Shortly after Windows 10 came out I was joking that Microsoft finally made a Linux distribution (by replicating all the jankiness we usually associate with it).

Now I guess it's Apple's turn.

Wait, they implemented Alt-Drag/Right drag?

I actually wish macOS would clone Alt-dragging from anywhere to drag and Alt-right clicking to resize from anywhere from Linux (at least GNOME and KDE Plasma have this built-in). That would certainly solve most of the complaints in the original post.

KDE doesn't actually suffer from this problem.

Dawn of the year of the Linux desktop!

Curious, how do you resize windows instead?

Can you interpret this comment for those of us that haven't used windows? All i can recall from "vista" is that it looked good

Not to beat on my own drum but as a mac convert from the days of Tiger I saw the writing on the wall from miles away.

Still on iOS 18 and macOS 15 (Sequoia). I was a day one upgrader up until now, never had any regrets but this time things seemed very different.

It's worrisome but all is not lost, I'll start sweating for real if next year's releases don't improve things substantially.

> Luckily for Apple, Windows 11 is not exactly in a position to attract switchers.

Yes, but Linux is finally in that position, not to mention we're seeing silicon from intel and amd that can compete with the M series on mobile devices.

> "I wish I didn’t.”

Can't you do a factory reset/recovery on Mac that lands on the version of macos shipped with the device? Then you could re-upgrade to the os you wanted, without trying it it seems Sequoia is still available in the app store

Thanks for the advise. I have not upgraded, and have no plan to.

At least on Windows 11 it’s possible to disable the rounded corners.

first time i used tahoe to help a friend w/ their laptop i legit thought it was like a knockoff macos or something, genuinely the ugliest macos version and even in the brief time that i've used it, i've encountered annoying bugs, QC at apple is dead lowkey

One of the most annoying things after installing Tahoe for me, that for no good reason an ordinary app would randomly lose its focus. In the midst of my typing. This is unbelievably preposterous and I just can't stop hating Apple for this crap. How the fuck this is acceptable? I just have no words. What makes it even worse that I couldn't even complain about it on their support pages - they just keep removing my comments for being "non-constructive". This is some random bug, and many people have complained about it, how am I suppose to make it "more constructive"? Send them the exact configuration of constellations, the number of monitors I use and their positioning angles, log the keyboard rate and delay, the latency, the level of magnetic interference caused by my Bluetooth devices, etc.?

I had to upgrade my iPhone to iOS 26 to setup my watch. I wish I had never done it. Nothing is where it's supposed to be from a UI perspective. Stuff breaks often. I can't use my contact search bar to search contacts. It only searches past calls. What the hell.

Apple software has noticeably declined from my experience, both iOS and macOS. I find the lifecycle of Apple products to be offensively short, also.

If I buy a product and the hardware is good for 10 years (because I looked after it), I expect the software to also run just as well as when I purchased it - that is the case with Linux, why isn't it the case with macOS?

Every year the software upgrades invariably degrade system performance. Outrageous.

I agree. This is the first time I regret updating macOs.

I hoped the .1 or .2 would fix things, but I'm still seeing glitches and even random freezes.

Microsoft is a disaster right now, but if the new intel processor can compete on battery life with mac I might go back to linux.

> Tahoe is a macOS mis-step on par with Windows 8 or Windows Vista.

Other than that weird resize thing written about here (which I didn't notice, thanks SizeUp for providing me with hotkeys remarkably similar to Windows) - why? Vista and 8 were immediately obvious changes in the UI, but in general it still looks and feels just like macOS has for well over a decade now.

New icons, new fonts, but... that's it?

Oh and HyperSwitch for some reason can't switch to Finder windows any more, but that's probably because HyperSwitch hasn't seen an upgrade in years...

I switched from Windows 11 to macOS after a disastrous upgrade experience and drastic downgrade in performance on my Windows laptop.

I mean Windows 10 wasn't great but I got used to the taskbar searching the web somehow and the dual config menus everywhere and so on. But 11 was just terrible.

macOS has its pain points but man oh man what a disaster Windows is.

I have had Linux on my personal desktop and laptop forever so that hasn't been an issue, only used Windows for work.

Ah yes, the classic Apple move of hiding basic functionality behind obscure shortcuts. Thanks for the tip.

I especially liked the part with the hand trying to grab the plate. Perfect imagery.

He will prevent it from getting much worse than it would have under another decade of Dye, but I don't think he can totally reverse the trend.

I think this is just what happens to companies as they get older. Most of the people who pioneered the Human Interface Guidelines aren't at the company anymore, and management doesn't see much financial growth in Mac sales compared to AI and services.

I worked on Finder/TimeMachine/Spotlight/iOS at Apple from 2000-2007. I worked closely with Bas Ording, Stephen Lemay, Marcel van Os, Imran Chaudry, Don Lindsey and Greg Christie. I have no experience with any of the designers who arrived in the post-Steve era. During my time, Jony Ive didn't figure prominently in the UI design, although echoes of his industrial design appeared in various ways in the graphic design of the widgets. Kevin Tiene and Scott Forstall had more influence for better or worse, extreme skeumorphism for example.

The UX group would present work to Steve J. every Thursday and Steve quickly passed judgement often harshly and without a lot of feedback, leading to even longer meetings afterward to try and determine course corrections. Steve J. and Bas were on the same wavelength and a lot of what Bas would show had been worked on directly with Steve before hand. Other things would be presented for the first time, and Steve could be pretty harsh. Don, Greg, Scott, Kevin would push back and get abused, but they took the abuse and could make in-roads.

Here is my snapshot of Stephen from the time. He presented the UI ideas for the intial tabbed window interface in Safari. He had multiple design ideas and Steve dismissed them quickly and harshly. Me recollection was that Steve said something like No, next, worse, next, even worse, next, no. Why don't you come back next week with something better. Stephen didn't push back, say much, just went ok and that was that. I think Greg was the team manager at the time and pushed Steve for more input and maybe got some. This was my general observation of how Stephen was over 20 years ago.

I am skeptical and doubtful about Stephen's ability to make a change unless he is facilitated greatly by someone else or has somehow changed drastically. The fact that he has been on the team while the general opinion of Apple UX quality has degraded to the current point of the Tahoe disaster is telling. Several team members paid dearly in emotional abuse under Steve and decided to leave rather than deal with the environment post Steve's death. Stephen is a SJ-era original and should have been able to push hard against what many of us perceive as very poor decisons. He either agreed with those decisions, or did not, and choose to go with the flow and enjoy the benefits of working at Apple. This is fine I guess. Many people are just fine going with the flow and not rocking the boat. It may be even easier when you have Apple-level comp and benefits.

My opinon; unless Stephen gets a very strong push from other forces, I don't see that he has the will or fortitude to make the changes that he himself has approved in one way or another. Who will push him? Tim Cook, Craig Federighi, Eddy Cue, Phil Schiller? The perceived mess of Tahoe happened on the watch of all of these Apple leaders.

Lemay's appointment was widely celebrated, but he'd been at apple since 1999 and never got the gig. My guess is that there are valid reasons for that that may not be design-related.

> Of the regions in the article, which bring window focus

Just did a quick test in a VM, and it seems all of them. I.e. if you could resize the window, clicking that space (even if empty) brings it into focus. But then I also tested on Sequoia and the same happens.

It seems then that basically everything remained the same except for the visual presentation of the corner.

Do you mean you don't observe the same thing? Or that it doesn't cause you difficulty?

Yeah the really misleading part of the screenshots in this article is that it doesn't show the "resize cursor", which basically makes this a non issue.

Also, for anyone reading this who hates the general aesthetic, go into Accessibility and hit "reduce transparency". This has been a desirable setting for last few OSX versions.

No. Direct that money to open source projects and let Apple ruin itself.

I mean, I don’t hate it, but it seems like a clear step back.

If you do, make them play that scrambled egg GIF from TFA in an endless loop. They'll eventually get it.

If they didn’t realize how broken things are by themselves, mere pressure from the outside won’t be turning the ship around.

please yes, they could use some real world roasting

Yes, I would gladly contribute $25. You can rent partial time on an electronic billboard on Highway 101 for under $2K per month.

Are there even any billboards in Cupertino?

I'd like to see a Super Bowl ad sponsored by one or more of the big Linux players.

"Hi, I'm a Mac."

"And I'm a PC. Wow, you suck, Mac. What the hell happened?"

"Yo momma, PC."

<wild gesticulating and arguing ensues for 20-30 seconds>

"Hi, I'm Linux. Neither of these people care anything about you. You see, you're not their customer anymore. When you're ready to make computing personal again, check us out."

Yep, came here to say this. It's the only thing that makes macos useable.

I wish I found out about it earlier. Aerospace is a tiling window manager for MacOS. As someone who prefers keyboard navigation over mouse navigation, I can't recommend it enough.

yabai too! I have fn + right-click set to resize window under cursor

This is probably not a coincidence. I can pretty much guarantee you a developer said something to a designer like "hey, most of this is outside the window, is that fine?" and the designer said back "well, I think so, but let's check what Windows did," and then they okayed the decision at least in part because Windows did it.

History always repeats itself. The young generation always thinks the old generation was rubbish and they have nothing to learn from them and can do better.

Call me cynical but I think designers need to occasionally break things that were already solved long ago to justify their continued relevance. Explains a lot of redesigns that make things only worse, reshuffling interfaces, hiding things behind menus in form over function redesigns, etc.

Fun fact: NEXTSTEP went 10 years without shipping a basic design refresh, except in prereleases (4.0PR1 and traces in 4.0PR2.) This was because it was a good fucking GUI that did its fucking job, and had "usability before aesthetics" as a core design tenet in its developer documentation.

Steve's brain fell out when he got back his throne at Apple. Aqua was a mistake.

Engineers (hopefully) come to learn the value of Chesterton's Fence young, because engineering failures tend to make themselves known quickly and loudly.

Designers probably have perverse incentives. Showy new designs get promotions. Even when they hurt usability, it's often only in insidious ways.

the inability to just hold win+mouse1 to move or win+mouse2 to resize is driving me insane compared to KDE

IIRC, win8 was the last windows to have thick graphical window borders, and that was after they got rid of the texture/aero look from vista/7, so at that point you at least had something graphical to grab onto which (mostly?) matched where the cursor was. Then in win10 onwards they shrunk the border down to one pixel with the zone around it where you can click off the window but still affect it.

On the back of my mind I think part of this was the move to fit scaling to large resolution monitors (i.e. 4k+) work better, as a graphical border of a fixed pixel width will shrink proportionally compared to a border that is as thin as it can be. For a while I've felt that it's a missed opportunity on high res displays to not use more detailed art for window chrome as pixel wide will only get smaller and more difficult to distinguish, such as the minimize/maximize/close icons which remain pixel wide line art even at big scaling.

Better in that it was clear, but worse that you had to resize from the bottom right. Made expanding to the left, or up, very annoying. I'd take the current situation over this.

It also - as seen in that screenshot, had large, always visible scrollbars where it was easy to see how far down you were in a folder or document, and could easily click and drag to scroll to where you needed. Now in the service of minimalism we have scrollbars that consist of a thin, semi-transparent line that fades out after half a second and is nearly impossible to click and drag due to how small it is.

It should be noted the drag handle was removed back in Lion. And the square cutout was removed in Panther, both of which were iterations of Aqua.

(and yes Lion was garbage, first upgrade I skipped since Tiger, and definitely the first "what the fuck are they doing").

Note that downside: you could only resize from that bottom right corner, not from any other edge!

I do think that was better overall, and it's something I miss about Snow Leopard, but I can see why they changed it.

Windows also used to have a "grip" indicator. Nowadays I only see this in resziable textboxes in browsers...

I didn't realize it was moom giving me my "move app to other monitor" hotkey, and moom didn't launch on startup after upgrading to tahoe. I've been using that hotkey for years.

That's when I realized there's no default hotkey for moving an app to an external monitor. That is absolutely wild. (Happy to be wrong)

MacOS always had its own quirks, but it had a good intuitive design that was well thought out.

All the Apple engineers and other visual designers get quite defensive really quick when we mention that Tahoe really screwed things up, because it's more than just a transition into glass design, but a complete dismissal of design principles, to the point that the entire system is slowly becoming user hostile.

Every critique of the 26 series can be explained like this article with really in depth design principles, which is already engraved in Apple design guidelines, but Apple itself just dismissed it all. Everything from being able to clearly distinguish UI elements, to general accessibility, to discoverability, everything got worse.

Operating Systems are one of the most complicated systems we created, not because they're a collection of processes and thread, but because everything is built on top of them and creating something that's well thought out and stable, and intuitive is really hard. Designers just randomly creating visual elements just because it looks cool and not paying attention how people are going to use it is simply half assing the whole thing.

That's still one of the reasons I believe Alan Dye was let go, fired in a sense, he had power over the company, but with that power he screwed things so much that we need to rediscover all the things related to usability in very high detail as if we're rediscovering the wheel, just so that we can get back to square one.

I know enough people at Apple who are at the mercy of the overlord design teams, and it sounds exactly like what you described

I think the mistake comes from when UI/UX started calling themselves a part of product leadership, vs basically being one of the team.

>I swear, this reign of visual artists as dictators has to stop.

Visual artists and graphic/ux designers weren’t exactly claiming for Tahoe either.

> I swear, this reign of visual artists as dictators has to stop.

> I'm sure people noticed this issue internally and brought it up but some thing by some designer was seen as biblically sacred and overruled all reason.

Funny how Apple went from Jony Ive sacrificing hardware usability for "beauty" (touch bars and butterfly switches) to Alan Dye mucking up macOS and iOS with Liquid glAss.

In my experience, part of the problem lies in visual artists not wanting to iterate the way software development does. Sure, they might iterate on the design as they work on it, but once they've found their final design, they strongly resist changing it, even as the actual development and testing of the software to implement it iterates and finds problems.

It's a throwback to BDUF.

Yea, the programmers aren’t to blame here. In fact some of the visual effects they have achieved are pretty cool. The designers are at fault because they prioritized visuals over usability. Literally nobody I know thinks “Liquid Glass” has been an improvement. The feedback is universally negative.

>I'm sure people noticed this issue internally and brought it up but some thing by some designer was seen as biblically sacred and overruled all reason.

I disagree. Seems more like the group that implemented border radius at the OS UI implementation level did not work with the group that handles window sizing. Not everything is a conspiracy.

Yeah, but to be fair to Apple, the guy wasn't even trying to grab the shadow of the plate.

It’s a great analogy but I wish, in the video, he had been grabbing the plate and it somehow didn’t move. Then, when he grabbed the air outside of the plate it should have magically moved. That would have highlighted how crazy Tahoe is.

The iOS compass redesign is particularly egregious

I've used Rectangle for years so I can arrange windows more quickly. Not good for arbitrary sizes, more for set positions.

https://rectangleapp.com/

Maybe you don't use the mouse because it just doesn't work as expected? ;)

> So I am wondering, are people fighting using a Mac in the most effective way simply because of old patterns and habit

"Most effective" doesn't mean "most intuitive". I don't want to learn keyboard shortcuts just to move or resize a window. That's the entire premise of graphical user interfaces.

What if your needs aren't as simple and you want to increase the size just a bit to fit more text than the tile permits and you don't want to waste the whole screen for that?

Yep. I hate it. Its easier to open the Finder and use the shortcut to open the application folder.

I was shocked when I first hit this. I'm also confused as to why the settings app constrains the window size but I think it did that in the previous version too - not a justification!

I complained about it to a team mate and he thought it was fine and I was weird for using the app launcher and not cmd-space. Although on Windows I always use win-r to run stuff.

Tahoe UI changes and LG are such a mistake and Apple being Apple will probably just double down on it.

It’s consistency with the rest of Spotlight. I imagine they want to enhance it, but getting people to use it might be the first step.

I don't know why it's so laggy when you open it. First time you open and scroll it jitters and not all app icons are loaded, so they kind of chunk and overlap.

You get worse icon pop-in if you add your app folder with grid view to the dock. These aren't stored on the network, so it's baffling they take so long to load the icons.

Pleased that I'm not alone. The comments here suggest that I should just bin my Mac and buy a Linux-capable machine instead since MacOS is now "unusable", "heinous", "diabolical", "worst OS EVER".

I updated, carried on enjoying the best desktop experience (IMHO). It's not perfect, but was and remains better than the alternatives for me. Very little "struggle".

that looks like xfce?

I have had issues with resizing Quick Look windows with their rounded corners on macOS for the last several major versions, well before Tahoe. The resize cursor indicator there also doesn't seem to appear at the correct location for the actual resize handles.

I'm so glad I haven't updated.

>"The products suck! There's no sex in them anymore!"

Enter "Lickable Pixels" -- the phrase that stuck to describe the Aqua era.

Introducing Mac OS X's Aqua interface, Jobs said at Macworld in January 2000: "We made the buttons on the screen look so good you'll want to lick them."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_(user_interface)

Then there was the red hot irresistibly sexy and well designed IBM Thinkpad TrackPoint -AKA- Keyboard Clitoris -AKA- Joy Button, and IBM's explicitly lascivious "So Hot, We Had To Make It Red" ad.

https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/hodidb/so_hot_we_...

Ted Selker, the inventor of the TrackPoint, told me the story of how that ad got written and refined by focus groups: He slyly suggested the slogan, and IBM's ad designers begrudgingly put it on the page in small text in the corner, below the photo and ad copy. Then they A/B tested it with the text a little bigger, then a bit bolder, then even higher, and it finally worked its way up to the top of the page in BIG HUGE BOLD TEXT!

More about Ted's work:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34425576

Ted Selker fondly reminds me of "Mr. Lossoff" the "Button Man" in "A Nero Wolfe Mystery” episode “The Mother Hunt”, where Archie drops in on "Mister Lossoff’s Distinguished Buttons” in the garment district of New York:

https://youtu.be/h-QgWOSVKm4?t=724

He's totally THAT enthusiastic, a distinguished expert fiendishly obsessed with buttons! He even carries around a big bag of replacement Joy Buttons that he hands out for free like candy to anyone who’s worn theirs out.

I know this from personal experience: Ted and his wife Ellen once ran into me working on my Thinkpad at some coffee shop in Mountain View, and Ted noticed my worn out Joy Button. He excused himself to run out to his car to fetch his Button Bag, while Ellen smiled at me and rolled her eyes up into her head and shrugged, and we hung out and talked until he got back. I really appreciated a nice new crisp one with fresh bumpy texture, because mine was totally worn down, and it made his day to get rid of a few. (I imagine their house has hoards of boxes and piles of bags full of them!)

The common thread: design that makes you come. Back for more, that is. Buttons to lick till they click. Nubs to rub till they're bald. Products you touched obsessively until they're worn smooth. Tahoe gives us clownish corners we can't even grab. Apple dropped the ball -- and frankly, it's a kick in the nuts.

I get your point and think it is a matter of when things are relatively "perfectly" done as in iOS/MacOS, every little anthill seems like an eruption volcano, but let's also not make excuses for some of the rather disgusting issues in Tahoe that Steve Jobs' would have never allowed to ship.

I can't recall them all right off the top of my head, but I waited til 26.2 to update because of all the comments I saw about glitziness, and this resizing issue is just one of the quirks I have noticed are still not resolved; not to mention that my M4 Mac has not crawled and locked up as often as it has since I updated to 26.2. But again, to put it in perspective, that's only been very little hassle compared to what seems to be nothing but misery, suffering, and existential questions suffered by the wretched souls condemned to Windows.

Edit: another issue I have noticed in iOS is that now things like saving bookmarks in Safari is no longer a two step/tap process using long-press, it's a three step/tap process....WHY?? Same with "add to home screen". Also, the long press horizontal context menu (i.e., copy, paste) now does not slide left to reveal more options, it just changes mode to a vertical list. What is going on??? That's sickening...in my opinion. Horizontal, vertical? Pick one.

Second Edit: I just experienced another Tahoe glitch in at least Safari, where hyperlinks become un-clickable and the only way to resolve that is to seemingly restart safari. I don't find that acceptable in Safari of all places.

I fully agree, but the winkey + tab order is simply in order of last used, with the most recent being at the upper left and oldest at the lower right.

Cars have similar UX issues as well. See the whole touchscreen saga.

It's also an issue on Linux, to an extent. GNOME has a tendency of forcing UIs on users, and Ubuntu with Unity, now GNOME again, etc. Though, thankfully, since the user is free to choose their own desktop environment and window manager, it's not as pressing of an issue.

I realized many years ago that simpler UIs deliver the best UX. This is a large reason why I love the command line so much. Most programs have a fixed and stable interface, and can be composed to do what I want. For graphical programs I prefer using a simple window manager like bspwm on X, and niri on Wayland. These don't draw window decorations, and are primarily keyboard-driven, so I don't need superfluous graphics. I only need a simple status bar that shows my workspaces, active window, and some system information. I recently configured it with Quickshell[1], and couldn't be happier. I plan to use this setup for years to come, and it gives me great peace of mind knowing that no company can take that away from me. I will have to maintain it myself, but there shouldn't be any changes in the programs I use to break this in a major way.

[1]: https://github.com/imiric/quickshell-niri/tree/main/fancy-ba...

Car designs do change all the time, mostly just for novelty too.

I think we need to call it as what it is, half assed design.

Scott Jenson - who worked on the classic Mac for Apple, and Android for Google - recently gave a talk on this:

https://youtu.be/1fZTOjd_bOQ?si=BVOxUPjoULhwiclE

The tl;dw is that copying UX lets others invest energy in identifying the paradigm. Linux, which tends to be starved for resources, has historically been reasonably well served by letting Apple and Microsoft define UX, while Linux focuses on implementing it. However, those headlining companies haven't been investing in desktop UX excellence in recent years. It's time for open source projects to embrace experimentation and take the mantle of cutting edge UX, because Apple et. al. aren't paving the way anymore.

I set up Raycast (https://www.raycast.com/) with the same keybinds as Magnet (https://magnet.crowdcafe.com/) because I learned those first and haven't looked back.

"I need to resize my window."

"You shouldn't need this."

Yeah, I have to agree. The blog post seems convincing when you look at the images, but now that I've actually been playing with it, I can always drag the corner to resize. In fact, the corner provides much more draggable area than the window edges do. There's no problem.

So I agree it's strange that the drag zone extends so far beyond, but that's not really something to complain about...? Everywhere inside the corner where it feels reasonable to resize, it resizes. The article is expecting an absurd level of a drag zone on the inside.

Again, the large drag zone outside the corner is kinda weird. But honestly that's more just an understandable artifact of the corner drag zone being a square. If it were me, I probably wouldn't bother to round off one corner of the drag zone either.

There's a lot of stuff to criticize about Tahoe, but this would be about last on my list...

Just tried this. Pretty cool. Kinda strange how the mouse cursor doesn't move with the window, but still might be worth using.