1/2 pixel strips everywhere, around tons of elements. Huge rounded corners. Slow showy animations.
This isn’t a UI for adults, this is a UI for a fake computer sequence in a cheap Netflix movie.
This force-upgraded a lot of Macs at work and we lost days of effective work across many engineers. The machines was practically useless for weeks.
They clearly don't care about power users anymore, and haven't for quite some time. It's so sad.
Also I've never seen so much hate on Apple on HN and barely anyone steps in to explain why Apple is right. They must've really fucked up this time.
Famously, Jobs' demands pushed engineers to think and work harder to achieve what they think was impossible, which resulted in many of the most iconic designs of personal electronic devices in history.
On the other hand, we have butterfly keyboard and this.
Mac OS X 10.3, 10.4, 10.5, 10.6, and 10.7 all took over 12 months to develop, sometimes much more, and 10.5 was famously delayed out to 30 months.
Jobs may have pushed engineers, but he was more careful about what he pushed out the door to consumers.
I believe that's how the designers at Apple came up with Liquid Glass
Maybe it's a good opportunity to consider whether you actually have to keep running on Apple's treadmill.
All of these seem to be fine on my thinkpad (true, I probably have somewhat lower standards for passable display). Battery life sucks a bit, what I can usually fine outlet somewhat to plug into.
Actually now that I think about it, my visceral reaction is one of dread: a feeling the trouble will be more than the benefit of a new computer.
Something as basic as scrolling feels slightly inconsistent in just about every app and keybindings are all over the place. There’s always the allure of getting the config ”just right” but after a while I swear I start seeing Sisyphus’ reflection in my screen.
But it doesn’t really matter, since the DE doesn’t determine how individual apps behave.
My baseline is OSX from decade ago OSX with native apps where everyone was following the Apple HIG so consistently that using a Java app felt like waking up in the twilight zone. macOS these days have fallen quite a bit from its UX glory days but there’s still quite a bit to go before it hits the level of Ubuntu or Windows.
On Linux it feels to me like every app exists in its own parallell dimension where you never know if even the basic laws of physics still apply.
I suspect that they were rather shaken at how poorly AVP was received.
It was bound to fail since day one.
It’s not as though anything about Liquid Glass makes a meaningful difference in usability.
It is equally aggravating to err on either side: Windows 3.1 clunk to the left, Tahoe's operationally useless (indeed, operationally detrimental) visual fireworks to the right.
Apple needs to hit a sweet spot of crisp, but the priority must be fast, logical interaction that lets me operate at the speed of thought. With Tahoe, Apple tried to gild the lily.
There is no true passion in MacOS, and the marketing has come face to face with reality in 2025. It's the neglected step-child of a company distracted by other things.
There's been some impressive engineering done by lower-level folks under the hood of it all, though.
i really missed snow leopard for about 10 years all the way up to when i moved on from my macbook circa 5 years ago.
My personal feeling on it is just "meh." My productivity with my laptop hasn't changed. I'm not a huge fan but it's not a deal breaker. I still find it better than Windows 11 for the most part, and Linux has other issues as a daily driver for me.
IMHO Apple needs a "tick" release where they only polish and fix bugs and usability issues with an almost total feature freeze. I've heard they may be doing that.
Also who uses MacOs beaides developers? Majority are creative prosumers in arts/design and they are even more annoyed by messed up designs. What you are left with are lawyers, writers, students? I guess they might like it.
Students - all of them.
I shouldn’t be surprised given that the mac save as dialog box has a name field that is still hard coded to 32 characters visible. Whenever I bitch about it I get pushback that filenames shouldn’t be longer than that! Um hello - tell me you have never worked in the real world outside your iphone bubble without telling me.
You used to be able to count on the basics working smoothly, but stuff like the camera and messaging are frequently broken for me
Definitely an “to each their own” kind of situation.
Answer: sometimes apps let you swipe right from the left margin, sometimes there may be a left arrow in the upper left, but it may not be visible unless you enable tinted Liquid Glass, but also look in the bottom left, there may be a less-than sign, and some times you have to force-quit the app and restart (like with Libby books borrowed via Kindle…)
But I couldn’t get over how bad the ux is compared to my 7 year old phone. Things like highlighting, autocorrect, placing the cursor where you want “just don’t work”, the setup is unintuitive, the hotspot doesn’t work half the time, there are bugs (like email not connecting) that based on my searches are prevalent and have no solution “did you try updating and restarting”. I really couldn’t believe how bad it is.
But evidently people really like them, and I imagine they could find things not to like about my old Samsung, so to each his own I guess.
I still prefer it over iOS due to being able to install stuff outside of the Play Store. If/when Google kills that, I'll be switching to a Linux mobile something. (I'm aware of the verification nonsense, but that isn't in place yet, and it has been shifting a bit)
NA seems to really fixate on the luxury and social significer aspect of having an iphone though. But I think this update is finally ending that for some people. I have many friends who were diehard iPhone users that are now thinking of moving to Android. There's also a growing sense that new gens of most phones are making only marginal advances. Keeping a phone for 3 or more years is much more common and some mid-tier phones are now getting long security and update commitments.
Unacceptable for the premium you pay for Apple software. Unacceptable for any software one is paying for. I hope they get their shit together and start fixing before they continue adding new stuff. 26.2 doesn't inspire me that they're on that trajectory.
The thing that amazes me most is that everyone on the teams responsible is probably using their Apple devices and running into these same bugs!
What does offend me are all the bugs, as you say. It's still utterly broken all these months after the public release. Spotlight is a mess; I've seen it take DAYS before it has made an app in '/Applications' findable through search (even as the app shows up in Spotlight's long scrollable list of apps), and the animation where it comes in as a result of the four finger gesture has so many bugs I won't go through them all here. The most annoying is that it can end up in a state where Spotlight is not on screen, but you need to do the "make Spotlight go away" gesture before the "make Spotlight appear" gesture works again. It also often loads icons slowly; sometimes loading them in one by one over time, sometimes all at once after thinking for a second. It's arguably better from a UX design perspective than Launchpad was, but Launchpad was so much more polished and better performing.
There's also just constant minor graphical glitches. Things which pop in, things which load in with the wrong background color, that sort of stuff. The Settings app sometimes loads in stuff gradually and parts of the app jump around for a second before it settles, like a bad web app. It feels janky.
Mac OS X used to feel like a solid operating system. It has been going downhill for a while, but macOS 26 is the biggest leap in a long time.
I don't care overmuch about the purely cosmetic side of it, but Liquid Glass looks absolutely terrible from an ergonomics point of view. It's just plainly, objectively bad UX.
That is how the current chaos feels like.
This is what surprises me the most to be honest. CarPlay seemingly still suffers from a (sometimes deadly) issue of covering the entire map on your dashboard with the avatar/number of the person calling, so if you're actively using it for navigation (since, you know, there is a map there and all) someone calling you is a highly stressful moment and more than not you need to hang up because otherwise the call is in the way.
I've had my iPhone 12 Mini for so many years now, and this is still an issue, the only conclusion I can take from this is that people at Apple actually all have Android phones.
There is also subconscious resistance to create an action that will uncover a bug and then remind of personal failure.
Then once whole teams get used to this, it's not possible to get it fixed as it gets deprioritised always.
If Apple leadership doesn't care about software quality, then Apple engineers can't care about software quality. They use the same buggy crap that we do, because they have no choice.
What I do know for a fact, is that for each error I have on my MacBook, I’ll have ~10 ungoogable errors on any other OS. I rage-sold my last Windows due to losing my Java installation (or just confusing which terminal I installed it in).
Please, crop all thumbnails in the corners, as long as you come pre-installed with just one working terminal.
If you ever attempt to compile software, the shoe instantly hits the other foot. WSL is a godsend, and Apple's "native" terminal environment becomes a confusing liability.
Catering to different audiences, I suppose.
There are so many parts of the os that flagrantly ignore well-established accessibility standards, some of which Apple themselves advocated for
Thank goodness Meta has done Apple the biggest favor of the century by poaching him.
Perhaps Apple is willing to accept that most macOS users will enable "reduce transparency" so long as devs implement support for transparency.
But there is another explanation making the rounds, possibly a conspiracy theory. Some people claim that Apple is doing this to make cross-platform technologies look obsolete and hard to implement.
If there's any truth to this, it's a terrible idea that could easily backfire. People could get used to there not being a consistent platform look and feel. Like on Windows, "native" could lose its meaning.
Whatever Apple promotes as "native" could become just another style among many.
Best hardware around, but at this point I might even take W11 over this locked down mess. At least Asahi support is decent these days.
And I'm tired of paying for things that should be stock, such as proper window and mouse management, or reasonable fan control so that the keyboard doesn't burn my fingers under moderate workloads.
I want to turn the clock back. It’s not a reflexive opposition to anything new. I thought OS X clearly got better from 10.0 to 10.4. But in the last vie versions it’s been a regression.
https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job
Thankfully he has now left. Things could hopefully pick up again usability-wise within 2-3 years.
What recommendations do people have for good metal-body linux-friendly "ultra books" (or whatever they're called these days)?
Now it was a while ago I left the Apple ecosystem as it became clear they didn't actually care about UX anymore, but did "strong feedback during beta-testing" ever actually result in any results? I remember doing something similar back in 2012-2013 sometime, and friends having similar feelings across the years, that it makes me think that Apple never really did any changes based on feedback receiving during the beta testing.
Has anyone here ever written something in via the traditional feedback forms/venues and actually had something changed before the final release? I even asked around my circle of acquaintances and even the ones 110% into the Apple ecosystem seem to never have noticed anything changed based on their feedback.
Fuck you, Apple.
So for Apple to start with a level of disrespect for the product where the question of whether each change is actually an improvement is effectively off-topic, it's no wonder they made a dog's dinner of Tahoe.
I don't own a computer for the OS, I own it to run the Applications that I find useful.
thenaturalist•2h ago
If this kind of software trend continues in 2026, it might be the first time I take a serious look at Linux distros on Mac.
renegade-otter•1h ago
While at it, nuked my old MacBook Pro and Air with Mint too - not like they are getting updates anyway.
It can be done, it should be done. These commercial operating systems have enshitified to a critical point and are beyond repair.
roxolotl•1h ago
Edit: Not to disagree though. I too have a Linux gaming pc and are helping friends do the same.
trinix912•1h ago
Sadly it's only a matter of time until everyone copies it because it's cool and it's what Apple does so they must be right!
trinix912•1h ago
Not a single update since 2019 has improved the UI more than it regressed it in my opinion. Too much whitespace, too little contrast, too big controls, and now too little readability.
It's almost like their entire UI department is under threat of being fired unless they invent a radical UI update every other year.
Even Vista was a readability zen compared to this and they aren't listening to feedback at all.