, window animations long before Microsoft wasted years for Longhorn finally releasing it as Vista with Aero. Not mention Compiz on Linux around same time.
My partner is already baffled with lack of polish and consistency across the system in this release. In some places it's just a transitional animation added on top of flat style for "wow" effect because hardware nowadays doesn't tax much for that. Tahoe feels like it tries to follow GNOME/Adwaita big interface elements that should stay exclusively on mobile devices, and it does this quite late and also really bad.
There’s no way this was developed by Apple. I keep thinking that they outsourced the macOS development to some amateurs online and took a year off traveling the world.
Looking at the screenshots and review videos, I cannot believe how ugly and out of proportion it is. Normally, there would be a consistent design and some people like it while others don’t. But this is simply ugly.
My guess is that it’s all product managers and “designers” now, a whole religion of procedures and terminology, and unfortunately very little engineering of the kinds that some of the early Ux pioneers applied.
The rumor mill speculates that Apple needed to ship something big and flashy to distract people from calling them out on their failure to deliver on the AI features promised (and previewed!) more than a year ago.
At this point, I have Plasma configured as a better macOS shell. Not a clone, those always look bad, but layouts close enough that my macOS muscle memory can't tell the difference.
I feel like we’ve gone full circle. For decades Apple hardware sucked and was badly overpriced, but you paid the price to enjoy running Mac OS X. Now Apple makes amazing hardware (especially laptops) but the drawback is that you have to run macOS on them.
I really wish Asahi Linux had more support, I would have bought a couple M4 Minis.
If you don't need the battery life of a MacBook and you're happy getting a desktop device, there's plenty of machines running new AMD chips that are just as fast as an M series mac, if not faster. And they'll run Linux with no compromises. Check out Bee-Link (https://www.bee-link.com/) for some mac-inspired hardware.
I always considered the butterfly keyboard[1] the point at which Apple's design system jumped the shark as it focused on it's own aesthetics vs. building quality and reliable products.
Funny enough, it's the only time period since 1999 that I was apple free for a while. My MBP broke. I've previously had a butterfly keyboard on my work mac, and it got replaced on a regular bases. While unfortunate for a work computer, this was not acceptable as my personal one with no spares)
Thankfully Apple returned to making great products that work, and I bought the next MBP.
Seeing that Apple's returning to it's "design roots"[2], I really hope they do not loose sight of building great products that work well for their customers.
> I always considered the butterfly keyboard[1] the point at which Apple's design system jumped the shark as it focused on it's own aesthetics vs. building quality and reliable products.
This statement describes pretty much every mouse Apple ever made, from the circular ones to the horrendous magic mouse with charging port underneath.
Ooh, the mouse myth! Love it when this one gets dragged out. Turns out it’s not really a problem - the battery life is measured in months, you’ll get several hours from plugging it in for thirty seconds, and days if you plug it in for a few minutes while getting coffee.
People love to hate it, but it’s never been a real problem. The ergonomics are bad. The charging isn’t.
This is true, but Apple mice have always been consistently bad. A laptop where getting a single grain of dirt under the keyboard meant you couldn't type was a very new thing in 2015.
> Funny enough, it's the only time period since 1999 that I was apple free for a while.
Same here. After the butterfly keyboard era, I spent about 5 years with Windows 10/11 and powershell, then WSL. There's still a lot of annoyance in the Windows space (NTFS is slow due to all the filesystem filters), but Linux package managers are much better than homebrew and WSL does make Windows a pretty reasonable developer system. I'm back on the MacOS now but I wouldn't hate a nice Windows machine.
Yes, WSL2 is quite good. WSL1 was even a step up, but WSL2 gives me an environment that I can use quite well and be productive with.
The NTFS speed thing is kinda amazing. I use cursor on MacOS. My friend has a windows laptop which is likely 2-3x more powerful than my Macbook Air. I can install a new cursor in 2-3s tops, on the Windows machine it takes minutes. Wow. It's all file copying speed.
Awful cheap UX, cartoonish style with huge padding, lack of structure and hierarchy. The spacing is inconsistent, everything is rounded. The app launcher stutters, the icons load one by one, it flickers each time I do the 4 finger gesture. Why does the volume bubble have tick marks but the one in the menu doesn't? The trash icon looks like the windows recycle bin or gnome theme from 20 years ago, not sure why it's flattened like that.
You explained the design inconsistencies the best. Though I’m worried that instead of fixing the underlying problems, they’re just going to make a bullet list of what people mention here and change those only. Then we’re going to have an OS where no two screens have the same paddings etc.
What the hell happened to the Apple design guides. Did all the engineers who read them retire.
Oh boy, I opened the settings app to change the wallpaper, the scrollbar gets cut off by the right bottom rounded corner. The wallpapers can be scrolled horizontally and they show up under the side rail (blurred), looks like a glitch, and I still can't resize this window to see more of the wallpapers. They may have fixed the custom color bug though.
It really does look like ass on the laptop. Maybe it works on mobile, idk, but terrible on laptop. Also not a good sign since apple is not known for rolling back releases.
Realistically speaking, they’re not going to rollback anything. They even kept and even double downed on that’s stupid photos app redesign on iOS.
At least the review sites are making some noise this time instead of parroting Apple’s announcements. They all sold us that awful photos app as the great new thing.
I am the only one to think that these days, GNOME and KDE are more usable than anything made by Microsoft or Apple? I think part of the reason is that devs working on these projects don't have an incentive to make arbitrary changes like people who need to justify their paychecks.
Been using Fedora + KDE since ~March on my main dev machine (hp laptop), basically without any issues and it hasn't broken itself yet. Works amazing. KDE has cured my last bit of distrohopping I had left and I moved on from Gnome too. Things that irritate me on my last macos machine is literally 3 config toggles away in KDE.
In the coming month will install Fedora+KDE on 5 more machines for family members due to Windows 10 hitting end of life.
(This about iOS, not Mac, but obviously a lot is similar.)
I might be in the minority on hn, but I’m using iOS 26 for the first time today and am pretty happy with the new design. For one, it’s a lot snappier and faster. I’m glad they finally did something about the slow-ass animations iOS had in a lot of places. Secondly, it has a lot more personality. I enjoy that. Thirdly, they finally moved more basic UI stuff close to the thumbs instead of literally 6 inches away at the top of the screen. Love that. Knowing app designers, my apps are about to get easier to use just by migrating to the new UX concepts Apple is pushing.
The glass look is mostly fine. iOS had contrast issues before, and I don’t think it’s any worse. If anything, it’s more adaptive to different types of backgrounds now.
There are some visual glitches and weird things, but they’re pretty minor and will be resolved with time. The glass panes for, say, folders look nice, and I like it more than the previous blur.
I don’t mind the visual appearance of iOS 26. My main gripe is that this update introduces some pointless additional taps for common interactions.
Here’s some of the UX regressions:
- Apple Music: the “next track” button is only visible if the tab bar is expanded. So now we have to scroll or tap, wait for an animation and then click next.
- Web views search web for selected text: previously we could highlight, swipe the action menu and then tap the button. Now we have to highlight, tap the small arrow, wait for the horizontal list to animate into a vertical list, tap the button. They removed the ability to swipe the action menu.
- Tab bars: since 2007, you could change tabs with one tap. Now it’s one or two taps, depending on whether it’s collapsed or expanded.
I’ve settled on swiping up on the (…) button. But yeah, either way I’m bummed that usability had been traded for shiny/trendy aesthetics here. Worst part is that they know and have provided options to have “classic view”/“try new ui” rather than iterating and polishing it to the point it’s substantially improved and there’s no choice but to release it.
Design is a series of decisions. Those decisions should be rooted in a strong, thoughtful, point of view. It’s a problem when the final product embodies multiple points of view; view options should be the extreme exception, not the norm we now see in phone, mail, safari, etc.
I should know better, but I'm still surprised they're shipping this version of Liquid Glass. Performance is stable but there are so many UI bugs and inconsistencies that haven't been fixed from early betas, including low-hanging fruit that a second year design student would notice. I don't mind change or interface elements moving around but keynote-level UI overhauls should be fully implemented at launch, otherwise people are stuck using a broken OS for a year.
At this point I'm doubtful that these will be addressed in the 26.X updates, so the wait begins for 27.0...
Yeah I shouldn't be surprised this was allowed to launch today, but yet I am.
I ran the whole beta on all my devices. Every new beta I'd ask myself "Surely they fixed 'x' by now, right?" and we advanced, beta after beta, with the same bugs and performance regressions all the way up to launch.
The icons still need to redraw in the settings app and app library. It's overall sluggish. The drop shadows are huge in the finder and other apps top bar. If you turn on always show scrollbars they get cut off at a weird angle due to the excessive corner radius.
My iPhone 16 PM runs hot all the time, even on release now, vs. iOS 18.
I don't mind the transparency or glass effects. I actually like it in some areas. But man does it need some serious polish and bug fixing, and a lot of time and effort spent on consistency.
This should never have went live in this state. I consider .0 just another beta, really. Actual release will probably be .2 or .3
They went way too far with the corner radii and pill shapes imo, looks like a Fisher Price toy. Some inner buttons retained the old radii and don't match the outer window radii anymore.
It's truly hideous to look at. I really can't believe they went for these massively rounded corners. They're too stubborn to allow you to select an option for right angled corners again. They just tinker as there's no other real UI enhancements.
It’s a trend that’s visible in other designs too, like Material 3 Expressive.
I’m not a fan of Windows but I believe that probably the best modern UI design system for desktops right now is probably the flavor of Fluent used in Windows 11. It still retains somewhat desktop-like information density, doesn’t go overboard on radii, and has a touch of depth. I’d like to see more design languages exploring in its general direction.
I don't think "defaults to windows-like" is a bad choice for newcomers.
I don't customize it heavily either. Move tray, clock and menus to the top, a-la GNOME2, leave taskbar at the bottom, both auto-hidden and narrower than screen.
Add four desktops as a 2x2 grid, re-enable old CTRL+ALT+$ARROW keyboard shortcuts, add a couple of usability effects with custom key combinations and two active corners, and I'm done.
Some applications (Konsole, KATE) get custom fonts and themes, but everything else is bog standard. Setting it up takes 30-ish minutes, and it's the same config for decades now. Probably because of sharpening the same tool and optimizing without knowing.
Then, I can just concentrate and fly on that environment.
Also, they have improved a lot in the small areas where it was lacking. You can use your system without a terminal if you want, plus Baloo works really well.
I would argue that it actually doesn’t go far enough in windows-like-ness to be viable for a lot of people, and for those who prefer a mac-like setup the possible customization doesn’t take it far enough in that direction, either. It’s not Windows or macOS, it’s KDE, and that’s fine but I think there need to be environments more specifically aimed at people who are happy with their current commercial OS setups.
Transparent UI, with controls sitting on top of arbitrary and changing content can NEVER be legible/discernible. Apple knows this, but fashion was more important than function and they decided, "who cares about disabled people, anyway."
Microsoft learned this lesson back in the Vista era but Apple's charging ahead with this terrible set of changes that will literally disable millions of users, people who will need to visit the accessibility settings to reduce the transparency.
It's a sad day when a company that has often lead in accessibility ships the least accessible OS in modern history. I guess it was a nice run having a Big Tech company to point to as a good example of doing various accessibility things well. Damn.
I've been submitting endless feedback about how Liquid Arse breaks dark mode during the beta. I keep seeing dark text on dark backgrounds all over the place in both Tahoe and iOS 26, for example: https://imgur.com/a/R3DTcSd
I've pretty much given up with submitting feedback though.
CarPlay has dark text on dark backgrounds in the latest version of iOS. And I’m talking about stock apps like Messages, not some obscure text buried somewhere deep in the operating system.
I'm sorry, but that's not a logical stance. If this were the method that anyone in the industry used (which absolutely nobody does) all interfaces would be high contrast 150pt font, no transparency, two color, because that's what my grandma needs.
Changing toolbars to text-only is pretty bad. The button hotboxes are tiny
Generally I think the toolbar settings needed more testing, they can be wonky (e.g. in Automator for text+icon it causes the traffic lights to misalign, in Safari toggling the sidebar on and off is janky).
You can turn off the transparency in the accessibility settings. Sure products could be 100% accessible out of the box but unless you had some sort of limit on that it would likely make the experience worse for the majority of users. I can’t imagine Helvetica Neue Extra Light was particularly accessible as the system font a decade ago - but there were accessibility settings.
This is what happens when designers are treated as royalty and are told that their new "clothes" are "awesome" all the time.
It's also a symptom of consumption addiction where there is demand/motivation for drastic, superficial changes that don't really offer any value except to those who are consumed by the need for constant change for change's sake.
Apple used to care more about disabled people because of how the Accessibility APIs worked and were required for most apps.
Whoa, you can now search clipboard history. Go to Spotlight Search, Command+4. You'll get a list of entries, each with a copy button, and is searchable. Even shows the app it was copied in.
Either way, I think it is better to not copy passwords to the clipboard or the selection, but store and transfer them via password-manager/browser/etc APIs.
And seriously, managers like 1Password clear the clipboard after some time. I would guess that there’s some clipboard API that allows managers to exclude copied passwords from being permanently added to the history.
Still, there are pieces of data that one might not want to store in such unobvious place as clipboard history so it’s good to know about it.
I use KeePassXC which does empty the keyboard after a few seconds. But keeping history seems like a breaking change to the social (if not technical) contract of the OS' clipboard API.
Can anyone speak to whether the performance of the Settings app has been improved? In Seq and every version since they redid it in presumably SwiftUI, if you select one of the navigation panes and then hold either the up or down arrow keys to quickly navigate between them, something like a memory leak occurs due to (seemingly) launching all of the nested panes as separate apps (this is what appears to be the case in activity monitor) and the Settings app will start lagging until you fully quit and reopen.
I'm normally on about 1 year delay on upgrading macOS for a multitude of reasons. I might not wait the full year but something else will have to force me to upgrade within the first few months.
I'd heard from people who were running the betas that it's not ready and they are surprised Tahoe wasn't delayed.
No way I'm upgrading any time soon to Apple's least cared for OS with a change this big (and this untested).
I'll be honest, I hear this every single time. But I've never delayed upgrading, and I've never regretted it. That's not to say every upgrade has been a strict improvement, but going back to my first Mac at 10.4 (Tiger) I've never wished I had stayed on an older version. We'll see how I feel after going to Tahoe, maybe this will be the one that breaks the trend.
You always have to be moving forward and I'll never say "I'll just stay on Sequoia for forever" but delaying a bit does make life easier. I know I'll eventually upgrade but being there day 1 or even month 1 is not something I'm interested in. There are never new features that outweigh sending my development workflows into disarray or dealing with broken apps.
There aren't always huge issues or huge time sinks but I'm happy to let other people be on the bleeding edge and I'll upgrade once the Github issues, blog posts, etc have been created/fixed so that when I upgrade I can easily find solutions to any remaining issues I might run into. Especially with Tahoe, I've heard that some apps are just broken, period, unless the developer makes (sometimes significant) changes to get the same functionality working again (that was working fine in Sequoia).
> But I've never delayed upgrading, and I've never regretted it.
I was the same way for until one of the upgrades, I forget which, broke resume from suspend about 10-20% of the time for my combination of laptop and monitor. Every morning I’d get a sense of dread when I tried to open the laptop to see if today was a day where I’d get to pick up where I left off or if I was in for a crash and reboot as soon as I tried to use the laptop.
I thought for sure it would be fixed with one of the point updates, but it went on for the better part of a year.
Any actual interesting changes under the hood other than UI changes? I cant remember the last time macOS release that actually brings any useful feature I use.
It's been so long since Apple has released anything in either iOS or macOS that excited me as a user. I don't seem to be their target customer anymore.
The only reason I even have to "upgrade" to a higher version number is how quickly app developers (including Apple themselves) drop support for older OS's. My iPhone which is stuck on iOS 15 runs just as well as the day I bought it, but every other app I download tells me (in essence) "LOL your phone is too old and our developers are too lazy to keep our software running on it. Upgrade your OS or get lost loser".
That's literally the only thing motivating me to upgrade anymore: The treadmill of software compatibility. Apple doesn't have to innovate--they just need to make sure the ecosystem is broken after ~5-10 years or so.
Isn't that true for pretty much every OS? The feature set we need to be able to do our jobs and computing hobbies have been available for two decades.
Operating systems like Debian is sufficiently boring that I can just upgrade and continue computing. macOS upgrades have become a small gamble, the stuff that I depend on may not continue to work, or at least it will take a good deal of work. There are however no reason to upgrade, so the risk isn't really worth the hassle of upgrading and breaking Java or Python.
You can still get software that installs and works perfectly on Windows 7 (released 16 years ago). Good luck finding software that even installs on Snow Leopard (released 16 years ago), let alone works well.
The flip side of this is that every attempt at advancing the Windows UI framework story beyond win32/MFC and WPF has failed and the platform itself is steeped neck deep in technical debt.
Sometimes it’s Apple and Google that are forcing developers. The system is perfectly capable of running the app (you’re not using any new API) but store policies force you to add the restriction anyway.
Yeah we are in this situation right now with an App, we literally can't update it unless we target a more modern version of the SDK, which introduces breaking changes
This problem could be mitigated by Apple making older versions of software available. Then you could continue to release updates, and users on older devices could continue to use earlier versions of your app on their devices.
Apple actually partially solves this: as a user, if I have EVER downloaded Older Version X of an app, and then go to download it again, they let me. However, if I have never downloaded the old version and go to download it, they just say “this app is not compatible with your device.” and don't give me the chance to get the older, compatible version. I don’t know why they make this distinction.
Worse are the third party apps where the old version still actually runs, but the developer deliberately blocks you with a full-screen “go away” dialog (I’m looking at you, FlightAware).
I got my first MacBook at Catalina, and still miss it. For a while, I downgraded my Intel Mac to Catalina again; I love the aesthetic compared to the newer releases, and it’s fast and snappy.
But the situation now is: No recent apps work on Catalina since it’s considered obsolete (except open-source apps you compile yourself). But Big Sur and higher are ridiculously slow on Intel hardware, to the point where it’s unusable. I now have an otherwise perfectly good 2019 Intel MacBook that has been gathering dust for the past years.
I’ve got a MacBook and Mac Mini stuck on Monterey (12), and an iMac stuck on Big Sur (11). I’m pretty much dead in the water when it comes to software compatibility, unless I want to put Linux on them. Even homebrew gives me a warning that they’ve stopped support and to expect everything to break. It’s a sad state of affairs.
This[1] worked well to upgrade old Macs that were stuck on old versions of macOS for me, if you're not choosing to stay on older versions for other reasons.
Support rapidly being dropped happens mostly with smaller devs, because when resources are limited in the Apple platform world you can either adopt newer APIs and language features or you can support old OSes 3+ versions back. Trying to do both lands you in feature check conditional hell and requires a large matrix of test devices to ensure that nothing is being broken.
It’s less of a burden for corporate giants which is why you see much longer support timelines from e.g. Google.
Not Linux, but I still look forward to window managers and Neovim releases. The Cosmic desktop also looks promising, though I’m not using it until it has a scrolling window manager available for it.
Spotlight got a major upgrade. It’s notably faster and deeply integrates with Shortcuts (letting you specify input variables, for example) among other things.
I’ve got Spotlight configured to index nothing but my applications (which is surprisingly difficult to configure and breaks with every major OS upgrade). Disabling all its default indexing has alleviated 95% of unexplainable CPU spikes and autocomplete pollution, so now I can finally use it for what it’s meant to be: the most overengineered fuzzy finder application launcher.
I actually preferred the pre-tahoe spotlight. The information density was higher and while it did not always give me the most relevant result atleast it was consistent and I could scroll down to find it. New spotlight is less dense and jumbles everything together.
Anyone using Raycast has had these features forever. Nice to see some attention on Spotlight but it's still nowhere close to the functionality you get from Raycast.
I've been using Raycast for a couple months but I'm hoping I can uninstall it if Spotlight is responsive enough in Tahoe. What bothers me about Raycast is the monthly subscription for certain features. I don't mind paying for Mac software – I'm quite happy to do that – but I do mind paying monthly subscriptions for Mac software with seemingly no justification for it (i.e. what monthly resources does running a "window command" use on Raycast that justifies locking it behind a monthly subscription?)
I thought Pro was only for AI features as well (that's what it said when I installed Raycast), but this dialog is saying Pro is required for custom window layouts as well. I only discovered this today when I was trying to create a new command to paste the screenshot from my clipboard into Preview for OCR.
Raycast is interesting but I’m not going to touch it so long as VC funding is involved. Alfred has been doing the job well enough, only requires me to buy a new version a couple times per decade, and isn’t going to become enshittified because there’s no VCs to come knocking looking for a profit.
+1 for Alfred. I'm a proud Power Pack / lifetime-license holder from the beginning. Very few outfits anymore have the chops to both offer and make good on a single-payment, long-lasting product with frequent and excellent substantive updates.
It’s insanely tiny and efficient for what it does, too. One of the only apps that’s so small that updates are done downloading within a second or two of clicking “Download”, even on a mediocre connection!
The fact that so much of the page is devoted to this liquid glass feature pretty much tells you the answer is no. Plus the fact that the "And so much more" section lists 10 different updates in the same space as their poster with a link to a PDF instead of building out a larger webpage speaks volumes.
TextEdit has a styling toolbar now which I appreciate. The new spotlight has more functionality and seems faster (and less likely to pull up a website instead of the app I'm trying to launch)
If anyone here feel aggravated by both Liquid Glass and whatever Windows 11 calls their UI, give KDE a try (Fedora is pretty stable with it). After tweaking a few things (display dpi, theme, wallpaper) - its a very coherent experience & information dense. You can do 95% of your computing in this environment. After getting used to KDE, it will be hard to go back to windows or macos.
Curious what your life is like that you can 'just' switch to Linux. For me changing desktop OSes at this point would be like moving to a different country.
Maybe it's new and controversial, but I like it. Honestly, I think there is something more about it. Like another Apple product that we're going to see in the future, like Apple glasses would work perfectly with this UI.
I've been using it for ~6 weeks, and I'm also a bit confused by the hate since it's barely changed. I'm a fan of the improved UX harmonization across form factors. My intuition is that the minor and gradual "Duploization" of macOS in Sequoia and now Tahoe foreshadows touchscreen MacBooks.
I agree with you. It really hasn't changed all that much. It's a bit more cartooney, but as long as it doesn't get in the way of my work, I don't care.
It looks like a lot of the hate flowing on HN is just people looking at worst-case screenshots on blogs and piling on. They haven't even used it.
There are a few things I'm not wild about, but for the most part it's a bunch of shoulder-shrugs. This isn't the end-of-the-world scenario that people are making it out to be.
I have a regular non-techie person in the family with a Mac who I think will like the changes. Those are the people who Apple is targeting. Not the tech bros and the wannabe posers who are desperately clutching their 10-year-old iPhones out of some kind of righteous indignation.
I'd like to see the presentation they used internally to sell the liquid glass aeshetic. I bet it is sillier than the famous Pepsi logo redesign document.
First rule of MacOS upgrade: don't.
Second rule: wait for x.1 or x.2 releases, so it's more stable and most importantly, the dependencies you need get updated.
Apple had a chance to bring back taste when they got rid of Ive, but missed it entirely. The overly rounded windows, the weird amount of blank space, the lack of clarity in general — the only thing that makes sense is that middle managers brought this about.
edit: Things are even worse — they already made newer apps much more difficult to read, likely because they have been brought from mobile to desktop. Now fonts are even smaller in System Settings, for example. What are they even thinking?
> Now fonts are even smaller in System Settings, for example. What are they even thinking?
It's worse on the iPad. They apparently think an iPad is now also a mouse and cursor device because they made touch targets so small, and the fonts in menus shrunk down making them more difficult touch targets as well.
More ways to express yourself with images.
Mix emoji and descriptions to make something brand-new. In Image Playground, discover additional ChatGPT styles. And have even more control when making images inspired by family and friends using Genmoji and Image Playground.
I have to say, is AI image generation really the job of an operating system? I've also seen this sort of stuff on Pixel Android, it's now built into mspaint on Windows 11 and there's also copilot everywhere. Does anyone even use this stuff? It requires constant updates and maintenance to support newer models, in my experience it gets stale and outdated much more quickly. I think it would be better served by the user just opening their web browser to go to ChatGPT (or other service) which receives latest model upgrades first. Am I going crazy or is this just a horrible idea?
It always seemed quite cringe to me. A use it once and "Ehh I guess it works and is cool, sure" and then never touch it again sort of feature.
Other than old people that always send gifs on Facebook and children who this is probably one of the only AI art things they have access too, idk who else uses this.
If one tech giant has it then they need to too for feature parity. Not a whole lot of use cases for generative AI for the masses, so if someone comes up with one, gotta copy!
What an ugly UI update. I usually don't mind too much about the changes in MacOS UI and visuals, but opening up Finder leaves me shocked that this actually got the green light. Who in their right mind looked at this and thought: "yep that's the future, it looks fantastic!".
For Finder I discovered that changing the Toolbar to Icon Only significantly improved it. Then I set the sidebar icons to small in the Appearance system setting. That helped a lot.
Most of the new UI is designed almost exclusively for icon only toolbars.
Writing this comment from my FrameWork laptop with AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, 96GB Ram, 4TB Storage, that I got for $4k. Running Fedora with KDE. How much would I need to pay Apple to get a laptop with this much ram?
The day I got my only Apple device, an ipad, only to know they will kill my browser download as soon as I switch to a different app, it became my last. I don't want to pay a company only to be subject to their decision of what I can and cannot run on my machine.
I’ve been using Omarchy (Arch+Hyprland) as my daily driver for over a month. It is faster, prettier and more efficient than macOS in my opinion. I have a Framework 16” on order. I can’t wait to get it.
If Apple stopped at the over-saturated/rounded-corners, it would have been a decent iteration on something established (and very much not broken). I realise the transparent icons are optional - but it now looks like a budget Android theme.
I'm not quite sure what to make of Liquid Glass, I developed an allergy of sorts to the term while listening to the keynote.
Any 'relevant' new features for power users / cmd line geeks that you know of?
The changes to Spotlight are fairly power-user focused. There's a lot of enhancements to make it quicker to set up shortcuts within it, and they've added a clipboard manager feature to it.
Not a direct response to your question but (I guess like you) I often find with these releases that the changes I actually care about aren’t flashy enough to even warrant a mention in the presentations or on the main web page.
There seems to be some expansion of screen time, finally, but I haven’t been able to figure out what it is yet based on the only *os 26 update I’ve done so far is the public beta on a single Apple TV.
I've run every version of macOS since Mac OS X Public Beta. I'm pretty sure I'm going to skip Tahoe. macOS 15 Sequoia is great; why would I switch to something profoundly ugly and unpolished if everything will keep running on my current OS and Apple's liable to make macOS 27 look tolerable?
A small but important detail of Aqua was that the assumed light source was pointing straight down, whereas everybody else was usually using a 45 degrees angle. I wish Apple took a lesson from the old masters.
Also these colors make my eyes bleed. And the border radius is ridiculous.
Who is macOS designed for? I assume a non negligible customer base are software professionals and this iOSification of the desktop is borderline hostile. I don’t get it.
It’s butt-ugly, but I find the usability better. Previously everything was so white that I found it difficult on occasion to distinguish between windows above and below. The heavier drop shadows and rounded corners are actually quite helpful
Open up the Calendar app on macOS Tahoe. Look in the upper right at the time zone selector. It is left justified to a fault, leaving a very awkward amount of space between it and the expand arrow/flyout arrows.
I hope they'll acknowledge what they've done and fix most of this nonsense. I like macOS how it is right now, and I switched from Linux partly for this. I always wonder why don't they just add new stuff based on user feedback?
The part that I am so tired of is the ‘we are the best at this and this is amazing’ pitch that comes with every release. Never mind that this release’s design ‘language’ DIRECTLY conflicts with things they used to say ‘never do that’.
So what changed exactly? Change is understandable but this is a full 180.
- floating anything was verboten
- accessibility was paramount
- clarity was prioritized
i really wish they didn't give up on stage manager. every beta i would look if they fixed the opening behavior to open a new application in the same stage :/ but stage manager seems like it would have potential to fix window management on the mac without needing rectangle, yabai, alt tab etc
Just upgraded my wife’s laptop and my iPhone. It’s fine. I think her use (she lives in the browser) and my iPhone use (calls, camera, browser) don’t really reveal anything terrible. It’s kind of a dumb gimmick, but it’s mostly fine so far. It would annoy me if a UI that I frequently used “upgraded” to this, though.
A reminder, if you dislike the liquid glass look, that going into System settings / Accessibility / Display and toggling “Increase contrast” gets you a properly nice design with actual borders and solid backgrounds. 100% recommended.
I initially tried that and thought it improved some things, but it increased contrast across the OS, such that some webpages, including stock HN became too blinding. I instead switched to "Reduce Transparency," but that has its own issues.
Overall not pleased. I really did not want to care about the UI changes at all. But having experienced it now, I'm so annoyed I upgraded to iOS 26 and I'm having trouble focusing on the screen. I want WebGPU support, but I'm very hesitant to upgrade to macOS 26 (which is required for WebGPU in Safari).
The main selling point of a macbook is not a UI with transparency. It's hardware stuff (like ARM processors, battery life, aluminum frames, etc..) and a decent, stable, unix-ish software environment. No one is using macOS for the visual effects, so it is annoying that Apple is revamping the UI everyone is used to in order to add more visual effects.
Seems nuts to me, but I'll be curious to see how this all pans out.
This is the first time I've ever seen a macOS update and not seen a single feature worth bothering to upgrade over. Is there anything developer-facing? I don't use any Apple ecosystem stuff and this is all that AFAICT
I've grown so used to Apple shipping buggy software that I wait a year or more before upgrading my mac to a major version. I do all the minor releases and security patches, of course.
Two of the latest Intel MacBooks, and the last Intel iMac, so technically, yes, there’s still some Intel support in there. My 2019 iMac is one version too old.
Apple have always seemed to drop support for hardware after 5-7 years, and then it's just a question of the last supported OS becoming itself unsupported too. My early 2015 Macbook Pro (new in April 2015) got as far as macOS Monterey (released October 2021) - and they stopped updating that in October 2024.
(I'm not digging through Wikipedia to double check but my previous 2 Macbooks Pro felt like they lasted about as long.)
It'll be interesting to see if they change this with the (presumably cleaner slate) Apple Silicon-based hardware.
Widget appearance is tied to *icon appearance. Grumble grumble. I want clear for my widgets but default for my dock and other icons. Too bad so sad me I guess.
edit: replaced dock with icon, because it affects much more than just dock
Is that call screening example a new feature or something I can do now that I didn't know about? That's something I've missed since switching from a Pixel to an iPhone last year.
Anytime a UI redesign comes with bullshit abstract designer justifications ("a translucent new material that reflects and refracts its surroundings", etc) you know it's bad.
are they giving any hints that in high vis/accessibility modes this will be fully disabled? I've been largely insulated from changes like this for a while by that, if that were to change however, more drastic measures may be needed
They openly fucked DP 1.4 to make the ProDisplay XDR work.
Catalina, sure, you can drive a DP 1.4 monitor at 144Hz in HDR10. Big Sur, coinciding with the ProDisplay...? No, that will get you 60Hz HDR10 or 95Hz SDR.
So stupidly that downgrading my monitor (mine would allow you to select advertised support) to DP 1.2 would increase your refresh and HDR options.
And it was never fixed, not in Big Sur, Monterey or Ventura, when I had switched monitors.
People were wondering how Apple made the math work. Simple, by "Fuck you if your monitor isn't our $6,000 flagship".
Eh, it has always looked horrible. Non fractional scaling is just too much to ask at this point...but hey look at this tiny toggle element doing this cool liquidy effect wohoo
Only since OS X Yosemite. Then they decided to mess with the font smoothing and it went downhill from there. And no, it wasn't because of Retina, as OS X Mavericks had Retina support and still worked fine on low DPI screens.
I hate it. Everything has become larger and weirder and uglier? When I reboot the machine the time on the lock screen is in liquid glass but the date isn't?
I'm so bummed that the workarounds to keep a 5k iMac in commission all seem to be really likely to piss off your corporate IT department.
Patching the bootloader in memory seems like a big op-sec no-no.
Last time this came up on Hacker News, someone pointed out that there are new display boards you can buy from China to reuse a 5K's panel as an external display.
I think we're only allowed to run Linux at work on blessed devices. Last I looked, the 5K panel in the iMac was actually presented to the firmware as two smaller displays, which were glued back together in software. Apple does that magic to support its own hardware, but it sounded like Linux doesn't.
Thank you so much. I only need a Mac to compile/debug with Xcode (still can't get USB pass through with quickemu working) but Apple has been killing old versions such that projects wont build and home brew has no bottles and whatnot.
I don't think so, apple supposedly cares about aesthetics and design. If I didn't care about little details I would use windows. Like Steve Jobs said, it comes down to taste. Why would I use a flawed unpolished product, it doesn't reassure me that the technical side was even done well.
I take it as a sign of typical increasing corporate dysfunction. Obvious problems, some even easy and uncontroversial, don't get fixed. Why?
The people who can fix them are not in control. The org must be very top-down. But Steve Jobs had a top down style, so what's the difference? Its: Using and caring about the product.
It's top down direction with the people at the top not using/caring about the product. Presumably they're concerned with other things like efficiency, stocks, clout.
Also if you had a majorly obvious bug, you could email steve@apple.com, which he would forward to a VP, who would be fired if it wasn't fixed ASAP. Knew a guy who lost his job that way, so it's not just a myth. Steve really was like that.
The wrath of Steve was a real thing that people feared.
Menu extras were never intended to be treated like Windows tray items. For the earlier portion of OS X’s life, there wasn’t even a public API to create them and required a hack and a private API, and the current API is intended for ephemeral menu extras that disappear when their host app isn’t running. In short, the menubar isn’t designed for users to collect menu extras like Pokémon.
It used to be a checkbox, now there's only this command.
Eventually that will be gone too, and none will be the wiser except the old who remember the good old days.
I'm starting to think these settings are left there by rogue engineers who fight against the oppression while staying under the radar. It's like a secret cabal that works to maintain sanity while the plebs are left to suffer at the mercy of their own ignorance.
If you really want to use such a thing, switch to Ice. It’s an open source thing similar to Bartender, before BT was bought by a shifty outfit. It still requires those permissions, but at least you can look at the code. I have a paid Bartender license. I liked it enough to pay for it, but don’t like the road it went down and stopped using it.
Tahoe lets you selectively remove app icons from the menu bar. I’m going to try that for a while and see if I can tolerate not using Ice anymore.
I think they kinda did? I'm not sure where to look for a link to this info, but I remember watching a YouTube video showing the ability to group and hide menu bar icons in Tahoe so they take up less space (and therefore encroach less toward the notch).
Maybe I'm misremembering the video though.
(edit) The linked page seems to hint at it:
> Personalized controls and menu bar. Your display feels even larger with the transparent menu bar. And you have more ways to customize the controls and layout in the menu bar and Control Center, even those from third parties
Notice how on the menu bar, when you click File and then the dropdown appears, you can move the mouse arrow to the right (without clicking) over Edit and now the Edit menu shows up. But the same doesn't work on the status menu icons, if I click on the volume icon and move the mouse, nothing happens, the volume menu stays open, even if hover over the battery indicator. So many little things like this that never worked consistently.
Looking at this webpage I realise I am absolutely no longer part of Apple’s demographic for MacOS. I couldn’t care less about any of these new features. I was hoping the UI would be improved but it’s just a diabolical clusterfuck.
I suppose I'm in the minority, but I do like the new changes. It's refreshing, and looks good. Most issues can be tweaked away if you desire that. (disabling transparency or removing tint window with background wallpaper)
What I want is my single row Safari address+tabbar back - why did they take it out? And where the hell is the newly refreshed Terminal.app?
I still need to use the Scroll Reverser because the scroll direction (aka natural scrolling) can only be turned on or off globally, not per pointing device. I love natural scrolling on the trackpad, but it doesn't make sense on the mouse scroll wheel.
I use a Shortcut for this because it cuts down on the unnecessary apps. Hammerspoon.app would work too though.
tell application "System Settings"
activate
end tell
delay 0.1
tell application "System Events"
tell process "System Settings"
click menu item "Trackpad" of menu "View" of menu bar 1
delay 0.25
click radio button 2 of tab group 1 of group 1 of group 2 of splitter group 1 of group 1 of window 1
click checkbox "Natural scrolling" of group 1 of scroll area 1 of group 1 of group 2 of splitter group 1 of group 1 of window 1
tell application "System Settings" to quit
end tell
end tell
I hate to say it, but Windows is much more productive than MacOS for the usually tasks you perform on an OS (with GUI, both have CLIs, but I'm not talking about them). I'm using both at work all day long switching between them. When reflecting why, I think it comes down to windows management and the file explorer (vs finder).
That’s an entirely subjective thing, though. I’ve used Macs more than PCs and I can’t stand what feels to me like Windows’s abysmal window management.
I don’t say that to argue that macOS is better at it, just that I strongly prefer the Mac way as much as you prefer the way Windows does things, and that’s perfectly fine.
I’ve used both interchangeably for decades and can swap between them without slowing.
So much of this comes down to knowledge of and experiences with the quick/er ways for getting around.
For quite sometime using search tools is vastly more efficient for navigation and file movement than Explorer or Finder anyway.
A lot of the focus here is on the design (obviously). It took me a while to get used to it. But there are a lot of really great improvements in this release that make it worth it. Spotlight gets big updates. Live activities and notifications syncing from your phone. Journal. Music app has been massively updated and redesigned. Phone app. And surprisingly it doesn’t feel like a launch release - definitely less buggy than previous efforts.
If you're up for a project, you can swap the guts of those 5K iMacs for an aftermarket controller board which turns it into a regular monitor. It's a bit janky but a hell of a lot cheaper than buying a new 5K monitor.
Which is a bit sad. There were some choices that didn’t pan out in the last Intel era (butterfly, touchbar), but part of me loved those changes (the keyboard and the touchbar felt super premium, until you tried to work with them for any amount of time).
Is there anywhere to find a comprehensive list of updates made "Under the hood"? Sure the new UI is cool and all, but what are they doing to make the OS better? In a previous life I was a mac administrator and every update, apple would remove some binary and suddenly we couldn't natively make calls to LDAP or something.
I mean it’s gotten bad already, but I think people’s hope is that they fixed it that if I type in a file name I work with all the time it’ll be the first result. At least that’s what I’m hoping for.
that and some kind of weighted memory for search history. i use photoshop almost daily, photos once a month or so, and photo booth once a year, but they appear in reverse order based on alphabetization.
Disappointed with the background image. I was expecting a similar treatment like with Sequoia and previous versions with a beautiful and inspiring scene in nature. Instead it is vaguely inspired by water?
"Reimagined with Liquid Glass, macOS Tahoe is at once fresh and familiar. Apps bring more focus to your content. You can personalize your Mac like never before. And everything just flows into place."
Now imagine it being said by someone presenting and doing the same hand pyramid stance that they make every Apple employee in WWDC videos do.
All kidding aside, it’s weird to read. Ever since I was a kid, I was taught that beginning a sentence with “And” or “But” is not “correct”. Times change and all that, I get it - it’s just weird though.
All of the major commercial OS vendors are trying to do that. Apple started it with iOS. Google have gradually been tightening the net. Microsoft are furthest away but they have the longest legacy of freedom so they the furthest to go.
Obviously they aren't going to publicly say that's their intent, but you don't have to be a genius to read between the lines.
As for why... money and power are pretty big motivators.
What evidence have you got that they aren't? I don't see why you're expecting some quote from Tim Cook saying "yes we're going to lock down macos in the next 10 years". Obviously not going to happen.
The evidence is their actions with gatekeeper, app signing, removing the right-click workaround, etc.
I remember when there was option to run any application. With Sequoia there are only 2 options: App Store; App store + Known developers. Third option was removed. You can still run other apps but you need to manually approve them with ~3 popups where first option is "move to Bin". You need to do this after every OS or App update. I wonder when this option will be removed as well.
This is tiresome. You cannot lock down development machines. If you pay attention you'll see that OSes made for development work will be the only ones not locked down. Android was a holdout but Google is now tightening the screws. MacOS, Linux, BSD, and Windows are the only OSes that can't be locked down. Microsoft tried but they abandoned that.
Good point, but it is entirely possible for Apple/Microsoft to lock down "consumer" versions of their operating systems, effectively turning the common man's computer into a glorified phone and a new cash cow. Add to that a requirement for an online account, age verification, and other malware.
I've been running it since the RC and am currently in the process of uninstalling it. The new UI is so incredibly ugly I honestly cannot understand how they thought it was acceptable to even released as a beta let alone an RC and now release.
There's SO much padding and wasted screen real estate, disjointed looking floating inner panels, window corners that are so rounded you see gaps in full screen apps, inconsistencies everywhere and - well, I could go on.
Basically the vibe I get from it is that they think their users are dumb - they won't care about things like this and that they want everything to look like a preschoolers tablet.
I count four different corner radius sizes currently on my screen, which is maddening.
Apple has a thing against people with OCD. Or taste.
The thing is horribly wasteful of screen real estate, and as someone who’s been writing a Mac blog for over two decades, I am so happy I started using Fedora two years ago—GNOME has its flaws, but it looks nicer than Tahoe.
Fedora Silverblue is the closest feeling to the macOS experience I fell in love with that I’ve had on Linux in, well, ever. Very happy with it on my desktop and laptop. It’s not perfect but it is less imperfect than modern macOS has become.
Finding a laptop that works well is annoying, however.
> Finding a laptop that works well is annoying, however.
It doesn't exist at the moment. :\
I would pay 2x the price of a macbook for a linux laptop with the same hardware quality.
The battery life and power/efficiency of my m4 pro is insane. It's so good that it's really hard to justify using anything else right now.
It's sad that the best Linux laptop right now arguably is a M4 Mac virtualizing Linux.
Framework?
Why not run it natively with Asahi Linux?
Well limiting to specifically OP's example (M4 Mac), Asahi doesn't support it yet. :(
IIRC, there bunch of random things that still don't work -- no USB-C output, webcam, audio and if I've to guess suspend/resume is probably not rock solid either. The only benefit is that you get to use Linux, but then you may lose on actually getting work done without worrying about these issues. The new UI is inferior, but can still get things done.
Is Asahi installed side by side on a mac? You pick it at boot? And how “install and just use” it is?
Asahi Linux doesn't support the M3 or M4. That said, I'd be curious why OP doesn't consider Asahi on M2 to be a good option. AFAIK the only thing missing at this point is Thunderbolt and USB-C display output (HDMI out works fine).
Asahi is only supporting M1, and partly M2 I believe. M3 was enough of a change that there are no drivers for it.
this is a psychotic question but have you actually tried doing that? like using a macbook as a vessel for running linux under parallels as a primary use?
> The battery life and power/efficiency of my m4 pro is insane.
They're coming. Look for AMD Strix Halo chips. They're in the comparably comfortable efficiency range.
> AMD Strix Halo chips
Do you happen to know any laptop that has a) equivalent screen quality (retina resolution), b) keyboard, c) trackpad but with full Linux support where all hardware pheripherals just work?
The ThinkPad X1 series usually have great linux support and you can option them with 2.8k@120Hz OLED panels, which at 14" lands between the Air and the 14" Pro in terms of PPI. I have a couple generations old X1 Yoga and all of the hardware worked out of the box with Manjaro and Debian, including the touchscreen and active stylus.
People usually buy them for the keyboards and trackpoint, but imo the touchpad is still pretty solid. It is a bit small on account of the trackpoint buttons taking up vertical real estate but its pretty responsive and multi-touch gestures work perfectly in my experience. I believe newer ones have larger trackpads than mine, though still not as large as a similarly sized mac.
Reminder that Thinkpad's makers, Lenovo, has shipped a laptop preloaded with the Superfish malware (https://easytechsolver.com/what-is-the-lenovo-controversy/)
This is true. However, Superfish hasn’t been relevant in years and Lenovo walked back on including such malware going forward as far as I can tell.
And furthermore, Superfish didn’t affect ThinkPads. Only lower end Lenovo models.
And surely didn't affect Linux installed on it, which is the topic of the thread.
The HP zbook g1a ultra is as close as you can get with Strix Halo. There are two screen options and the OLED one is high resolution. It's Ubuntu certified as well and can run LLMs nicely. The keyboard, trackpad, etc are all to notch. It's somewhere in between a mac pro and max.
I have one and love it but it's not close to my wife's mac on battery life.
I've yet to understand the point of OLED, if it sits at 400nits. All Apple's devices from iPhone to Studio Display are brighter, some of them are much much brighter even with OLED :/
Contrast and pixel response time. OLED PC monitors still look amazing even with low all-screen brightness.
HP ZBook Ultra G1a? It has Strix Halo, 14" 2880x1800 (242 ppi) 120 Hz VRR OLED, and Ubuntu 24.04 options.
Can't speak for the keyboard, but HP ZBooks/EliteBooks tend to be decent.
I'm typing this post on the 395+ 128gb RAM model. IMO, the keyboard is better than the one in the newest Macbook Pro. Just enough travel, and quiet enough so I don't disturb co-workers when I type.
I use it for development running Fedora Workstation. My job involves spinning up lots of containers and K8S KIND clusters.
I often reach for it instead of my 14" M4 Macbook. However, I will choose the Macbook Pro when I know I'll be away from a charger for a while. The HP, as great as it is, still has bad battery life.
The only downside is that the webcam _does not work_ unless you use Ubuntu 20.04 w/ the OEM kernel package.
The ISP driver which will enable the camera to work is in the process of being up-streamed, though. I believe they're targeting early 2025 for mainline Linux support.
> early 2025
Is that a typo?
There’s barely 4 months left in 2025.
Do you feel a difference between Strix Halo and other x86 machines you could lay your hands on to date? I want one, but with an M2 Max macbook pro and Zen2 desktop it feels very hard to justify.
Razer Blade is my windows laptop. The hardware is great, MacBook nice, but it needs the chip efficiency.
> retina resolution
That just means 3024x1964. With other laptops you can either go up a step to 4k or down to OLED 2880xsomething.
Well, the highest resolution MacBook has less than 4K resolution and there's plenty of 4K laptops out there...
Most "business" centric laptops work great with Linux, as long as you use a well supported distro (Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, openSuse). YMMV if you use other distros...
Your best option is framework IMO.
The 2.8k panels are overall inferior to Apple's across a number of metrics, but they have a higher pixel density than the Air 13, (and has the S-tier aspect ratio of 3:2).
The FW13 keyboard is objectively pretty decent but not perfect, and is much much better than any keyboard Apple has made in the last decade, could be personal preference but apple has been making some pretty bad keyboards for a while now.
Trackpad on FW13 is OK, no one even comes close to Apple, but it's pretty decent, nothing upsetting if you're comparing it to any non-apple trackpads.
Framework has excellent linux suppport, all hardware bells and whistles generally work out of the box on every Linux distro, but Fedora, Ubuntu, and Bazzite are officially supported by Framework they QA against all three and work with maintainers to resolve issues and you can be totally confident that everything will just work. (At least work as well as it would on Windows!)
The other two downsides relative to a macbook are build quality and support. Although the FW13 is pretty solid in practice, I have dropped mine dozens of times and throw it in my bag and treat it overall rough and it has take on some dings and scratches but everything still works. But the frame is not very rigid, it flexes in lots of places, and it just does not feel as nice and solid as a macbook. And support can be hit-or-miss, like with any small manufacturer.
I think you’re talking about Apple’s butterfly keyboards which were only around for 3-4 years of the last decade you’re talking about. Apple’s keyboards have been great for 5+ years now.
Agreed. Only issue is that they wear down really fast. Your fingers sand them down at a mindblowing pace, and soon enough all of them are smooth, with most used keys having shiny blemishes on them
The performance seems to rival Apple's Pro / Max chips but the battery life can only do that for light workloads or videos.
I've asked this question very recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44319903
Spoiler Alert: There really isn't anything that comes close to the macbook (even at 2x price).
Try starlabs, best build quality I've ever seen after apple
what models have you used, specifically.
It's messed up TBH, the only laptops competitive on battery are Qualcomm which comes with a different set of sacrifices instead!
> I would pay 2x the price of a macbook for a linux laptop with the same hardware quality.
How about half the price?
Huawei are probably banned in the USA these days, however, the hardware quality is top notch and everything Linux works just fine out of the box. Not everything is perfect though, it all depends on what you want to do. If you are okay with integrated graphics (so no Blender or other 3D applications) but do need genuine Intel floating point single-thread performance, then give Huawei a go.
I have had plenty of Dell XPS, Lenovo things and much else over the years and all of them have poor thermal management and tend to creak if you use less than four hands to pick them up. The Huawei machines are in a different league.
As for battery life, I think you are right, but I am inanely loyal to genuine Intel and that means plugging in. I don't have problems with that.
People do get triggered by Huawei though, because the dreaded communists will steal your soul and brainwash you into hating the American way of life. So you might want to just cover up the badging lest anyone be offended. Ironically, a Huawei Matebook X Pro running linux is the laptop that is least likely to spy on you because the camera folds down into the keyboard.
My ThinkPad P1 Gen 7 works absolutely fine. I get about 10 hours of battery life out of it. You can get it with Fedora preinstalled.
In my experience, ThinkPads generally work fine.
I have a couple that work quite well with it, including a very nice 10” one - https://taoofmac.com/space/reviews/2025/05/15/2230
And I run a macOS-like GNOME theme that is pretty great.
This looks great, but not for the US market!
https://store.chuwi.com/products/corebook-x-i3-1220p?#descs
Based on past experience, I wouldn't buy chuwi hardware unless you're willing to treat it as disposable
Good to know... at that price it almost is. I just want a half way decent Linux laptop that isn't FHD or 5 years old. Carbons are more than I want to pay for something 'for fun'.
That's less expensive than the ASRock NUC BOX-225H I bought... and that was without RAM/NVMe.
Calling gnome's UI better than macOS, even with Tahoe, is wild.
Silverblue is great but regular Fedora is worth a look too if you don't want to deal with the teething issues of managing all your dev-tools with Silverblue's immutable setup, granted that was 2 years ago when i tried so thing's might be better now.
Infuriatingly; I have a macbook because a couple years ago I wanted a laptop that just worked while keeping my familiar tools but it really feels like Linux is trending up in polish and macOS on the down with an intersect possibly happening in a couple years.
That Apple would allow this development to happen without any reversal is astounding. If allowed to continue it could seriously damage their MacBook market share.
Then again, they may not care that much as long as they have the iPhone customer base.
In bluefin (silverblue based) they have brew preinstalled, which helps alot. Plus now its more mac-like.
Are you using Fedora on the Mac (via Asahi)?
Or are you using Fedora on an Intel/AMD laptop?
If it supported M4 I would be using it on my MacBook, but I am using a ThinkPad P14s gen 6 (AMD) right now. Some issues with suspend that I worked around with a kernel parameter but other than that, everything else worked out of the box
Thanks, I wasn't sure from your initial post
Do you mean corner radiuses on the edge of windows? Because corner radiuses within windows should be different from the edge ones because the same corner radius stacked within itself creates ugly corners.
GNOME does look quite nice and I use it on my desktop everyday. Unfortunately, once I go beyond programming/general productivity (e.g. photography, music recording) there is nothing that comes to MacOS+MacBook combo. Windows usually have ports of these apps, so I'm hoping maybe one day Linux can run those (we are already there with games).
> Apple has a thing against people with OCD.
Their window close button with slightly off cross in the red circle was a nightmare to my OCD.
Doesn't MS still have screens rendered like Windows 3.1 or Win95 in some corners of the OS?
I'd pay (even more) for Apple to have the same backwards compatibility policy as Microsoft has.
And I love it
Yeah because some enterprise customers override/extend those panels.
So? That doesn't make what Apple is doing sound any better.
I always thought that Gnome developers are imitating macOS. Not copying blindly, but following the ideas and intents.
Finally I hear from real users that the Gnome team has not just reached parity, but has actually exceeded their source of inspiration. (Partly due to the degradation of the latter, but still.)
When it takes me 5 clicks and two open windows to pick a bluetooth speaker in Gnome, I remember how far behind it is from MacOS's 2 clicks and zero windows.
It doesn't. It takes 2 clicks.
It is only Apple can do. It needs courage and innovation.
We, as user should not be beta tester.
> It is only Apple can do.
I've come to doubt this. Literally anything Apple does gets copied (sometimes even better than Apple's version).
That's not possible. I saw a video yesterday where Greg Joswiak (SVP worldwide marketing at Apple) assured me that Apple has the best design team in the world.
Making the world a better place by rounding off all the hard edges including those edge cases…
If 12px won’t do, try 42
I have been running the beta from the beginning and they have improved quite a bit, but I am actually shocked they didn't delay Mac OS 26, because the design is so rough around the edges. Some of the larger aesthetic changes, such as the menu bar and the dock look good, but there is so much more that looks objectively awful.
1. the way window UI elements float in bubbles on the top over a white background is horrible. It looks amateurish.
2. Icons look low detail and blurry. At first I thought they were using low resolution placeholder icons, but no, the layered diffused glass effect just kind of translates to blurriness on many app icons.
3. The side bar, such as on Finder, just kind of floats there. That is fine and looks kind of neat on the Maps app as you can see some of the maps behind it, but on the Finder it is just a white bubble over top of a white background, which... is a choice.
4. The app launcher is gone, and replaced by Spotlight, which is worse.
I could go on. The point is it is bad and Apple should be embarrassed. I say that as someone who likes Apple products alot.
The original, updated version of the Finder icon alone should have been enough of a warning that the UX designers at Apple have lost their minds and any aesthetic sense, let alone an ability to design interfaces that are functional, efficient, and well thought-out.
https://512pixels.net/2025/06/wwdc25-macos-tahoe-breaks-deca...
Apple changed this in Tahoe Beta 2
https://512pixels.net/2025/06/finder-icon-fixed/
They know that. They’re saying the fact that it ever shipped in the first place should’ve been a warning sign.
> 4. The app launcher is gone, and replaced by Spotlight, which is worse.
Do you mean the Launchpad? (I've never used it; but always use Spotlight to launch apps.)
The biggest surprise to me from this whole beta period is that a significant number of people used Launchpad. I have absolutely zero idea why when Spotlight has existed for more than 20 years. Why would you ever want to click and page through a giant iPhone screen on a desktop/laptop computer?
You don't have to click: Launchpad is available via an unmodified F4, so it's a single button press to bring up instantly, no matter what you're doing.
You don't have to "page through a giant iPhone screen", you can type and select. I used to use it all the time, without ever reaching for the mouse to do so.
Launchpad also let you change the order of app icons and group them into pages and folders; I don't think the new system lets you do any of these things.
Launchpad was focussed on a single task: launching an app. If I need to launch an app, I know I need to 99.9% of the time (I'm hedging; it's probably 100%), so there's no benefit showing me documents, web pages, and god-knows-what-else at the same time.
I nearly forgot: while I was testing Tahoe, I had a situation in which some apps just did not show up when I typed. They were in the list, they just got filtered out incorrectly. I've no idea if this was a bug or not; I'll see when I upgrade to the final release.
Interesting. I've never had any issues using Spotlight to search/open apps. For your use case unmodified F4 will bring up Spotlight now where you can type. If you want more precision unmodified F4 followed by CMD+1 will allow you to search only apps.
> For your use case unmodified F4 will bring up Spotlight now where you can type.
Yes, this is what I've been doing during the beta, and it's far less useful than Launchpad IME so far.
> If you want more precision unmodified F4 followed by CMD+1 will allow you to search only apps.
It looks like I had previously done so, and now the setting is 'stuck'. I.e. it's the default view — I can still go 'up' to search across stuff, but F4 takes me to an app launcher by default, so that's one drawback eliminated (thanks).
As an aside, I've learnt just now while testing this that F4 has an awkward asymmetrical input buffer. You can open+close instantly with two quick presses, but the same does not work to close+open. I'm not really complaining so much about this, just mentioning it!
I don't use Launchpad but I can say, for me, Spotlight sucks! It decides at random times not to complete. I have it set to show apps only. I don't want it to find other things. But quite often I'll press Cmd-Space and type something and it won't find it. For example I just tried "pho" and it did not show Photoshop (which is on my system) but did show stuff completely unrelated to apps and I double checked, I only have apps selected in the Spotlight Search Results section in settings.
This is a uniquely new-macOS issue. Spotlight has never worked well since the big redesign in 10.10. In the snow leopard days it was predictable and seemed to be ordered by frequency of use. (There were occasional issues where the entire launchservices DB got messed up, but this can be fixed with an lsregister reset without reindexing all of the files).
This is a bug. The applications need to be reindexed. Happened to me on my work laptop and personal one
Schrödinger's Spotlight: always indexing and hogging your CPU, never quite indexing everything properly.
If you have multiple ways to do something on a computer/phone, some relatively large percentage of people will fumble around until they figure out a way to do it - and then do it that way forever.
So if someone accidentally triggered Launchpad and realized they could see their apps, they might use that forever (not knowing you can put your Applications folder in your Dock and use it as a start menu lol).
Or, equally, they might never discover the advantages of Launchpad and always use inferior alternatives :)
they've had a launch-pad-ey thing forever, I remember when our school lab had Mac IIs and Performas, and there was some simplified UI on top of finder which basically was all your apps in giant rectangular icons. I forget what it was called though.
It was called At Ease (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_Ease).
I’m surprised to find out it was itself an Apple product; I had always assumed it was a third-party shell, akin to Norton Desktop for Windows 3.1.
I remember seeing my work colleague drag the applications folder to the dock for quick access, this was before the modern launchpad, and before I even started using macs.
Because I vaguely remember that one icon I use every other month, but can't recall the name. The icons are also ordered by installation time, so it's easy to jump to the most recent ones.
I use it rarely, but sometimes I'm happy it's there.
> The icons are also ordered by installation time, so it's easy to jump to the most recent ones.
If I had this need, it wouldn’t even occur to me to solve it with Launchpad; I would just go to /Applications in Finder and sort by “Date Added”. (Which is a non-default column, but a very helpful one, so the series of gestures to enable it for a given folder is almost reflexive to me now.)
That's: 1 get the menu, 2 Finder, 3 go to applications, 4 View > Show View Options, 5 sort by popup, 6 choose date added, 7 actually look for the app.
Compared to: 1 - 4-finger pinch, 2 look for the app.
That only really works if you have a totally flat Applications hierarchy. Even by default, macOS creates a "Utilities" subfolder.
Exactly this. Most of the time I use spotlight like everyone else.
Because Spotlight seems to fall over regularly and not find files. Earlier this year it stopped finding applications and I had to run some shell command to delete it's cache and recreate it.
> click and page through a giant iPhone screen
1. Launchpad filters based on what you type. You don't have to page through things 2. As soon as you type anything, the first hit is selected and the return key launches it 3. Launchpad shows nothing but apps. As an app launcher, it's fantastic.
If Launchpad is gone I'm going to be sad.
Launchpad is not actually gone: it's now a sub-unit of Spotlight.
I still have an M1 Macbook Pro with touch strip, and my Launchpad touch strip button still works, bringing up Spotlight but with a predicate that makes it search only ./Applications and ~/Applications.
That's not Launchpad; it's inferior in many ways.
Launchpad is an easy gesture with the trackpad (pinch with thumb and three fingers), then type to filter and return to launch. I got used to it for stuff I don't keep in the dock (which is a lot, since I have the dock on the side and only a few things in it).
I suppose Spotlight is OK as a substitute: COMMAND-SPACE, then type to filter and return to launch. It's a little more clunky (as the search results take a few milliseconds to be assembled) but it'll work.
I just tried it. The gesture you mentioned now opens the spotlight application search and there is no delay.
What feels breaking there is when you pinch to open launchpad you are not on home row, so typing to filter is inferior to swiping and clicking large targets.
Cmd+space to open spotlight already worked and typing was the best option for that use case.
I do like the new spotlight experience but this feels like losing a gesture, and it does not spark joy scrolling through the app list.
I always forget that Launchpad even exists. I guess it doesn't now. I suppose it might be helpful if you just know "I need that app that looks like X" and don't actually recall the first two letters of the app's name.
Lol same. Wasn't there something like it in System 7 that also got deprecated. I think back then it was called "Launcher" ... https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Launcher
Launching seems easy enough from Finder but you never know about innovation.
What if you forgot the name of the app?
What if you rely on groupings to remember what you have installed for a given activity?
What if you want a quick visual overview of what is available to you?
What if you like or even prefer launchpad?
What if you install tons of tiny little apps that have a specific, if infrequently used, purpose?
What if you enjoy a little app gardening?
What if you don't like command-prompt style interactions?
What if you see value in having more than one way to do something?
What if you have 20+ years of muscle memory established?
What if the only thing you know prior is how to use your iphone?
And on another note, what is it with tech people lacking the ability to see how other types of people may want to use the hardware they paid for with their hard earned dollars? I am so sick of this awful perspective of, "everybody in the world must be exactly like me"
You wouldn't if you are a software engineer or some other power user. The sad fact is Apple knows that the majority of macOS users are accustomed to an iPhone-like workflow, which is swipe-centric, not keyboard-centric.
Then why are they removing it?
My sentiments exactly
the app doesn't appear in spotlight until it's indexed.
also spotlight hogs resources indexing stuff all the time, completely pointless when you just want a list of apps
I use it when I can't remember the name of an app, or when I've first installed an app and it's not indexed yet.
Shocking as it is, search based UIs are really despised by some people (me).
I greatly prefer visual/spatial browsing
It's not the mode so much as the comparative efficiency. In a handful of keystrokes you can launch a commonly used app in under a second. Any type of visual browsing mode is going to take an order of magnitude more time/effort.
For people who never work with things like terminals, sure. For fellow devs, it's an unusual choice unless they routinely cycle through irregularly used apps w/ hard to remember names.
I click one icon, then another. It takes say 2s. Typing two letters and pressing enter would take 10x faster, so 0.2s. Given that I delegated work to AI agents, that’s 1.8s less of waiting :))
As a fellow dev, command line shit is a pain in the ass sometimes. I grew up as a Windows kid, visual browsing for stuff is sometimes the only way to fly. I absolutely loathe the amount of brute-force memorization that is required to operate a command-line efficiently. It took YEARS to memorize simple linux shit
Everyone talks about how CLI is supposedly way more efficient. It is way more efficient to THEM. And now we are stuck in a hell where a good deal of functionality is only accessible if you want and are able to memorize the arcane nonsense that are command names, or the design-by-committee naming choices of moronic PMs who can't stop lapping up whatever bullshit marketing tells them to
> I absolutely loathe the amount of brute-force memorization that is required to operate a command-line efficiently. It took YEARS to memorize simple linux shit
Not to invalidate your experience, but you shouldn’t need to memorize too much to use the common command line tools (although it does always help to have more experience using them).
I recommend always keeping a second terminal session open, purely for referencing man pages. You should be able to see most options easily, or be able to grep for the instructions you need.
The tight integration between documentation within the CLI, coupled to the exact software version you have installed, helps immensely when invoking CLI tools.
For the common linux tooling, found in most distros (e.g. coreutils or common busybox ops) the documentation in man pages is quite excellent.
While I think man pages are perfectly fine as documentation, the terminal interface for accessing them is awful (more mysterious keypresses or incantations to memorize if you want to do anything more than scroll), and visually I have always found them very difficult to scan visually, particularly if I wasn't sure of the exact wording for the task I needed, or if I am thinking in a different vocabulary. Plus theres the whole wall-of-text thing that makes me kind of instinctively bounce out.
A lot of them also lack sufficient (or any) examples, which are the things I need to see to learn. Making sense of the their sometimes (and seemingly intentionally) obtuse wording when I'm trying to do something I'm not already familiar with makes them a lot harder to parse than they need to be.
And many of the commands are extremely arbitrary. `cd` (change directory) very well could have been `mf` (move folder). `del` in DOS is `rm` in Linux. `move` vs `mv`, `copy` vs `cp`, etc etc. There's no common orthodoxy. If you are not well versed in the history of this stuff its all gobbledygook.
LLMs have been great in this regard, as they can supply those missing examples and then explain to me exactly what it is doing, oftentimes worded more clearly than the original documentation. And they can help me string together whole sequences.
So a TL;DR of your comment is that you just have to learn / memorize to use things. That applies to everything, not just what you are discussing here.
If you only use 'cd', 'mv', 'rm', and 'ln', then really, there is not much to learn. Perhaps the '-rf' option to 'rm', which is how you delete directories (that are not empty). You complained about the naming, but 'mv' requires fewer keystrokes than 'move', and once you know that 'mv' = move, 'rm' = remove, and so on, then what is the issue? It makes sense. DOS had just as "arbitrary" names: 'del' instead of 'rm', for example. The UNIX versions are deliberately short for efficiency, and once you learn them, they are universal.
Man pages are fine. Just press '/' to search by string or regex, and 'n' for next match. They are also consistent: if you want a particular section, you search for it. But it is important to remember that man pages are reference material, not tutorials. If you want quick examples, try https://tldr.sh, https://cheat.sh, or another alternative.
If this is difficult, or you simply do not want to learn it, that is fine: use what works for you. But if you are a programmer, you are going to be learning tools constantly, and the core UNIX utilities are among the simplest. Once learned, they do not change. Personally, I have not had to learn anything new about them since I was 13. I am 31 now. You learn once, and you use forever.
That said, there are real examples of arcane tools. 'ffmpeg' and 'rsync' have some of the most obscure command-line options I have ever seen, which is why I keep bash aliases and functions for the things I do often. That is how you make your life easier as a programmer: learn the fundamentals, then abstract the complexity where it makes sense.
TL;DR: Learning is not optional. Whether it is GNU/POSIX utilities, GUIs, wizards, or even LLMs, you still have to learn them. Man pages are reference material, not tutorials. Learn the basics once, and you are set for life.
My big issue with the icons-in-menus is that they don't align properly. Each 'row' in a menu is an optional icon with some text to the right of it. But when an icon isn't displayed, the text shifts left into its position, meaning that menu text no longer aligns nicely on the left.
Looking at the Slack icon right now, and it just looks blurry and low resolution, same for Calendar and some others, it's awful.
The maps icon is the most egregious. It makes my head hurt.
So people do use Apple maps and that too on a mac.
Usually I just go with the flow, because what else I could do :)?
But somehow the missing App Laucher made me bit sad (well, to the extent software can make one sad :)) - even though I can always switch to Finder to browse apps, App Launcher has some nice visual quality to it that makes it more pleasant to use for me..
I agree with a lot of what you said but the app launcher was dumb. It was just the iPhone’s Home Screen ported to Mac.
Spotlight is way faster than that when you’re at a keyboard. I barely even use the dock, just command space and type in the first few letters of the program I want. Clicking is for people with too much time on their hands.
It was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me. After trying out the preview for a month, the writing was on the wall, and I began the process of switching to a Thinkpad with Linux. I am now fully off macOS for the first time in 20 years of being an Apple die hard. I could use a lot of emotionally loaded words to describe how I feel about this release, but the long and short of it is that I am no longer the target audience for Apple.
In the same boat. After like 15 years I had enough. I've started de-Apple'ing my life in 2024. Still run M1 Pro Mac from work, which is great. 2 days ago I've finally ordered all the parts for a Linux PC, high spec. Not for gaming or so, just for compute. I'm soooo looking forward to the freedom that this will bring. The stuff that I already run on Linux, the distros are all great. I love Gnome for how it looks and KDE for how seamless it works. The new PC will let me tinker and try and hop and swap like I could never dream of for so many years.
Similar story here. Loong time Apple fan, but as they say.. "trust arrives walking, but leaves on a horse". I'm real mad!
I installed tahoe in a virtualbuddy VM to see how it was before running on my main system... and.... I will be definitely be keeping Sequoia for a while (at least a year, probably).
If the situation does not improve in the meantime, I will probably switch to a framework laptop running cosmic desktop or something like that.
Yep I feel the same. To know if you're the target user or not I guess you go to Apple's marketing material.
Do you see anyone that looks like you, doing anything that looks like what you do? I don't and I can't remember the last time I did.
It seems to be a lifestyle brand now for people I have little in common with.
At least with Linux there's the possibility that you can make it your own even if it's not that way right now.
I have no where to go. I want to move away from iPhone, but Pixel is not available in my place, and Google doesn't seems to care about distribution. Nor does it do enough with its SoC development. There aren't anything come close on Laptop. And Windows or Linux aren't exactly in good shape either. I have no where to run. And I have wished for a third option for a very very long time.
You just move away from them on your computer. Just keep the iphone. It's a minor device. That's what I plan on doing. If I get fed up with my iphone, I also have nowhere to go. so will reduce usage. Sideloading gets more and more difficult everywhere.
Similar story here, but going from Windows to Linux. It seems like Linux is gaining some market share with the OS disasters from both Apple and Microsoft.
Just run linux with utm!
The whole "Liquid Glass" UI is by far their worst ever take on a design language. It feels like stepping backwards to web 2.0 but with even bigger accessibility issues.
It doesn't look or feel modern, its ugly, inconsistent and just all around crap. God knows what they were thinking with this.
Also who on earth green lit these low resolution looking blurry icons everywhere?!
It’s ugly as hell and plain stupid.
I couldn’t watch the WWDC and when I saw the screenshots I thought it was a joke. Giant buttons with weird padding and extreme transparency effects.
This is going to sound harsh but it looks like when “working” from home, Apple engineers outsourced their work to amateurs online.
I simply cannot believe that Apple is shipping an OS this out of touch with elegance.
Steve Jobs said in his inauguration speech that he slept on the floor to take typography classes and later obsessed over having great typefaces on Macs. Steve would’ve burn the place down instead of shipping a crap like this.
Or maybe Steve would tell us all that we're "holding it wrong".
I try not to indulge in negativity and scorn, but I agree with these sentiments. This is resoundly a regression. Text overlapping on text, searchboxes that are broken and now just function as text boxes, increased latency throughout the operating system.
It's so bad that it's kind of fascinating. Unfortunately, even "Reduce Transparency" doesn't fix the LG update.
Yeah similar situation here. I've been running it since basically the day after WWDC, and I've just had this sinking feeling that its so bad, they wouldn't be able to fix it before release. Or, they don't even view it as something that needs fixing.
I'll begrudgingly get a couple more years out of this personal M2 Air, but my engineering team is prepping to do upgrades on some older M1 Pros we've had since launch, and after seeing Tahoe, the CTO and I formed a plan to give devs the option of getting either an M4 Pro or a Framework. We haven't launched yet, but I think a solid number of our engineers are going to opt for the Framework, hopefully as high as half.
There are also under-the-hood changes that I found truly upsetting: among other things, all the Emacs versions I've tried (stock GNU Emacs or Mac Port, downloaded binary blobs and compiled on my machine) are either immediately unusable or become so slow after a day that they are almost unusable. Tracing things on Instruments suggests a culprit (the culprit?) is NSAutofillHeuristicController. This is not a new feature, but I'm guessing with them pushing Apple Intelligence it was rewritten. AFAIK no obvious way to disable this "feature". (Turning off Apple Intelligence doesn't seem to do it.)
I'm contemplating rolling back to Sequoia.
> among other things, all the Emacs versions I've tried (stock GNU Emacs or Mac Port, downloaded binary blobs and compiled on my machine) are either immediately unusable or become so slow after a day that they are almost unusable.
So basically my #1 work tool will no longer work.
That’s a hard deal-breaker right there.
As a longer-term means of escape, what’s the best way to run a «full» Linux desktop on a otherwise managed Mac?
I was on RC too, for a few days, and also uninstalled. I'm glad I did, the fresh Sequoia install feels much nicher. Even with reduce transparency on, the design was too ugly and the drab gray icon jails for non-squircle icons were downright offensive. First macOS version I'm gonna skip and I've been a day one updater since mountain lion, very sad.
lol are you an ATP listener?
I don’t think the icon situation is enough to keep me off the release, but agree that the design is just kind of a mess and not my taste.
ATP was enough to convince me to tell people at work not to upgrade right away.
Last time I did this was ... the version that removed 32bit compatibility, I think?
Haha I'm subscribed but haven't listened to that episode, I took the squircle jail term from the arstechnica tahoe review.
There's SO much padding and wasted screen real estate
That seems to be a growing trend ever since "UX designers" started taking over (early 2010s?), to the point that I wonder if they're trying to see how far they can take it.
I made the mistake of updating my phone, and immediately regretted it. We tried Liquid Glass already, it was called mid-aughts Windows. It sucked then, and it sucks now.
Quite an insult to Windows Vista and Windows 7, where Microsoft actually took care to make things consistent and text readable. Here they didn't even put shadows behind all labels!
I'm glad I'm not the only one getting Vista vibes with this look.
and vista was MORE beautiful than this vomit
It would be one thing if they excessively rounded and padded the windows, but they shipped with a bunch of different padding and border radii. So far I’ve counted 4 different borders, and I’m sure there’s more.
Yeah, 4 different corner radius sizes is where I’m at too. Won’t be surprised if there are more.
I just counted 5 different radii in Apple’s apps alone. I also discovered they space the window control buttons in all sorts of different spots to, so it’s even more insane than just multiple radii.
Everything I've seen of it looks a disaster. I'll wait for macOS 27.
I have a Mac M1 that's been on MacOS 14 Sonoma for a couple years at this point - I've not seen anything even remotely interesting in later releases that could incentivize me to roll the dice and upgrade.
My Mac is also on Sonoma. I'm sure there are some incremental features that I would appreciate, but I'm always worried about what's going to break or be worse with the next OS update.
I'll update my phone because iOS jumps are bigger in terms of functionality. But 14 years in, OSX just doesn't have a lot of new bells and whistles that I care about. The last time I updated, I was only excited about getting Sidecar functionality so I could dual-screen onto my iPad. When a minor feature like this is the most memorable, that's saying something.
I think the only thing that would get me to update would be notable AI improvements. But seeing what I've seen of AI on iOS, I'm in no rush.
Waiting an extra year to jump on new macOS releases has been the norm for sane people for quite some time now.
It sucks if you buy a new mac which isn't supported by older macOS releases though, so maybe don't do that for a year or so. I guess you sometimes just have to put your new Apple device in storage for a year until there's functional software.
For me I simply don't upgrade ever until I'm forced to, usually by an app that I want to use.
As someone without an iPhone and who doesn't really use included desktop apps, there are simply never any improvements in the OS for me, only regressions.
I usually wait 6 months, but this time I plan to skip the release altogether
Waiting an extra year to jump on new macOS releases has been the norm for sane people for quite some time now.
/Looking forward to macOS Fresno.
Ugh I upgraded excitedly and can't stand the UI - there is no upside to any of it. Also for some reason things are also beachballing and VSCode keeps crashing - new M4 MBP. All the system log errors are present exactly as they were and my USB-C dock with Ethernet port still doesn't work.
> SO much padding
No idea on macOS, but turn on Reduce Transparency on iOS and there’s tons of padding most of the time, but then sometimes zero padding. And I mean zero. The edges of buttons and text are at the edge of the underlying background. It’s…embarrassing.
Either Tim Cook does not use a Mac computer or he does not notice/care. I am not saying he should helicopter-parent all the design process but the "finished" product?
So: that is Apple's CEO for you.
Why would he when he's a numbers and supply chain guy not a product and vision guy.
Wouldnt be surprised if he spends more time on an iPad than Mac these days
He gets older so everything must get bigger
> they think their users are dumb
Aren’t they/we? :-)
*majority of
Well, hasn’t this been the single biggest reason for their sustained stellar returns year after year where often (or maybe most of the time) the biggest change their devices (like iPhones) used to see was the version number change e.g. iPhone 13 -> 14.
For the rest of their users — they make a noise (which is not even feeble in comparison), bicker around, lament the fact that the other alternative is Google (Windows and the Wild Linux West), and they stay. Rinse, repeat.
That was my experience with liquid glass on mobile. I’d heard it was bad, thought it couldn’t possible be that bad then tried it and was flabbergasted. Really unfortunate.
Honestly, Windows 7's Aero effects are better looking. Best thing after that is KDE (with light customizations). Everything else has regressed.
The Finder looks like shit. The sidebar is like badly retrofited from another program, perhaps from some crappy Gnome theme.
The Control Center (or however they call the drop down window with quick controls for volume, wifi, brigthness, etc) has floating isolated icons like crap.
Bring back Scott Forstall. Give him a big bonus. Let him fix this shit.
Otherwise, the code changes and actual features are probably fine.
I’m glad to see another member of Club Forstall here. My biggest wish for Apple is to bring back Forstall. Letting him go was their biggest mistake.
Can you post screenshots of what you mean?
I see grossly rounded corners in some apps, but I don't see the other stuff like gaps in window corners for full screen apps. I may have some config bit flipped that has disabled those.
Yeah, the new corner radius is ugly but by and large, it's not much different than before, from what I see so far.
https://imgur.com/a/jLPM9oV
this is what I'm seeing with Safari, WhatsApp and Chrome all maximized but with various radius on each corner.
This is like back when a lot of major devs like Adobe just straight up started faking window borders instead of updating their apps to the newer framework and it all looked and felt inconsistent or just obviously way off.
Wow! At this point I wouldn’t be surprised if they started mixing square corners with rounded just for the hell of it.
Holy crap is this real??
Good lord, that's awful. I'm definitely firmly in Camp Apple for the most part, but this just looks actually atrocious.
If this were April 1st, it might make sense. But this is a major OS release by a brand that's famous for its design aesthetic. What the actual fuck Apple? Does nobody test anything anymore? How did this get out of the lab? Who exactly is steering this ship? Tim Cook's days at the helm might be winding down.
> Does nobody test anything anymore?
Honestly feels like QA and release qualification are non-existent in so many organisations these days. This can't possibly be the case though, right? Right?
Try running console with tmux. The window menu just floats there instead of being snugly fit against the bottom from end to end.
It's very unstable, indexing doesn't work anymore
> There's SO much padding and wasted screen real estate, disjointed looking floating inner panels, window corners that are so rounded you see gaps in full screen apps, inconsistencies everywhere and - well, I could go on.
Remember in the beforetimes when we decoupled themes from OS updates? Wouldn't it be nice if once again we discovered this lost technology that let different users have different UIs?
How hard is it to downgrade?
Did you notice any impact on battery life?
I'm afraid for the battery life of my MacBook Pro 2019 (Intel).
I'll think I'll never update and just keep using Sequoia until I switch to Linux.
You're in luck. Your device isn't supported.
It's supported.
But it's going to be the last major OS update for my device, so I won't upgrade. I don't want to be stuck with a half-assed version.
Mine has been fine, literally no perceptible differences on my MBA M4 since I loaded the public beta a few weeks ago.
Training/preparing users for upcoming AR glasses interfaces?
I've been running the RC and I have had no issues. Some of the design choices (sidebars particularly) are strange, but it's generally fine.
I recommend not overcomplicating your life and just staying on the latest macOS.
It took a day of getting used to it, but I have had no issues either. Some of the commentary on this thread seems overly critical to me, but you tend to see that on any Apple thread on HN. There’s stuff I like, some stuff I don’t, but in the end I’ll adapt.
I think sime people just hate change. I am convinced that some folks complaining here will be complaining when MacOS 28 comes out and changes some OS 26 feature they have grown to like.
Steve Jobs would never have allowed this to be released.
I tried 3 betas of ios and then sold my iPhone and bought a Pixel, that's how disappointed I was from what I saw.
My progression:
1. Apple photos redesign from last year sucks and I’m already frustrated with iCloud abstraction and lack of cross platform friendliness
2. Switch to an alternate cloud photos provider
3. Find out about Liquid Glass, looks like shit, impulse sell my MacBook Pro in favor of a Framework
4. Surprise surprise, it’s actually the year of the Linux desktop. My gaming situation is way better on Linux and it does everything my Mac did. The only compromise is my need to carry a big extra battery around.
Eh. I like it. Seems more modern. Who cares as long as it’s not windows.
So the Gnome 3 gang were ahead of their time?
Indeed, gives old Gnome vibe.
> Basically the vibe I get from it is that they think their users are dumb
Your point would have been much more convincing had you refrained from this sort of pejorative assigning of motives. It wasn't necessary.
I've been running the betas to the final release and there are a number of basic affordances and system improvements that are definitely worthwhile. I will not be going back.
Having said that, while I know they had good intentions with this whole design, and probably really thought they were pursing a winner, what a massive, massive miss. This is such an aesthetic disaster that I'm just in awe. I feel like they had a huge push to do some seemingly substantial change, particularly on the mobile side, given the stumbles in the AI space, so they changed a lot of things maybe without quite enough thought.
Ugly as hell. More dead space. On the mobile side they released an update to iOS just today from the RC a few days ago that removes some of the particularly stupid animations (the app tray did some dumb thing where it expanded and shrank, and that and a few similar things are gone).
I float around the VC world in SF. Several of the women that work for VCs in decent positions don't know how to maximize a window on the MacBooks.
If there are enough OGs, they should recall Windows XP with all those bells and whistles AND those life-saving switch to "Windows Classic" that survived next three generations of Windows.
I personally pray for that "MacOS classic" switch... It's sad to enter that decay era for Apple where every next software upgrade for the device feels effectively as a hardware downgrade.
I swear I don't usually complain about UI styling updates, because it's usually not a big deal - but this looks really, really bad [1]. It's less functional with bizarre transparency choices destroying legibility, and big rounded corners taking up more dead space. And stylistically, the layouts just look unbalanced and amateurish (It reminds me of what happens when I attempt to do CSS layouts). Most Linux desktops unironically look better than this.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/09/macos-26-tahoe-the-a...
It's ironic that Apple makes screen size incredibly expensive for every millimeter - and then designs UI which proceeds to waste that pricey real-estate as well as user time by burying options (or worse, simply removing many advanced user options "because they don't fit").
Wow. I know I’m not the first to say it, but it really does give me Windows Vista vibes. No bueno.
vista was pretty nice looking tbh (or, it was to me, especially the black ultimate edition with the frosted glass).
It just chugged like madness, the UAC dialogs were slow to fade in (and numerous) and the widgets and moving wallpaper was about 10y too early.
I was distinctly not happy with the control panel changes, but hindsight tells me that I should have been.
Vista made me jump ship to Linux on 2006, where I remained for a good 17 years.
Maybe I'm going to jump back to Linux because of this update.
It’s funny how different people saw things. UAC was hated back then but I was a Linux user primarily and when I bought my laptop I kept the Windows Vista while dual booting. UAC mostly made sense and worked like gksudo.
I remember saying so once and got flamed by people online because of course Microsoft didn’t copy this from Linux and of course gksudo was much better.
But the subjective experience I had was the same. IMHO the greatest victory with Electron has been that the OS wars have practically ended.
Imagine if Steve saw this...
https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/tahoe...
Steve saw this and approved it...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f2/Apple_US...
The iMac mouse looks amazing though! Ergonomics, not too sure about those.
Major throwback to icon rendering on the Amiga Workbench.
I had the same issue on first start, the icons had to load while I was scrolling.
my iphone 16 and m1 mac are much slower on this.
Think something is borked there. Mine doesn't do that.
Windows Aero is back
Aero didn't have absurd padding. It made good use of texture, colour and shade. It actually looked quite appealing. We've been steadily downhill since.
oooh, nice burn ^^
Aero was peak HCI compared to this
Agreed. Very few UI's has surpassed Windows 7's Aero
I absolutely hate it. I guess we’ll probably get used to it but until then… gah ugliest MacOS ever?
Don't think of it as the ugliest MacOS ever, think of it as the most beautiful MacOS of the rest of your life.
What's not to love about macOS Vista?
Hoping the next update is the iOS 8 to the iOS 7 redesign and then it'll be fine.
You'll get used to it.
I'd rather get used to Linux.
Do it.
I'll give it a try, I installed the iOS and iPadOS betas and I actually like some of the changes.
But I do not understand how the color-tinted UI/icons ever got shipped. They just look... bad...
So far the only thing bothering me so far is the way the tabs look (in Finder and Safari). And I did turn on the menu bar background.
Have the tabs in Finder always been slow to appear? Right now there is a noticeable delay from when I press cmd+tab to when tab animates itself into existence, reminds me of lag in windows 11.
For me it is very fast to appear. I am on a M3 MacBook Pro.
It seems instant to me?
I do dislike how toy-like the user interface looks, but I really hate how illegible notifications are on iPadOS. I had to turn on the reduce transparency setting so I could read the notification text against my lock screen wallpaper.
You've been disabled by Apple. There's no other way to characterize your (and my) need for an accessibility setting to make the OS usable.
You're just old, kids love this shit
I decided to install this and the updated iOS today to see how I felt about it.
My very initial impressions on MacOS:
(1) I like the look of Safari better and the Mail app compared to the prior designs. They both look really nice to me and the Mail app especially looks like a huge improvement in terms of design unification with some of the features like summaries and unsubscribe options that looked bolted on in the past now blending in seamlessly.
(2) I really, really don't like the new icons! Especially so on iOS.
(3) On iOS the app group/folders look terrible to me with the way they distort my wallpaper. Not a fan.
(4) A lot of people are complaining about transparent icons. It's not a valid complaint and is strong evidence whoever is saying that hasn't used the new OS as that is a choice you can make if you want. The default is not transparent.
(5) The increased radii in some places doesn't seem to have any meaningful impact to my information density. A simple comparison of Chrome (old styling) and Safari (with the liquid glass design) shows that Safari has a few pixels fewer in height search + tab bar as a concrete example.
(6) Messages app in MacOS looks like shit. I hate almost everything about it.
(7) Spotlight search has marked improvements! UI is nicer and functionality has expanded greatly (eg clipboard search).
I really like the Apps change. Instead of opening up the icons full screen, it opens in a spotlight search window.
Except when I forgot the name of an app
CMD + SPC for spotlight and then CMD + 1 gets you to the full set of apps.
Which is shit because with launchpad you had muscle memory.
Imagine you no longer have pages with icons on your phone and instead only have a search bar
I guess thats personal preference because you’re describing exactly how I use both macOS and iOS.
I can’t be bothered by app icon locations or launchpad. Just CMD+Space and boom its there.
In a phone writing text is not as simple, but I also find looking for the right icon there tedious, so I hope there was a better solution. In contrast, imo it is easier to get muscle memory with a keyboard (cmd+space > "first 3 characters of app name") than with searching for the app icon around. I cannot imagine the case where looking around in the launchpad is better except with some app you use so rarely you do not know the name (but somehow you have muscle memory for where it is there?).
I use CMD+SPACE 95% of the times I want to open an app. The rest 4% I do it with `open -a` on a terminal with autocomplete (or `/path/to/apps/binary &` for some specific stuff), and 1% going through the `/Applications` directory. I never use launchpad.
I have to believe that Apple had anonymized telemetry that told them how many people used Launchpad and acted as justification to nix it. I remember when it came out, and I probably used it more in the first month when it was novel and new than I have since then. I'm sorry a feature that you liked is gone, but I'm sure it wasn't done blindly.
> Imagine you no longer have pages with icons on your phone and instead only have a search bar
I haven’t had pages of icons on my phone since the App Library was added. Generally the app I want is right there and if not a couple of letters in the search bar and there it is
Your “Imagine…” hypothetical is literally how I run my iPhone. I don’t need piles of icons cluttering up my screen. I can pull down and type 1-2 characters and get any app on my phone, easily.
More room for glanceable, informational widgets that way.
Hah. I can pull down and type 1-2 characters and my app might show up. Eventually.
Sadly you can’t swipe left and instantly type into the App Library search - that search bar actually works pretty well.
I have a 16 pro and pull down and type a couple of characters is delivering apps to me pretty much instantly
What I find weird: you can have light icons with color, dark icons with color, but not clear (and/or tinted) icons with color.
It’s a strange omission.
I weirdly like the clear apps on iOS. Less visually stimulating.
Spotlight improvements are one of the only things I actually like about it so far, it's unbelievable how bad messages app looks... we're certainly losing some space in cases where they're doing this weird sidebar container
Being able to search an app from spotlight is so great.
CMD + SPC => "Mail" => TAB => then I'm searching all my emails is fantastic. Spotlight really is a huge improvement for me.
No more *poof* animation when you drag a control out of the toolbar during customization.
But I was told Liquid Glass was going to add a bit more whimsy to the OS!
The poof animation was such a lovely touch. Removing it feels like a crime honestly.
Most of the friendly computer interactions are being removed. I presume someone thinks it takes too much effort to replicate. They’re making the computer soulless, just like Windows, they might as well remove the Mac name as well.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
Possibly, although I definitely don't recall the macOS Big Sur re-design being as disruptive UI-wise as Tahoe is.
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…
There are now plenty of ARM laptops with Windows (and Linux) support and very similar, if not better, battery life.
Like?
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 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.
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.
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.
Except that it's impossible to downgrade to previous MacOS versions on new Mac computers
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.
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 can't remember the last time I was excited for a macOS release. This time again there is nothing I'm looking forward in this new release.
Whew. Those screenshots: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/09/macos-26-tahoe-the-a...
As a KDE Plasma dev, I always counted on us getting better, but I didn't expect the competition to get so much worse. We'd be flamed to high and heaven for shipping broken notification popups and rendering glitches like that in a prod release.
What happened internally to cause this, I wonder?
After years with Xfce and GNOME, I recently switched to distro that by default prefers KDE, and I'm overall satisfied - Qogir theme, little customization and I'm as good as I was with Win7. Plasma 6.4.5 feels way more stable than line 5 that would crash during stupidest things.
As for what happen at Cupertino: it seems that they replaced people who knew theory and practice, principles of interface design with designers who were told to make a product that looks "fresh" and will diverge attention from Apple's AI failure.
Because why this Liquid Glass now if not as "rattling keys" effect? It's not a technological breakthrough - we've seen translucent plastic/glass/acrylic elements and fancy animations in operating systems before. Hell, even Plasma had that glass stuff in initial line 4 of release. And OSX had Aqua interface, window animations long before Microsoft wasted years for Longhorn finally releasing it as Vista with Aero. Not mention Compiz on Linux around same time.
My partner is already baffled with lack of polish and consistency across the system in this release. In some places it's just a transitional animation added on top of flat style for "wow" effect because hardware nowadays doesn't tax much for that. Tahoe feels like it tries to follow GNOME/Adwaita big interface elements that should stay exclusively on mobile devices, and it does this quite late and also really bad.
There’s no way this was developed by Apple. I keep thinking that they outsourced the macOS development to some amateurs online and took a year off traveling the world.
Looking at the screenshots and review videos, I cannot believe how ugly and out of proportion it is. Normally, there would be a consistent design and some people like it while others don’t. But this is simply ugly.
My guess is that it’s all product managers and “designers” now, a whole religion of procedures and terminology, and unfortunately very little engineering of the kinds that some of the early Ux pioneers applied.
The rumor mill speculates that Apple needed to ship something big and flashy to distract people from calling them out on their failure to deliver on the AI features promised (and previewed!) more than a year ago.
At this point, I have Plasma configured as a better macOS shell. Not a clone, those always look bad, but layouts close enough that my macOS muscle memory can't tell the difference.
Wow those looks broken. I switched to Mac precisely thinking Apple knew best. Whatever happened to don’t change it if it ain’t broken?
My guess is organizational inertia around dependency chains
I feel like we’ve gone full circle. For decades Apple hardware sucked and was badly overpriced, but you paid the price to enjoy running Mac OS X. Now Apple makes amazing hardware (especially laptops) but the drawback is that you have to run macOS on them.
I really wish Asahi Linux had more support, I would have bought a couple M4 Minis.
Without knowing your specific workloads, I'd imagine an M2 Pro Mac mini (which is supported by Asahi) is still plenty fast.
That's not a full circle, a full circle would be if Apple later returned to badly overpriced yet enjoyable macOS again
If you don't need the battery life of a MacBook and you're happy getting a desktop device, there's plenty of machines running new AMD chips that are just as fast as an M series mac, if not faster. And they'll run Linux with no compromises. Check out Bee-Link (https://www.bee-link.com/) for some mac-inspired hardware.
I always considered the butterfly keyboard[1] the point at which Apple's design system jumped the shark as it focused on it's own aesthetics vs. building quality and reliable products.
Funny enough, it's the only time period since 1999 that I was apple free for a while. My MBP broke. I've previously had a butterfly keyboard on my work mac, and it got replaced on a regular bases. While unfortunate for a work computer, this was not acceptable as my personal one with no spares)
Thankfully Apple returned to making great products that work, and I bought the next MBP.
Seeing that Apple's returning to it's "design roots"[2], I really hope they do not loose sight of building great products that work well for their customers.
[1] https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Butterfly_keyboard
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-09-14/apple-...
> Seeing that Apple's returning to it's "design roots"
There's a very important and relevant design quote from Steve Jobs that keeps popping up in my head:
https://mastodon.world/@lensco/115184866965741757
When Steve died, so did the Apple we all knew and loved.
I worked at Apple in the years shortly after his death, and was trying to convince myself this wasn't true, but it is.
Tim should find someone smart and willing to take a real look at the company and ceed power to the next generation.
> I always considered the butterfly keyboard[1] the point at which Apple's design system jumped the shark as it focused on it's own aesthetics vs. building quality and reliable products.
This statement describes pretty much every mouse Apple ever made, from the circular ones to the horrendous magic mouse with charging port underneath.
Ooh, the mouse myth! Love it when this one gets dragged out. Turns out it’s not really a problem - the battery life is measured in months, you’ll get several hours from plugging it in for thirty seconds, and days if you plug it in for a few minutes while getting coffee.
People love to hate it, but it’s never been a real problem. The ergonomics are bad. The charging isn’t.
This is true, but Apple mice have always been consistently bad. A laptop where getting a single grain of dirt under the keyboard meant you couldn't type was a very new thing in 2015.
> Funny enough, it's the only time period since 1999 that I was apple free for a while.
Same here. After the butterfly keyboard era, I spent about 5 years with Windows 10/11 and powershell, then WSL. There's still a lot of annoyance in the Windows space (NTFS is slow due to all the filesystem filters), but Linux package managers are much better than homebrew and WSL does make Windows a pretty reasonable developer system. I'm back on the MacOS now but I wouldn't hate a nice Windows machine.
Yes, WSL2 is quite good. WSL1 was even a step up, but WSL2 gives me an environment that I can use quite well and be productive with.
The NTFS speed thing is kinda amazing. I use cursor on MacOS. My friend has a windows laptop which is likely 2-3x more powerful than my Macbook Air. I can install a new cursor in 2-3s tops, on the Windows machine it takes minutes. Wow. It's all file copying speed.
Awful cheap UX, cartoonish style with huge padding, lack of structure and hierarchy. The spacing is inconsistent, everything is rounded. The app launcher stutters, the icons load one by one, it flickers each time I do the 4 finger gesture. Why does the volume bubble have tick marks but the one in the menu doesn't? The trash icon looks like the windows recycle bin or gnome theme from 20 years ago, not sure why it's flattened like that.
You explained the design inconsistencies the best. Though I’m worried that instead of fixing the underlying problems, they’re just going to make a bullet list of what people mention here and change those only. Then we’re going to have an OS where no two screens have the same paddings etc.
What the hell happened to the Apple design guides. Did all the engineers who read them retire.
> they’re just going to make a bullet list of what people mention here
bold of you to assume they're reading this (and will fix this)
Oh boy, I opened the settings app to change the wallpaper, the scrollbar gets cut off by the right bottom rounded corner. The wallpapers can be scrolled horizontally and they show up under the side rail (blurred), looks like a glitch, and I still can't resize this window to see more of the wallpapers. They may have fixed the custom color bug though.
It really does look like ass on the laptop. Maybe it works on mobile, idk, but terrible on laptop. Also not a good sign since apple is not known for rolling back releases.
I think this might be the one.
Realistically speaking, they’re not going to rollback anything. They even kept and even double downed on that’s stupid photos app redesign on iOS.
At least the review sites are making some noise this time instead of parroting Apple’s announcements. They all sold us that awful photos app as the great new thing.
It’s like a crap Linux theme pretending to be windows vista or something. I don’t get it.
I am the only one to think that these days, GNOME and KDE are more usable than anything made by Microsoft or Apple? I think part of the reason is that devs working on these projects don't have an incentive to make arbitrary changes like people who need to justify their paychecks.
Been using Fedora + KDE since ~March on my main dev machine (hp laptop), basically without any issues and it hasn't broken itself yet. Works amazing. KDE has cured my last bit of distrohopping I had left and I moved on from Gnome too. Things that irritate me on my last macos machine is literally 3 config toggles away in KDE.
In the coming month will install Fedora+KDE on 5 more machines for family members due to Windows 10 hitting end of life.
I agree, except for the GNOME part. I think GNOME 2 was the last usable version, everything went downhill since GNOME 3.
KDE or Cinnamon (Linux Mint) are good though.
You’re not the only one.
(This about iOS, not Mac, but obviously a lot is similar.)
I might be in the minority on hn, but I’m using iOS 26 for the first time today and am pretty happy with the new design. For one, it’s a lot snappier and faster. I’m glad they finally did something about the slow-ass animations iOS had in a lot of places. Secondly, it has a lot more personality. I enjoy that. Thirdly, they finally moved more basic UI stuff close to the thumbs instead of literally 6 inches away at the top of the screen. Love that. Knowing app designers, my apps are about to get easier to use just by migrating to the new UX concepts Apple is pushing.
The glass look is mostly fine. iOS had contrast issues before, and I don’t think it’s any worse. If anything, it’s more adaptive to different types of backgrounds now.
There are some visual glitches and weird things, but they’re pretty minor and will be resolved with time. The glass panes for, say, folders look nice, and I like it more than the previous blur.
I don’t mind the visual appearance of iOS 26. My main gripe is that this update introduces some pointless additional taps for common interactions.
Here’s some of the UX regressions:
- Apple Music: the “next track” button is only visible if the tab bar is expanded. So now we have to scroll or tap, wait for an animation and then click next. - Web views search web for selected text: previously we could highlight, swipe the action menu and then tap the button. Now we have to highlight, tap the small arrow, wait for the horizontal list to animate into a vertical list, tap the button. They removed the ability to swipe the action menu. - Tab bars: since 2007, you could change tabs with one tap. Now it’s one or two taps, depending on whether it’s collapsed or expanded.
The worst thing is Safari removing all tabs button.
Quick way is to pinch out with two fingers but that is impossible one-handed.
Another is to swipe up (or left/right) on address bar but that often triggers app switching because he indicator is 3mm lower
I’ve settled on swiping up on the (…) button. But yeah, either way I’m bummed that usability had been traded for shiny/trendy aesthetics here. Worst part is that they know and have provided options to have “classic view”/“try new ui” rather than iterating and polishing it to the point it’s substantially improved and there’s no choice but to release it.
Design is a series of decisions. Those decisions should be rooted in a strong, thoughtful, point of view. It’s a problem when the final product embodies multiple points of view; view options should be the extreme exception, not the norm we now see in phone, mail, safari, etc.
It’s still there, just moved. Tap the … icon next to the address bar. “All tabs” will be under your thumb.
Settings > Safari > Set tabs to “Bottom”. This gives you back the old style bottom bar, including the all tabs button.
The “Compact” UI option is complete and utter garbage.
I don't really like the look, but I noticed it feels a lot faster, too. That is certainly welcomed!
I should know better, but I'm still surprised they're shipping this version of Liquid Glass. Performance is stable but there are so many UI bugs and inconsistencies that haven't been fixed from early betas, including low-hanging fruit that a second year design student would notice. I don't mind change or interface elements moving around but keynote-level UI overhauls should be fully implemented at launch, otherwise people are stuck using a broken OS for a year.
At this point I'm doubtful that these will be addressed in the 26.X updates, so the wait begins for 27.0...
Yeah I shouldn't be surprised this was allowed to launch today, but yet I am.
I ran the whole beta on all my devices. Every new beta I'd ask myself "Surely they fixed 'x' by now, right?" and we advanced, beta after beta, with the same bugs and performance regressions all the way up to launch.
The icons still need to redraw in the settings app and app library. It's overall sluggish. The drop shadows are huge in the finder and other apps top bar. If you turn on always show scrollbars they get cut off at a weird angle due to the excessive corner radius.
My iPhone 16 PM runs hot all the time, even on release now, vs. iOS 18.
I don't mind the transparency or glass effects. I actually like it in some areas. But man does it need some serious polish and bug fixing, and a lot of time and effort spent on consistency.
This should never have went live in this state. I consider .0 just another beta, really. Actual release will probably be .2 or .3
> I consider .0 just another beta, really. Actual release will probably be .2 or .3
This is good advice for Apple software in general. Always let it burn in for a couple patch releases. Being a guinea pig for Apple is a losing bet.
They went way too far with the corner radii and pill shapes imo, looks like a Fisher Price toy. Some inner buttons retained the old radii and don't match the outer window radii anymore.
It's truly hideous to look at. I really can't believe they went for these massively rounded corners. They're too stubborn to allow you to select an option for right angled corners again. They just tinker as there's no other real UI enhancements.
> They're too stubborn to allow you to select an option for right angled corners again.
"right angled corners again"
I have a feeling you aren't and haven't been a Mac user for a long time. When was the last time Macs had right angled corners!? 30+ years ago?
It’s a trend that’s visible in other designs too, like Material 3 Expressive.
I’m not a fan of Windows but I believe that probably the best modern UI design system for desktops right now is probably the flavor of Fluent used in Windows 11. It still retains somewhat desktop-like information density, doesn’t go overboard on radii, and has a touch of depth. I’d like to see more design languages exploring in its general direction.
I still find KDE superior in productivity, information density and "useful effects" category.
Apple still has the best "get out of the way, be invisible" UI.
Both are valid ways to approach to a problem, but I like KDE's batteries included, infinitely customizable way better.
I think KDE has the right spirit but its execution leaves something to be desired.
I don't think "defaults to windows-like" is a bad choice for newcomers.
I don't customize it heavily either. Move tray, clock and menus to the top, a-la GNOME2, leave taskbar at the bottom, both auto-hidden and narrower than screen.
Add four desktops as a 2x2 grid, re-enable old CTRL+ALT+$ARROW keyboard shortcuts, add a couple of usability effects with custom key combinations and two active corners, and I'm done.
Some applications (Konsole, KATE) get custom fonts and themes, but everything else is bog standard. Setting it up takes 30-ish minutes, and it's the same config for decades now. Probably because of sharpening the same tool and optimizing without knowing.
Then, I can just concentrate and fly on that environment.
Also, they have improved a lot in the small areas where it was lacking. You can use your system without a terminal if you want, plus Baloo works really well.
I would argue that it actually doesn’t go far enough in windows-like-ness to be viable for a lot of people, and for those who prefer a mac-like setup the possible customization doesn’t take it far enough in that direction, either. It’s not Windows or macOS, it’s KDE, and that’s fine but I think there need to be environments more specifically aimed at people who are happy with their current commercial OS setups.
Definitely the “be invisible” part.
It reminds me of the Wii U interface[1]. Except less playful. It really is a disaster.
[1] https://wiki.cemu.info/images/1/1a/Wii_U_Menu.png
totally agree, this is kind of an embarrassing look for supposed workstations
The humiliation " " "
Apple no longer cares about disabled people.
Transparent UI, with controls sitting on top of arbitrary and changing content can NEVER be legible/discernible. Apple knows this, but fashion was more important than function and they decided, "who cares about disabled people, anyway."
Microsoft learned this lesson back in the Vista era but Apple's charging ahead with this terrible set of changes that will literally disable millions of users, people who will need to visit the accessibility settings to reduce the transparency.
It's a sad day when a company that has often lead in accessibility ships the least accessible OS in modern history. I guess it was a nice run having a Big Tech company to point to as a good example of doing various accessibility things well. Damn.
It might be more accurate to say that they are giving non-disabled people an experience akin to that of disabled people. ;)
I've been submitting endless feedback about how Liquid Arse breaks dark mode during the beta. I keep seeing dark text on dark backgrounds all over the place in both Tahoe and iOS 26, for example: https://imgur.com/a/R3DTcSd
I've pretty much given up with submitting feedback though.
CarPlay has dark text on dark backgrounds in the latest version of iOS. And I’m talking about stock apps like Messages, not some obscure text buried somewhere deep in the operating system.
Absolutely brutal.
> Apple no longer cares about disabled people.
Did you enable the relevant accessibility options that are there for this purpose?
Why do that? If they did any investigation into the accessibility options whatsoever then they wouldn't be able to treat us to Kanye style analysis.
I'm sorry, but that's not a logical stance. If this were the method that anyone in the industry used (which absolutely nobody does) all interfaces would be high contrast 150pt font, no transparency, two color, because that's what my grandma needs.
My post is agreeing with you. It's sarcasm. Please try to parse it again.
Text emojis were invented by the grey beards out of necessity, not cuteness. ;)
> literally disable millions of users, people who will need to visit the accessibility settings to reduce the transparency.
I'm confused. You're condemning them for not accommodating the disabled, yet admitting they provide an accommodation in the same sentence.
Changing toolbars to text-only is pretty bad. The button hotboxes are tiny
Generally I think the toolbar settings needed more testing, they can be wonky (e.g. in Automator for text+icon it causes the traffic lights to misalign, in Safari toggling the sidebar on and off is janky).
Much the same on Linux with Wayland.
I haven't touched Windows for over a decade, does it still have a decent story for disabilities? They've certainly regressed in other areas ...
You can turn off the transparency in the accessibility settings. Sure products could be 100% accessible out of the box but unless you had some sort of limit on that it would likely make the experience worse for the majority of users. I can’t imagine Helvetica Neue Extra Light was particularly accessible as the system font a decade ago - but there were accessibility settings.
This is what happens when designers are treated as royalty and are told that their new "clothes" are "awesome" all the time.
It's also a symptom of consumption addiction where there is demand/motivation for drastic, superficial changes that don't really offer any value except to those who are consumed by the need for constant change for change's sake.
Apple used to care more about disabled people because of how the Accessibility APIs worked and were required for most apps.
[dead]
Whoa, you can now search clipboard history. Go to Spotlight Search, Command+4. You'll get a list of entries, each with a copy button, and is searchable. Even shows the app it was copied in.
At last Apple implemented a decent clipboard history. KDE has this thing for a decade now, I guess...
KDE also can encode entries as QR codes, so you can make URLs transferable to your phone or whatnot.
-- Sent from my MacBook Air.
If you use KDE Connect, your clipboard history immediately goes to your phone's clipboard :)
macOS/ios can also share clipboards for awhile now.
For KDE Connect, does the phone have to be an Android or ?
KDE Connect works on macOS, Windows, Linux, Android and iOS
KDE Connect exists on both iOS and Android, though some functions like text messages aren't available on iOS.
KDE doesn't have infinite clipboard history yet, like the GPaste extension for GNOME Shell has.
CopyQ works for forever history for me, it also doesn't save copied passwords, which is nice.
How does it detect passwords? Usually those are just plain-text when copied.
https://hluk.github.io/CopyQ/
Either way, I think it is better to not copy passwords to the clipboard or the selection, but store and transfer them via password-manager/browser/etc APIs.
More like, almost 3 decades.
Windows has this with Win+V for those wondering.
Including passwords from password managers?
Pretty handy, right :)?
And seriously, managers like 1Password clear the clipboard after some time. I would guess that there’s some clipboard API that allows managers to exclude copied passwords from being permanently added to the history.
Still, there are pieces of data that one might not want to store in such unobvious place as clipboard history so it’s good to know about it.
I use KeePassXC which does empty the keyboard after a few seconds. But keeping history seems like a breaking change to the social (if not technical) contract of the OS' clipboard API.
Does that mean that add-on clipboard managers like Maccy are obsolete now?
No. Spotlight’s clipboard history doesn’t even keep items for longer than eight hours.
Wow, didn't realise there was more than one tab
There were already a zillion and one apps (Maccy, ClipMenu, Jumpcut, Flycut, Alfred, ...) that provided this.
It'll be one of the first things I turn off whenever I get around to installing it ~6+ months from now.
Can anyone speak to whether the performance of the Settings app has been improved? In Seq and every version since they redid it in presumably SwiftUI, if you select one of the navigation panes and then hold either the up or down arrow keys to quickly navigate between them, something like a memory leak occurs due to (seemingly) launching all of the nested panes as separate apps (this is what appears to be the case in activity monitor) and the Settings app will start lagging until you fully quit and reopen.
No, it's worse. Basically it's the same experience but with an uglier UI
The search textbox overlaps with text which scrolls underneath.
The search box did not work for a few minutes after updating, but I assume that was a temporary indexing bug.
I'm normally on about 1 year delay on upgrading macOS for a multitude of reasons. I might not wait the full year but something else will have to force me to upgrade within the first few months.
I'd heard from people who were running the betas that it's not ready and they are surprised Tahoe wasn't delayed.
No way I'm upgrading any time soon to Apple's least cared for OS with a change this big (and this untested).
I'll be honest, I hear this every single time. But I've never delayed upgrading, and I've never regretted it. That's not to say every upgrade has been a strict improvement, but going back to my first Mac at 10.4 (Tiger) I've never wished I had stayed on an older version. We'll see how I feel after going to Tahoe, maybe this will be the one that breaks the trend.
Windows, on the other hand…
You always have to be moving forward and I'll never say "I'll just stay on Sequoia for forever" but delaying a bit does make life easier. I know I'll eventually upgrade but being there day 1 or even month 1 is not something I'm interested in. There are never new features that outweigh sending my development workflows into disarray or dealing with broken apps.
There aren't always huge issues or huge time sinks but I'm happy to let other people be on the bleeding edge and I'll upgrade once the Github issues, blog posts, etc have been created/fixed so that when I upgrade I can easily find solutions to any remaining issues I might run into. Especially with Tahoe, I've heard that some apps are just broken, period, unless the developer makes (sometimes significant) changes to get the same functionality working again (that was working fine in Sequoia).
> But I've never delayed upgrading, and I've never regretted it.
I was the same way for until one of the upgrades, I forget which, broke resume from suspend about 10-20% of the time for my combination of laptop and monitor. Every morning I’d get a sense of dread when I tried to open the laptop to see if today was a day where I’d get to pick up where I left off or if I was in for a crash and reboot as soon as I tried to use the laptop.
I thought for sure it would be fixed with one of the point updates, but it went on for the better part of a year.
You obviously haven't had firewall issues with EDR software a couple years ago or so.
I won't ever touch a .0 macos release again.
That’s from the old lore and I’m surprised so many have forgotten it. I learned that back when we had to buy upgrades on physical media, .0 is .no.
Wasn’t this sequoia?
I don't wait a full _year_, but I definitly give it many months before upgrading. This one I might wait longer...
Any actual interesting changes under the hood other than UI changes? I cant remember the last time macOS release that actually brings any useful feature I use.
It's been so long since Apple has released anything in either iOS or macOS that excited me as a user. I don't seem to be their target customer anymore.
The only reason I even have to "upgrade" to a higher version number is how quickly app developers (including Apple themselves) drop support for older OS's. My iPhone which is stuck on iOS 15 runs just as well as the day I bought it, but every other app I download tells me (in essence) "LOL your phone is too old and our developers are too lazy to keep our software running on it. Upgrade your OS or get lost loser".
That's literally the only thing motivating me to upgrade anymore: The treadmill of software compatibility. Apple doesn't have to innovate--they just need to make sure the ecosystem is broken after ~5-10 years or so.
Isn't that true for pretty much every OS? The feature set we need to be able to do our jobs and computing hobbies have been available for two decades.
Operating systems like Debian is sufficiently boring that I can just upgrade and continue computing. macOS upgrades have become a small gamble, the stuff that I depend on may not continue to work, or at least it will take a good deal of work. There are however no reason to upgrade, so the risk isn't really worth the hassle of upgrading and breaking Java or Python.
Microsoft still manages to do 'cool stuff' at the kernel level; IO Rings, VBS, Rust, etc.
Only thing I see on the Apple' what's new that looks interesting is Metal updates. Most of the rest is UI.
You can still get software that installs and works perfectly on Windows 7 (released 16 years ago). Good luck finding software that even installs on Snow Leopard (released 16 years ago), let alone works well.
The flip side of this is that every attempt at advancing the Windows UI framework story beyond win32/MFC and WPF has failed and the platform itself is steeped neck deep in technical debt.
Snow leopard is a unix based os. There is a ton of software that can still install on it and work fine.
Sometimes it’s Apple and Google that are forcing developers. The system is perfectly capable of running the app (you’re not using any new API) but store policies force you to add the restriction anyway.
Yeah we are in this situation right now with an App, we literally can't update it unless we target a more modern version of the SDK, which introduces breaking changes
This problem could be mitigated by Apple making older versions of software available. Then you could continue to release updates, and users on older devices could continue to use earlier versions of your app on their devices.
Apple actually partially solves this: as a user, if I have EVER downloaded Older Version X of an app, and then go to download it again, they let me. However, if I have never downloaded the old version and go to download it, they just say “this app is not compatible with your device.” and don't give me the chance to get the older, compatible version. I don’t know why they make this distinction.
Worse are the third party apps where the old version still actually runs, but the developer deliberately blocks you with a full-screen “go away” dialog (I’m looking at you, FlightAware).
I got my first MacBook at Catalina, and still miss it. For a while, I downgraded my Intel Mac to Catalina again; I love the aesthetic compared to the newer releases, and it’s fast and snappy.
But the situation now is: No recent apps work on Catalina since it’s considered obsolete (except open-source apps you compile yourself). But Big Sur and higher are ridiculously slow on Intel hardware, to the point where it’s unusable. I now have an otherwise perfectly good 2019 Intel MacBook that has been gathering dust for the past years.
I’ve got a MacBook and Mac Mini stuck on Monterey (12), and an iMac stuck on Big Sur (11). I’m pretty much dead in the water when it comes to software compatibility, unless I want to put Linux on them. Even homebrew gives me a warning that they’ve stopped support and to expect everything to break. It’s a sad state of affairs.
This[1] worked well to upgrade old Macs that were stuck on old versions of macOS for me, if you're not choosing to stay on older versions for other reasons.
[1] https://github.com/dortania/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher
Linux runs fine on my wife’s old (2013) MacBook. It’s more than fine, actually. I have Arch and Niri on there, and it makes a great SNES emulator.
Support rapidly being dropped happens mostly with smaller devs, because when resources are limited in the Apple platform world you can either adopt newer APIs and language features or you can support old OSes 3+ versions back. Trying to do both lands you in feature check conditional hell and requires a large matrix of test devices to ensure that nothing is being broken.
It’s less of a burden for corporate giants which is why you see much longer support timelines from e.g. Google.
When was the next Windows or Linux (distro) release that "excited" you?
It's all slow incremental updates pretty much.
Not Linux, but I still look forward to window managers and Neovim releases. The Cosmic desktop also looks promising, though I’m not using it until it has a scrolling window manager available for it.
https://xkcd.com/2224/
But yeah, I agree with you.
Spotlight got a major upgrade. It’s notably faster and deeply integrates with Shortcuts (letting you specify input variables, for example) among other things.
I’ve got Spotlight configured to index nothing but my applications (which is surprisingly difficult to configure and breaks with every major OS upgrade). Disabling all its default indexing has alleviated 95% of unexplainable CPU spikes and autocomplete pollution, so now I can finally use it for what it’s meant to be: the most overengineered fuzzy finder application launcher.
I actually preferred the pre-tahoe spotlight. The information density was higher and while it did not always give me the most relevant result atleast it was consistent and I could scroll down to find it. New spotlight is less dense and jumbles everything together.
Even more importantly: there's a clipboard manager built into it now.
I'm curious if it will get me to stop using Alfred
Alfred leverages the spotlight indexes, so Alfred will also get the speed up
Anyone using Raycast has had these features forever. Nice to see some attention on Spotlight but it's still nowhere close to the functionality you get from Raycast.
I've been using Raycast for a couple months but I'm hoping I can uninstall it if Spotlight is responsive enough in Tahoe. What bothers me about Raycast is the monthly subscription for certain features. I don't mind paying for Mac software – I'm quite happy to do that – but I do mind paying monthly subscriptions for Mac software with seemingly no justification for it (i.e. what monthly resources does running a "window command" use on Raycast that justifies locking it behind a monthly subscription?)
What's the window command? I'm able to use things like "Top Left Sixth" on the free plain. AFAIK you only the pro for the AI features.
I thought Pro was only for AI features as well (that's what it said when I installed Raycast), but this dialog is saying Pro is required for custom window layouts as well. I only discovered this today when I was trying to create a new command to paste the screenshot from my clipboard into Preview for OCR.
https://imgur.com/a/6OeqJYQ
I wrote my own window management with Hammerspoon, mostly duplicating what Rectangle et al do, but with specific tweaks just for me.
The most useful feature is the fact it uses my display layout + wifi name to figure out where I am and adjusts window locations accordingly.
Raycast is interesting but I’m not going to touch it so long as VC funding is involved. Alfred has been doing the job well enough, only requires me to buy a new version a couple times per decade, and isn’t going to become enshittified because there’s no VCs to come knocking looking for a profit.
+1 for Alfred. I'm a proud Power Pack / lifetime-license holder from the beginning. Very few outfits anymore have the chops to both offer and make good on a single-payment, long-lasting product with frequent and excellent substantive updates.
Mad props and three cheers for the Alfred team!
It’s insanely tiny and efficient for what it does, too. One of the only apps that’s so small that updates are done downloading within a second or two of clicking “Download”, even on a mediocre connection!
Sure and QuickSilver had it even earlier. But it is nice that one can finally extend Spotlight with Services ehm I mean Shortcuts.
Does "BetterDiscord" still show up as the first choice after you type "Disc"?
What’s wrong about this?
Can it find my files now?
At a minimum, it can not find them faster!
The fact that so much of the page is devoted to this liquid glass feature pretty much tells you the answer is no. Plus the fact that the "And so much more" section lists 10 different updates in the same space as their poster with a link to a PDF instead of building out a larger webpage speaks volumes.
Native container support is pretty exciting.
ICYMI: Apple's new native containers start in ~100ms and have better security. I updated to Tahoe just for this.
And it's open-source:
https://github.com/apple/container
It's not really supported before Tahoe, presumably due to required hypervisor support.
Interesting to see this utilizes kata-containers project alongside virtualization.framework. Cool project.
https://github.com/kata-containers/kata-containers/
Linux containers, not Darwin containers.
Does this mean I can dump Docker Desktop for good?
- Apple Sparse Image Format allows you to create virtualized disk images with a virtualized file format that can be formatted to any kind of file
- Terminal.app now supports 24-bit color and powerline glyphs
- Vehicle Motion Cues to reduce motion-sickness when in a moving vehicle
Good catch on the terminal. I missed that, and it might get me off Ghostty (I prefer to have less apps installed in general).
The on-device foundation models framework is interesting to me. So far the responses have not been good but the potential is appealing.
TextEdit has a styling toolbar now which I appreciate. The new spotlight has more functionality and seems faster (and less likely to pull up a website instead of the app I'm trying to launch)
I was in Beta since Beta 2, and I saw massive improvement in energy efficiency on my MacBook Air M2 and Pro Max M4
If anyone here feel aggravated by both Liquid Glass and whatever Windows 11 calls their UI, give KDE a try (Fedora is pretty stable with it). After tweaking a few things (display dpi, theme, wallpaper) - its a very coherent experience & information dense. You can do 95% of your computing in this environment. After getting used to KDE, it will be hard to go back to windows or macos.
The new approach they took is a disaster, technically and visually. This is a joke.
I agree, it's hideous. I miss the cleanliness of macOS Sierra.
I'll just stay on Sequoia for the time being, and then switch to Linux.
Curious what your life is like that you can 'just' switch to Linux. For me changing desktop OSes at this point would be like moving to a different country.
Aside from the Liquid Glass stuff, has anyone detailed the changes to the Unix bits of the OS? What's new, deprecated, moved, locked-down, etc. ... ?
How dare you not complain about the UI?
Long time Apple user advice: don't update before .1 version if you use your mac for important things.
Maybe it's new and controversial, but I like it. Honestly, I think there is something more about it. Like another Apple product that we're going to see in the future, like Apple glasses would work perfectly with this UI.
I've been using it for ~6 weeks, and I'm also a bit confused by the hate since it's barely changed. I'm a fan of the improved UX harmonization across form factors. My intuition is that the minor and gradual "Duploization" of macOS in Sequoia and now Tahoe foreshadows touchscreen MacBooks.
I agree with you. It really hasn't changed all that much. It's a bit more cartooney, but as long as it doesn't get in the way of my work, I don't care.
It looks like a lot of the hate flowing on HN is just people looking at worst-case screenshots on blogs and piling on. They haven't even used it.
There are a few things I'm not wild about, but for the most part it's a bunch of shoulder-shrugs. This isn't the end-of-the-world scenario that people are making it out to be.
I have a regular non-techie person in the family with a Mac who I think will like the changes. Those are the people who Apple is targeting. Not the tech bros and the wannabe posers who are desperately clutching their 10-year-old iPhones out of some kind of righteous indignation.
I'd like to see the presentation they used internally to sell the liquid glass aeshetic. I bet it is sillier than the famous Pepsi logo redesign document.
First rule of MacOS upgrade: don't. Second rule: wait for x.1 or x.2 releases, so it's more stable and most importantly, the dependencies you need get updated.
I always wait until x.6 or x.7! usually around May
Christmas is a good time to update usually.
Apple had a chance to bring back taste when they got rid of Ive, but missed it entirely. The overly rounded windows, the weird amount of blank space, the lack of clarity in general — the only thing that makes sense is that middle managers brought this about.
edit: Things are even worse — they already made newer apps much more difficult to read, likely because they have been brought from mobile to desktop. Now fonts are even smaller in System Settings, for example. What are they even thinking?
> Now fonts are even smaller in System Settings, for example. What are they even thinking?
It's worse on the iPad. They apparently think an iPad is now also a mouse and cursor device because they made touch targets so small, and the fonts in menus shrunk down making them more difficult touch targets as well.
It always seemed quite cringe to me. A use it once and "Ehh I guess it works and is cool, sure" and then never touch it again sort of feature.
Other than old people that always send gifs on Facebook and children who this is probably one of the only AI art things they have access too, idk who else uses this.
If one tech giant has it then they need to too for feature parity. Not a whole lot of use cases for generative AI for the masses, so if someone comes up with one, gotta copy!
This seems more of a toy. I hope we get to eventually able to use a local Apple LLM model with more flexibility.
People want this.
Remember, those of us on HN aren't really the target demographic. They are targeting people who use their device(s) for fun and entertainment.
Agreed.
What an ugly UI update. I usually don't mind too much about the changes in MacOS UI and visuals, but opening up Finder leaves me shocked that this actually got the green light. Who in their right mind looked at this and thought: "yep that's the future, it looks fantastic!".
For Finder I discovered that changing the Toolbar to Icon Only significantly improved it. Then I set the sidebar icons to small in the Appearance system setting. That helped a lot.
Most of the new UI is designed almost exclusively for icon only toolbars.
The new UI is horrible. That’s it. No need to deep analysis.
Writing this comment from my FrameWork laptop with AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, 96GB Ram, 4TB Storage, that I got for $4k. Running Fedora with KDE. How much would I need to pay Apple to get a laptop with this much ram?
The day I got my only Apple device, an ipad, only to know they will kill my browser download as soon as I switch to a different app, it became my last. I don't want to pay a company only to be subject to their decision of what I can and cannot run on my machine.
If I vote for that with my wallet, I deserve it.
You can get a 128GB MacBook for around $4300. With a 4TB SSD it'll be around $5k I think.
https://www.apple.com/shop/product/G1FW7LL/A/Refurbished-16-...
I’ve been using Omarchy (Arch+Hyprland) as my daily driver for over a month. It is faster, prettier and more efficient than macOS in my opinion. I have a Framework 16” on order. I can’t wait to get it.
Is there an equivalent to macOS' Ctrl-scroll to zoom the screen yet?
It's little accessibility features like that keep me coming back to macOS everytime I switch to Linux.
> More you. Shines through.
It just sounds like a shampoo commercial.
Will I be able to disable the glass effect so there isn't any load on the system just for the ui to exist?
If Apple stopped at the over-saturated/rounded-corners, it would have been a decent iteration on something established (and very much not broken). I realise the transparent icons are optional - but it now looks like a budget Android theme.
Am I the only one finding this design extremely dated? Like Android Kitkat like from 10 years ago?
I'm not quite sure what to make of Liquid Glass, I developed an allergy of sorts to the term while listening to the keynote. Any 'relevant' new features for power users / cmd line geeks that you know of?
https://github.com/apple/container is supported from macOS 26
The changes to Spotlight are fairly power-user focused. There's a lot of enhancements to make it quicker to set up shortcuts within it, and they've added a clipboard manager feature to it.
This summary looks acceptable: https://www.computerworld.com/article/4041433/spotlight-is-m...
Not a direct response to your question but (I guess like you) I often find with these releases that the changes I actually care about aren’t flashy enough to even warrant a mention in the presentations or on the main web page.
There seems to be some expansion of screen time, finally, but I haven’t been able to figure out what it is yet based on the only *os 26 update I’ve done so far is the public beta on a single Apple TV.
I think we'll have to wait for benchmarks to see if this is a leopard or a snow leopard
I've run every version of macOS since Mac OS X Public Beta. I'm pretty sure I'm going to skip Tahoe. macOS 15 Sequoia is great; why would I switch to something profoundly ugly and unpolished if everything will keep running on my current OS and Apple's liable to make macOS 27 look tolerable?
A small but important detail of Aqua was that the assumed light source was pointing straight down, whereas everybody else was usually using a 45 degrees angle. I wish Apple took a lesson from the old masters.
Also these colors make my eyes bleed. And the border radius is ridiculous.
Who is macOS designed for? I assume a non negligible customer base are software professionals and this iOSification of the desktop is borderline hostile. I don’t get it.
It’s butt-ugly, but I find the usability better. Previously everything was so white that I found it difficult on occasion to distinguish between windows above and below. The heavier drop shadows and rounded corners are actually quite helpful
Open up the Calendar app on macOS Tahoe. Look in the upper right at the time zone selector. It is left justified to a fault, leaving a very awkward amount of space between it and the expand arrow/flyout arrows.
That looks so bad :D
For a more granular features list: https://www.apple.com/os/pdf/All_New_Features_macOS_Tahoe_Se...
I hope they'll acknowledge what they've done and fix most of this nonsense. I like macOS how it is right now, and I switched from Linux partly for this. I always wonder why don't they just add new stuff based on user feedback?
I still hurting from the crappy System Settings. Please Apple, make System Settings better... It's a mess
I don't want the low contrast glassy stuff or even bigger corner radiuses on my iPhone or mac, so I disabled automatic OS updates for the first time.
When I updated to iOS 18.7, it automatically re-activated iOS updates! Fuck you very much, Apple!
So be warned, if you don't want to update, check your settings.
Updated to iPadOS 26 on my iPad 9.
It's so laggy on the home screen now. Absolutely ruined the poor thing.
Does anyone know what Qt 5 or Qt 6 applications look like on macOS Tahoe?
OpenSCAD and others look like they did even before Sequoia, with a small corner radius and older control spacing.
It looks like you can make your Qt app look like it did for previous OSes:
https://www.qt.io/blog/qt-on-macos-26-tahoe
That might be a useful stop gap.
First macOS version I’m holding off on. Just too unusable.
The part that I am so tired of is the ‘we are the best at this and this is amazing’ pitch that comes with every release. Never mind that this release’s design ‘language’ DIRECTLY conflicts with things they used to say ‘never do that’.
So what changed exactly? Change is understandable but this is a full 180. - floating anything was verboten - accessibility was paramount - clarity was prioritized
How did this release come about??
New people in design roles that no longer care about old rules.
Declining institutional taste and no one at the helm who appreciates or enforces old rules when necessary.
The pixel above the menu bar Weather widget isn't clickable. Sound, wifi, battery, Control Center, clock are just fine.
Let that one get under your skin.
they need to bring Scott Forstall or someone Bertrand Serlet-esque back, and a designer who isn't Alan Dye
Rich Corinthian Leather? Green baize backgrounds? Really..?
I really dislike how everything MUST become rounded to be "more user-friendly and fluid". The UI looks awful and I will probably never be upgrading.
i really wish they didn't give up on stage manager. every beta i would look if they fixed the opening behavior to open a new application in the same stage :/ but stage manager seems like it would have potential to fix window management on the mac without needing rectangle, yabai, alt tab etc
Just upgraded my wife’s laptop and my iPhone. It’s fine. I think her use (she lives in the browser) and my iPhone use (calls, camera, browser) don’t really reveal anything terrible. It’s kind of a dumb gimmick, but it’s mostly fine so far. It would annoy me if a UI that I frequently used “upgraded” to this, though.
A reminder, if you dislike the liquid glass look, that going into System settings / Accessibility / Display and toggling “Increase contrast” gets you a properly nice design with actual borders and solid backgrounds. 100% recommended.
I initially tried that and thought it improved some things, but it increased contrast across the OS, such that some webpages, including stock HN became too blinding. I instead switched to "Reduce Transparency," but that has its own issues.
Overall not pleased. I really did not want to care about the UI changes at all. But having experienced it now, I'm so annoyed I upgraded to iOS 26 and I'm having trouble focusing on the screen. I want WebGPU support, but I'm very hesitant to upgrade to macOS 26 (which is required for WebGPU in Safari).
This settings turns reduce transparency and it turns makes the menu bar gray, which looks horrible on a display on notch.
Is there any way to make it black? Like it appears on full screen applications? (apart from enabling the transparency together with a black wallpaper)
Currently even on dark mode it doesn't have a black background while reduce transparency is toggled on.
We're all disabled now. Thanks, Apple.
Weirdly, I had that enabled pre-Tahoe and have had to turn it off as it was even worse with it on for me.
Everyone’s different I guess :)
Back on Sequoia, but this is great advice, thank you!
The GUI of an OS has never concerned me. Seems like a red flag when the main selling point is a slight bit of transparency.
Well, that's why there is a lot of complaints.
The main selling point of a macbook is not a UI with transparency. It's hardware stuff (like ARM processors, battery life, aluminum frames, etc..) and a decent, stable, unix-ish software environment. No one is using macOS for the visual effects, so it is annoying that Apple is revamping the UI everyone is used to in order to add more visual effects.
Seems nuts to me, but I'll be curious to see how this all pans out.
Sure, sure... The UI is a waste.
But: 24-bit color support in Terminal.app!
Finally.
(Next year, macOS Ukiah will use Apple Intelligence: just describe the UI you want in Spotlight, and macOS will vibe-code it up for you.)
This is the first time I've ever seen a macOS update and not seen a single feature worth bothering to upgrade over. Is there anything developer-facing? I don't use any Apple ecosystem stuff and this is all that AFAICT
I've grown so used to Apple shipping buggy software that I wait a year or more before upgrading my mac to a major version. I do all the minor releases and security patches, of course.
I had thought Tahoe was the first version to drop Intel CPU support, but it looks like it will be the last version to still support Intel Macs.
Two of the latest Intel MacBooks, and the last Intel iMac, so technically, yes, there’s still some Intel support in there. My 2019 iMac is one version too old.
does not support 2018 Mac mini
Apple have always seemed to drop support for hardware after 5-7 years, and then it's just a question of the last supported OS becoming itself unsupported too. My early 2015 Macbook Pro (new in April 2015) got as far as macOS Monterey (released October 2021) - and they stopped updating that in October 2024.
(I'm not digging through Wikipedia to double check but my previous 2 Macbooks Pro felt like they lasted about as long.)
It'll be interesting to see if they change this with the (presumably cleaner slate) Apple Silicon-based hardware.
I'm on the beta right now and a "<<" icon has appeared.
It's embarrassing that it took them that long but they have in fact fixed it.
I think I’m going to stick with the previous version of macOS on my work laptop until I’m forced to upgrade.
Widget appearance is tied to *icon appearance. Grumble grumble. I want clear for my widgets but default for my dock and other icons. Too bad so sad me I guess.
edit: replaced dock with icon, because it affects much more than just dock
This is unrelated, but in Indonesian language, "Tahoe" is a word for tofu but spelled the old way
The new UI is incredibly disappointing, it looks like an old Android theme from 2005.
I feel like Joey Tribbiani with Rachel’s Traditional English Trifle, because I like it. iOS, macOS, ipadOS, tvOS.
I like the new feature in tvOS to see incoming calls on the tv.
It's not as bad as the first previews but ugly nonetheless and overall accessibility nightmare.
All I hope is that the design language stays contained in Apple ecosystem and does not spread.
Accessibility hasn't changed at all, and it remains trivial to turn off visual effects that present a problem. https://imgur.com/a/Vw55f8V
Is that call screening example a new feature or something I can do now that I didn't know about? That's something I've missed since switching from a Pixel to an iPhone last year.
That's new in the 26 OSes.
Looks like they're putting an AR UI in a Desktop
Anytime a UI redesign comes with bullshit abstract designer justifications ("a translucent new material that reflects and refracts its surroundings", etc) you know it's bad.
The key question - now that Liquid Glass is a reality, will Tim Cook lose his job like Ballmer did over Windows 8 metro design?
are they giving any hints that in high vis/accessibility modes this will be fully disabled? I've been largely insulated from changes like this for a while by that, if that were to change however, more drastic measures may be needed
Looks horrible on non-hdpi monitors
Apple straight up doesn't give a fuck about us third-party monitor users. Timmy says 1440p at 27" is big enough for anyone.
Just a joke of a company
They openly fucked DP 1.4 to make the ProDisplay XDR work.
Catalina, sure, you can drive a DP 1.4 monitor at 144Hz in HDR10. Big Sur, coinciding with the ProDisplay...? No, that will get you 60Hz HDR10 or 95Hz SDR.
So stupidly that downgrading my monitor (mine would allow you to select advertised support) to DP 1.2 would increase your refresh and HDR options.
And it was never fixed, not in Big Sur, Monterey or Ventura, when I had switched monitors.
People were wondering how Apple made the math work. Simple, by "Fuck you if your monitor isn't our $6,000 flagship".
Eh, it has always looked horrible. Non fractional scaling is just too much to ask at this point...but hey look at this tiny toggle element doing this cool liquidy effect wohoo
Only since OS X Yosemite. Then they decided to mess with the font smoothing and it went downhill from there. And no, it wasn't because of Retina, as OS X Mavericks had Retina support and still worked fine on low DPI screens.
Has anyone gotten this running in with QEMU and kvm?
Windows XP had Theme Settings. I never used them, but at least they allowed you to choose.
The juxtaposition in the marketing speak is ridiculous.
"...all with a whole lot less effort."
Seriously Apple, a whole lot less?
I usually wait a couple weeks for the bugs to be worked out before installing.
It's like every macos release. The internet rushes to upgrade to it and then tries to be the first to sh*t on it. Nothing to see here. Winning.
I hate it. Everything has become larger and weirder and uglier? When I reboot the machine the time on the lock screen is in liquid glass but the date isn't?
It reminds me of Cydia Themes
Reminder that if you have an old Mac, and you'd like to run more recent versions of macOS on it, you can do so with Dortania OpenCore (https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/).
They don't have Tahoe support yet, but almost certainly will in the coming months.
I highly recommend doing this instead of throwing away a 5 or 6 year old computer as ewaste!
(Windows and Linux also work on Intel Macs.)
I'm so bummed that the workarounds to keep a 5k iMac in commission all seem to be really likely to piss off your corporate IT department.
Patching the bootloader in memory seems like a big op-sec no-no.
Last time this came up on Hacker News, someone pointed out that there are new display boards you can buy from China to reuse a 5K's panel as an external display.
I think we're only allowed to run Linux at work on blessed devices. Last I looked, the 5K panel in the iMac was actually presented to the firmware as two smaller displays, which were glued back together in software. Apple does that magic to support its own hardware, but it sounded like Linux doesn't.
Thank you so much. I only need a Mac to compile/debug with Xcode (still can't get USB pass through with quickemu working) but Apple has been killing old versions such that projects wont build and home brew has no bottles and whatnot.
I'm baffled by the hate. So far, it's just some nice looking cosmetic changes.
All entirely inconsequential -- I've seen nothing yet that will affect my workflows in any way.
I don't think so, apple supposedly cares about aesthetics and design. If I didn't care about little details I would use windows. Like Steve Jobs said, it comes down to taste. Why would I use a flawed unpolished product, it doesn't reassure me that the technical side was even done well.
Wait until you use it a bit more and get some overlap into an unreadable mess.
Open System Settings right now, do a search, then scroll the view. That’s the least worst you’ll find.
This is the Windows 7 version of MacOS
How has Apple still not addressed many basic UI issues, such as menu bar icons disappearing behind the notch with no way to see them?
I take it as a sign of typical increasing corporate dysfunction. Obvious problems, some even easy and uncontroversial, don't get fixed. Why?
The people who can fix them are not in control. The org must be very top-down. But Steve Jobs had a top down style, so what's the difference? Its: Using and caring about the product.
It's top down direction with the people at the top not using/caring about the product. Presumably they're concerned with other things like efficiency, stocks, clout.
Also if you had a majorly obvious bug, you could email steve@apple.com, which he would forward to a VP, who would be fired if it wasn't fixed ASAP. Knew a guy who lost his job that way, so it's not just a myth. Steve really was like that.
The wrath of Steve was a real thing that people feared.
[flagged]
Menu extras were never intended to be treated like Windows tray items. For the earlier portion of OS X’s life, there wasn’t even a public API to create them and required a hack and a private API, and the current API is intended for ephemeral menu extras that disappear when their host app isn’t running. In short, the menubar isn’t designed for users to collect menu extras like Pokémon.
But that’s exactly how it is used, and them disappearing behind the notch feels like a bug.
Sure, but for twenty years that’s not how they’ve been used.
In case you don't know, at least there's a setting to help:
I have collected a long list of these types of settings over the years, for example disable font smoothing:
It used to be a checkbox, now there's only this command.Eventually that will be gone too, and none will be the wiser except the old who remember the good old days.
I'm starting to think these settings are left there by rogue engineers who fight against the oppression while staying under the radar. It's like a secret cabal that works to maintain sanity while the plebs are left to suffer at the mercy of their own ignorance.
And the apps that provide solutions for it, like Bartender, need screen reading permissions which I just can't bring myself to grant.
If you really want to use such a thing, switch to Ice. It’s an open source thing similar to Bartender, before BT was bought by a shifty outfit. It still requires those permissions, but at least you can look at the code. I have a paid Bartender license. I liked it enough to pay for it, but don’t like the road it went down and stopped using it.
Tahoe lets you selectively remove app icons from the menu bar. I’m going to try that for a while and see if I can tolerate not using Ice anymore.
I think they kinda did? I'm not sure where to look for a link to this info, but I remember watching a YouTube video showing the ability to group and hide menu bar icons in Tahoe so they take up less space (and therefore encroach less toward the notch).
Maybe I'm misremembering the video though.
(edit) The linked page seems to hint at it:
> Personalized controls and menu bar. Your display feels even larger with the transparent menu bar. And you have more ways to customize the controls and layout in the menu bar and Control Center, even those from third parties
I love my Mac and yes, this is easily the most absurd problem. It happens to me all the time and I can’t believe they haven’t fixed it.
Apple…if you’re listening…please fix this.
Notice how on the menu bar, when you click File and then the dropdown appears, you can move the mouse arrow to the right (without clicking) over Edit and now the Edit menu shows up. But the same doesn't work on the status menu icons, if I click on the volume icon and move the mouse, nothing happens, the volume menu stays open, even if hover over the battery indicator. So many little things like this that never worked consistently.
They need to bring back the control strip!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_Strip
Solves this exact issue.
It was great, but they had to quietly retire it when somebody pointed out it looked like a dick.
Apparently it's not important.
Looking at this webpage I realise I am absolutely no longer part of Apple’s demographic for MacOS. I couldn’t care less about any of these new features. I was hoping the UI would be improved but it’s just a diabolical clusterfuck.
Hard pass.
I suppose I'm in the minority, but I do like the new changes. It's refreshing, and looks good. Most issues can be tweaked away if you desire that. (disabling transparency or removing tint window with background wallpaper)
What I want is my single row Safari address+tabbar back - why did they take it out? And where the hell is the newly refreshed Terminal.app?
They didn't even fix the horizontal resizing in the Settings app.
Sigh.
I still need to use the Scroll Reverser because the scroll direction (aka natural scrolling) can only be turned on or off globally, not per pointing device. I love natural scrolling on the trackpad, but it doesn't make sense on the mouse scroll wheel.
I use a Shortcut for this because it cuts down on the unnecessary apps. Hammerspoon.app would work too though.
This looks like their Windows Vista.
I hate to say it, but Windows is much more productive than MacOS for the usually tasks you perform on an OS (with GUI, both have CLIs, but I'm not talking about them). I'm using both at work all day long switching between them. When reflecting why, I think it comes down to windows management and the file explorer (vs finder).
That’s an entirely subjective thing, though. I’ve used Macs more than PCs and I can’t stand what feels to me like Windows’s abysmal window management.
I don’t say that to argue that macOS is better at it, just that I strongly prefer the Mac way as much as you prefer the way Windows does things, and that’s perfectly fine.
I disagree on this.
I’ve used both interchangeably for decades and can swap between them without slowing. So much of this comes down to knowledge of and experiences with the quick/er ways for getting around.
For quite sometime using search tools is vastly more efficient for navigation and file movement than Explorer or Finder anyway.
Tim Cook has no taste
Looks like a niche Gnome theme that’s trying to clone a MacOS look.
I don’t think it’s that bad, nothing to get upset over - but yeah sort of like candy iMac aesthetic.
Screenshots of this OS sure are...something. I'm gonna hold off on upgrading. Maybe they'll tone it down next year.
A lot of the focus here is on the design (obviously). It took me a while to get used to it. But there are a lot of really great improvements in this release that make it worth it. Spotlight gets big updates. Live activities and notifications syncing from your phone. Journal. Music app has been massively updated and redesigned. Phone app. And surprisingly it doesn’t feel like a launch release - definitely less buggy than previous efforts.
This seems like a relatively minor update.
This is the last ever version with Intel support, right? That's a milestone of sorts.
I'm not sure what I'm going to do with my 2020 iMac in a year. I really want to be able to repurpose that 5k screen but Apple does not make it easy.
I might just leave it in perma-Windows Boot Camp.
If you're up for a project, you can swap the guts of those 5K iMacs for an aftermarket controller board which turns it into a regular monitor. It's a bit janky but a hell of a lot cheaper than buying a new 5K monitor.
I mean the obvious other choice would be Linux. Wayland is pretty good with hidensity screens nowdays.
Which is a bit sad. There were some choices that didn’t pan out in the last Intel era (butterfly, touchbar), but part of me loved those changes (the keyboard and the touchbar felt super premium, until you tried to work with them for any amount of time).
Is there anywhere to find a comprehensive list of updates made "Under the hood"? Sure the new UI is cool and all, but what are they doing to make the OS better? In a previous life I was a mac administrator and every update, apple would remove some binary and suddenly we couldn't natively make calls to LDAP or something.
That’s why I miss the old Ars Technica reviews.
The closest I’ve seen is this Apple PDF and I’m not sure it’s what you’re after: https://www.apple.com/os/pdf/All_New_Features_macOS_Tahoe_Se...
Okay that seems pretty nice. A lot of small improvements to day-to-day use. This is what I want from a desktop OS update.
I wish Apple would skip yearly macOS releases, there is no need.
Am I the only one here who thinks liquid glass is pretty? I like it.
More than that, I love the new Spotlight features, and the ability to remove apps from the menu bar without installing Ice (or the legacy Bartender).
Ios26 isn’t bad. Installing it on my non work MacBook.
I love how when apple could offer nothing more, their ui became nothing, and a celebration of blankness
I really hope spotlight didn't just get ruined
"ruined"?
It hasn't been able to find anything in years.
It's faster to scroll down in Finder than use the search box to locate anything =)
I mean it’s gotten bad already, but I think people’s hope is that they fixed it that if I type in a file name I work with all the time it’ll be the first result. At least that’s what I’m hoping for.
that and some kind of weighted memory for search history. i use photoshop almost daily, photos once a month or so, and photo booth once a year, but they appear in reverse order based on alphabetization.
Disappointed with the background image. I was expecting a similar treatment like with Sequoia and previous versions with a beautiful and inspiring scene in nature. Instead it is vaguely inspired by water?
The Tahoe beach pictures are pretty nice.
https://mrmacintosh.com/download-the-new-macos-tahoe-wallpap... has them at the bottom of the link
Is there alternative backgrounds included? Often there are two or three.
There are four alternative Tahoe backgrounds/screensavers in Landscape. They're the same shot of the lake at different times of day.
To help highlight the new "Liquid Glass" UI?
Or because Tahoe is a lake?
Both?
I, for one, am going to wait a much longer while before installing this.
The internets suggests the following disables glass effects:
https://www.apple.com/v/os/c/images/macos/highlights/mac_pho...
Two different fonts (Mac vs iOS) for the same data display?
And replacing all humans by AI avatars, to make it easier for spambots to impersonation people?
Running it already. Seems pretty solid. No compatibility issues. UI changes are fairly ok. Glad they got rid of launcher and merged it into spotlight.
Never used spotlight. I have it disabled permanently. I don’t like the indexing.
If you ever used Quicksilver, the new Spotlight feels a lot like it.
"Reimagined with Liquid Glass, macOS Tahoe is at once fresh and familiar. Apps bring more focus to your content. You can personalize your Mac like never before. And everything just flows into place."
what is this grammar
I think this is just 'sales writing'. As if written for a trailer video.
Apple used to be like... the standard for how to do this.
IMO we're losing a lot of writing craftsmanship across many industries with Gen X'ers retiring
It's Apple house style. Marketing writes in tiny sentences. Even fragments. Makes the copy more punchy. And it's been like this for decades.
Now imagine it being said by someone presenting and doing the same hand pyramid stance that they make every Apple employee in WWDC videos do.
All kidding aside, it’s weird to read. Ever since I was a kid, I was taught that beginning a sentence with “And” or “But” is not “correct”. Times change and all that, I get it - it’s just weird though.
The hand pyramid stance. Yes! I find it quite off putting. It feels overly choreographed and fake.
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Shwiggity shwagg, the GA release hath come!
Can't wait to write a beamline control application for crystallography on this sumbitch!
Have they got any further on their roadmap to only allowing apps from the Mac store in this release?
They will certainly be enough idiots who think that it is for the user's own good, so that apps are more "secure."
What evidence do you have that they are trying to do that?
All of the major commercial OS vendors are trying to do that. Apple started it with iOS. Google have gradually been tightening the net. Microsoft are furthest away but they have the longest legacy of freedom so they the furthest to go.
Obviously they aren't going to publicly say that's their intent, but you don't have to be a genius to read between the lines.
As for why... money and power are pretty big motivators.
Ok, so no?
What evidence have you got that they aren't? I don't see why you're expecting some quote from Tim Cook saying "yes we're going to lock down macos in the next 10 years". Obviously not going to happen.
The evidence is their actions with gatekeeper, app signing, removing the right-click workaround, etc.
> What evidence have you got that they aren't?
I'm sorry, but I can't take this question seriously.
The main evidence is that they haven't. I also believe that it would be quite damaging to an important part of their user base.
Other than that, you're essentially asking me to prove a negative.
I remember when there was option to run any application. With Sequoia there are only 2 options: App Store; App store + Known developers. Third option was removed. You can still run other apps but you need to manually approve them with ~3 popups where first option is "move to Bin". You need to do this after every OS or App update. I wonder when this option will be removed as well.
It's been missing since at least Big Sur, so if they're going to go any further they do seem to be taking their time over it.
They are still working on it. This is from a year ago
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/08/macos-15-sequoia-mak...
Obviously they can't do it instantly or there would be too much resistance. Microsoft have to go even slower.
This is tiresome. You cannot lock down development machines. If you pay attention you'll see that OSes made for development work will be the only ones not locked down. Android was a holdout but Google is now tightening the screws. MacOS, Linux, BSD, and Windows are the only OSes that can't be locked down. Microsoft tried but they abandoned that.
Good point, but it is entirely possible for Apple/Microsoft to lock down "consumer" versions of their operating systems, effectively turning the common man's computer into a glorified phone and a new cash cow. Add to that a requirement for an online account, age verification, and other malware.
> You cannot lock down development machines.
Of course you can. What makes you think you couldn't?