I don't mind how Liquid Glass looks at all. It's just insane how buggy the system has become. Even Messages will bug out, like deleting my first word if I type too fast after opening a conversation or auto scrolling and not letting me scroll down until I exit and re-enter.
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!
I've had similar observations with different behaviors in Safari and Finder. One would think the quality of Apple's software would be increasing with the usage of Swift over Objective-C, but the opposite seems to be true.
Spotlight is also slow and buggy now, on an M3 Pro. I loathe the feeling of being faster than my computer, something that I haven't felt since the M1 came out.
Apple employees should have kidnapped Alan Dye from his office and deposited him on Facebook's doorstep wrapped up in a straightjacket with ribbons and a bow years ago before he finally left voluntarily.
I think parts of Liquid Glass on macOS looks pretty bad. But I don't care that much about how things look, so it doesn't offend me.
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 think parts of Liquid Glass on macOS looks pretty bad. But I don't care that much about how things look, so it doesn't offend me.
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.
This year I've had to perform many hard resets on my MacBook, iPhone and even Apple Watch because they've locked up. And they're all relatively new devices. Apple needs to get its shit together. I already expect to move away from their mobile ecosystem when it comes time to upgrade.
It's Apple itself that needs a hard reset. Maybe if we all at the same time collectively hold our power buttons down for sixty seconds, Apple Park will reboot.
> 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!
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.
The Apple release schedule is unremitting. We know that bugs are reported to Apple by developers, and we know that reported bugs get ignored for years, or forever. I suspect that every Apple engineer has a mountain of bugs in their queue.
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.
It's like being a doctor in a MASH unit. You can quickly patch up the casualties that come to you as best you can, but you can't stop the bodies from coming, can't end the war. That's above your pay grade.
What's obvious to me is that the PRIMARY motivation for Liquid-Glass-ifying MacOS was not to improve MacOS, but simply to make it look consistent with the new version of iOS/iPadOS.
So for Apple to start with a level of disrespect for the product where whether each change is actually an improvement is effectively off-topic, it's no wonder they made a dog's dinner of it.
The worrying thing is that his departure seems in no way like a consequence of his terrible job. He wasn't squeezed out by upper management, he left because Meta made him a better offer. I'm sure Apple's software quality will go up now that he's gone and his replacement is allegedly liked by Apple's competent UX people who disliked Dye; but Cook clearly doesn't recognise the problems, lest he'd have planned to get rid of Dye by now.
I think for the first time I’ve been considering moving off iOS because of liquid glass. The bugs on apple products have hit a breaking point for me. Mac is still unequivocally the best laptop around imho, but it’s less clear cut for phones. My iPhone 15 pro is borderline unusable. Every day is a new issue. I’m very much over it.
You used to be able to count on the basics working smoothly, but stuff like the camera and messaging are frequently broken for me
I've recently been using an Android phone a family member gave me after they upgraded and to my shock it's...fantastic? It's not at all like I remember Android from back in the early Android days.
Android has frequently been ahead of Apple in terms of features for years at this point. But Apple's overall "ecosystem" is (or was) much more cohesive, so everything felt very Apple, while Android's has (for better or worse) been something of a wild west situation; and iPhone's have excellent cameras. If you go with a flagship Android phone, though, you're now getting an equally good camera (if not better in some cases) and the benefit of Android's more freedom, in relative terms of course.
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.
If you want to see daily bugs on top of it: disable animations in accessibility. Constant, 10x-daily-or-more issues in system UI (apps are surprisingly much better normally). E.g. it has partly or completely broken the recent app switching for the past 4 major versions so far, especially if you use a non-stock launcher.
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)
I had (the same) Samsung android phone from 2017-2025. I bought an iPhone, mainly because of privacy concerns (for which I consider apple to be the least bad mainstream option, not good).
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.
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…)
iOS UX-affordance has done an incredible reversal from "one of the best" to "unambiguously the worst" over the years :| it's stunningly unapproachable nowadays, and Android seems excited to follow them
I recently switched from a 13 Mini to a Motorola Razr and wow Android is so much nicer than iOS. Notifications don't randomly disappear on Android, I have a Back button, and I can use real Firefox!
I’m actually glad because it seems like we are finally leaving behind the flat design that started in iOS 7, if I remember correctly. I’m not sure it would be good to go full skeuomorphic but at least a button looks more like a button again
I just hope that my current Mac keeps being usable long enough that Liquid Glass has been fixed or replaced entirely by the time I'm forced to upgrade to whatever's shipping on my next computer.
I thought Liquid Glass was cool & interesting when I first saw it in the Developer releases, but I find myself yearning to go back to Sequoia. Hopefully, Apple decides to go back to "simple" soon.
My kid dumped a glass of water all over my MBP M1 a few days ago. Deciding between an inferior M4 with Sequoia or a fancy new M5 with Tahoe has been rough :/
If it helps, I've been using XFCE since 2007 and it's remained functionally identical for all of those almost 20 years. It just works, it improves a tiny bit with each major upgrade, and they don't rearrange everything every couple years for the sake of justifying a salary.
Maybe it's a good opportunity to consider whether you actually have to keep running on Apple's treadmill.
I’d love an XFCE (or even gnome tbh) environment on a properly built laptop, unfortunately only Apple is able to build something that works in all areas that matter: sleeps when lid closed, wakes when lid opens, touchpad and display don’t suck.
FWIW that all worked out of the box for me on my Intel Framework. But yes, it's fair to say there are tradeoffs for each solution. Maybe Apple's cons are getting big enough these days. Worth considering.
Which version? I have a X1 Carbon from, uhh, 2017? It supports S3 sleep. I'd think about an upgrade, if only I wasn't worried about sleep issues. I run Debian if that makes any difference.
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.
> all areas that matter: sleeps when lid closed, wakes when lid opens, touchpad and display don’t suck.
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.
I’ve combined my MacBook with a Linux desktop for about five years now. Linux has its pros as a developer, but IMHO daily driving it is like walking around with pebbles in my shoes.
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.
What DE are you using? Some of the higher profile ones (Gnome, KDE) try to be all smooth and polished and feature-full and in my opinion just introduce more complications and bugs that get in the way of just being a good desktop. I like XFCE because it's just a really good, simple window manager, desktop, and set of basic utilities. Other than that it just gets out of your way and doesn't make you relearn how to do things every few years. It's like if the Win98 desktop got another 30 years of gentle refinement.
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.
Fair. I guess I haven't had that experience, but so much stuff is web-based these days that probably 90% of my computing time is just spent in a browser and the rest in just a handful of applications that I know well.
Eventually it will go away just like brushed metal, lickable, green felt, and woodgrain. Unfortunately for that to happen they will need to invent something so heinous you will wish for liquid glass.
It sounds plausible, but only in the shallowest “yeah, make ‘em look the same” way. Just like when they started shipping the Catalyst-based Mac apps of Messages, Photos, etc so that they’d look the same as the iOS apps (and no doubt so they could reuse some code from there instead of wasting developers on the Mac platform they hate).
It’s not as though anything about Liquid Glass makes a meaningful difference in usability.
I would be shocked if Apple was making any product decisions to benefit visionOS at the expense of anything else. It’s so abundantly clear that the vision pro was a failure, it would be a horrible mistake to sacrifice anything to try and save it at this point. I think Apple is done with that experiment.
It would help if it wasn't 3500 dollars, they did not embrace games, and were expecting developers to buy such devices for so little return in development cost, released at a time most headsets were already on yet again going down on another VR headset cycle.
the market agrees for the most part. VR goggle interfaces just aren't taking the world by storm. When it came out I thought: I'll wait for the iteration that comes 2 years later (the AVP 3 or whatever) since by then they'll have worked out the kinks and it will be a solid computing platform. It's 2 months shy of 2 years since general availability of the AVP and it's essentially identical to the initial release with just a minor chip upgrade. It's a dead product line
> Maybe this is because I’m getting older, but that gives me the benefit of having experienced Apple’s older interfaces, with their exceptional quality and functionality.
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.
One of the most egregious issues with macOS 26 is the accessibility/usability regression. Apple prided itself on making their operating system accessible. Good ux is inherently accessible.
There are so many parts of the os that flagrantly ignore well-established accessibility standards, some of which Apple themselves advocated for
It’s what you get when you install a hack print designer who knows nothing about UI as the head of software design and leave him there for a decade. Even Jony Ive, who also had no business designing software, didn’t respect Dye.
Thank goodness Meta has done Apple the biggest favor of the century by poaching him.
Perhaps the thing I hate most about Tahoe is the embedded rounded rectangle around the menu inside of the larger rounded rectangle window. They're trying to go for this look of a menu floating above the rest of the window it belongs to, but it just looks sloppy to me in dark mode.
Looks sloppy in any mode. The amount of wasted space has gone from “well a little bit of rounding/padding is alright to achieve a unified unique look” to “holy shit this is just Fischer price laugh and learn garbage”.
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.
It would not matter if they dogfooded it, the decision makers higher up in the chain are getting paid more to make a visible change and/or increase revenue, not to make a better user experience.
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.
> That was little more than a decade ago, in 2014. Not that I want to turn the clock back, but it would be really helpful if I could read clearly what’s on my display once again.
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.
Since macOS went to a yearly cadence, I usually upgrade during Christmas break, this allows for a couple of point releases to work out the kinks. I won’t be upgrading this year. I hope macOS 27 fixes this abomination. Otherwise, this 30+ year Mac user will be moving on…
You would do well to avoid 26. I upgraded to be a Guinea Pig for a few colleagues and I regret it. Things like apps and scripts work in the technical sense, but it is worse because the myriad of graphical and interactive issues.
My MacOS has this insane bug where the cursor sometimes won't change to a pointer/loading/any other state on my second monitor. This is really bad, but even worse for me who writes websites for a living, and need to check that my CSS cursor pointer class actually worked. I can't count how many minutes I've lost refreshing my browser and double-checking my code. Now I just keep my browser on my primary monitor. I've found many other people with this bug on the internet, and it has been happening for YEARS. I honestly can't understand how a premium product aimed at developers can have something like this for YEARS without a fix. I'm moving away from MacOS, and might ditch my iPhone too as I won't have all the nice integration with MacOS anymore.
All the non-technical people I know loved it. It's pretty. It's neat. It looks cool. Apple is a consumer products company.
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.
Looking at popularity of similar design on iOS it would be surprising “non-technical” users like it. People HATE new iOS. Low contrast, not clear layering and focus, things being moved around for unknown reasons.
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.
I’ve deferred my next Mac upgrade to when my current M1 air on Sequoia stops being supported. If they mess it up further I may just move off the platform. Such a shame because the hardware is great.
> After three months of strong feedback during beta-testing, I was disappointed when Tahoe was released on 15 September to see how little had been addressed
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.
Tahoe has to be the worst software Apple has released in three decades. It's unbelievable it got through. If Macs and macOS were not a tiny portion of their revenue I would short the stock.
One thing that made Tahoe even worse is that Apple changed what they considered an update or upgrade, so for Tahoe it was suddenly considered as a update and not an upgrade, in all management solutions.
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.
iOS 26 is also very bad. Many Christmas conversations between boomers baffled by their phones, and as I younger (than boomer) person I am not as baffled but there are a number of things that take more button presses than they did in previous versions for no apparent reason. And it’s real ugly imo.
While the UI designers are rearranging deck chairs, the UX is totally failing to love up to the promise of an ecosystem. Cross system cut n paste is a neat trick, but I just want timers and alarms to actually work as expected.
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.
The thing that’s weird about this though is it isn’t enshitification. I don’t want to defend the worsening of software quality/ux/ui for monetary gain but at least it’s somewhat rational. This is not a change that emphasizes profit driven changes over user driven ones. Maybe I’m missing some profit motive but it just seems like an awful design choice.
Edit: Not to disagree though. I too have a Linux gaming pc and are helping friends do the same.
I'm holding off upgrading my laptop (2013 MBP running Catalina) until they get their UI stuff together. I'd just gotten used to Sequoia on my desktop but this is unbearable.
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.
M2 MBP here. Definitely skipping Tahoe. Sequoia is already just terrible, not only is the UX clunky and hostile, but Apple seems to have flat out broken its Bluetooth and networking stacks in multiple ways, and in general the system is extremely unstable.
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 do enjoy the liquid glass controls in some places. The glass effect is really beautiful. What I hate about it is the way the overall UI constantly gets in the way of my content.
I expect and demand a level of, for want of a better term, UI crispness.
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.
It seems obvious to me that liquid glass is no designer's idea of a good UI. It's a business move to force developers to support the upcoming iGlasses where transparency is actually necessary.
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.
MacOS aesthetically peaked with Leopard in '09, but speaking frankly the OS has felt abandoned to me since around 10.2, with so many basic interaction issues with window management and the dock just never getting fixed properly and a long list of half-assed bandaids and abandoned experiments over the years.
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 am trying hard to have strong feelings about it, but I just can’t bother. The only thing constant is change.
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.
> I’ll have ~10 ungoogable errors on any other OS.
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.
I don't mind how Liquid Glass looks at all. It's just insane how buggy the system has become. Even Messages will bug out, like deleting my first word if I type too fast after opening a conversation or auto scrolling and not letting me scroll down until I exit and re-enter.
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!
I've had similar observations with different behaviors in Safari and Finder. One would think the quality of Apple's software would be increasing with the usage of Swift over Objective-C, but the opposite seems to be true.
Spotlight is also slow and buggy now, on an M3 Pro. I loathe the feeling of being faster than my computer, something that I haven't felt since the M1 came out.
It is akin to some military operations doomed to fail, and everyone ends up dying because of the chain of command no one is willing to speak against.
That is how the current chaos feels like.
Apple employees should have kidnapped Alan Dye from his office and deposited him on Facebook's doorstep wrapped up in a straightjacket with ribbons and a bow years ago before he finally left voluntarily.
I think parts of Liquid Glass on macOS looks pretty bad. But I don't care that much about how things look, so it doesn't offend me.
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 think parts of Liquid Glass on macOS looks pretty bad. But I don't care that much about how things look, so it doesn't offend me.
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.
This year I've had to perform many hard resets on my MacBook, iPhone and even Apple Watch because they've locked up. And they're all relatively new devices. Apple needs to get its shit together. I already expect to move away from their mobile ecosystem when it comes time to upgrade.
It's Apple itself that needs a hard reset. Maybe if we all at the same time collectively hold our power buttons down for sixty seconds, Apple Park will reboot.
> 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!
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.
The Apple release schedule is unremitting. We know that bugs are reported to Apple by developers, and we know that reported bugs get ignored for years, or forever. I suspect that every Apple engineer has a mountain of bugs in their queue.
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.
It's like being a doctor in a MASH unit. You can quickly patch up the casualties that come to you as best you can, but you can't stop the bodies from coming, can't end the war. That's above your pay grade.
Often it is that people who use the devices learn how to work around bugs and then they forget they exist.
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.
What's obvious to me is that the PRIMARY motivation for Liquid-Glass-ifying MacOS was not to improve MacOS, but simply to make it look consistent with the new version of iOS/iPadOS.
So for Apple to start with a level of disrespect for the product where whether each change is actually an improvement is effectively off-topic, it's no wonder they made a dog's dinner of it.
Liquid Glass appears to be the culmination of the Alan Dye era at Apple, where UI terms like "radio buttons" were derided as "programmer talk".
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.
The worrying thing is that his departure seems in no way like a consequence of his terrible job. He wasn't squeezed out by upper management, he left because Meta made him a better offer. I'm sure Apple's software quality will go up now that he's gone and his replacement is allegedly liked by Apple's competent UX people who disliked Dye; but Cook clearly doesn't recognise the problems, lest he'd have planned to get rid of Dye by now.
I'm hopefully optimistic that he can destroy Meta in less time than that!
I think for the first time I’ve been considering moving off iOS because of liquid glass. The bugs on apple products have hit a breaking point for me. Mac is still unequivocally the best laptop around imho, but it’s less clear cut for phones. My iPhone 15 pro is borderline unusable. Every day is a new issue. I’m very much over it.
You used to be able to count on the basics working smoothly, but stuff like the camera and messaging are frequently broken for me
I've recently been using an Android phone a family member gave me after they upgraded and to my shock it's...fantastic? It's not at all like I remember Android from back in the early Android days.
Android has frequently been ahead of Apple in terms of features for years at this point. But Apple's overall "ecosystem" is (or was) much more cohesive, so everything felt very Apple, while Android's has (for better or worse) been something of a wild west situation; and iPhone's have excellent cameras. If you go with a flagship Android phone, though, you're now getting an equally good camera (if not better in some cases) and the benefit of Android's more freedom, in relative terms of course.
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.
Dunno man, I’ve used Android recently and it’s still as bafflingly confusing and crappy as I remember it being.
Definitely an “to each their own” kind of situation.
If you want to see daily bugs on top of it: disable animations in accessibility. Constant, 10x-daily-or-more issues in system UI (apps are surprisingly much better normally). E.g. it has partly or completely broken the recent app switching for the past 4 major versions so far, especially if you use a non-stock launcher.
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)
I think that is what you get used to. I've been using Android for over a decade and my wife's iPhone is super confusing to me.
I had (the same) Samsung android phone from 2017-2025. I bought an iPhone, mainly because of privacy concerns (for which I consider apple to be the least bad mainstream option, not good).
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.
That’s a good observation, I think you’re right.
Yep, my parents are both Android users and have to ask "where is the home button" when someone passes them an iPhone.
Followed by “where is the back button.”
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…)
iOS UX-affordance has done an incredible reversal from "one of the best" to "unambiguously the worst" over the years :| it's stunningly unapproachable nowadays, and Android seems excited to follow them
I recently switched from a 13 Mini to a Motorola Razr and wow Android is so much nicer than iOS. Notifications don't randomly disappear on Android, I have a Back button, and I can use real Firefox!
I’m actually glad because it seems like we are finally leaving behind the flat design that started in iOS 7, if I remember correctly. I’m not sure it would be good to go full skeuomorphic but at least a button looks more like a button again
I just hope that my current Mac keeps being usable long enough that Liquid Glass has been fixed or replaced entirely by the time I'm forced to upgrade to whatever's shipping on my next computer.
I thought Liquid Glass was cool & interesting when I first saw it in the Developer releases, but I find myself yearning to go back to Sequoia. Hopefully, Apple decides to go back to "simple" soon.
My kid dumped a glass of water all over my MBP M1 a few days ago. Deciding between an inferior M4 with Sequoia or a fancy new M5 with Tahoe has been rough :/
If it helps, I've been using XFCE since 2007 and it's remained functionally identical for all of those almost 20 years. It just works, it improves a tiny bit with each major upgrade, and they don't rearrange everything every couple years for the sake of justifying a salary.
Maybe it's a good opportunity to consider whether you actually have to keep running on Apple's treadmill.
I’d love an XFCE (or even gnome tbh) environment on a properly built laptop, unfortunately only Apple is able to build something that works in all areas that matter: sleeps when lid closed, wakes when lid opens, touchpad and display don’t suck.
FWIW that all worked out of the box for me on my Intel Framework. But yes, it's fair to say there are tradeoffs for each solution. Maybe Apple's cons are getting big enough these days. Worth considering.
I have an oled thinkpad running fedora that has never had a sleep issue. Excellent touchpad as well. Thinkpad X1 Carbon.
Which version? I have a X1 Carbon from, uhh, 2017? It supports S3 sleep. I'd think about an upgrade, if only I wasn't worried about sleep issues. I run Debian if that makes any difference.
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.
> all areas that matter: sleeps when lid closed, wakes when lid opens, touchpad and display don’t suck.
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.
I’ve combined my MacBook with a Linux desktop for about five years now. Linux has its pros as a developer, but IMHO daily driving it is like walking around with pebbles in my shoes.
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.
What DE are you using? Some of the higher profile ones (Gnome, KDE) try to be all smooth and polished and feature-full and in my opinion just introduce more complications and bugs that get in the way of just being a good desktop. I like XFCE because it's just a really good, simple window manager, desktop, and set of basic utilities. Other than that it just gets out of your way and doesn't make you relearn how to do things every few years. It's like if the Win98 desktop got another 30 years of gentle refinement.
I’ve tried XFCE, i3, Pop Shell and plain Gnome.
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.
Fair. I guess I haven't had that experience, but so much stuff is web-based these days that probably 90% of my computing time is just spent in a browser and the rest in just a handful of applications that I know well.
> dumped a glass of water all over my MBP
I believe that's how the designers at Apple came up with Liquid Glass
Liquid Glass is not that bad lol.
Neither is an M4 Pro.
Eventually it will go away just like brushed metal, lickable, green felt, and woodgrain. Unfortunately for that to happen they will need to invent something so heinous you will wish for liquid glass.
https://imgur.com/a/5uHuYyV
It’s infuriating that you can’t downgrade.
eh, the problems aren't prominent on macOS.
liquid glass is a total disaster. what the hell is going on in the ux teams at apple? this is like their windows vista era. i hate it so much
I'm almost positive that it's because they want to make as many apps as possible VisionOS-friendly.
I suspect that they were rather shaken at how poorly AVP was received.
It sounds plausible, but only in the shallowest “yeah, make ‘em look the same” way. Just like when they started shipping the Catalyst-based Mac apps of Messages, Photos, etc so that they’d look the same as the iOS apps (and no doubt so they could reuse some code from there instead of wasting developers on the Mac platform they hate).
It’s not as though anything about Liquid Glass makes a meaningful difference in usability.
I would be shocked if Apple was making any product decisions to benefit visionOS at the expense of anything else. It’s so abundantly clear that the vision pro was a failure, it would be a horrible mistake to sacrifice anything to try and save it at this point. I think Apple is done with that experiment.
It would help if it wasn't 3500 dollars, they did not embrace games, and were expecting developers to buy such devices for so little return in development cost, released at a time most headsets were already on yet again going down on another VR headset cycle.
It was bound to fail since day one.
I don’t want to wear one of those things on my face. I want a high-quality computer and phone. Apple executives are out to lunch.
Alright grandad. You said the same thing about touchscreens, and look how well that went for blackberru.
the market agrees for the most part. VR goggle interfaces just aren't taking the world by storm. When it came out I thought: I'll wait for the iteration that comes 2 years later (the AVP 3 or whatever) since by then they'll have worked out the kinks and it will be a solid computing platform. It's 2 months shy of 2 years since general availability of the AVP and it's essentially identical to the initial release with just a minor chip upgrade. It's a dead product line
Counterexample: how did the metaverse go? Is there anyone using it? Facebook even rebranded to Meta on that bet.
Bring him inside, we're just about to start another round of Ultraman Quiz King on the family Pippin.
It actually runs on Metal so the “GL” wasn’t supposed to be in the name.
Liquid (Gl)ass
> Maybe this is because I’m getting older, but that gives me the benefit of having experienced Apple’s older interfaces, with their exceptional quality and functionality.
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.
One of the most egregious issues with macOS 26 is the accessibility/usability regression. Apple prided itself on making their operating system accessible. Good ux is inherently accessible.
There are so many parts of the os that flagrantly ignore well-established accessibility standards, some of which Apple themselves advocated for
It’s what you get when you install a hack print designer who knows nothing about UI as the head of software design and leave him there for a decade. Even Jony Ive, who also had no business designing software, didn’t respect Dye.
Thank goodness Meta has done Apple the biggest favor of the century by poaching him.
Perhaps the thing I hate most about Tahoe is the embedded rounded rectangle around the menu inside of the larger rounded rectangle window. They're trying to go for this look of a menu floating above the rest of the window it belongs to, but it just looks sloppy to me in dark mode.
Looks sloppy in any mode. The amount of wasted space has gone from “well a little bit of rounding/padding is alright to achieve a unified unique look” to “holy shit this is just Fischer price laugh and learn garbage”.
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.
its very odd that apparently everyone working in Apple software dev either refuses to dogfood this stuff or just uses iPads for everything.
So many of the rough edges disappear when "Reduce Transparency" is enabled I've theorized that setting must be pretty popular around Apple's offices.
My browser has a half-inch white bar at the bottom constantly, presumably because of this setting.
Cannot reproduce on 26.2 with either Safari or Chrome with the setting on. That would infuriate me.
When first scrolling, the bottom page controls disappear. But they leave their container blocking the page content.
Ironically that would be a new kind of dogfooding.
It would not matter if they dogfooded it, the decision makers higher up in the chain are getting paid more to make a visible change and/or increase revenue, not to make a better user experience.
I think this goes both ways.
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.
Jobs did not run on a fixed annual schedule like Tim Cook does.
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.
> That was little more than a decade ago, in 2014. Not that I want to turn the clock back, but it would be really helpful if I could read clearly what’s on my display once again.
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.
Since macOS went to a yearly cadence, I usually upgrade during Christmas break, this allows for a couple of point releases to work out the kinks. I won’t be upgrading this year. I hope macOS 27 fixes this abomination. Otherwise, this 30+ year Mac user will be moving on…
You would do well to avoid 26. I upgraded to be a Guinea Pig for a few colleagues and I regret it. Things like apps and scripts work in the technical sense, but it is worse because the myriad of graphical and interactive issues.
My MacOS has this insane bug where the cursor sometimes won't change to a pointer/loading/any other state on my second monitor. This is really bad, but even worse for me who writes websites for a living, and need to check that my CSS cursor pointer class actually worked. I can't count how many minutes I've lost refreshing my browser and double-checking my code. Now I just keep my browser on my primary monitor. I've found many other people with this bug on the internet, and it has been happening for YEARS. I honestly can't understand how a premium product aimed at developers can have something like this for YEARS without a fix. I'm moving away from MacOS, and might ditch my iPhone too as I won't have all the nice integration with MacOS anymore.
Fuck you, Apple.
I ran into this, and there was a bizarre fix—I think having Adobe apps open in the background caused it, or something.
I saw some responses like this. I have zero Adobe apps in my Mac.
Adding insult to injury, my fans are constantly going now because I have to pay for this disastrous upgrade with tons more resources.
There are claims that Liquid Glass was in development for three years. If that is accurate, the results are even more appalling.
All the non-technical people I know loved it. It's pretty. It's neat. It looks cool. Apple is a consumer products company.
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.
Looking at popularity of similar design on iOS it would be surprising “non-technical” users like it. People HATE new iOS. Low contrast, not clear layering and focus, things being moved around for unknown reasons.
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.
> Also who uses MacOs beaides developers?
Students - all of them.
I’ve deferred my next Mac upgrade to when my current M1 air on Sequoia stops being supported. If they mess it up further I may just move off the platform. Such a shame because the hardware is great.
> After three months of strong feedback during beta-testing, I was disappointed when Tahoe was released on 15 September to see how little had been addressed
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.
Design got worse since Maverick for professional users.
The answer is KDE and GNOME, at least on the machines that support some form of Linux.
Not upgrading to Tahoe for as long as $DAYJOB allows. ‘Defer update‘ dialog can be conveniently moved away to the second display almost out of sight.
Tahoe has to be the worst software Apple has released in three decades. It's unbelievable it got through. If Macs and macOS were not a tiny portion of their revenue I would short the stock.
One thing that made Tahoe even worse is that Apple changed what they considered an update or upgrade, so for Tahoe it was suddenly considered as a update and not an upgrade, in all management solutions.
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.
Does Apple even have power users? I thought the one-size-fits-all philosophy was half the appeal for those who choose the ecosystem?
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.
That's egregiously bad, and malicious.
iOS 26 is also very bad. Many Christmas conversations between boomers baffled by their phones, and as I younger (than boomer) person I am not as baffled but there are a number of things that take more button presses than they did in previous versions for no apparent reason. And it’s real ugly imo.
Viewing all tabs in Safari is the thorn in my side.
While the UI designers are rearranging deck chairs, the UX is totally failing to love up to the promise of an ecosystem. Cross system cut n paste is a neat trick, but I just want timers and alarms to actually work as expected.
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.
Tahoe is such a criminal worsening of UI quality, it really is worrisome that Apple is proudly releasing it.
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.
Installed Mint on my GAMING Windows system, uninstalled Steam on Windows. All is well.
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.
The thing that’s weird about this though is it isn’t enshitification. I don’t want to defend the worsening of software quality/ux/ui for monetary gain but at least it’s somewhat rational. This is not a change that emphasizes profit driven changes over user driven ones. Maybe I’m missing some profit motive but it just seems like an awful design choice.
Edit: Not to disagree though. I too have a Linux gaming pc and are helping friends do the same.
Maybe not enshittification in the sense that every other UIImageView has an ad in it, but definitely a huge regression from the UI it had before.
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!
I'm holding off upgrading my laptop (2013 MBP running Catalina) until they get their UI stuff together. I'd just gotten used to Sequoia on my desktop but this is unbearable.
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.
I'll have to upgrade my M1 MBP some time and no way am I putting up with this nonsense - back to Linux laptop for me.
What recommendations do people have for good metal-body linux-friendly "ultra books" (or whatever they're called these days)?
M2 MBP here. Definitely skipping Tahoe. Sequoia is already just terrible, not only is the UX clunky and hostile, but Apple seems to have flat out broken its Bluetooth and networking stacks in multiple ways, and in general the system is extremely unstable.
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 do enjoy the liquid glass controls in some places. The glass effect is really beautiful. What I hate about it is the way the overall UI constantly gets in the way of my content.
I expect and demand a level of, for want of a better term, UI crispness.
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.
It seems obvious to me that liquid glass is no designer's idea of a good UI. It's a business move to force developers to support the upcoming iGlasses where transparency is actually necessary.
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.
MacOS aesthetically peaked with Leopard in '09, but speaking frankly the OS has felt abandoned to me since around 10.2, with so many basic interaction issues with window management and the dock just never getting fixed properly and a long list of half-assed bandaids and abandoned experiments over the years.
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 switched this year from windows to mac because windows is unbearable.... but apple seems to want to get rid of desktop user also
Updated iOS overnight and what the fuck man. Also Settings search is so totally broken I can’t even
I am trying hard to have strong feelings about it, but I just can’t bother. The only thing constant is change.
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.
> I’ll have ~10 ungoogable errors on any other OS.
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.