It's hard to justify Liquid Glass in general. The wastefulness of flat design (in terms of space) married with the visual excess of skeuomorphism, but without even providing any affordances (does the sidebar being raised give you any new information on how to use a sidebar? No).
If you're a designer at a top 10 S&P 500 company making 6 figures, you owe it to yourself to have some love for your craft. If a PM tells you to shove a UI style meant for an unsuccessful VR device onto desktop and mobile platforms, say no. Get your colleagues to say no. Make that PM read everything the Nielsen Norman group has ever written. Read it too.
More than likely designers are making up work to justify their jobs. Not good for your career if you admit the desktop interface was perfected in ~1995.
100% this. I recall watching their launch video about Liquid Glass. It was filled with ego-driven "we're changing the world here" nonsense. They were designing in a bubble and wanted to do something different so they could justify the work. It was never about the user.
My hot take on this is that there is a business goal to Liquid Glass that extends beyond ego - but it's about the restoration of Apple UI as an exclusive status symbol, not as a usable experience.
Apple looked at innovations in hardware form factor and, rather than trying to out-innovate in that sphere, said, instead: how do we make something in software that nobody would ever try to imitate, and thus position ourselves as the innovators once again?
And the monkey's paw curled and said: Liquid Glass is a set of translucency interactions that are technically near-impossible to imitate, sure, but the real reason nobody will try to imitate is because they are user-hostile to a brand-breaking extent.
And Apple had nobody willing to see this trainwreck happening and press the brakes.
we saw this exact playbook with ios 7. i don't think you need to attribute malice or read into it much.
ios 7 relied heavily on blurring effects-- a flex at the time due to the efficient graphic pipeline vs android they had. this was coming off the heels of Samsung xerox'ing and they wanted a design that would be too expensive for competitors to emulate without expensive battery hit. liquid glass is following in this tradition.
and similarly to ios 7, the move to flat design was predicated on the introduction of new form factors and screen. flat design lent itself well to new incoming screen sizes and ratios. prior there was really one or two sizes and that was it, easy to target pixel perfect designs against. as apple moves to foldables and more, this design flexibility is once again required.
as for no one trying to emulate it, i'm not so sure, OriginOS 6 ripped it off back in October.
A design system I am required to use made a recent "major" update announcement: "Styles have been converted to variables. Styles are out and Figma variables are in".
Where what we really needed was a stable release version (now a year late from the original promised date) so we can build out UI components for the content editors to use that don't require constant design tweaks.
You know the designers are:
a) Just fucking around having fun
b) Making busy work to drag it out as long as possible
As it's now 4 years since they began working on the "design system", there's a good chance it will get canned as there's some more modern design they will want to use.
There is a product I have to use that updated its ui design some years ago, only the functionality is partially implemented and the new design has some functional elements that weren't present in the old configuration.
This has been solved with a button that switches the layout between the two designs, when I'm making changes it is sometimes necessary to flip back and forth between the two mid-change.
Who was driving that, though? If the project has high-level management buy-in, the people in the scripted videos are going to be on message if they want to stay employed.
Microsoft totally screwed up the windows interface with windows 8 to suit tablets which they viewed as the future of computing. Not only were they wrong, they also really broke the UX for the users they did have for a new product that hardly sold and still doesn't (windows tablets). Eventually they had to cave in but Apple is more stubborn than Microsoft.
Even if Apple is right, why shoehorn the future into the present on devices unsuitable for its new paradigms? The iOSification also only worsened the macOS UX. It's one of the reasons I moved to Linux with KDE which I can configure as I like.
If they want make the AR OS of the future then make it on the vision pro where it belongs.
Microsoft may have "caved", but we're still stuck with two different settings menus and a start menu that prioritizes ads and search results over your own programs.
2 settings menus? We have every version of Windows from 3.1 all the way to 11 styled settings menus, sometimes multiple styles depending on which settings you want to look at. It's a total shitshow.
Windows is borderline unusable to me without Open Shell / Win 7 settings. I refuse to learn yet another icon idiom, just to have it change 2 years later. Thinking of trying Bazzite for my new upcoming 2nd gaming machine (for daughter) build because I'm tired of Windows. If it goes well, may convert multiple Win 10 HTPC/gaming machines.
Apple just reduced Vision Pro production, but Liquid Glass was in motion well before that. What leaves me scratching my head is I never got the impression Apple believed in Vision Pro. It launched because after years of research, management wanted to see if the effort was worth continuing to invest in, but that wasn't a vote of confidence.
I'll have to second this. It's not even on Apple's homepage! I hadn't heard it mentioned for months before today. It had its niche share of users who actually found it useful, but apart from them it seems that the world is not ready for spatial computing (or maybe current spatial computing isn't ready for people, who knows?).
I'm hoping the new Valve headset will be like, 60% of what the Apple vision is. My boss got the Apple vision on launch day and it is really premier hardware, visuals that are almost exactly like seeing the thing you're looking at in real life, and the hand sensing / interactivity was the best I have experienced, even though it still had flaws.
But being tied to Apple's ecosystem, not being really useful for PC connection, and the fact that at least at the time developers were not making any groundbreaking apps for it all makes it a failure in my book.
If Valve can get 60% of that and be wirelessly PC tied for VR gaming then even if they charge $1800 for their headset it will likely be worth it.
Exactly. More expensive than a high end desktop or laptop while having less useful software than an iPad. No thanks.
If it were around the $500 point I’d pick one up in a heartbeat. Maybe even $1000. But $3500 is nuts for how little they’re offering. It seems like a toy for the ultra rich.
I assumed the price would eventually come down. But it seems like they’ll just cancel the project entirely. Pity.
I’m assuming Vision Pro is viewed as what the Newton was to the iPhone. It will provide some useful insight way ahead of its time but the mainstream push will only happen after a number of manufacturing breakthroughs happen allowing for a comfortable daily driver UX. Optics and battery tech will need multiple generational leaps to get to a lightweight goggle / sunglasses form factor with Apple-tier visuals, tracking, and battery life…
It has incrementally improved, and gotten cheaper, to the point that I now see them everywhere. When they first came out, they were pretty expensive. Remember the $17,000 gold Watch (which is now obsolete)? The ceramic ones were over a couple of grand.
But the dream of selling Watch apps seems to have died. I think most folks just use the built-in apps.
The $17,000 Apple Watch was a (rather silly) attempt to compete in the high end watch space. However, they also launched the base "Sport" model at US$349.
Not really anything like the watch, the existence of a stupidly expensive "luxury" version doesn't change the fact that the normal one started at $350.
I think the current rumor is that development of a cheaper XR headset has been shelved in favor of working on something to compete with Meta's AI glasses.
Magic Leap 2 and HoloLens 2 proved that we still haven't cracked the code on AR/XR. Similar price point, plenty of feasible enterprise use cases for folks willing to pony up money to hire Unity or Unreal devs. And I'm sure there are enough of them tired of being flogged to death by the gaming industry. But they both went splat.
It's going to take a revolution on miniaturization AND component pricing for XR to be feasible even for enterprise use cases, it seems.
I have a vision pro (obtained on day 1 for development purposes), and have given demos of it to a number of non enthusiast/non techie people.
All of them immediately hate that it’s bulky, it’s heavy, it messes with your hair,
messes with your makeup, doesn’t play well with your glasses, it feels hot and sweaty. Everyone wants to take it off after 5-10 minutes at most, and never asks to try it again (even tho the more impressive 3D content does get a “that’s kinda cool” acknowledgment).
The headset form factor is just a complete dud, and it’s 100% clear that Apple knew that but pushed it anyway to show that they were doing “something”.
Did they commit to additional production of the Vision Pro? I read their announcement as quiet cancellation of VR products. They announced some kind of vaporware pivot, but I didn't read a single analyst projection that Apple ever intended to bring another wearable to market. Customer usage statistics of the Vision Pro are so low Apple hasn't even hinted about reporting on them.
Wearable products, outside of headphones, have a decade-long dismal sales record and even more abysmal user retention story. No board is going to approve significant investment in the space unless there's a viable story. 4x resolution and battery life alone is not enough to resuscitate VR/AR for mass adoption.
That's probably regional then. In my area most people using watches nowadays are usually into sports.
I must admit I don't understand the point of a smart watch when most people have their smartphone in their hand a significant amount of time a day and said smartphones screen sizes have been increasing over the year because people want to be able to doom scroll at pictures and videos and interact with whatsapp all day. I don't know how you can do that from a tiny screen on a watch.
Those like me who don't subscribe to that way of living don't want distractions and notification so they use regular watches and would see as a regression a device that needs to be charged every few days.
Some people said payments but I see peolle paying with their smartphone all the time since they have it at hands or in a pocket very close anytime having it in a watch doesn't look like a sigmificant improvement. I'd be curious to see a chart of smartwatch adoption by country.
Apple watches have the highest marketshare in a lot of the world's markets. According to this analysis[1], watchOS (Apple watches) make up around half of all smartwatches used in Europe. Global sales puts Apple around 20-30% market share, with brands like Samsung and Garmin around 8% [2]. I haven't found good US-only statistics to show what the market share is of watchOS is, but I'd imagine its probably close to 50% or more.
I do agree though, anecdotal experiences will vary depending on the kind of people you hang out with. For the people I know heavily into running and cycling, brands like Garmin are over represented. Meanwhile lots of other consumers practically don't even know these are options.
Recent moves have convinced me that Apple is getting ready to push Vision Pro substantially harder.
In recent weeks, I’ve been getting push notifications about VP.
They hired Alex Lindsay for a position in Developer Relations.
And there’s the M5 update.
Just remember, it’s a lot cheaper than the original Mac(inflation adjusted). Give it 40 years – hell, given the speed of change in tech these days, it won’t even take 10.
I think they bought the metaverse hype and hurried up. If only they had put half the energy on AI, we'd have a createML with something else than yolov2 in 2026
I think this is the right read in terms of intent but I also feel it offers a lens into the silliness of Apple's current strategy around all this. VisionPro appears to be currently floundering, and no matter how much they try to make it unintrusive and airy and transparent in its interface, it's presently an unwieldy device not designed to leave the home or office. Predicating company-wide design systems on this line being the future feels aspirational at best and delusional at worst. And what good is liquid glass on a Mac? To show me an obscured glimpse of my desktop background and add visual clutter?
(Apologies to @cyberge99 if my tone comes off intense, this is not to come at you but rather is just me venting my frustrations with Apple. I think you are correct in your assessment of the idea here.)
What’s frustrating about the VisionPro is their absolute refusal to address it as a giant screen.
All people I know describe this usecase first: “Will be awesome when it replaces my 2x34" screens”. I described it to the salesman when he asked me why I wanted to try it. He never showed it. Gave him 0/5, he complained, I explained this is specifically what I asked. You can emulate one screen in VisionPro but it’s absolutely obnoxious about making it about apps and iPhotos 3D whatever. Users desire it. Apple is hell-bent in not addressing that usecase, and addressing family usecases first.
Imagine they find a proper UI to visualize an infinite Typescript file. Something like flinch and you find yourself in a method, look elsewhere and you immediately see the other method. Make it viral by making it possible to write files in a way that is not practical to normal-screen users, like the old “max 1 screen height” limit. View your team in the corners of your vision. THE tool for remote working.
Workplaces would look futuristic. Your experience at the workplace would be renewed thanks to Apple.
And then, reuse the desktop’s UI on VisionPro instead of the desktop using VP’s concepts.
But no, Apple prefers killing off VisionPro and imposing LiquidGlass to everyone. (In waiting for my threat letter from Steve Jobs for suggesting ideas now).
No, this is the fault of a company and industry with way too much money and not knowing what to do with it.
So they hired a bunch of artists who would otherwise be carving wood in a decrepit loft somewhere after taking half a mushroom cap. These people now decide how computers should operate.
I remember watching a documentary from the 80s where Susan Kare explained how every pixel in the Macintosh UI was deliberately put there to help the user in some way. One lady did the whole thing, the whole OS.
Now we have entire teams of people trying to turn your computer into an avant-garde art piece.
> a bunch of artists who would otherwise be carving wood in a decrepit loft somewhere after taking half a mushroom cap. These people now decide how computers should operate.
…brother, you’ve just described the history of the personal computer and the Internet. It’s not the hippie artists causing this problem, I promise you that.
. . . so other devices are required to have the same interface? No, they're not. Just because you want to share enough design cues to make people understand they're dealing with the same brand doesn't mean you have to hammer square pegs into round holes.
Not to mention the fact that first, you have to get to a point where AR wearables are commercially viable, and we don't seem to have hit that point yet.
Eh, I would disagree as there's nothing in it where you go "Oh wow, that's why they did it" in the context of Vision Pro or wearables.
It seems much more likely that the driver here was to produce a UI that was resource intensive and hard to replicate unless you control the processors that go into your devices as well as the entire graphics processing stack that sits above that as well. It seems created to flaunt the concept of "go ahead and try to copy this" to Google and Microsoft.
If it's a strategic play, it's a terrible one that douses usability in gasoline and sacrifices it at the altar of visual novelty for no real gain. Apple has spent literal decades working on and refining their Human Interface Guidelines for different devices. Between Tahoe and Liquid Glass, they seem to have just tossed them on the bonfire for no justifiable reason.
VisionPro was meant to literally overlay its interface over your field of vision. That's a very different context and interaction paradigm. Trying to shoehorn the adaptations they made for it into their other, far more popular interfaces for the sake of consistency? It's absurd.
> Apple has spent literal decades working on and refining their Human Interface Guidelines for different devices
Things like “human interface guidelines” get written by nerds who dive deep into user studies to make graphs about how target size correlates to error rate when clicking an item on screen.
Things like Liquid Glass get designed by people who salivate over a button rendering a shader backed gradient while muttering to themselves “did I cook bro???”
They’re just two very orthogonal cultures. The latter is what passes for interface design in software these days.
It's like the KDE developer who reluctantly gave out the script to set "border offset" from a window back to 0 (i.e. how close you could snap/drag the window to the border of the screen). He had defaulted it to something like -5 (i.e. at minimum, 5 pixels between the edge of the screen and the window, no matter WHERE you tried to place it), because "otherwise, how would you use the negative space, bro?". I.e. left-clicking JUST outside the window brought up a context menu for the window. WTF? I've been doing GUIs since 1987. Don't make "clicking outside the window" a way to interact WITH the window. I very nearly threw KDE out before he gave the fix.
This. The Windows 95 interface was optimal in many regards. Given how much faster computers are now, every UI operation should just be instantaneous. It's ridiculous that desktop interfaces and Web pages became heavier as computers got faster, so that a heavy website today does not load meaningfully faster than a plain text webpage in 1995.
Edit: On Linux, you have desktop environments like LXQt for this. Unfortunately, last time I checked, Wayland was not supported.
Beyond that, any lag from Win95 era was probably because of spinning hard drives. Running it on a SSD would be instantaneous. Also, file search might even work, instead of whatever we have now.
I can attest to this one, 6 months ago I had a vintage pc I needed to rehab due to the curse of the proprietary ISA card. Imaged the failing drive to an ssd, sata->IDE adapter. P3 733MHz, 128 mb ram, W98SE, its astonishingly fast and responsive. Boots nearer to my memories of MSDOS 6.22 firing up than anything else.
Acrobat reader still performs like a lead balloon though, even a miracle can't fix that one.
A whole installation of Win95 with Office95 is only a few hundred MB and would fit entirely in RAM on a modern system. You can run a VM of it like that to experience the extreme speed. Even a browser these days uses several times that.
There have been many, many, desktop improvements since 1995, some of which came from the Mac, some came from Windows and some came from UNIX/Linux & friends.
- Arguably the dock, though it's probably contentious
- Ubiquitous instant search (e.g. Spotlight)
- Gesture-based automatic tiling of windows to left/right side of the screen, tiling presets
- Smooth scrolling, either via scroll wheel or trackpad
- Gesture-based multi tasking, etc
- Virtual desktops/multiple workspaces
- Autosave
- Folder stacks, grouping of items in file lists
- Tabbed windows
- Full-screen mode
- Separate system-wide light and dark modes
- Enhanced IME input for non-latin languages
- App stores, automatic updating
- Automatic backup, file versioning
- Compositing Window Managers (Quartz, Compiz, DWM, modern Wayland compositors...)
- The "sources bar" UI pattern
- Centralized notification centers
- Stack view controlelr style navigation for settings (back/forward buttons)
- Multi device clipboard synchronization
- Other handoff features
- Many accessibility features
- The many iteration of Widgets
- Installable web apps
- Virtual printers ("print to PDF")
- Autocomplete/autocorrect
- PIP video playback
- Tags/Labels
- File proxies/"representations"
- Built-in clipboard management
- Wiggle the mouse to find the pointer
None of these can be said to be at their final/"perfect" form today, and there are hundreds if not thousand of papercuts and refinements that can be made.
The real issue is probably due to management misunderstanding designer's jobs, and allocating them incorrectly. The focus should be more on the interactions and behaviors than necessarily on the visuals.
The Dock came from NeXtSTEP circa 1989. It had square edges and no Happy Mac. (So did Mail.app, TextEdit, some of the OS X Finder, and a whole bunch of other things.)
To the untrained eye it looks like an Apple innovation because most people couldn't afford NeXt computers unless you worked in a university or research lab.
They also forced us to waste relatively valuable vertical screen space on the task bar, taking away our ability to move it to the left or right screen edges.
When I started using Linux, I didn't do so because I disliked Windows so much, I just was an insatiably curious nerd.
But since then, each new version of Windows has made me more and more grateful for not having to deal with that dumpster fire on my personal devices.
The saddest part to me is that I have the strong impression it wouldn't take that much work to turn Windows into a much better system. But for whatever reason, Microsoft is not interested in making that happen. Maybe they are incapable of doing so. But the system itself not the reason.
No kidding. “Reverting” to something pretty similar to Mac OS in the late ‘90s, as far as visuals and basic UI behavior (but not removing modern features) would be a big improvement. And once they did that they could just leave it that way. It’d be fine. UI churn sucks enough that it’s not worth it for users unless it’s a huge improvement, and nothing has been.
Though if we could get the newer settings panel of macOS a few versions back, before they inexplicably ruined the best OS GUI settings interface I’ve ever used, that’d be great.
It’s not just career. Any artistic endeavor suffers from competition with the past, which eventually becomes a guaranteed loss. Negating the frame becomes the primary way to leave a mark.
But for actual art, such as music, constantly doing novel things is kind of the point. Every generation needs its own music that runs counter to what came before.
I imagine some see it as engineering - make things work efficiently for the users. Others see it as art. The outcome will depend on which group gains the upper hand.
There's some linguistic ambiguity here if we just say "art", because it includes things we might divide into "artistic choice" versus "craftsmanship", ex:
1. "Picasso, that's the wrong way to depict a human nose."
2. "Picasso, that's the wrong material, that vibrant paint is poisonous and will turn to black flakes within the year and the frame will become warped."
I interpret parent-poster's "interfaces are not art" as meaning they're mostly craftsmanship.
It may not be quantifiable enough to be labeled "engineering", but it's still much less-subjective and more goal-oriented than the "pure art" portion. All these interfaces need to be useful to tasks in the long term. (Or at least long enough for an unscrupulous vendor to take the money and run.)
Style matters, maybe unfortunately depending on the point of view. Products like consumer electronics have a large amount of fashion to them. Just like the t-shirt was perfected in the 1950s people still make new ones with little style changes for no functional reason.
Designers at Balenciaga don't have to justify their jobs when they make oversized t-shirts, neither do the ones at Apple.
Corollary: the extent of fashion-driven variability those "tools" support over generations tells us just how little utility those tools provide.
In actual tools, the form and function are strongly connected. Tools of competing brands look pretty much the same, except for color accents, because they can't look any different without sacrificing functionality, performance and safety characteristics.
You don't see power tool vendors trying to differentiate their impact drivers by replacing rubber handles with flat glass because it's more "modern", because it would compromise safety and make the tool unsuitable for most jobs its competitors fulfill. This happens in software mostly because the tools aren't doing much of anything substantial - they're not powerful enough for design to actually matter.
I do see tool vendors often adding their own logos to the tools. They choose non-functional colors for styling. They'll make something more rounded or more squared for aesthetic reasons. For consumer-facing tools there are lots of little non-functional changes they'll choose to do for their own stylistic and branding purposes. They do want to ultimately differentiate their products from competitors, not just be the exact same as all the others on the shelf.
I can't see how half of the icon choices made in the article would pass internal testing, let alone actual user testing.
Maybe stakeholders were calling the shots and everyone was like, "Fine. If you want us to reuse the same icon for different purposes, you're the boss. We are done trying to explain why this is a bad idea."
Sadly, the desktop interface was not perfect by 1995. It was visually near-perfect, but the UX, acutal ease of interaction, left much to be desired.
Sadly, it's the visuals that make pretty screenshots. The actual UX of OSX is quite jarringly bad in many regards 30 years later :( But developing interactions is much harder.
Yes this is always how it's been, especially if you're a front end developer. Changing designs every few months just for the hell of it is what designers do.
I worked at Uber. The UX designers were pretty obsessed with the iPhone app, making sure it was pixel perfect and the little cars in the city view moved smoothly and every transition was crisp and so on. The vast majority of new users at the time were on the comparatively ugly Android app.
Things got pretty bad. More than 95% of all employees (and I'm guessing 99% of designers) were using iPhones at the time. There would be rough edges all over the Android app, but as one of our designers said "people with taste don't use Android".
Imagine knowing that most of your new users were getting a subpar experience, and that not being enough motivation to expense a flagship Android and drive it daily.
But the new users kept coming, and despite mostly being Android users, they still used the product. Turns out that legacy taxis are themselves an ugly interface, and ugliness is relative.
I remember excitedly switching to a Nexus 5X and then going back to my old iPhone a few months later because every app felt like a bad port of the ”original” iPhone app.
Using the term "Legacy Taxi" to imply that a taxi you don't summon by phone is somehow out-dated is wild. I understand the reason you would use it, especially at a company like Uber, but it still seems hilariously delusional.
"Beautiful" maybe, not "good UX" for sure. Prior to Uber, calling a cab using the phone app was...suboptimal and easier to actually call a taxi company. They also provided much better services, which is what make them stick around.
RH made a lot of investment tool accessible to people that "I just want to buy stock of some company", I used tasty trades for a while, but their mobile app while has all functionality, but realistically you will just look to overview portfolio.
I think we can pretty safely assume that every large and successful company has done horrible and illegal things to get themselves there. That being said I think design and ease of use still play a significant part in Uber’s success.
There’s a huge difference between anti-design bias and calling out Liquid Glass for the garbage human interface design that it is. If anything, it demonstrates a substantial *pro-design* bias because it shows that people actually care about design more than any “party line” here.
This. Every time Apple made Ui changes, I’ve seen negative reactions. People react negatively to change, not to good or bad necessarily. I’ve been using the ne UI since it was in the developer beta, and can’t really tell a practical difference.
It's difficult for me to believe that you might be arguing all of the icons in the drop-down menus are beautiful... I know I have found them distracting.
In my opinion, this article had very clear and direct criticisms; they were hardly "anti-design bias". The increase in visual clutter is, for sure, a net loss for MacOS Tahoe.
Design is not just pretty visuals but also solving problems. The design of Tahoe doesn't solve any problems the previous designs didn't but it solves many of the previous problems worse than the designs before.
design for design's sake is bad, and that's what Liquid Glass is. There was no thought behind it.
It is 2026 and UIs are still abysmally slow in many cases. How is that even remotely possible? Now, with that in mind, consider (just for a moment) why people might think that UX people don't know what they're doing.
> Same thing happened with modern building architecture
Yes. Yes, it has. I'm currently in the midst of a building project that's ten months behind schedule (and I do not know how many millions of dollars over budget), and I'd blame every one of the problems on that. I - the IT guy - was involved in the design stage, and now in construction (as in, actually doing physical labor on-site), and I'm the only person who straddles the divide.
It's utterly bizarre, because everyone gets things wrong - architects and engineers don't appreciate physical constraints; construction crews don't understand functional or design considerations - so the only way to get things right is for someone to understand both, but (apart from me, in my area - which is why I make sure to participate at both stages) literally no one on the project does.
Seen from a perspective of incentives I guess I can understand how we got here: the architects and engineers don't have to leave their offices, and are more "productive" in that they can work on more projects per year, and the construction crews can keep on cashing their sweet overtime checks. Holy shit, though, is it dispiriting to watch from a somewhat detached perspective.
I would think like you, but then some of their design decision are truly baffling. I like the idea of Liquid Glass, but there are thousands of rough edges that scream lack of care.
I have a strong feeling people working and approving Liquid Glass didn't dog food it in dark mode because it just looked BAD in the first builds available.
I sometimes wonder if anyone in charge at Apple uses Apple devices the way I do. I expect they have one, consistently-apple, high-end setup and it probably works very well for their style. Some things are great but others are insane and it seems like that happens most when using things like non-apple monitors or not typing a certain way on the phone or if you don't drive the same car.
Switching windows between two non apple monitors after waking from sleep is wildly unpredictable and has insane ux like resizing itself after a drag.
My carplay always starts something playing on my car speakers even when I wasn't listening to anything before connecting. It's so off it's comical.
The iPhone alarm will go off like normal, loudly from the speaker, even if you're currently on the phone and have it up to your ear. This has been a problem since my very first iPhone.
There has been a bug about plugged in physical headphones being unrecognized sometimes after waking from sleep even if it worked fine when going into sleep. I checked once in probably 2014 and Apples' official response was that it literally wasn't physically possible despite all of us people experiencing it. The bug was ancient even at that time and >ten years later my m4 macbook pro STILL DOES IT.
Apple and apple fanboys seem to take the stance that these are all user error on my part (remember the "you just aren't a Mac person" era?). I bet some of these are configurable with settings deep in some menu somewhere so from a certain perspective that's right but also underscores my point about the limitations of myopic dogfooding.
As a fun aside, the ux for turning on the "Voice Over" tutorial is the worse thing I've ever experienced on an Apple device. I was laughing out loud trying to figure out how to get out of it instead of finishing the unknown remaining steps. I feel bad for folks who need that accessibility in order to be effective.
My main gripe with Liquid Glass is how distracting it is.
Many top bars have become a group of bubbles over the content, which we’ve been conditioned to see as floating notifications for years. Things shine and move when they don’t require attention, just because.
The end result is that my OS feels like a browser without ad blocker. As much as people hated flat design, at least it didn’t grab your attention with tacky casino tricks.
My main gripe is that the visual shenanigans alone were enough of a change, why rearrange the buttons?! In the early iOS beta, the new tab button was at the top of Safari, as far away from your thumbs as it could be.
Genuinely believe Apple’s design team are rudderless or have unintentionally been forced to produce something to justify someone’s career, because this whole thing is disastrous.
> In the early iOS beta, the new tab button was at the top of Safari, as far away from your thumbs as it could be.
It’s relatively recent in iOS history that Safari’s address bar is at the bottom. There’s a setting to move it back to the top. This specific example is probably as innocent as a default getting accidentally changed during the development process.
> to produce something to justify someone’s career,
This is the curse of being a UI designer for a long lived product. Once a thing has been created and future work consists of 99% code and 1% UI, your UI designer job has evaporated. And so we see that everything changes every major release of an operating system, so the UI people can justify their pay checks.
I think you have cause and effect the wrong way around.
These changes in design are intended to appeal to our magpie brain of wanting the latest, shiniest, things.
You have to understand the vanity of consumers. If every new product looked the same then a lot of people wouldn’t both buying the latest gizmo because there’s no magpie appeal. So when the market stagnates, you need to redesign the product to convince consumers to throw away a perfectly good, working device.
And it usually works as a sales strategy too.
So designers then get told thy has to come up with something that looks newer and more futuristic than the current designs. Regardless of how much those designers might love or hate those current designs.
They come up with this shit not to justify their jobs but because they’re hired exactly to come up with this shit.
If it's coming down from the C suite, that just makes it worse. That's cheap marketing tricks winning priority over lasting intent. It's not just the design folks trying to justify their job at that point, it's the executives surrendering to the "stock must go up during my quarters at all costs" mentality.
If Company X didn’t reinvigorate their product line then consumers might switch to Company Ys products because they look shiny and new. Which is literally why people switched from BlackBerry et al to iPhones in the previous decade.
Consumers are fickle and want that dopamine hit when they spend money. I know this and even I find myself chasing shiny things. So there’s no way we can change that kind of consumer behaviour.
To be clear, I’m not saying it’s right that companies do this, but I do think they’d go out of business if they didn’t because consumer trends will continue like this regardless of how ethical companies tried to be.
So the problem here isnt that Apple tried to refresh its operating system look. It’s that they completely jumped the shark and created something that was too focused on aesthetics while failing in literally every other metric.
You’re talking about very specific rearrangements of controls. Whereas I was talking about why these big redesign initiatives get green lit to begin with.
Maybe that's why disabilities are on the rise. I went through the MacOS installer yesterday, it asked 3 times if I wanted to configure any a11y options, with cognitive disability featured.
Every distracting visual element of liquid glass looks like a tiny Ad to me which is constantly trying to distract me from what I am doing and trying to grab my attention. Super annoying.
I'm usually in linux (dual boot on a mac) but had to boot into macOS for something. I was utterly confused when I moved my cursor to the top-left and missed clicking the apple menu
I rather like the skeuomorphism ... on the buttons anyway. The distortion effect on the glass is simply annoying, and the overall effect on an already-cramped UI like Safari on a phone is just ... ugh. There's now basically three blobs of mystery meat at the bottom of the screen. So if Liquid Glass was made for mobile first, it's an even bigger failure. It's actually more tolerable on desktop, though the double-border effect on things like the control panel stick out pretty badly.
It's not only not how you get promoted, it's a pretty good way to get canned as well. If you don't like the work you're being asked to do, your options are pretty limited to doing it or going elsewhere. There are a million UXers and engineers who'd love to work at Apple and would be happy making whatever their boss suggests.
Seriously. People got canned for resisting the corporate overlords. That’s capitalism. Corporations run by their employees? Guilds? Cooperatives? Hah! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynbgMKclWWc
Just that usually the forcefed initiatives have to do with corporate profits for shareholders, or trends like shoving AI into everything. Imagine saying no to that!
Even at the supra-corporate and supra-national level, if the organizing principle is competition, no actor not even a CEO or a corporate board or a government can afford to stop racing towards disaster. There is a simple mantra: “If we don’t achieve AGI first, China will and then they’ll dominate.”
Once in a while, the world comes together to successfully ban eg chemical weapons or CFCs, and repair the hole in the ozone layer. Cooperation and restraint takes effort.
Judging by the way we’ve drained all the aquifers, overfished the last fish, destroyed the kelp forests, cut down the rainforsts, bleached the corals, and polluted the world with plastic, I don’t think there is much hope of stopping.
Insects and pollinators are way down, and many larger species are practically extinct, 95% of the world’s animal biomass is humans and their food, and people still pretend environmental catastrophe is all about a few degrees of temperature.
PS: Yes, that escalated quickly. In the real world, it has taken only 80 years… :-/
I don't think corporate profits are the reason Apple has shitty UX because it's hard to argue how shitty UX correlates to higher profit, especially when it costs more to create a shitty UX than to keep the good one you already have.
I reckon it's more that some Apple VP has to justify their million dollar equity package by creating work for their org, because otherwise why should you still have a job?
Let’s focus on the specific claims in your comment.
> People got canned for resisting the corporate overlords. That’s capitalism
Being told to do things by your boss is a problem as old as time. Except with capitalism you can change bosses — a luxury which has not existed throughout history.
Okay great. Now keep going with the rest of my comment and address the rest point by point. You’ll find that it expands from that first point, and describes the consequences of capitalism and competition as an organizing principle.
We are discussing UI/Icon design, not the geopolitical implications of AGI or the Holocene extinction event.
Why should someone that disagrees with you on whether capitalism is uniquely responsible for bad icon design now be forced to defend it for every sin / shortcoming ranging from the social inequity to ecological collapse?
Why is capitalist competition worse than any other form of competition? Wouldn’t wartime competition over land and sovereignty be far worse? Didn’t the Soviet Union have extreme forms of political competition?
Besides the visual design, I've been thinking about the tech part of it. There's so many bits shifting, morphing and having state, that it sounds antithetical to what a UI is supposed to be: a consistent and unnoticeable tool to interact with software. I do like some of the things they do to free up screen space, but having components being to programmatically complex is bound to cause issues. Besides having your presentation desync with your data, your UI now has opportunities to desync with itself...
It’s an extremely uncomfortable conflict and contradiction between corporate organization, finance “capitalism”, engineering, and creatives; in addition to individual vs group dynamics.
Corporate structure is driven by exploiting and using value for and by a de facto nobility (the c-suite).
Finance “capitalism” seeks to extract value, be it short or long term.
Engineers are motivated by building and creating value.
Creatives are driven by changes for changing’s sake to remain or get a seat at the table.
The uncomfortable reality is that these are inherently conflicting interests that are pulling and pushing each other, but mostly top down.
It’s essentially the “colonialist” exploitative model of existence using creators to leverage rather than extract natural resources, a system that is increasingly not suitable for the modern, technological, commoditized world. AI is a good example of that; it arguably diminishes the value to n degrees of both engineers and creatives, while also leaving the “nobility” and their neo-aristocratic corporate system out in the open exposed as revealing it not only as having no clothes on, but utterly abusive, useless, and downright evil. And no, that’s across the whole political spectrum, not just the opposite of your silly system approved political sport team.
The problem with Apple's execution of Liquid Glass is that the intended audience isn't the iOS user, it's the onlooker watching the iOS user (FOMO). That was an effective strategy when iPhone popularity was growing rapidly. Now that we're in a plateau of market saturation (post-peak Apple), anything directed at the onlooker which detracts for the actual user will hurt their bottom line.
How would this work? The only place I've ever heard of liquid glass is from iPhone users complaining about it incessantly and tutorials on how to turn it off or diminish it. What would I fear missing out on?
MacOS 26 highlights were... and this was _Apple's_ opening modal...
"Icons that look like shit!"
and
"Notification summaries that may not be correct!"
In general I feel as if Apple's software feels buggier and less solid lately across my iPhone and my computers. Won't be upgrading the personal computer for as long as possible
What I love is how their own features don't even play well together anymore...
For instance you can "hide your e-mail" by using Apple's relay, but if you do so... your payments using Apple Pay will fail unless you fill all the information in manually because the e-mail addresses don't match
It's ridiculous how poorly tested everything is, and that combined with their newly entered foray into the world of politics has nearly destroyed three decades of steady Apple use for me. I'll be actively considering other options, not upgrading, and looking elsewhere for products in spaces they're in
I finally talked my company into letting me swap out my MacBook pro for some little Dell. After the last year of updates, my Mac has stopped resuming from sleep reliably, everything is ugly, they took the already barely usable (imo) finder and system settings and found exciting new ways to make them worse. Sadly corporate security means os updates were not optional.
I've never really liked macOS but it feels like someone at Apple was hired just to make it even less likable for me personally lol
been using a Mac for years, and to this day I don't know how it's possible to navigate directories using Finder. It only has shortcuts for a few folders by default (photos, documents...) and doesn't have a button to navigate to the parent folder. I have literally no idea how to get to my home directory, I need to use the CLI
> doesn't have a button to navigate to the parent folder.
Command + Up Arrow, which is also visible if you click on the "Go" menu. There is also a toolbar button that shows the entire set of enclosing directories; offhand I can't remember whether this is visible by default. There is also "View -> Show Path Bar" which shows all this information at the bottom of the window.
> I have literally no idea how to get to my home directory
Go -> Home, which shows a shortcut key for this, Command-Shift-H.
You can add shortcuts to the sidebar by dragging. You can right click the folder name in the top bar to get a list of parents. You can also View > Show Path Bar and see the the full clickable bread crumbs. Not sure why this is so confusing if you bother to try.
Even after decades of using macOS I still cannot wrap my head around the fact that Finder has no single button shortcut for opening a file - the most common operation a file manager should do. It’s Cmd+O, and it cannot be changed to anything sane like Enter key.
Why on Earth is this a requirement? When you're navigating through Finder using keyboard, it's very inconvenient to use two keypresses to perform a very basic operation. Using Enter to open a file is how every file manager on every operating system works except Finder. Why would Enter key be hardcoded to a file rename operation instead?
It is a typical Apple behaviour of doing things differently from the rest of the world just for the sake of it, even when it's detrimental to the user experience.
Actually I just checked and it's not, technically you can create key equivalents without modifiers as well [1]. For Finder this doesn't work though, because enter seems to be specifically handled before menu-level key equivalent processing. (Note that it's not guaranteed to work on other apps either, based on [2] seems key equivalents are only dispatched if modifier keys exists. But that might be out of date since it worked for the people in the SE post.)
Option+Enter is the next closest thing.
I agree that their implementation here is not good. In fact there's already a "Rename" menu item, which isn't actually wired to the enter hotkey (this is very un mac like because it means there is no easy way to discover it). The "rename" menu item is actually a fairly recent addition to mac (I think maybe 10.11) while Finder itself is ancient (it was one of the last few apps to be migrated to Cocoa and even today still has lots of legacy warts), and possibly no one bothered cleaning things up.
I’ve said many times before that I think Finder is the worst default file manager of any popular desktop environment.
I get it’s supposed to be easy to use but so much functionality is hidden behind non-obvious shortcuts. The end result is you either need to memorise a dozen secret handshakes just to perform basic operations, or you give up and revert to 70s technology in the command line.
Is it actually though? It’s cool to criticise Nautilus but, at worst, it’s just equally as bad as Finder. Which shouldn’t be surprising given how much it’s styled to look like Finder.
However in my personal opinion Nautilus’s breadcrumb picker does edge it against Finder.
So I stand by my comment that Finder is the worst.
Nautilus opens a new window for every folder you enter. Finder does not.
That used to be a preference, and last I used it, it was not. It is forced on because that’s how the GNOME developers thought you should use it… “Our way or the highway!” — GNOME devs.
Finder wins based on that alone. Finder wins so completely because of that one single thing that I’ll never voluntarily use GNOME again.
My go to example would be long lasting issues with SMB support in Finder. All operations are very slow, the search is almost unusably so. The operations that are instant on every non-Apple device take ages on a Mac. I first ran into these issues 7 years ago when I set up my NAS, and they present to this day. I tried all random suggestions and terminal commands, but eventually gave up on trying to make it perform as it does on Linux.
With Apple's focus on cloud services, fixing the bugs that prevent the user from working with their local network storage runs contrary to their financial incentives.
I got a new Apple Watch and just getting it set up was a pain. For some reason the passcode input would fail to register key prompts and I had to spam the buttons until something clicked. Then I gave my old Apple Watch to my mom and the setup failed like three times before we managed to get it done. Did make me wonder if anyone at Apple actually tests setting up these devices.
The only "real" justification is that this is a long term play to figure out a UI and interaction shift that will work for general augmented reality devices (aka whatever device Apple releases five years and two iterations from now based on the Vision Pro.)
That’s the same logic that led to the Windows 8 UI being designed tablet first because that’s “where we’re all going”. Fast forward to Windows 10 where MS had to concede that, no, turns out it isn’t where we’re all going and rolled most of it back.
A lot of us felt at the time that surely laptops and tablets would converge. Otherwise, what a waste of hardware.
But it hasn't really happened. From a hardware perspective, things have gotten closer with the iPad's magnetic keyboard. But, I still find that the iPad as laptop replacement to be a compromise that I may tolerate for travel but don't love for a lot of laptop work.
Magnetic keyboard on the iPad is such a lose. Some Thai hacker got full macOS running on his iPhone over Christmas. Apple are cowards collecting dividends.
The magnetic keyboard lets you use the iPad without it having to be resting on a solid surface like basically every tablet/keyboard combination out there. Microsoft has tried various hybrid laptop/tablet arrangements that did both things mediocrely. I have zero interest in what someone has hacked together.
iPads are great devices for non-tech savvy people who need a computer for stuff like writing and reading documents and e-mails, planning travel and making reservations, keeping in touch with people on messaging and social media.
That's a gigantic market segment, and Apple has to be very careful to not make those devices complicated or vulnerable.
Exactly. I tend not to use my iPad that much except when traveling--partly because I have an old MacBook that lives on my dining room table. If I didn't have that I would certainly use my iPad more (and would doubtless get more comfortable using it for more purposes).
I struggle to find any use case at all for my iPad. Even when traveling, I use my phone most of the time and when I want something bigger, I have the MacBook Air in my bag, which doesn't feel any more cumbersome to have with me than an iPad.
I won't really argue much. I can get by with just my iPhone. I think a MacBook (don't have an Air) is better for a lot of things even if the iPad is better for media on a plane. The weight difference is minimal if you count the keyboard. I don't draw so don't need an iPad for that. A Kindle weighs nothing so I can always bring that for reading.
Not sure I'll buy another iPad given my current lifestyle.
That will be part of it. The main driver though that they've been working on for years is trying to figure out how to add just enough desktop to UIKit to allow them to kill off AppKit as a separate thing.
Without hyperbole, Liquid Glass on Mac OS is visually the worst commercial desktop UX I have ever had the displeasure of using. It is amateurish and frankly, ill advised to have even tried to unify the aesthetic across devices so universally. I think much of what is on the phone works fine. There are some pain points and some bits that are visually awkward, but generally it works and is new and fresh, but on the Mac it is as if no one really cared. And that reflects really poorly on where Apple is at, because if nothing else, Apple seemed like the company that always really cared about the user experience.
There are some things that are nice. The dock looks nice. The transparent menu bar is nice enough too and there is a toggle off switch if it doesn't work for you. Spotlight looks fine. But the rest is so bad that I just cannot fathom how someone at Apple did not stop it before release. I would be throwing a fit to stop it from being released if I was in Apple and had any sway at all. I assume the executive team was all looking at it and using it before release. So how did this happen? The new side bar and the new tool bars are abominations. I cringe every time I have to use the finder; it is just a blob of various shades of white or, if you prefer, dark mode, grey.
My hope is that if nothing else they roll back the sidebar and the tool bar changes or do a complete rethink on how they are implemented. If they rolled back the extra rounded corners I wouldn't complain either.
Even on mobile it took a few iterations from when the design was first introduced for it to be usable. Not good mind you, just usable.
Even Apple's own marketing material had screenshots where text was near impossible to read, even for someone with good eyesight: grey text on top of highly transparent glass... what were they thinking!?
Keyword “looks”. Because considering behavior, there’s tons of delay introduced and results change under your finger as you’re selecting them, causing you to get the wrong thing.
A lot of Windows 8 I liked, but Windows perpetually suffers from needing to support older versions of Windowing systems, or some corporate usecase from the early 90s that carries too much money to ever say no to implementing.
Windows 11 is, I think, worse than MacOS these days, half for still dragging the past along with it, and half for introducing a second start menu just for ads.
I think Windows greatest strength is their greatest weakness, which is backwards compatibility. MacOS greatest weakness is their UX, which has slowly been going downhill for the past few years and on this release took a nose dive. It is a wild reversal from the mid 2000s when Apple's UX was so far superior to anything else that it felt revelatory to switch from Windows XP to OSX.
Oh geez, I forgot about Windows 8. Visually it looked nice enough, though. Once you got out of the insane touch first overlay it was fine, but I reinstalled Windows 7 so fast I never had to spend much time with it. I guess by that measure Windows 8 was worse.
I'd say this is a pretty unhelpful, demanding, and borderline damaging take to spread. I've learned from experience that it's unlikely "a designer" should follow this advice or accept the archaic guilt-trip "because you make six figures" whatever that means.
If you run your own design agency, you've got your own company's reputation and yours on the line, so be as opinionated as you find necessary, but otherwise if you're just an employee without an inordinate amount of clear authority within the scope of your discipline at the large company (you know if you do or don't) then don't try and create a mutiny, it will more than likely be a childish assumption of personal risk on your part, much more so than it costs the company, much more so than anyone else needs to care, because someone on a forum told you to be passionate about round rects or small icons or whatever. If you need to tell your boss "google NN group", you probably don't have the trust or experience to be successful with such a play.
It's okay to have a personal hatred of it and do what you can to steer the work appropriately, but when you're tasked with a dumbass plan, let it be the decision-makers' dumbass plan, unless it's your decision to make. Let it be the project we tried and it didn't and couldn't have worked out, which sometimes happens, but you learn and then leave if it's pervasive and you have other options.
It would be remarkably stupid to single yourself out as the person who thinks of themselves as the reincarnation of Steve Jobs and risk your livelihood to save Apple's reputation. The unlikely upside is that you get your way and that can boost your confidence, but the downside is that you fumble your best shot at financial security for the rest of your life because you thought you'd be received well.
That's not to say you shouldn't say no to nothing, or have love for your craft, just don't pretend it's your job to, unless it is, which it's probably not. Disagree and let it be a failure if it's going to be, feel vindicated if it is, but the money is there for you if not. The people who worked on the Vision Pro aren't responsible for it being a dud product, and they can be proud of what they did design-wise and technologically despite that.
I think your take is unhelpful, demanding, and damaging to engineering ethics. If you want to live in a 90s corporate workplace hierarchy model, that's your value system. But it is untenable and harms people in the long run.
Ethically speaking, the parent seemed to be demanding that some hypothetical designer put their livelihood on the line because good taste in UI design is paramount, we're not talking about building a skyscraper in a swamp out of twigs. Pat yourself on the back I guess if you want to volunteer to be a trillion dollar company's human meat shield, and relish in the virtue of being unemployed in a very bad market due to having a volatile emotional temperament, but I'd just recommend not doing that.
In the long run, no you don't want to set that much of your taste or expertise aside forever, but you shouldn't have to, it comes with all the things I said, trust & agency.
Dont worry, there are thousands of aspiring artists that will gladly do it for a 6 figure salary. The person that manages your salary, they determine what you work on. Dont like the work, walk away …
And he also takes credit for the dynamic island. It is an assault on my senses to see everything constantly moving around on my screen.
I have been working with Macs since 1995, but this year is my first using Pixel with GrapheneOS, that is how done I am with Apple. Unfortunately I know the UI will not change for years and I just could not take it.
I don't think that's fully accurate, unless you have a link that confirms it? That Dye designed it, I mean, not that it was horrible...
Jony Ive was the head of design at that point (both hardware and UI). Wikipedia says Dye "contributed greatly to the design language of iOS 7" but Ive would have had final say. Certainly at the time as I recall it, iOS 7 was seen as Ive's baby.
Also, I'm not defending iOS 7, but I reckon its visual design was a lot more influential than it gets credit for. Think of those ubiquitous Prime bottles, with their bright saturated color gradients; the first place I remember seeing that style was iOS 7. I bet they picked that style for Prime because kids liked it, and kids liked it because kids like iPhones.
Edit to add: "bright saturated colors" goes back a long way to Fisher Price toys and the like, of course, but it's the gradients specifically that I think iOS 7 popularized.
I've heard rumors that part of why iOS 7 was so garish is because Dye's background was in product packaging so his team were doing design reviews on paper and didn't realize that the colors would look different on device due to CMYK vs RGB. Not sure if it's ever been confirmed but it would explain a lot.
I was in the room for a few design reviews for my part of iOS 7 (I was an engineer writing the new screens). Everything was done on a 90+ inch HDTV that we AirPlayed from our Macs or iPhones to for the room to view. Not printed, though the design studio walls were covered in printed explorations of variations of concepts, that is true.
Dye was the senior rep of the Design org present and commenting on all our software progress. I never once encountered Ive.
Thanks for the clarification! Out of curiosity, do you have any other insight into how/why iOS 7 turned out the way it did? What was the internal attitude towards it like?
It’s not a stretch to say that Tim Cook created the whole Shenzhen microelectronics industry. The thousands of specialist component vendors and large integrators that assemble products trace to his instigation with Compaq and then Apple. The iPod, Macs, iPhone, copied the Swiss Watch model of vast redundant networks of component competetors working as an ecosystem to drive down costs.
This created the skill and machinery base that made it possible for other western design companies (such as Android vendors that were not Samsung or Japanese) to make clones of the iPhone quickly and easily. (Let’s be real, every smartphone is an iPhone 1 clone)
Nielsen Norman used to be quoted constantly during UX discussions at various places I worked. Seems like UX folks and Information Architects have slowly been replaced by a general purpose “designer”
I don't mind Liquid Glass. What annoys me is how it's seemingly someone's full-time job at Apple to periodically make me relearn how to find my photos or open Safari tabs.
I generally don't place "conspiratorial" motivations to explain the decisions of tech companies, but I can't help but think this is a move from apple to keep their ludicrously powerful M-chips busy with mundane UI because the average user will never need to otherwise upgrade past an M1.
Unpopular opinion, but I find Liquid Glass incredibly satisfying (I set it to Tinded though). The transitions are just really well done. The glass effect itself is a fun gadget, but unnecessary. I dislike how it must waste my battery. Give me the transitions of Liquid Glass with a basic frosted glass material and I would be perfectly happy, but the current state is fine too.
> If you're a designer at a top 10 S&P 500 company making 6 figures,
... your career requires constantly chasing after what amounts to fashion trends every few years, otherwise it's a solved problem and probably does not provide much of a career
The justification is that they feel it necessary to make obvious, superficial changes in pursuit of differentiation between software versions to help keep the upgrade treadmill running.
The only UI change that I've found useful since Yosemite was Mojave's introduction of a dark mode. They made the fonts look worse on non-Retina displays, threw out the Preference pane in favor of a weird list that can only be resized vertically, added transparent everything, and banned any icon that's not in a squircle. Such UI, many differentiation, much insanely great, wow!
> If you're a designer at a top 10 S&P 500 company making 6 figures, you owe it to yourself to have some love for your craft.
I think you've unintentionally illustrated the root of the problem here.
People motivated by profit are not incentivized to produce high-quality results. Rather, people motivated by profit are only incentivized to do the least effort that they can get away with.
People motivated by pride are those who are incentivized to produce good results, because the result reflects on them personally.
Which is all to say, pride motives produce a race to the top, whereas profit motives produce a race to the bottom. It's no wonder our modern economy can only produce slop.
Apple has been rudderless on the interaction design front for over a decade now. The windowing mess is evidence of it. We now have the cmd+tab (app switcher), Spaces, Mission Control, (full screen) split screen, Stage Manager, and now tiled window control. None of those interaction metaphors have been expanded upon since their initial launch.
I'm a "mac guy". I understood why Apple initially eschewed windows style alt-tab, given the emphasis on app-centricism. But now, they've created a thousand different ways to switch windows without giving us a proper window switcher. There are apps that bring alt-tab to Mac, but they are all bad because Apple doesn't give developers access to the low-level APIs to create performant and fully featured window management.
Before, Apple had an endless well of great ideas to tap. That's how we got the term "Sherlocked". However, now that they've locked down macOS so much, they've suffocated themselves of new ideas.
I strongly believe we need to return to the drawing board and design a Window Environment from scratch because we've gone so far down the "everything's a mess" route that it's impossible to work our way out again.
Here's an example: panes, tabs, windows, apps, spaces. These things all fight against each other, have their own little silos, get treated differently by every single app, etc, etc.
> Here's an example: panes, tabs, windows, apps, spaces. These things all fight against each other, have their own little silos, get treated differently by every single app, etc, etc.
Disagree. The fact that these are independent is a huge organizational boon for those who know how to apply some combination of them.
Example: I set up spaces (virtual desktops) to have themes: one of general web, one for iOS dev, one for Android dev, etc. within that, it’s useful to be able to further organize with windows and tabs — windows can represent projects for example, and tabs can represent files. These work together to prevent a Cambrian explosion of windows that would be impossible to manage no matter how your environment works.
It’s useful for apps to be distinct from windows, too. This allows things like moving all windows belonging to a particular app between screens, or minimizing/maximizing them all, hiding them all, etc. Panes in most circumstances are an entirely different beast than tabs and windows… it wouldn’t be useful to turn an inspector palette into a tab.
They work together as long as one’s mental model isn’t overly simplistic.
I didn't really explain my objections very well in such a throwaway statement. My issue isn't that those things exist; pretty much the opposite. I think it's good that they exist and they almost certainly always should. My problem is when app A implements tabs differently from app B, app C uses the same shortcut for switching windows that app D uses for switching tabs, etc. It just all seems so disjointed.
What I want is for an OS that treats things like tabs as first-class citizens, not a byproduct that each app implements in its own way.
macOS actually has native tab support built in. It supports everything you’d expect from a tab system, including merging windows into tabs and splitting them back out. All third party devs have to do is opt in and tell the OS which windows are intended to participate. It’s been a feature for a long time now.
Problem is that most third party apps don’t opt in and instead reimplement tabs themselves. It’s mostly native Mac apps made by small boutique developers that use native tabs.
I only very recently changed my System Settings > Desktop & Dock > Windows > Prefer tabs when opening documents to "Always". I'm pretty sure the default is "In Full Screen".
Now, something like TextEdit creates new files in new tabs rather than new windows. It's great! But by default, everything on macOS seems to use windows rather than tabs. I don't even think most people know about the "Prefer tabs" option at all.
I say this only half in jest, as it's what I'm using on my personal desktop. It's far from perfect though, for some reason the taskbar/launchpad just feels awkwardly shaped, some of the keyboard based navigation gets a little wonky sometimes. And I feel that there's a few areas where the split brain between docking regions and windows isn't quite as polished as it needs to be.
On the plus side, it performs better than Gnome, and is slightly more consistent than a lot of Linux desktop options. In the end, I do think that OSes need to expose a bit more details in a somewhat consistent way as cross-platform apps and even electron-like options are boing to become more common place as people jump between and need to support Window, Linux and MacOS targets, with the variances they all have.
Personally, there are a lot of things I like and dislike between all of them.. I spent a large amount of time tweaking Budgie to be almost exactly what I want at one point, and an update borked my setup... I just switched to Pop/Cosmic and dealt with it from there.
Agreed. Lots of conflicting principles. Like, it doesnt make sense to increase the padding across the UI and at the same time, push quarter-screen layouts. I'm almost begging Apple to create something that I don't like, but in a way that's thoughtful and committed to that bit.
I agree. If you (or anyone else who shares your sentiment) hasn't tried it before, you might enjoy "distro hopping" across different Linux distros, using something like Ventoy to make it easy to try out different desktop environments.
There's a veritable zoo to try out. KDE, COSMIC, XFCE, GNOME and its many derivatives (like Pantheon or the previous COSMIC), Unity, etc. Also interesting are the old XMotif based ones like CDE (which has the delightful "chiseled marble" look of 90s-era DEs).
Windows also has its own share of alternative shells, but AFAIK only Cairo DE is actively supported and developed.
I feel like there are a million reasons why this is the wrong choice. There are probably 10 xkcd comics alone that explain why this is a bad idea.
"Let's throw every away and start from scratch" is a tempting idea, but it rarely works. Even taking your example of panes, windows, tabs, apps, and spaces, each of those have a separate and identifiable use case that, IMO, is valid. At least in my mind, I have a mental model around where panes, windows, tabs, and apps are appropriate, and I personally rarely use spaces (though I certainly understand people who like them), and they've never bother me because I can safely ignore them.
And when you look at the issues identified in the article, they all seem very fixable to me. Fixable starting with Apple getting new design leadership, and given the guy responsible for Liquid Glass jumped to Meta, sounds like it was a good thing for Apple.
I misworded that. See my other comment; tldr, I want windows, tabs, etc. to be properly implemented by the OS, to a standard, rather than in many different conflicting ways.
Cmd+~ switches windows of a given app in case you didn't know (not disagreeing with you but it is one shortcut I find super useful and it helps switch windows).
This is why I regard ChromeOS with fear. Because it really does feel like everything is just converging on the browser as the OS, and a browser is not a goddamn OS.
I have a non-ANSI keyboard so tilde is in a super weird place for that (next to left shift). I swapped the shortcut to Option+Tab, makes much more intuitive sense.
Alt tab is okay but it has performance issues (sometimes window switching is instant, sometimes there's a slight but perceptible delay). The devs have acknowledged it and said that it cannot be fixed.
Other pet peeves include the smallest window thumbnails are enormous and enabling mouse hover to switch windows causes me to switch to the wrong window, and thumbnails are often stale.
I think MacOS would be much more unusable without alt-tab, like this app is a critical piece of software that has to be installed on any MacOS machine I'm using. But it does sometimes miss a window, like it doesn't show up in the window list in alt-tab even though it is open. And then I have to use the three finger swipe up thing to find it. Not a huge deal but occasionally annoying, and I assume it is because they are limited in the access they have to this information, which Apple could make available if they wanted, but have decided not to.
This isn't the only aspect of Tahoe that seems amateurishly designed by someone following "wrong rules", the wrong rule here being "for consistency, let's assign an icon to every action.
Another wrong rules I've seen blindly followed is making everything an edge-to-edge canvas, so that the sidebar floats on top. Having a full-window canvas with floating sidebars can make sense for applications where content is expansive and inherently spatial (like say, Figma) or applications where the sidebar is an actual floating element that can be moved around (like Photoshop once was).
It doesn't make sense in Finder, or Reminders, where the content is ultimately just a list. Forcing the sidebar "to float on top of the content" yields no benefit because the content wont ever scroll under it, and because it can't be moved anyway, but it does lead to wasted space, that ugly "double border", etc.
In theory, the problems highlighted in the article would have become apparent shortly into the process of assigning an icon to every menu item. Forging ahead despite the impossibility of doing a good job on the task is a sign of orders being issued from top to bottom without feedback working its way from the bottom to the top.
I'm afraid you both may be right in this case. "Make it blue!" - stakeholder. "Ok, but then we'll have to change everything for consistency." - VP of UI. Produces the horror that we have today.
They've got the SF Symbols font, and probably assumed that's enough. Everyone has the same set of icons available, technically.
It seems that Apple has nobody left who has all three at the same time: taste, attention to detail, and authority to demand fixes. Having lots of people who have max two out of these three gives you designs of Microsoft and Glass Apple.
I’ve always respected macOS for being the 'stable' choice for not-as-techy people. But recent versions feel like a mess. Running Tahoe on my 2019 Mac Pro (Yes the cheese grater one) has been surprisingly frustrating. Simple things are broken: Ableton couldn't even trigger a microphone permission prompt, forcing me to meddle with a SQLite database, which is definitely not meant for end users to touch, just to get it working.
Logitech’s software is also stuck in a loop denying it has Bluetooth access (Which it has). And with the added graphical glitches (Apple likes to call them liquid glass) and weird window artifacts (For some reason, all my windows had a black, rectangular border one day), it’s honestly less reliable than my macOS-style Linux rice from 2015. But I'm still stuck with MacOS since I NEED Adobe Lightroom for my work and there is still now way to run that with GPU acceleration on Linux. But if there was, there would be no device running Windows/MacOS left in my household
I've also recently come upon this talk by an ex-apple UI/UX engineer: https://youtu.be/1fZTOjd_bOQ
I think what he's talking about is precisely what got lost at apple.
Edit: In case someone stumbles upon this after experiencing the same problem with ableton, here is the command I executed:
sqlite3 ~/Library/Application\ Support/com.apple.TCC/TCC.db "INSERT OR REPLACE INTO access VALUES('kTCCServiceMicrophone','com.ableton.live',0,2,4,1,NULL,NULL,0,'UNUSED',NULL,0,1725000000,NULL,NULL,'default',0);"
Disclaimer: I have absolutely no Idea what it does, as it was generated by Gemini. I do not have anything super important on this computer so I just executed it, but please don't touch obscure system files if you have data to lose.
Your Ableton and Logitech issues seem to be the same: screwed up access permissions. Not your fault, macOS has been sucking at it for a while. It’s not unheard of for System Settings to show you some app has some permissions, but in practice it doesn’t.
What usually works is fully resetting permissions for an app:
There definitely is something weird with Tahoe permission system. I was trying to learn Swift and after a couple keystrokes, the banner asking for the permission to access other's app data pops up without fail. Making it almost impossible to use Swift Playground. And it's been like that for a couple months now.
The System Settings panel for TCC permissions has been fucked since Ventura. It never reflects reality properly and won't show managed settings either (like those granted or denyed outright by a configuration profile). So users have no idea that Firefox can't access their microphone because their device administrator explicitly denied that. The redesign of System Preferences should have raised far more alarm bells than it did, and it did raise a fuck ton of alarm bells that something utterly broken is happening in Cupertino. Along the same line as the another comment in here said, it's just that some amateur is following the "wrong rules". Like, oh, we have to have the macOS settings app look and work exactly like iOS', despite being a far more complex system with a lot more legacy components.
I am literally writing a bug report right now for 26.2, because on my Mac, for whatever reason, running tccutil reset All on com.apple.Terminal isn't removing Full Disk Access. It removes everything else (screen recording, specific folder domain access, but not FDA).
I did try that amongst other things. Launching Ableton via Terminal also brought up the microphone permission pop-up...for the Terminal app. One has to wonder if a System that regularly "forgets" permissions is even secure at all.
> One has to wonder if a System that regularly "forgets" permissions is even secure at all.
It does not "forget", the permissions are limited to 30 days. So you have to re-grant them periodically.
Oh, and if you miss the popup (because sometimes it pops _under_ other windows) then you just start getting silent failures. With absolutely NO indication in the UI that something is wrong. There is literally no way to find that out without looking directly into the TCC database.
Yeah I'm hopeful that they spend the next software update atoning for their UI sins.
I remember being really excited for Liquid Glass, because it felt like a return to the good old days of Skeuomorphism, at least in some spirit. In reality, it was a botched delivery, I suspect for two reasons:
1. Trying to unify all of their design (in one year no less) against one style -- developed primarily on Apple Watch & the now defunct Vision Pro -- was a colossal undertaking.
2. There's so much goddamn software packed into each OS that you're going to inevitably be stuck with bloated menus. Imagine Apple releasing OS 27 this year and saying "we're stripping you down to the bare bones. It's going to feel like Snow Leopard, but we're going to give you customization menus to alter that experience." I would lose my mind with joy. I'd be so excited to be able to operate my fucking phone again.
No, Liquid Glass was stunted from its conception. Any UI designer worth his salt could have pointed out the legibility issues immediately.
The fact that no one (in power) saw a problem with Liquid Glass shows that Jobs was right, that letting the MBAs take the power never works out. And he was wrong for appointing Cook. Remember that Jobs made MacBooks "expensive" (no more expensive or even cheaper than a Vaio or Portege) because he wanted to make great devices with a great UX and UI, which needed a certain level of investment. Jobs loved his users. Cook only loves his shareholders.
But how would they do that without scrapping the whole version?
Their marketing for this year heavily relies on liquid glass but if they remove the shiny stuff, it’s not very pretty, it’s just functional. Functional is what people with work to do appreciate, marketing people will want the shiny back now that it was introduced.
I really don't think the shininess is the issue at hand. It's interface clutter. My iPhone is so cluttered. It's packed full of software I'll never use. I wade through menu options I'll never use.
I like the look of Liquid Glass and I'm generally for it. It just needs to be organized better.
> just functional
This is ultimately what I disagree with. I think iOS/macOS have become entirely dysfunctional. Software is broken, webpages are broken simply because they're running from OS 26. Alarms and calendar events either run randomly or not at all. The system preferences menu is hardly navigable. I could go on. Maybe I'm just getting old and crusty, and yearn for the days when Steve Jobs was running the ship.
They just pack needless software in and do nothing to keep it organized/usable.
> But how would they do that without scrapping the whole version?
There is a way for them to fix this while saving face. You see, Liquid Glass™ was just the first of their incredible new Material Design paradigm. Now introducing Apple Stone™, Apple Paper™, Apple Linen™ and Apple Brushed Metal™. All just as realistic as Liquid Glass™.
> Yeah I'm hopeful that they spend the next software update atoning for their UI sins.
I have heard Liquid Glass was in development for two years, so I see no hope of them spending all that money over again. Nevermind all the developers who have redesigned apps for IOS26.
They could just re-release IOS 18, but that would piss me off as a developer.
This is why I left the Apple Ecosystem last month, I see no hope.
That’s on point - it really reminds me of a Linux distro that someone went a bit too overboard on customizing. The inconsistencies are so familiar from cobbling different OS and window themes and icon sets etc together. One more reason to move away from MacOS since they don’t have that anymore either
I know someone who works on the macOS permission system. If you submit a bug report and share the feedback number, I will send it their way
https://bugreport.apple.com/
>Simple things are broken: Ableton couldn't even trigger a microphone permission prompt, forcing me to meddle with a SQLite database, which is definitely not meant for end users to touch, just to get it working.
You shouldn't have to do any of that. Even if Live couldn't trigger the permission prompt, you should be able to give it a microphone permission in Settings.
For whatever reason, apps need to request the microphone permission first to show up in the settings menu. For other permissions you can drag/drop the application into the settings window, but not for the microphone permission.
Tahoe broke trackpad scrolling in Safari on my 2023 MBP. Other users have been experiencing and reporting the issue for months. Apple still hasn’t fixed it in any of its updates or addressed it. Pretty bad.
I wonder if this is a symptom of a broader shift away from cathedral-style "owned" software toward bazaar-style free software, perhaps due to the ascendant SaaS model sucking investment away from traditionally shipped product teams, or if Apple is just sleepwalking down the slope of mediocrity.
What you are describing is a symptom of a system already in the process of breaking. The "OG Hacker Mentality" is a thing of the past, corporations are run by executives looking at money, maybe at shareholders but never at users. Most companies have internal processes with complexity comparable to government processes and outsourcing/using a SaaS for everything is just what managers do to get a short term win and thereby a promotion. UI/UX design on the other hand has to be done by a small group, with a very thought out concept and lots of freedom and no financial pressure. However, executives see UI/UX developers as glorified icon-generators. They are already talking about doing UI/UX design with AI. Tell me, when has an AI ever cared for usability?
A UI/UX Dev has two choices in 2026:
1. Try to execute their own vision and get shot down into burnout by management
2. Just make everything look shiny and modern, create demos that look great and get promoted
I guess they only work on Apple Silicon software by now and only do the absolute minimum on Intel/AMD support. It's getting phased out anyway next update, which is also a shame for a machine that 5 years ago cost more than a pretty great car.
Liquid Glass is horrible on my iPhone SE 2020. Slow and looks weird on the smaller screen. I tried to turn most effects off but it still is just worse in every way
Yes, I have 'reduce transparency' set to true. Overnight after upgrade the UI became noticably sluggish.
The outstanding example is Spotlight. For years since the M1 release I have been able to bring the bar up and type C-H-R then Enter, in ~500ms I guess, and I would always get Chrome.
Now, I have to wait another 1-2 seconds for it to think. If I hit enter before it has finished thinking, Spotlight goes away and nothing else happens!
The UI and Spotlight are still fine on my 2020 M1 Air running Sequioa
Fair enough. With Tahoe's removal of Launchpad, I assume you're talking about Spotlight in the sense of what appears when you press the Launchpad icon (F4)? Anyway, I can confirm that I also get very weird laggy behaviour from it—sometimes a double-press is interpreted as two presses, sometimes as just one.
I hadn't noticed that they killed Launchpad! On my M3's keyboard, F4 is a magnifying glass icon for Spotlight. I've always used cmd+space, which has been around for a while.
What's even worse is I have disabled all search categories for Spotlight except Apps and System Settings. It's searching a list of 40 apps and idk maybe 200 settings, and it still sucks.
I also never had a problem launching apps from Launchpad (I guess because that was its sole purpose, and it did it well) while I think it was pretty much day 1 that I encountered an app that just refused to show up in the Spotlight replacement.
Exactly. The whole permissions system, while nice in theory, just does not work in practice most of the time. Apple needs to understand, that unifying experience across mobile/desktop is neither possible nor the right thing to do.
Yeah I really don’t get it at the end of the day. Laptop/desktop screen and the couple of inches on my phone cannot operate the same way anymore than a car and a motorized scooter can. They’re just not the same thing.
Tahoe and Liquid Glass™ solidified for me the idea that Apple completely dropped the ball when it comes to design. Clearly they needed an a-hole in charge, Jobs would've crucified a few people.
It's painful to see the decay, update after update, into a more confusing, cluttered, and tacky experience.
Liquid Glass was actually a big surprise for me, and it was a shock to see Apple moving forward with this and nobody stopping it. Microsoft did that with Vista back in 2006 and they stopped doing this. So Apple is copying a 2006 design? From Microsoft? Where even Microsoft stopped doing it because of all the known issues? So many questions...
Even Vista did not have nearly as many problems as Liquid Glass. Most of the elements were static images, and the "aero" effects could be disabled, as well as the "Fluent Design" effects in later Windows 10.
Liquid Glass - with its wobbling jiggling jerking, shimmering and flashing, blurry and difficult-to-read, shifting and unpredictable design, and battery-demolishing performance - is so much worse. It's mindblowing how bad it is.
I would be very tempted to place a bet that nobody in the decision making chain used Vista or Compiz to any degree.
Commercial software coding glorifies denying anything older than 10 years exist outside of museums, let alone learn anything from it. The same has merely infected design world.
But they did use early builds of liquid glass and that should've triggered nausea and someone must've said "Don't"... yet they still did. You don't have to have gone through Windows Vista time to understand UI/UX (least of all, Apple Designers).
Is this known to be true or speculated? I don't know how this process is handled at Apple specifically, however, generally decision-makers are highly detached from UX. One would think that, especially for an overhaul initiative, "important" people would daily-drive dev/nightly builds to wear off the cool factor and experience the not so pleasant annoyances, but generally they shield themselves from that and mostly look at the "cool demos".
Regardless, as far as I am aware Apple has a tight product release cadence and ties feature gates to that. Obviously hardware readiness gates are much earlier than software, but I can easily imagine situations where "yes men" report "good enough" at gates relevant for marketing, feature gets greenlit, but then gets half-assed for the actual release. Recall iphones crashing at the initial release demo? Might as well be history rhyming.
And rightfully so. Tahoe is not just a step back, but it throws away so many good design elements that have been there for ages - and for no good reason.
I really hope they revert most of the design changes in macOS 27. I don't mind the Liquid Glass - the other changes they made to expose/highlight Liquid Glass are the real issue.
IMO we reached peak design in 2013 with Mavericks.
The golden rule from Apple in 2007 when they changed to flat design was icon or text - never both together.
Apple abandoned enforcing HIG for app developers around 2012 (Facebook tiled menu, modal abuse, and hamburger) but now seems to have given up on standards entirely.
The wall to wall interaction pattern is terrible too. Every time my hand brushes my phone some unexpected (and sometimes unknown) interaction occurs. Classic example is changing orientation while watching YT where accidental contact with the bottom-left (becoming top-right) part of the screen as you move the phone selects a new video. It’s becoming slop.
Apple's UI design started going downhill with the iOS 7 "flat design" release which was very shortly after Steve's death, and seemed to correspond to Ive being given a little too much free rein in the leadership vacuum that followed.
Jobs had his own flaws, but he was definitely a huge part of why Apple's UI design (and product design in general) has historically been as good as it has.
> Apple's UI design started going downhill with the iOS 7 "flat design" release which was very shortly after Steve's death, and seemed to correspond to Ive being given a little too much free rein in the leadership vacuum that followed.
This was so obvious to me. The damage done to Apple by losing Jobs as their most vicious editor was almost instantly noticeable.
I agree. Jobs being around for the birth of the GUI probably played a big role in that. Pushing past text-based terminals to graphical interfaces meant having to spend every moment thinking about purposeful interaction and design.
Maybe we could use Vison Pro to recreate a visit to Xerox Parc in 1979 to inspire the current designers to use UI patterns that gave been working well for fifty years.
Pretty sure iOS 7 was regarded as awful on launch and then a little while later people decided it was amazing and lovely to look at once the kinks were ironed out.
People just don't like new things that change what they are used to.
One thing I'll definitely give Apple is that they have walked back some design decisions that were total flops in the past, such as the butterfly keyboard and the touchbar (though I found it more than a bit annoying when I'd see reviews saying how great and visionary Apple was for simply undoing bad decisions - it deserved an "OK, good" not an "OMG Apple is amazing!!)
I like this article because it points out how undeniably awful some of these decisions were in a "this signifies something is seriously, fundamentally wrong with Apple design" way. I really hope Apple listens a does a major course correction.
Jony Ive’s elevation was the problem: neither he nor his protege Alan Dye (who worked on the boxes) had UI training or experience and that has shown since iOS 7 where the focus shifted to things which looked nicer on the side of the iPhone box than they are in actual use - stuff like Liquid Glass shipping with an illegible lock screen keyboard is possible because they never put the lock screen in a presentation or product screenshot.
As a complete outsider, my impression is that this started slow because they had to politically overpower Apple’s actual UI group. Liquid Glass probably managed that with a unified look across all devices pitch which should’ve weighted the relative impact on the popular platforms much higher than the niche Vision Pro.
Jobs liked to talk this side of the business up because creatives were the substantial part of the business. Now they sell to everybody it doesn't matter so much. The average person won't even notice the complaints in the original article. They aren't sensitive to it in the way that creative people are.
They don't notice, but they can _feel_ it. My aging mother, god bless, doesn't give a crap about design.. but she updated her iPhone and asked me what I thought about it because she hates it. And it wasn't nitpicking design choices - she just said 'it's so hard for me to do anything now and know where anything is'
They might not _notice_ but that doesn't mean it's not affecting their ability to use their computer smoothly.
With computers such a huge part of almost everyone's lives now, it's a travesty for one of the largest companies in the world to inflict something so subpar on so many old-style
I consider myself above average with UI design, but I still got confused with that dang "i" icon in the Preview app just yesterday.
I had to add my signature and write in the date so it looks like it was handwritten. So the plan was to just draw the date with a pencil tool and if that failed use the text tool to write the date.
First I instinctively clicked the pencil icon which turned out to be a highlighter. That's a great example where if they had added color for the tip and line it would have clearly looked like a highlighter. After that failed, I clicked that "i" icon because it looks like it's for inserting text. Honestly I was in such a rush I didn't even see the info pane popping up and was dang confused when nothing was happening.
I'm very familiar with info icons and have used them in my own apps, yet I had never seen one without the circle around it.
I'll chime in with the others to say that "amateur" users still notice, even if my dad isn't calling me to say "Son, why does this new MacOS version have different icons for the `New` action across apps?"
I had to help him "get his bookmarks back" meaning see his bookmarks toolbar in Firefox. He must have hit a keyboard combo on accident. Since Firefox hides the menus by default, I had to tell him to tap Alt to see the menu, after which he was easily guided to View > Toolbars > Bookmarks Toolbar.
Bad UI design for novices is felt, if not conveyed outright.
Reminds me of how OSX used to treat opacity in app icons as not part of the hithox. So I'd accidentally click the hole in the "O" for Outlook and it wouldn't open, haha.
Everyone makes mistakes every now and then. He also approved the Ping "music social network", and a few other nonsense products that no one wanted or liked.
But when you see mistakes made consistently, year after year, you know the problem is systemic.
The audacity to critique Apple's use of icons (which is objectively justified critique, IMO) while having animated snowflakes falling over the text and images on the site is something on an entirely different level.
Thank goodness for Firefox reader mode. That animation is so incredibly distracting.
It is a personal blog. I would not apply the same kind of criticism to a personal blog, even though it does sound ironic. Moreover, turning off JS was an easy solution. There is no solution right now for apple's UI mess (except not updating).
Personal blog or no, I think the UX and usability critiques are equally valid.
Whether or not the author cares will certainly be influenced by the fact it’s just a personal blog. I wouldn’t expect them to change anything for that reason alone, but the criticism stands nonetheless.
An author of a personal blog does not have to care about judgements of usability vs what they find appealing. A personal blog is a place of self-expression firstmost, not a public service nor a product that targets users. When usability is not the primary goal, you may take unconventional design decisions. If the author likes snowflakes all over the canvas, snowflakes it is. They put an easy way to disable them, I did it in <1 second through disabling JS before I even noticed there was a switch, that's all. Similarly, I would not care about the design choices of apple if I could just disable them even if it took me 5 minutes to do so.
I agree that the author has the right to self express. But in this case, I think the point being made is that it's less about what the author cares about, and more about the author's topic. They're writing about usability and design, while using (arguably) poor judgment and taste for both. It would be a little bit like an extremely out-of-shape person criticizing a marathon running program as being too hard on someone's body, or a homeless person writing that active investing is better than Vanguard's low-fee indexing model. The person's context doesn't make their arguments right or wrong, it just lowers their authority and believability.
> It would be a little bit like an extremely out-of-shape person criticizing a marathon running program as being too hard on someone's body, or a homeless person writing that active investing is better than Vanguard's low-fee indexing model. The person's context doesn't make their arguments right or wrong, it just lowers their authority and believability.
it absolutely would not, it would be more akin to someone wearing a fat-suite for a joke and criticizing someone for running with bad form
but you are taking this so seriously I can't quite tell if you're joking anyway
Yeah. I immediately went to the snowflake icon at the top of the page thinking it would turn the animation off. Instead, it changed the background color :-(
I can't stand animations while I'm trying to read something, and this one is particularly egregious.
It change the background color AND turns off the animation.
(TBF, it slowly fades the animation out, probably for aesthetic reasons, to avoid a jarring sudden stop. I do agree, though, that a sudden stop would probably be more appropriate in this context)
Ohhh thank you! I thought the same as the parent comment: I expected that button to turn off the animation immediately. I guess the author wanted the yellow background to "melt" the snowflakes?
Hah, that's a blast from the past! You've reminded me of "Ameko", which added a little cat to the Amiga Workbench, walking around over the windows. I think I had it from a magazine coverdisk.
A personal blog is not the same as the UI of an operating system. More expressiveness is to be expected in a personal blog. That said it’s so easy to turn off that I was distracted for less than 5 seconds. How easy is it to turn off icons in the menu bar in Tahoe?
In my opinion, I can be a worst UX expert in the world, and I still reserve the right to criticize bad UX elsewhere: the fact that you are a bad "creator" does not mean that you are a stupid "user".
Yes, it is a bit hypocritical, but you can look at the content of the message and judge it without judging the presentation of the message, even if it talks about usability of interfaces in computer software.
Sure. But as Ray Dalio suggests in Principles (https://www.principles.com/principles/633d5d13-8610-425f-ad6...), you will be more likely to succeed at your task if you believability-weight the information you receive. When considering a military strategy, you should probably weigh the advice from a 4-star general who's served in similar circumstances over the advice of a 4-year-old boy who is relying on his experience watching Paw Patrol.
As the worst UX expert in the world, you can obviously feel free to criticize others, but you're probably going to lose a lot of people after the first sentence if you're using 2003 MySpace-style blinking text and animated GIFs to make your point.
But, if a 4-year old boy finds "there's more of them with bigger guns", and a general has a personal interest in hurting someone without you knowing that, you'd be unwise to not consider the words of the boy as you prep your military strategy.
Note that you were careful to establish hard-to-prove circumstances ("served in similar circumstances"), which seems to say that you don't want to discount what the non-expert is saying too easily either.
Sometimes you need an animation to turn your site into a special snowflake of a site, and what better way to do that than to use a snowflake animation? TBF, you can turn it off by clicking on the snowflake icon in the top right corner. But then the background turns from blue into an annoying shade of yellow. Ok, you can click on the sun icon to fix it by switching to night mode. But then... aaaaargh!
This is exactly my thoughts. If you are reading this, author, please either make the snowflakes less distracting or toggleable. They are a pain on mobile.
Yup: all the animation stops, the overlaid snowflakes disappear, and the background changes from blue to yellow. I haven't bothered to check the foreground/background contrast of the two versions, but I suspect that, although the yellow version will have less contrast, the removal of the snowflakes will make for a net benefit to readability for the average person.
I genuinely went looking for an "off" button, and was very confused when the snowflake icon changed the background color instead. I didn't even notice that the snow stops being generated until I read your comment and tried again. I'm both impressed and annoyed.
> Sometimes you need an animation to turn your site into a special snowflake of a site, and what better way to do that than to use a snowflake animation?
It's Christmas, lighten up. I think the animation adds a glorious bit of irony: "look, here's a horribly distracting effect that is almost designed to make it difficult to read the article, and it's still not as egregious as Apple's Tahoe design!"
It's a shame the author didn't test on mobile, but I think we should cut them some slack. It would be understandable for this particular article's audience to mostly be viewing on desktop.
Even if they were being hypocritical, I think the impact of briefly-bad UI on someone's blog post pales in comparison with bad UI in a product of macOS scale.
I don't know, I figure with a billion dollars Apple should be able to do much better at being awful than this. More proactive rather than accidental awfulness. Something that isn't just bad but capital intensive at the same time. Anyone can build a bad UX on a few menus, or a whole system incrementally over time. But to really lean in? Maybe commission famous artists with eye watering fees for each icon, truly over the top marketing campaigns, really get the cash-fired furnaces going. Really just go full-potlatch on things.
Author seems to enjoy writing posts that get lots of votes on site that I would describe as eye-rending, especially the "normal" yellow color scheme. It's aggressively unpleasant to read.
It's easy to justify: it's cute. Just like the other options up at the top. If you click the sun it turns out the lights and turns your cursor into a flashlight. And it has an actual hamburger as the icon for the menu.
It also immediately eats 5% of the raw compute on my RTX 4080 Super, which is more than a dozen tabs in chrome and 3 active youtube videos running, run in each of Chrome, Firefox, Edge-- all combined, which was 3% before loading this page (which is 5% on its own) up to 9% total.
That explains my other comment, which speculated the snow as the cause for my iPhone instantly overheating, followed by screen-dimming throttling.
Also: this is not a plea to stop putting snow/etc on pages. I miss the days of such things in earlier internet. I'd trade back janky plugins and Flash player crashes for the humanizing & personalized touch many sites had back then.
I was starting to wonder why my iPhone got crazy hot. I’m using reader mode and it appears to continue running the web page and animation in the background… crazy.
I found this kinda funny. The content of the page is something I strongly agree with. But then the page itself was just so distracting. I saw the snow flake icon so I tapped it but it just turned my snow into the dreaded yellow snow.
> including the way snow doesn't just immediately turn off but stops falling slowly. I love it.
Funny, i disliked this exact detail. I thought turning it off hadn't worked for a few seconds and i retoggled it on and off a bunch of times before i got it
:-) and while doing this, the background turns yellow — why? how annoying it would be if something like this existed in real life - turning off the fan switches on the lights, and turning off the lights switches on the fan.
Can people actually read it with the snowflakes? The motion draws my eyes and makes it extremely unpleasant trying to read the underlying text. Very poorly thought out decoration.
And yes, I did think "this is terrible, there must be a way to change it", clicking the snowflake icon. The colour changed to a new colour but otherwise it didn't seem to change, so I just clicked back.
Because, as you noted, the snowflakes slowly end, which I didn't realize until seeing your comment.
It's fun. Looks neat. It's an extremely poor idea for a site trying to convey textual information.
Hot take: The snowflakes are fun and when blogs integrate fun things they make me feel joy like when I was throwing marquee elements all over my geocities site in grade school. In an era where most of the content I read is written by AI, the more personal a blog feels to me, the better.
It takes over 10 seconds to turn off fully. I had to go back and try it after your comment, because I thought that button just turned the page yellow, which was worse than the blue.
I ended up using reader mode to read the page. The whole site design undermined the point being made. One of the first things mentioned is not to be distracting. Yet they went out of their way to make their own site distracting. "Do as I say, not as I do."
I literally didn't notice that the snowflake icon turned it off:
1. I scrolled through the article getting more and more frustrated with the snow
2. I scrolled all the way back to the top and saw the snowflake icon
3. I clicked the snowflake, saw the hideous yellow, said WTF and clicked again to go back to blue
4. **I never noticed** that the snowflake *does* stop the snow, but *only* stops *new* snow, so the existing snow continues to fall across the screen
5. I clicked several other things, then came here to complain and saw this thread
Came here to say the same. Not only is it redundant and distracting, destroying the reading experience, it even makes the fucking fan turn on and make noise because apparently it’s a lot of work for the video card. A presentation of valid arguments destroyed by something completely superfluous and ironically the same kind of stupidity that’s the target of the criticism made.
FWIW, while I'm complaining about this site I'm actually adding a nice easy-on-the eyes particle system in the background of a point-and-click online game. You don't put it in front of the content or behind text people are supposed to read.
This is such a common failure mode with coders who do their own design. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.
A hint to the site developer: add an option to purchase the Weather Control Pack Platinum Pro+ to get to choose your site weather any way you like. It would fity nicely next to that 'Personal Information' section. Who knows, someone might even 'purchase' it since that seems to the thing to do in the Cult of the Fruit.
It seems like Apple's hardware design is universally loved with much acclaim, why is their software getting progressively worse?
It's not Microsoft-add-all-the-bloatware-and-adverts-we-can worse, but it's 20-year-old-operating-systems-were-better-designed worse.
We're getting to a point where I think Linux windowing systems like KDE are better designed. And it seems that all they had to do was not change much over the span of a few decades.
Or am I out of touch? It feels like I could use a computer better back when XP was the mainstay.
It's quite simple: Most people who work in software now aren't actually very good at their jobs, at least in terms of how that job would have been defined 15 years ago.
This is because incentives have changed such that being good at your job in your average mega-corp has very little to do with the outcome: To climb their ladder, you optimise for impact and move before you have to deal with the consequences.
When company is small and the leader is competent, it's easy to weed out incompetent employees. But beyond certain size, or when the leader themselves is incompetent, this becomes impossible, and the whole company starts to rot.
Maybe Apple just got so many things right early on, then the people with experience slowly left and inexperienced people kept showing up and they felt compelled to keep making changes to justify their jobs. How do they justify their job if they can't roll out huge visible changes? So they rationalize whatever change they wanna make and keep advocating for it until they get the green light, regardless of whether or not it's a good idea. The best part is that cleaning up this mess will probably lead to a whole bunch of promotions, even if just ends up circling back to what they should've already known.
I think a lot of key lessons that were studied and learned back in the day weren't adequately transferred to the new generation.
>How do they justify their job if they can't roll out huge visible changes?
This is the core rotting value in so much of big tech. So much of your bonus, performance review, promotion package, etc is hinging on "delivering impact" (ie: doing the flashy stuff). Imagine a world where some internal R&D team took a risk on liquid design but then thought it was okay to not ship it because it didn't work out.
Problem is that “the same” isn’t good enough. To get a promotion, you’d need to somehow prove that your specific change was so good that more customers are happy now than before.
To prove that, you need some data to compare before/after. Hm, how about how much time people send in the software? Seems like a decent proxy. Well, plenty of people are very unhappily addicted to social media. and yet that’s what companies and investors frequently look at.
It’s very hard to come up with an incentive where just keeping things the same is acceptable. I mean it’s basically an admission that you as a company cannot innovate or invent better ways for people to interact with a computer.
We used to treat macOS and Windows like direct competitors. They used to channel their efforts into competing for market share and routing one another from weak customer-bases. For a while, they did give us better operating systems.
Today, both software products are treated like monopolies. macOS is satisfied being an insular underdog, and Microsoft has no motivation to compete if Apple won't get off their ass.
Yeah I think this is a well known problem. Humans tend to get a lot of stuff right on the first try, and then it's subsequently thrown away in the name of "progress".
It used to be the opposite! From the end of the PowerPC era throughout most of the Intel era, the Mac OS X was the main selling point, while the hardware was slow, overpriced and overheating (they've had some nice touches like MagSafe and "ears" on power supplies for the cable, but that didn't make up for everything else).
People used to build hackintoshes to get Mac OS X without paying Apple's RAM tax or suffer having mid-range laptop GPUs in the top-of-the-line desktops.
Apple's outstanding success with their ARM chips is more of an exception than the rule.
Yes, we can all look forward to the breathless bots lauding Apple's visionary hardware prowess when they remove that damned stupid notch ten years from now, while replacing it with something equally egregious.
My personal theory is that making the menu bar transparent by default (and shifting/ritating backgrounds) on Tahoe is preparing for OLED laptops and displays, which maybe will get under screen cameras or just a nicer cutout.
Not all reverted. Still waiting for my USB-A ports and the SD card reader, on laptops described as "Pro". It's as if Apple forgot that "Pro" is a shorthand for "professional" instead of a meaningless marketing term.
Did not know that, thanks for the info. But Apple lost me as a customer 10 years ago with their hostile actions. Even if they added back USB-A, I wouldn't go back.
Hardware improvements are easier to quantify and progress naturally comes in incremental steps.
Software however especially from UX point of view, is more likely to be more or less ready at some point. Any improvements are marginal and subjective. What are the large UX teams at Apple going to do if not redesigns for the sake of redesigning? I wish it would happen, but it’s hard to imagine Apple shipping an annual OS release without noticeable visual changes.
> It seems like Apple's hardware design is universally loved with much acclaim, why is their software getting progressively worse?
It's not so different from the rationale for many consumer electronics products: novelty for marketing's sake rather than functionality. Similarly, notice the ridiculous trend of removing most physical buttons from car dashboards, started by Tesla and mindlessly aped by the other carmakers.
There's plenty to criticize them for on the hardware front. Why design round edges on your macbook pro and then put cheese grater vent holes on the sides where you're most likely to pick it up? Same goes for the Apple TV remote.
In the early 2000s I helped an engineering from transitioning from the CAD software CATIAv4 to v5.
While v4 was pretty much text based in early v5 every item and action had an icon, often only an icon. The manual read something like this:
"To do ⌘ you navigate from the ⌙ page to the ⌟, while holding the middle mouse button. The⌇will open and you will see the ⌆."
I think they did that with good intentions. CATIA being a French product sold all over Europe and beyond, localization must have been a significant line item. The result was a nightmare though and they to toned the reliance on symbols down in subsequent versions.
> with every extreme of inventiveness of visualization in its most exaggerated form, what did we have every fifteen seconds? An utter halt to the action, while words flashed on the screen.
> It seems like Apple's hardware design is universally loved.
To be fair, the bar is really really low in terms of mobile hardware. It’s just really hard (and expensive) for new players to design, build and manufacture hardware with competitive processing power.
It's just entropy. It takes a special kind of person to be able to fight it in a big org. Jobs, Musk et. al. are assholes but they do manage to push their vision through. Probably because they are assholes.
Somehow its usage has quickly devolved from a very specific pattern companies used to squeeze “value” out of their customers over time into just “something getting worse in any way” or even just “something I don’t like now but I did before” which is not at all the point.
Liquid Glass has worse performance implications, which is bad for older devices with slow processors, and older devices with older batteries. It's also very difficult to use on older devices with smaller screens, like the 2022 iPhone SE. Further, Apple stopped making it possible to upgrade to minor releases for security patches.
All these give someone a reason to replace their otherwise perfectly-working iPhone sooner.
Man I really disliked him for creating that word that got so overused that I saw it in practically every single comment thread this past year. Now I dislike him even more for actively promoting its overuse. Ugh.
I never disliked an OS as much as I dislike what Apple is doing with MacOS (and iOS by extension). I've been with MacOS for 20 years, but I've switched at home to Linux full time 2 years ago and I don't regret it. At work I'm forced to be on MacOS. It's concerning how Apple doesn't care anymore about user needs, usability, design and consistency. Where it was the best OS in the past for me, it's not anymore. Other OSes are better suited for where I'm at in my life.
Importantly, that philosophy relies on the result having merit, and working cohesively on its own terms, even if it's not your preference. Like, if I go to a restaurant that refuses me sugar for my tea, it better be darn good tea.
I might prefer my tea with sugar, given the choice, but I'll still be satisfied if the tea is very good (this metaphor assumes I don't demand sugar, but merely prefer sugar). I might prefer that Apple products work differently, but if they work well, I'll tolerate that they don't work exactly how I want. In either case, I'm willing to adapt my preferences a bit to an expertly made product.
> I thought that was supposed to be Apple’s thing. “We decide how to make it and you decide to buy it or not.”
This was Apple; your customization options were limited, but things were well designed and cohesive. If you were willing to adapt to their design paradigms, you'd benefit from their expertise, and also have to put in less effort tweaking. Plus you could pick up any random new Apple product and be up to speed immediately.
But to extend the metaphor, if the tea sucks, I'll stop going to that restaurant. If Apple makes their UIs both immutable and bad, I'll use something else.
This is an opinion, though. macOS did do certain things better than Windows, but it also did a lot of things markedly worse. The Mac market share never overtook the Windows market, on-merit it was considered a worse product. You or I might think it was a decent system at some point, but the evidence is really just anecdotal.
I agree with the parent comment, Apple's "thing" was their financial skill and not their manufacturing or internal processes. Once the IIc left the mainstream, people stopped appreciating the craftsmanship that went into making the Apple computer. It was (smartly) coopted by flashy marketing and droves of meaningless press releases, documented as the "reality distortion field" even as far back as the 1980s.
How is that different with other companies? Like with Windows? Do you have a choice of UI when loading the OS? Are there ways to remove the taskbar and replace it with a third-party one? Can you change all the core OS shortcuts?
The fact Apple makes and sells the only hardware to run macOS does not mean the software is fundamentally different from the rest of the industry. Apple has deprioritized backwards compatibility, not user choice.
> does not mean the software is fundamentally different from the rest of the industry.
I bet you wish that was the case. XServe existed though, and for all of Apple's confidence in the product it was (and is) treated like a second-class citizen that doesn't compete with free alternatives.
There is literally nothing that stops macOS from falling into the same pit of irrelevance besides first-party hubris. How much do you trust Apple to make smart, responsive decisions?
Seriously? UX in Linux is awful, there's no single desktop metaphor. You have hundreds of distros each with their quirks. There is no "Linux" other than the kernel.
There's a lot more consistency in the Apple ecosystem.
Don't get me started on the other crap with Linux distros: power management doesn't work, audio barely works, heck even though both Linux and MacOS use CUPS for printing, in MacOS it works way better.
But Linux is getting better each year (seriously, KDE is amazing, Gnome works well if you like it), made by hundreds of independent people, while Mac is getting worse, made by one focused company.
I've had no problem whatsoever with 2 laptops regarding power management or audio.
Get a major distro and major software if you don't want to wander into problems.
Judging from this article, Linux seems to have more consistency between the thousands of applications all built by different people with no guidelines than MacOS right now.
At least half of those complaints on the article have standard, close to universally agreed icons.
Your experiences are not universal. I'm sorry that happened to you, but I've personally never had a power management, audio, or printing problems with Linux in 17 years of using it.
Having no single desktop is a huge bonus. If you don't like one distro, you might like another. "Consistency" is a poor way to restate, "Windows or MacOS might be bad, but at least someone can unilaterally make it worse against your will."
I'd rather choose a drink from a soda fountain than get a more consistent flavor from a urinal. But to each their own.
It looks like an old comment from 5 years ago. I bet you haven't tried Linux lately. Yes there are many flavors of this OS, and that's alright. Everyone will find what it needs. As for the other crap that doesn't work: again, install and use any popular distro. You'll see for yourself. Most recent hardware is perfectly supported and things just work™.
The other way is true too. I’m reading for about 20 years quite often that Linux is perfect at last, no issues exist at all, and it improved immensely the year before, because “back then” (ie one year before) it was terrible. And of course if you mention a problem under an article mentioning problems, you obviously just somebody who doesn’t know anything. You just need to “configure” it bro, because a famously unreliable thing cannot be unreliable, because it worked for them in a completely different setup. And probably I will read these in 5 years too.
CUPS has "just worked" on Ubuntu for me for like, as long as I can remember. If you use only GTK apps and either gnome or cinnamon, things are a lot more consistent than Windows (like, windows itself, not even 3rd party stuff)
Whereas on my laptop and my distro it works. And a lot of other people probably feel the same way. I use Linux at work and have never had issues with it in the last 6 years. Prior to that, yes.
The word "stable" literally does not appear in the comment to which I was responding.
Maybe I'm just scarred from laboring much too hard in the 90s and aughts to get desktop and laptop Linux working, but here is my current take:
- Yes there is fragmentation. Perhaps there are not hundreds of Linux distros but, off the top of my head: Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, RHEL, CentOS, Rocky, Alma, Arch, Manjaro, openSUSE, Kali, PopOS, elementary OS, Zorin, Gentoo, Alpine, NixOS are all viable options. Next, pick a desktop: GNOME, KDE Plasma, Xfce, LXQt, Cinnamon, MATE, Budgie, Pantheon, Deepin, Enlightenment. Each has different UX conventions, configuration systems, and integration quality. There is no single Linux desktop and its bewildering.
- Power management now "works" in the sense that, when you close your laptop lid and re-open it, yay! the machine (mostly) comes back to life instead of just crashing. It took us at least 15 years to get to that point. However, PM does not work in the sense that battery like on my M4 Macbook Air is literally 2x what I would get from a comparably priced Linux laptop. Part of that is better hardware, but _a lot_ of that is better power management.
- Audio now mostly works without glitching, just like it did in OS X circa 2002. But God help you if you're not using a well-supported setup and find yourself manually having to dick around with kernel drivers, ALSA, Pulseaudio. (Just typing these words gives me PTSD.) Here is a typical "solution" from *within the past year* for audio troubles in Linux: https://www.linux.org/threads/troubleshooting-audio-problems.... There are thousands more threads like this to be found online. For typical, 99%-of-the-time use cases, experiences of this sort are rarely if ever encountered on Mac.
- Printing is arguably the closest because, as previously noted, they are both using the same underlying system. But printing, thanks to AirPrint, is still smoother and more pain-free on Mac than on Linux.
- Don't even get me started on Bluetooth.
It's not that I'm anti-Linux, I wanted sooo bad for Linux on the desktop and laptop to succeed, for a variety of reasons. But Steve J came along 25-30 years and completely pulled that rug out from under us.
I've used Mint for a long time. Extremely solid, stable and simple. In the last three months I've been on Arch (through Omarchy) and it's also very stable and so powerful. Everything just works. I have a pretty beefy computer and even my favorite game of all times (Path of Exile 1) runs fantastically on it.
if they're going to just crap on their software, I'd be far happier with just neglect.
They did desperately need a distraction from the complete bedshitting mess they've made of AI though. Regardless of whether you think AI is good or wildly overpromised, getting on stage and lying through your teeth about what your AI does is what C-tier companies do, not Apple. Except they do now.
Looking at the old Microsoft menu gave me a pang of nostalgia for what we lost. It was so clear and readable. The icons were clearly colored and so easy to understand.
I think the key issue with macOS is that they don't seem to have someone who is looking at the whole ecosystem holistically to make sure that there's consistency and integration across experiences. You probably have development silos for different applications and they don't really integrate with each other. There should really be a role like Integration Emperor that exists outside of the traditional corporate hierarchy who can go to different teams to push for increased consistency.
>I think the key issue with macOS is that they don't seem to have someone who is looking at the whole ecosystem holistically to make sure that there's consistency and integration across experiences.
The complaints were that the UI was not customisable, with limited functionality, stubbornly did things the Mac way even if that was confusing to Windows users. The implementation was often slow and sometimes buggy.
But it had taste and attention to detail. It followed Apple's own HIG (design guidelines). The UI had some flashy details, but they had a purpose or at least didn't get in the way. I don't feel any of this in the current Apple designs.
UI was simple, maybe too simple, but it made sense. The only complaint from that era was the thin scroll bars and the flipped scroll direction, both of which are forgotten about and accepted nowadays.
As someone whose primary interaction with her computer is via her drawing tablet stylus I still loathe the thin scroll bars; I've turned them off in prefs but I still regularly encounter apps and websites that force them and they have to be really special to overcome that.
They do have a culture of silos and secrecy where employees are not allowed to talk to each other. This is actively enforced to prevent leaks but this also gets you this.
I used to be a die hard UI perfectionist. I thought there were perfect UIs, and that you could go more or less away from or toward perfection with choices.
But lately, over the past 5 or 10 years, it seems to me that perfection in UI is just as arbitrary and mutable as people's tastes and preferences.
It's hard to admit it to myself, but I think my love for the early Mac OS and Windows 9x UIs was mere puppy love at first sight, and now is simply nostalgia.
To me, it seems very related to the idea of how to fall in love with a person. There seems to be nothing you can measure it against. You simply either do or do not feel a connection with the person, an inexplicable infatuation. And if you do, then that love cools and settles into something more subtle but just as real over decades, until you're holding hands on your deathbeds. Yet I can't for the life of me figure out how it begins, or what its metrics are, or where its catylists come from. I suppose this is what Randall Monroe wondered all those years ago when he came up with his blog's subtitle. If only I could ask him, perhaps I would have the answers to everything.
"Perfection" is an irrelevant concept here, but "principled" is not. The reason people favored certain older OS UIs is because they were substantially more principled in their designs, not because the executions of those principles looked a particular specific way.
The Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines, especially the old ones, were seriously well thought out. Apple just doesn't follow them anymore, and that leads to demonstrably poor design choices. "Consistency" is still one of the three banner concepts (see https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...), and Apple just fails wildly at paying attention to itself.
Windows 2000 and Mac OS 9.x.x were contemporary with each other, are both considered to be strong examples of principled interface execution, and they were very different from each other in both behavior and appearance. They were also notably both the last generations of iterative executions of principled designs before both companies started veering off into the wilderness.
There is a big nostalgia factor which I think corresponds to the UIs you grew up with and are most familiar (would be Windows 2000 and XP for me) however I think it doesn't explain everything.
By that logic, you shouldn't have any particular preference for newer UIs (apart from how similar they are to your "primed" UIs) and you shouldn't ever able to discover new UI patterns you particularly like. You should also be unable to articulate why certain UIs are good or bad, or your reasons should be wildly inconsistent.
I don't think this is generally the case. There lots of articles like this one, and usually the takeaways are similar: UIs should be predictable and consistent and allow the user to reliably find actions and elements. Ideally they should also have markers and "fast paths" to allow more experienced users to find and do an action quickly. They should not overwhelm the user with too much irrelevant things.
That's the very high-level gist of it. There is actually lots of research in the details of it, which you can get a glimpse of in books like "The Design of Everyday Things".
They just don't seem to have a very high priority in current tech development for some reason.
That a good part of the industry seems to have essentially given up on GUIs, left them to the fashionistas and engagement maximizers and retreated to the command line and TUIs instead also doesn't bode well.
I don't trust such books and research. The fundamental thing in question here is what makes Beauty beautiful, which I think is indefinitely mysterious and perpetually elusive. If anyone claims to have grasped at a few concrete conclusions or tangible expertise, I think they're just trying to sell it. The concepts of beauty apply equally to all forms of art, which includes GUIs.
I do agree that Steve was somewhat revolutionary in this, bringing his personal quest for beauty into early GUIs through his (overly) perfectionistic command. I remember a decade or more ago being struck by just how genius it was for him to bring professional typography into personal computers, complete with kerning and everything.
> The fundamental thing in question here is what makes Beauty beautiful
GUIs are tools first and art second.
Any GUI that looks good, but gets in the way, or fails to make the task at hand easy is not a good GUI.
The books and research are about making GUIs functional in an effective way. No one is claiming that a GUI that follows all the principles will look good. However it will make the task at hand easier to perform than it otherwise would be.
The problem is when people in charge of GUIs focus exclusively on Graphic Design instead of UI design. They are different fields, with different goals that only sometimes overlap.
I don't disagree with much of what you said. Form and function have to be married harmoniously, which inherently increases beauty. When form decreases function, so does beauty dissipate. And I think GUIs have gone in that direction. They have not maintained the principles that would help bring proper balance.
I've seen this logic (and similar) posted often and i disagree. By this logic, for example, i should find Windows 3.1 the best UI but actually i think Windows 2000 was peak Windows. Similarly i think Snow Leopard to be peak Mac OS X (i include macOS here) and while it was the first Mac OS X i used, i think i was old enough at the time to not be affected by nostalgia much (and it wasn't that long ago).
Also there are certainly better UIs than others, otherwise people wouldn't complain about software having bad UIs (see GIMP, older versions of Blender, etc).
I wonder how much of it is the seeds of principles of beauty being planted, then watered over time, and finally sprouting at a ripe age.
For example, I also am old enough to have used DOS before Windows 3.1 came out, which was my first GUI. When Windows 95 came out, it was a clear improvement, but retained the same principles as Windows 3.1 began. Windows 98 iterated on it, and Windows 2k perfected it in my eyes.
So that when Windows XP came out, it abandoned the principles, going for a look that felt cartoonish and childish to me, but for others was perhaps casual and inviting. It was during this time that I discovered Compiz and other Linux eye candy, and although it abandoned the fundamental principles that Win 3.1 planted, it almost admitted this with pride, submitting a new set of principles altogether.
So when Windows Vista came out, clearly trying to compete in the arena of that new set of principles of beauty, I was ambivalent but mostly impressed. That's when I found out about Mac OS X, which Compiz et al. were clumsily imitating, and I fell in love with them, which I realized had perfected those principles before Microsoft and Linux even began to imitate them.
It almost seems like the same concept as the original purpose of MMA (mixed martial arts). There is a perfection particularly to a set of principles. You can be the best at boxing, or the best at Brazilian Jui-Jitsu, and it's almost comparing apples to oranges because they're so fundamentally different that they don't actually mix well (the current UFC being proof that the experiment has failed and created a monster).
It's the same reason movies exist like Home Front: it's that age old question, "who would win if ...", in this case London gangsters vs Southern American gangsters. Or Freddy vs Jason, or Alien vs Predator. I wish I could remember more, because those are some of the most interesting types of movies, with different real human cultures being pit against each other. Like David and Goliath, the top champions of two cultures facing off for the world to see.
I think MacPaint is one of the most beautifully designed GUIs ever created.
Individual style choices (e.g. whether to use a shadow or not) are always going to be opinionated. Even if one choice is objectively better, it's not going to be so 100% of the time, in every context, to all users.
Consistency is always better. App A and App B should use the same save icon, without any caveats, regardless of what it actually is. If you offer me a consistent experience, I'll take it whether it's Windows 95 or Tahoe.
Perfection doesn't exist, but you can measure outcomes. For example, how quickly users are able to complete a certain task, or how many mistakes they make while trying to complete a certain task, etc.
Based on the measurement of these outcomes you can absolutely say whether an interface is better or worse than another.
Anyone in software design in the 90s/early 00s was quite familiar with this subfield of human factors. Very few people making software today are. As vibe coded UIs become more and more widespread, it's only going to get worse.
I fell in love with early macos as well, but it was the enormous amount of care they put into it that got me. Maybe it was actually the same thing for you, not puppy love.
> But lately, over the past 5 or 10 years, it seems to me that perfection in UI is just as arbitrary and mutable as people's tastes and preferences.
No. Perfection exists, but it's not how something works or looks. Perfection is stability. A bad solution that you know inside and out is preferable to a "better" solution that you have to spend time to think about every time you use it.
Yes, it is. UI is not not about stable form, alone.
> Otherwise any old solution that does not change would be good.
UI design is nuanced, regardless of the large number of people who dismiss it as borderline irrelevant. eg The most common used elements should be the easiest to recognize and access. Culture driving change is the most useful, while random association is less useful and statistically worse for user experience.
Apple has taken a great leap in misinterpreting that if the most common functions benefit from iconography, there must be a benefit the icons convey, as opposed to the other way around. It's disturbing.
> In menus, the ellipsis character means that the user must provide more information before a command will operate.
More specifically, to the user it means they’ll still have the opportunity to back out of the operation; that it won’t take effect immediately upon clicking the menu item. It allows the user to “explore” the command without committing to its execution yet. For that reason, IMO the ellipses in “Attach Files…” and “Add Link…” are appropriate.
What I’m seeing more often in practice is that menu items that should have an ellipsis don’t. They make you wonder what the immediate effect of the command would possibly be.
Indeed, the ellipsis means some kind of dialog box will open. Regarding the wording "the user must provide more information", that's what that dialog box is for, while also providing a "cancel" option so that as you say, the user can back out. Surely "Attach Files..." brings up a file requestor, so it's exactly the correct use. I can't see why the blogger thinks otherwise.
It's just a small nitpick though. The article generally seems to do a good job of highlighting some frankly shocking (and worrying amateurish) problems in these menus.
And modern desktops do not even documentation, there are all sorts of shortcuts and small features in Windows, for example, that seem to be passed around between people like computer game cheats instead of being documented somewhere :-P
Web technologies took off, web giants emerged, and the desktop monopoly maintaining rough standardization and being forced into steady ease of use improvements was hobbled.
Microsoft’s desktop dominance was challenged by Google Docs and Facebook apps in parallel, Microsoft had to jump to web tech late, and the last few decades have been them reconciling their stack to the fact they missed the web and mobile despite pioneering key user-facing tech for both. Then they entered catchup-mode for client and search tech, only to later realize maybe they don’t care because the cloud catchup efforts blossoming into MS-consultant orthodoxy for every-darned-thing made their cloud offerings the most profitable bit… Ads and desktop stagnation pulled Windows into a weird OSX-at-home territory everyone kinda hates. And then LLMania took off, entrenching MS cloud and AI strategies into all of it, all the time. Pushing so hard that they’re gonna spend billions distancing their semi-Enterprise office brand from the term‘Microslop’.
TLDR: the rush to the web/mobile moved the focus off thick clients and desktop affordances, the money is elsewhere, a universal GUI toolkit isn’t obvious for anyone, and SaaS feels better online
500+ comments and no one's mentioned the jack of all trades "share" button? I would really love to see the internal metrics around how many users press share because they're actually sharing something versus wanting to use any one of the myriad of other functions it hides.
Exhibit A: In Safari I had to "share" this page to use the "Find on Page" feature to search whether anyone had mentioned the share button yet. Bonkers.
> Exhibit A: In Safari I had to "share" this page to use the "Find on Page" feature to search whether anyone had mentioned the share button yet. Bonkers.
You can also long-press on the address bar to see a whole slew of even more hidden functionality
It's very hard to reply without making a snarky sarcastic comment at Apple's expense. Thanks for sharing that super intuitive interface trick, it's so obvious now I know it's there.
Feels like this could be a riff on Android's 'Share' functionality, which is actually the user-friendly name for "send an Intent". And that means that any inter-app handling ends up stuffed into a "Share" menu that pretends only social media apps exist. So you do "Share -> Edit with Photoshop" or similar.
Sounds like Android's share button is exactly as ambiguous as the one on macOS/iOS... A dumping ground for all the misfit utilities and functions that couldn't find a home anywhere else on the system.
The surface area of the Apple suite is now enormous. We now have an incredible array of devices, physical environments, and purposes. It's really quite staggering: just look at the spans between a) checking the UV index on Apple Watch and writing code in Xcode on Mac, b) tracking an outdoor run and navigating with Car Play and watching a movie on Apple TV, and c) messaging and maneuvering spreadsheets and designing/building. Huge expanse across each spectrum.
Apple's effort to maintain some semblance of consistency across this incredible array is laudable. (Which is not the same as letting the grievances highlighted in this article slide; I agree with the author 100%.) We all want consistency (probably to a degree greater than Apple is capable of delivering) simply so that we can use the metaphors we're familiar with.
I imagine Apple has dozens of design teams, each of which cannot talk to more than a sliver of the others, with probably not a single person aware of exactly how many design teams exist at once. There was probably a period in Apple's history – and probably not that long ago – when a single employee could assess the iconography across the entire suite. Those days are over.
My question: beyond preventing the obvious and severe transgressions (Liquid Glass), what systemic solutions are available on a scale like Apple's to maintain high-quality and strong consistency?
(I appreciate that Apple does generally one design refresh per year, in contrast to the continuous zero-utility tinkering observable in Google's products, for example.)
> We all want consistency (probably to a degree greater than Apple is capable of delivering)
This thinking is the fatal poison of the tech industry. The further you repeat it, the faster the industry dies. Watch:
"We all want privacy, probably to a greater degree than Facebook is capable of providing."
"We all want browser competition, probably to a greater degree than Microsoft is willing to provide."
"We all want advertisement options, probably to a greater degree than Google can tolerate."
See what's happening here? You're not making a concession, you're flat-out accepting their failure. Apple can provide consistency, they're a trillion-dollar business that has every incentive to compete on their own merits. Instead they carve out arbitrary and harmful rules for each platform and then steelman it when any authority of any kind suggests that they're wrong.
This isn't a "perfect being the enemy of good" situation, it's degraded into "good being the enemy of intolerable defaults" instead.
My question "what systemic solutions are available on a scale like Apple's to maintain high-quality and strong consistency?" was sincere.
I'm neither complacent (as you seemed to imply) nor magically hand-waiving a "just do it" notion (as you seem to exemplify). I'm seriously interested in what it takes to effectively manage complexity as this scale.
Ever since I first tried a modern Mac (around the time of M1 MacBook Pros with Max coming out: work mandated, or I wouldn't), I could easily see inconsistencies all around the system, and could never get to grips to why people cling to the belief that it has consistent, simple UI. It was as inconsistent as GNOME (which I mainly use), and sometimes more so (though this could be my personal bias, since I've used GNOME since before 2.0 days, so 2003 or so -- though, I'd note that 2.x series was significantly more consistent, especially with Sun-contributed GNOME HIG, than 3.x still is).
Not to even mention hardware support, as I had a lot of issues with Realtek external USB network devices randomly disconnecting (and they are in many USB-C hubs, including inside USB-C monitors), with no such issues under Ubuntu.
I imagine there is some history around MacOS being similarly much better in the past, but I've never seen anything great about MacOS UI/UX in comparison to GNOME.
I do like their performance and battery life, but the "shells" it's stuck in also sucks (until recently, only glossy screens; shallow keyboards with sharp palmrest edges; either heavy or passively cooled; no touchpad buttons...). Putting some of this hardware into a new Thinkpad X1 Carbon case would be amazing, though I'd want to run Linux on it.
Good that Alan Dye is no longer at apple. Liquid Glass on macOS is a mass. The icons, the floating side menus, the inconsistent corners, the new tabs in Safari..
On iOS it's totally fine, but on macOS it's a disaster. I've only updated one machine so far and will keep all others on Sequoia until this mess is resolved.
You can get away with sloppy, cluttered and inconsistent UI on mobile when everything runs serially, full-screen.
But bring that to desktop, where your UI is windowed and appears alongside (or overlapping) other windows, and you end up with chaos.
The floating sidebars are a prime example of this. Why should I have to expend mental energy to differentiate what's an actual window -vs- what's just a novelty round-rect with a shadow (oh, and and window controls for the parent round-rect, which is a window)?
Yeah, but I doubt that would change much; the amount of damage done would be difficult to roll back. What do you think Apple is going to do for the next macOS: "Look we told you to design all these extra icons last year. Guess what, this year we want you to remove them."
I just can't imagine that happening. This is the fundamental thing that is wrong with this. They had the OSes in beta for a few months, barely listened to feedback, and now we're stuck with the damage. For how many more OS iterations?
I really wish they had at least macOS in a different cycle than iOS (and with the idiotic year version names, they've brazenly signed themselves up for the yearly schedules.) I really couldn't care less about what damage they do to iOS after iOS 7, but I still haven't upgraded to Tahoe and I won't do so until they roll this design back entirely...which I don't see happening.
Maybe I'm just pessimistic about Apple at this point but I feel like no amount of criticism is going to change their design trajectory now, unless it affects their bottom-line.
I hope with change in leadership correction of these things will be possible again. Not just Alan Dye, but Tim Cook is rumored to leave in the next year too.
Hah, really? If you enter recovery mode and install an OS via network it installs the OS the device originally shipped with, right?
On an Intel-based Mac:
- If you used Option-Command-R to start up from Internet Recovery, you might get the latest macOS that is compatible with your Mac.
- If you used Shift-Option-Command-R to start up from Internet Recovery, you might get the macOS that came with your Mac, or the closest version still available.
But it wasn't just Alan Dye. He's not tunning the MacOS division. He's not running tge iOS division. There are literally dozens senior management people and several people of the same rank who could've pointed out all the issues and stopped this.
My hope is that the new generation of designers/UX people question and reject many of the UI/UX patterns made popular in the past 15 years and go back to the 90s for inspiration. Resources like the Apple Design Guidelines from 1992 linked in the OP is excellent!
Perhaps my biggest gripe is that many of these terrible UI/UX patterns are built in at such a low level, it is near impossible for developers to override them in the software they build. For example, I really dislike flat UI and particularly flat scrollbars. But it is near impossible to add scrollbars that look like these in any Windows or Mac app I build: https://flowingdata.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/evolution...
Usability has become theatre across Apple products. The sad part is that since Microsoft just seems to copy Apple, over time Windows usability has also degraded severely. I am so frustrated by what Apple, Microsoft and Google have done.
IMHO, the "new generation" of designers is the problem. Same goes for the "new generation" of developers. Want to make a basic HTML page with a contact form? Better get React + 300 dependencies, require the backend to provide a REST endpoint... fast forward six months...
Why has this happened? Everything is too easy. You used to have to have pretty good intelligence to break into UI design and software development. Now, anyone can do it with 30 minutes of "e-learning", and, therefore, the average IQ of a UI designer/or software engineer has decreased, dramatically.
Fair enough. But tides do shift. A lot of today’s terrible patterns (like flat design) were born in the late 2000s and early 2010s. The current generation of UI and UX folks—for simplicity, designers in their 20s—who are empowered to make both big and small decisions at Big Tech are largely riding that inherited wave. There’s still time for their taste to evolve as their confidence and seniority grow.
Have to say, it’s quite wild to me that one of the design blunders of macOS Tahoe could be a pages long blog post.
I’d actually forgotten about the menu icons in Tahoe (I tried Tahoe during the beta period and lasted less than a day) and at first thought this would just be a pretty short piece on Tahoe’s new application icons.
Going back to the article though: another amusing detail is that the one menu where having icons is actually helpful (the Move & Resize menu) actually had those icons before Tahoe.
It is incredible just how widely held the view is that Win2k (or XP in classic mode) was close to peak desktop UI. (Contenders also being Tiger to Snow Leopard and Windows 7).
A key problem is that big US corps have always had a product design mentality that can produce monstrosities like your average cable TV remote and think it is in any way a good solution. That was clearly already an influence on things like XP.
Classic Mac OS' Platinum is also a contender for pre-2000 peaks. I actually never grew up with a Mac, my first one ran Tiger when I was in high school. But over the years I have collected rare or interesting Macs of yore, from before my time and come to adore Platinum and the classic Finder.
Win XP was excellent, as was Win 7 I thought. However, since then KDE has in my opinion, gone even further and become even better. So, the peak is not gone, it has just moved to KDe.
Little UI elements like that are generally inconsequential. I agree they have changed for the worse in a negligible way.
The reason for all this change is simple.
The first reason is planned obsolescence. The GUI has to change enough such that it looks like there’s constant progress so users think the company is moving forward when in reality GUI design plateaued decades ago.
The second reason is designers need to stay employed. So they change inconsequential things and make up reasoning to justify it. Liquid Glass is one of these things.
I also want to note that the most useable GUI is not the prettiest GUI. The current MAC GUI looks more modern and better then he one in the OPs guideline example. So gui design isn’t just about usability, it’s about manipulating consumer psychology.
As consumers ourselves There’s two traps here that people fall for. The first is aforementioned it’s that it looks better and feels flashier (like Liquid Glass) but isn’t rationally or logically better (in fact it can be worse). Most HNers don’t fall for this trap.
The second trap is to think these changes actually matter. Liquid Glass barely changed anything. More icons barely changed anything. This entire blog post is making it out to be a bigger deal than it is when in actual reality the difference is so minor it’s negligible. Every HNer falls for this trap.
> The second reason is designers need to stay employed. So they change inconsequential things and make up reasoning to justify it. Liquid Glass is one of these things.
Working at BigTech, this is the answer. ICs need to find their own impact. That's how you get things like Material Design 3 which talked about how "Bold" it made a brand look - "Boldness" is something you can measure with user tests, and designers need something they can point to and call success; even if everyone knows it's stupid.
I agree, but this concept of updating a design every year was actually a business decision. Planned obsolescence. You see cars do it when they update every year with a new look.
It is as much of an actual business strategy as it is a method used to stay relevant in the company.
The snowflakes are a clever engagement hack. They doubled the amount of comments here. I find it funny for the moment, but I hope this will not become the norm for hn posts.
> I was reading Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines from 1992 and found this nice illustration:
> Fast forward to 2025
The past wasn't as rosy: while the left column is purposefully confusing (the icons don't match the description), the lack of keyboard shortcuts is just bad design "for the sake of emptiness". It degrades, rather than enhances, the "usability of the interface"
And re. icons: while this is correct
> The main function of an icon is to help you find what you are looking for faster.
The following isn't as straight-forward
> Perhaps counter-intuitively, adding an icon to everything is exactly the wrong thing to do. To stand out, things need to be different. But if everything has an icon, nothing stands out.
Not really, there is plenty of difference - length, the presense of ... ellipsis ..., the presence of a keyboard shortcut, the icon itself. This combo gives visual cues without reading, so improves the ease of finding. Yes, it would be better to have colors here and there, but then you have the following fundamental issue:
> Look how much faster you can find Save or Share in the right variant:
But "Save" is something I do NOT want to find fast, I never use that menu item! So I'd prefer the slighly worse (but not bad) busy version rather than a highlight of useless menu items and no icons for the menus I'd actually use!
Of course, there is an easy way out - user customization to match user needs (maybe you never use shortcuts, fine, remove the "noise" then; maybe you don't care about "Save", fine, remove the icon there), but that was anathema even in 1992.
(but otherwise very good criticism of the basic design fails like tiny size, inconsistency, lack of vertical alignment, bad metaphors, etc.)
I've just gone through the rather painful and protracted process of reverting from Tahoe to Sequoia.'Reverting' rather than 'downgrading' since Tahoe is in no sense an upgrade.
I consider myself quite tolerant of UX quirks, iPhones are still pleasant to use, particularly if you select 'reduce motion' from the accessibility settings.
Tahoe though, bugs aside, is just genuinely unpleasant to use and interact with. By far the most offensive thing to me is the pointless rounded rectangle thing. It delivers absolutely no value at all to the user and defies any form of justification. How in any form is this a decision designed to improve things for the user?
The other multiple weirdnesses commented on elsewhere while unpleasant are more liveable with, but I honestly never found a single change that improved my interactions with the computer. How on earth can you have spent a whole year on this and why didn't anyone have the authority to pull the plug?
I would no longer recommend a new mac to my anyone. A second hand model running a previous operating system makes far more sense.
Sort of, but be warned it wont automatically revert a time machine backup of your Tahoe files to a Sequoia system, you have to manually copy them. Similarly you have to recovery boot into disk utility to flatten your hard drive before installing Sequoia from (say) a memory stick.
It all seems a bit needlessly tricky. Frankly though - for me at least - it's worth the trouble.
Tahoe feels like at some level a manager had said "the rule is every menu item needs an icon" and just left individual engineers to figure out what to use.
A lot of these actually feel like unifying on a swift UI component library that has a "menu item" component which has a non-nullable icon as a parameter.
I bet it’s simpler than that: I reckon the management don’t give a shit, and the engineers just got away with whatever they (incorrectly) thought was right because nobody whatsoever was critiquing their work.
As a fan of pictograms in general and very much a visual learner, I don't mind Tahoe icons or menu icons in general. By default I look to those first and then the text, it works for me.
That said, Apple's Liquid Glass is really poor UI. It works okay on my Macbook but feel like it's basically broken a couple features of my second gen iPhone SE, which is kind of untenable imo. Apple also clearly seems to design for larger devices now, which I get but... am I any less of a customer because I use an older device? why should I be de-prioritized?
Lastly, speaking of UI/UX - this blog's website was really bad! Ironic that a blog on UI/UX would have bubbles floating down the screen interfering with text readability and no way to turn them off!
Im also starting to slowly suffer as a fellow iPhone SE enjoyer. Every month another app or website has some UI update that doesnt take the SE screen size into account and is either awkward to use or sometimes impossible because they dont allow scrolling.
> These are OS basics, these are foundational. Every app has them, and they are always in the same place. They shouldn’t look different!
This is the key point for me. I think I go further than the OP, though; I would almost force apps to use the stock menu items. Declare that your app has to save stuff, and the OS can take care of supplying a 'File -> Save' menu item, a Save toolbar icon, and a Save keyboard shortcut.
I guess the more 'liberal' way of doing this would be to make it so easy to do the above that you would really have to go very far out of your way to purposefully deliver a worse experience. But you're free to do that if you're so inclined.
Given the headline, the article took longer to deal with the alignment issue that I was expecting! However, I noticed that some of the screenshots were less affected than I remembered, so I checked my own OS. It turns out that Apple has, sort of, addressed the mismatched alignment problem in its own apps.
Oh, but Google hasn't, so Chrome's icons are still all over the place. Apparently, that's not for the OS to sort out, but every single individual app.
Oh, while some of the menus in Preview are fixed (File, Edit), others aren't (View, Tools). So it's not just down to each app to manage its own icon alignment, but each menu!
That Windows 9x menu screenshot made me realize how far we’ve fallen. This entire post is a great enumeration of many of the problems I have with Tahoe and Liquid Glass
Wow, this article is a tour de force in menu and icon design, I learned a lot. For anyone who wants to understand the design world better, or wants a glimpse into the brain of a design-minded person, this is a great article. Incredibly accessible, incredibly insightful, and just overall a gem.
As a Mac newcomer from Ubuntu, I find it baffling to see this much controversy around minor UI semi-issues while everyone seems to be fully content with the way macOS litters the filesystem, external included, with dot files.
Ah least partly I believe the inconsistencies are due to the design of SF Symbols. That is, they are named after what they look like, rather than what they represent. E.g.: “square.and.arrow.up” rather than “share”.
I do prefer this approach because it makes the symbols generally more useful for everything else than menu/toolbar icons. However as the article makes very obvious, unless a consistent scheme is placed in place, program developers will choose whatever they want to represent common actions.
There seems to be a large issue with Tahoe styling, it seems fine to me. This article seems like someone has nothing else to focus on. If you don’t like the styling, switch OS?
On mobile there’s a snowflake toggle button in the top left corner. I only noticed this after reading the whole article in reader mode and wondering why my iPhone was on fire…
The irony did not lost on me that an article about superfluous visual elements is overlayed by an unnecessary distraction. But maybe the point is to not be 100% utilitarian but to weave in a "warm" feeling of the season. It did give me that a fuzzy feeling for the first few second. Then I was bored; then annoyed. Which pretty much follow my feeling of using Tahoe: Cool -> Meh -> Uggg!
This is why it's important for consumer devices to be "hackable". I'm not saying provide 15 different stock themes for the OS. I'm saying open up the OS interfaces/APIs enough for the community to build their own themes. Give some control back to the power users.
Indeed, hackable is the solution: don't that one icon? Fn + Right click on it and select to hide it, also changing the menu description in the process.
But also do provide 15 different themes for the OS and make sharing themes trivial and built-in so that you can upvote a theme you like (or even a specific icon you like), downvote the one you don't, install the most popular theme in few clicks.
Low quality, inconsistent software is a result of a lack of standards, QA, internal communication and rigged corporate processes that are serving the private interests of managers trying to satisfy the board, not the users.
This is a symptom of no strong leadership that's capable of enforcing standards, Apple downslide as a whole firm where departments and people are fighting each other for resources.
Apple design has a designer problem. For far too long they worshiped the Ives of design, distilled it until there was no flavor left, and then lost their Oracle. Ever since, they have produced sub-par UX/UI experiences. They don't follow their own guiding principals, and they let shareholders and executives tell them what they should do. They figured they mastered remote work before anyone else and rested on their laurels while the industry innovated itself beyond. What was once the pinnacle of user experience is now sub-standard. It takes an extra second to unlock my phone now because of the stupid icon animations. The glass effect on the desktop doesn't look good at all. It didn't in 2006 with Vista, it doesn't now. The only thing keeping me on the Mac is the unified memory M series chips and *nix pedigree.
Soon, I'll get my hands on one of those fancy AMD AI Max's and go Linux everywhere.
The issue is that on Linux, unless you are really careful and fastidious in lowering your expectations, there is no desktop environment that comes close to the experience on macOS (despite its now numerous flaws and horrible regressions).
OT (but funny) when looking for a good icon for translation I couldn't find anything obvious so I went with 译 I've since considered if their icon set isn't simply 3000 years ahead? They adopted our numeric system because it was simply better. Are our icons simply better than theirs? We could color it too. Can use manila yellow to make 存 (save) look like a folder.
That article almost made me cry. I was reading the NewtonOS 2.0 Human Interface Guidelines yesterday and it was so clear, so well-thought. The mess we find ourselves into in macOS Tahoe is impossible to excuse. I have no idea how that got out of the door.
I suspect the icons have to do with a non-english or reading disabilities accessibility requirement.
I'd argue it's not comparable to the 1992 standards because there's not clutter on the right due to dimming for the hotkey labels. These guidelines were written only slightly through Mac OS's colour era, with an extensive install base of monochrome Macintoshes where you could only depict dimming with hard-to-read dithering. Now that colour is ubiquitous, this gives designers the option to fade or tint UI items to make them look less distracting or to deemphasise them.
New Design, New Features, New Programming Language, New Products or even New Sector. It is like Apple without Steve Jobs again the first time around.
None of them were done because it is better for the customers, but do so because it is better for paid promotion, justify their existing department budget or increasing it, and simply for profits.
In many ways Apple is still best of the pack, but they are no longer the same.
Agreed 100 %, but the snow kept me from reading the whole article. Would've thought the snow icon turned it off, but instead it changed the background color… Liquid Glass is bad, but not _that_ bad.
I suppose I wouldn't mind much either way, apart from the misaligned text maybe now that you brought my attention to it.
I agree that colors could help.
Don't hesitate to give KDE/Qt a try, it apparently happens to get all these things right according to this article from a quick glance: everything is correctly aligned, even when in the same menu some items both have an icon and a checkbox, and some don't have anything; icons are mostly meaningful, some icons are colored (most are monochrome though, there's a move to this), and not all items have icons.
I guess it's the kind of things that are hard to get right for a hobby OS like macOS that lacks professional UX designers. :-)
Is there a reason Apple can’t focus on system improvements instead of constantly tweaking with their UI so thoroughly every couple years? I don’t disagree the OS UI needs to be revamped periodically, but it seems they do it too often.
> constantly tweaking with their UI so thoroughly every couple years
Between any of the big 3 companies putting out major OSes (Apple, Microsoft, Google), Apple is the best for sticking to tried and true designs. It's certainly gotten worse the past couple of years (like the Photos app redesign they immediately changed again in iOS 26) and I hope with their new design lead he can pull things back to somewhere sensible, but compared to Android or Windows it's not even close. I used Android for the better part of a decade and every year they'd completely redesign the notification shade, the settings app, they'd switch the SMS app out for Hangouts, then put you back on Messages, then rename it, then change the logo/branding, then redesign it again, etc. Everything was endless changes for no reason, felt like a constant beta.
If you look at the basic iPhone apps - Messages, Settings, Notes - prior to Liquid Glass it's been pretty much exactly as it was when Jobs showed it off at the iPhone reveal 19 years ago.
It's a damned if you don't, damned if you do. Apple could release a new system with zero UI updates and tons of internal improvements and people would call it 'old' and 'dated' and 'lack of innovation'.
It's a bit like adding new emojis in an OS release. There's been reports that new emojis are one of the drivers for getting people to upgrade. No one cares about a zero day security flaw, but that new kiss emoji everyone wants.
> Apple could release a new system with zero UI updates and tons of internal improvements and people would call it 'old' and 'dated' and 'lack of innovation'.
Apple has released incremental upgrades to macOS for years, and I've never heard this criticism of them. On the contrary, I ofter hear people missing Leopard design, and when UI has changed I've heard pushback (ie, when System Settings was renamed and redesigned). On macOS people care about the apps and interactions, not wether the buttons got a new look.
> There's been reports that new emojis are one of the drivers for getting people to upgrade. No one cares about a zero day security flaw, but that new kiss emoji everyone wants.
I agree with this. New emojis are new functionality; you can now express something you couldn't. A zero day security flaw brings no new functionality. Equally, updates to to apps and interactions bring new functionality. A re-skin of the OS doesn't.
I agree, but I'm pointing out why UI changes happen. Apple could certainly do UI changes as part of a cleanup release though. Basically start with getting back to consistency pointed out in the article.
But, having worked with users I've seen first hand out tons of internal improvements are ignored while one small UI change makes 'everything seem new'.
Don't you feel that the circumstances are similar though? There was a pressure (expectation and competition) for new features. There were rapid changes in the UI and UX. But also bugs. And IIRC Mac OS X upgrades were still paid-for.
It was a brave move to spend a major release without adding feature. And people were grateful for it, once it happened.
I'm all about them spending a major release bug fixing. I've been on their side with a much smaller project and see what users say though.
The analogy I use is that no one thinks about plumbing until it's not working. I could stand up and tell people we have the best plumbing ever, it's been improved, is less likely to break, etc... and as long as it works at a surface level it seems the vast majority of user don't care. We actually save little UI tweaks/fixes to point to when doing major behind the scenes upgrades so users 'see' we're doing something. It's silly, but /shrug.
The bosses who are actually in charge likely don’t even use their Macs (and when they do, they only use the web browser) and only care about how the OS is going to look in the demo, not how it works.
Pretty sure Tim Cook has said before he does most of his work on the iPad; it doesn't seem like an unreasonable guess that too many of the C-suites do the same and don't use Macs enough.
He has a knack for putting words to the vague frustrations I feel but can't quite articulate. How does he find so many perfect examples that nail exactly what's wrong?
The old guidelines assumes the user is literate. Apple's focus has changed since then. I'm not saying it's working well, but this vision leads to things like this.
I love this article. It sums up everything I think it's wrong in our line of work.
Things have become very... Amateurish. Think of the way these apps got to where they are-who decided to put all those icons? Probably someone who hasn't a good understanding of usability but maybe - like someone with not enough domain knowledge - looked at other apps and thought that the icons look pretty, while having a small amount of understanding of their purpose.
Why is that happening? I have theories... Hypothesis. Maybe too many managerial types are calling the shots. Maybe we needed more workers than we where able to educate and the average skill dropped (a lot). Maybe companies realized that poor quality doesn't matter, because either customers don't have other choices or the choices that there are are as bad.
Every few months, I will get tired of the current look of my status bar in i3 (or sway on my laptop). For the icons I will go to https://www.nerdfonts.com/, search for ones that look cool, and copy paste them to the relevant-ish sections.
Apparently I'm qualified to be a designer for Apple.
The story in the patterns book about architecture: the architect got tired of arguing with the bishops about a church, so they put a hot tub in the corner on the next design. The bishops agreed that the hot tub must go, and the design was approved.
I think all the icon „bloat“ is from the designers that needed to stay relevant. They learned to use pictures instead of text from some professors and wanted to show how much they are worth. The picture for text pattern is valid if you want to replace one or two words in a commercial but not if you have about 200 icons on your page. Also the trend to a flat black and white design makes the icons just to blend together
Are they really trying to tell me how bad the icons on a Mac are while presenting the website with a constant snow animation, which when turned off turns into a horrible bright yellow colour, and the dark mode toggle is a joke turning the website into a pitch black nothing where your mouse becomes a torch...
What's your suggestion to deal with Apple's current fail? Wait until Tahoe's successor(s) or leave for good? When Jony Ive left, Apple managed to listen to their customers and quickly got rid of the Touch Bar thing, reintroduced a physical Esc key, etc. so there's hope left, isn't there?
> Apple managed to listen to their customers and quickly got rid of the Touch Bar thing, reintroduced a physical Esc key, etc. so
Those are all hardware upgrades that Apple profits from. What incentive does Apple have to make the App Store better, or improve the visual clarity in the iOS and macOS interface? Shouldn't we be seeing downward pressure there too, if innovation can be generalized to software?
Most users don't have a say in the matter, and Apple has exploited their ambivalence for decades. If you're the sort of person who cares, you're not Apple's target audience.
I am very glad I have maintained my hesitance to update the operating systems on my Apple devices. The Liquid Glass announcement from the jump seemed really just like 1. a transparent (no pun intended) ploy to answer broad anti flat design sentiments from the public, without any expressed functional benefit and 2. a way to normalize this sort of design with an eye on a future of wearables and AR devices, something they seemed fairly invested in with the release of the Vision Pro. All of this is at the cost of immediate visual clarity, as it only adds more visual noise to the interface and removes (or at least inhibits) color as a core visual differentiator.
This new system of icons is something I was entirely unaware of until now, since I haven't updated or had to use an updated MacOS device. I've in the past been a defender of MacOS, but it really does feel like the decision making is completely off the rails and has no consideration of the most basic principles of design. Baffling.
Same. All my colleagues had to update, and I feel dread just looking at their screens. There is something very deeply disturbing in this new design that I cannot even pinpoint.
I wait and hope that some point apple will revert certain changes, or at least give more options for disabling some stuff.
Funnily enough, I find icons an improvement overall - even if those are inconsistent, it feels like it gives me more points to anchor my eyes on when skimming through an unknown menu and gives me any context.
Starting to use Mac ~3 years ago, I often encountered giant blocks of text in right-click menus and while pleasing aesthetically, those were a chore to actually parse. For someone who daily drives macOS for, I assume, multiple years more than me, it probably comes down to memorisation, and how it looks becomes more important (with Tahoe breaking habits), but I find the inconsistencies and icons something that actually helps me find my ground.
Granted, the execution leaves a lot to be improved, I won't argue against it. Tahoe in some places feels downright amateurish. Despite that, I'll still take what Tahoe added over no icons at all... I feel like color icons + using them more sparingly would certainly be better though.
I guess a justification for Tahoe icons on my end is - those help me navigate the UI despite all their shortcomings (and ugliness they bring in many places).
It’s best when only some of the items in a menu (like maybe a third of them) have icons, preferably the most important commands. This gives the menus a visual structure and can also help in better recognizing groups of related items.
I agree, that would be ideal, mentioned that above (so used sparingly + colors is what I would love to see). The linked example I saw in the article is what I had in mind and agree with it being the best way to go.
Though even the visual clutter of everything having icons I find faster to scan with my eyes on the first "visit", as those usually suggest the functionality I might be looking for at least. Even if not perfectly distinct, I find iconography faster to parse and guide me towards what I seek. I don't even particularly mind reused ones, as those usually mark a "section" of their own.
However I understand that some people would probably take no icons at all rather than every option having one... or whatever Apple decided to do in a given menu, considering Tahoe's inconsistency all over the place).
One of the touted advantages when Microsoft introduced the Office product suite was the integration and consistency of the apps. Whether you opened Word, Excel or Powerpoint, when the user wanted to quit the app, they'd use the same command - they didn't need to realize that the Quit command at a certain location in one menu had the same functionality as the Exit menu that was positioned in another location in another menu in another app.
Same name, same menu location, same shortcut key.
Much easier to train yourself or your employees - learn one app and you'd be familiar with the other apps in the Microsoft Office product line.
Other companies that tried to create Office-like suites didn't/couldn't create the consistency amongst the apps since they had to acquire the missing apps from other software makers to complete their own Office-like suite.
But this consistency was tempered by common sense.
The goal of shortcut keys was to make common actions quickly accessible to users. But for consistency, the same shortcut key should be used across apps.
When Mail/Outlook was introduced, users found that CTRL-F was bound to the Find command. Makes sense on first thought. But what's the most common command in an email app - is it "Find" or is it "Forward email". Especially when the prevailing standard for CTRL-F in email apps was CTRL-F.
When Bill Gates angrily complains that he's always invoking the Find command by mistake, Program Managers are willing to make exceptions to dogma.
It'd be interesting to compare the menus in Apple's iWork suite (Pages / Numbers / Keynote) to see if their menu items /shortcut keys are consistent or unique.
Note that this Microsoft Office suite consistency didn't necessarily extend to other Microsoft apps. There's no one managing menu item consistency company-wide at Microsoft, just within Office.
Look at where it came from. Excel was a Macintosh app. By 1989, Microsoft had designed one or two Mac applications to blend seamlessly with MacPaint, MacWrite, and MacDraw. (MacProject became MS Project IIRC.) Word on Mac was a native GUI while Word remained DOS based and Word for Windows was still launched from DOS by typing WINWORD.EXE.
Apple Human Interface Guidelines were foundational to Win 3.1. At the same time, doing UI on Unix I was always asked to solve problems by “doing it the Apple Way.” My secret was the MITRE Corp UI book which surveyed best practices from all platforms and underlined the reasoning.
This makes me think of QGIS. I've recently been learning it for a couple different projects. It's an incredibly powerful and configurable tool, but its learning curve is incredibly steep. A big reason for this is that the UI is almost entirely toolbar+button based -- but the meaning of all of the button icons are completely opaque to a new user. And, making things worse, there's no way to change the UI to show text next to buttons. So every time a user wants to do something, even if following instructions that say "click the add feature button", they have to hunt around for it.
QGIS is free software, so it can be somewhat excused vs a billion dollar company. But they could really benefit from some UX expertise...
I've yet to upgrade from Sequoia and having read this _excellent_ article, I'm going to hold off as long as Apple let me.
I really hope the recent changes at Apple mean this will get completely overhauled and they'll return to their roots as design leaders. It will be such a shame if this mess is allowed to continue
I tend to disagree with the author on this. Reading actual words takes time (and, for me, mental energy). I have to look at each character, say the word in my head, then visualize what action that word means. Where as icons have a lot more built in meaning (but lack specificity). I tend to use them as a _local_ fuzzy filter (unless it's a common, well known icon like share) then read the words to understand exactly what they mean.
In other words, I'm not using icons to find a single action. I'm using icons to quickly understand the available options to me. Meaning, they're only there to help me compare and contrast options within the same visual context. It's fine for the same action to have different icons in different places. When I'm looking at the "File" menu, I'm not really concerned what the action looks like on the toolbar (let alone a different app).
> Reading actual words takes time (and, for me, mental energy). I have to look at each character, say the word in my head, then visualize what action that word means.
It might sound flippant but I'm asking in good faith: do you have a reading disability (like dyslexia)? I (and I think this is generally the case) don't consciously read words character by character or say them in my head, it feels more like my brain pattern-recognizes whole words and I understand them "at a glance".
I don’t believe I have dyslexia, but I’m an incredibly slow reader. By contrast, I’m an extremely good skimmer - but in a are much easier for me than text.
But that's the author's point, no? Icons are great when used as visual shortcuts, but the way they're implemented makes absolutely no sense to the point of being detracting. They're inconsistent from menu to menu, even in the same application, and don't even necessarily represent the action they're assigned to.
That's different from how menu icons apart have been used clasically. In e.g. Microsoft Office the save icon was present in the File menu along the text, and also the toolbar, stand-alone.
And it was clear enough that you would trust the stand-alone save icon to perform the action you expected. Icons were also selectively chosen for common actions.
If icons are considered non-deterministic and non-canonical, then they can't [confidently] be used stand-alone.
Also, I'll meet your data point of 1 with mine. I have an iPhone and find it far easier to pick an app from the list of names than pick an icon. I frequently mix them up (and I only use a dozen routinely)
The funny thing is the most clear example of useful icons, the eight top/left/bottom/right/corners options, could be more helpfully replaced by a single image where you click on it in the place you want the stuff, and remove the text entirely (other than for screen reader support).
Does anyone have a good method for avoiding accidentally accepting an "upgrade" notification from Sequoia to Tahoe?
With the potential to set off the installation flow with the wrong click (when its being shown over-and-over again), it makes me anxious and feel like I'm not even in control of my own computer anymore.
For the time being, I've installed a management profile to defer updates, disabled the Settings options for automatic updates, and used "Quiet You!" to try and keep the notifications at bay.
But the maximum deferral time for profiles is 90 days, so if anyone knows of a better solution or work-around, please let me know
It's hard to justify a blog post about unnecessary and distracting visual elements when the you're peering at the article through a freaking blizzard on the screen lol.
Some people (like myself) derive enormous contextual object-recognition and GUI navigation assistance from iconography of any kind (such as emojis that prepend any sort of list item). But others find the same exact thing wildly distracting. We're all wired differently. Hence: why not just make menu bar icons an OS-level setting?
I suspect this sort of thing starts to happen when UX decision-making gets decentralized. No single god-king would allow six or more different new icons; the lack of uniformity is obviously nonsensical to anybody, but not necessarily to a disorganized collective of anybodies.
To all the people whining about the Snow, click the buttons at the top of the page, come on now.
To all the people also whining about the snow, as if it invalidates the opinions written in the article, again, PLEASE click the buttons at the top of the page.
The author is clearly going for a fun, whimsical, playful vibe that works perfectly fine on a personal blog. Expecting something different from a workstation operating system made by one of the Fortune 10, especially one who heavily markets their design "prowess", is perfectly reasonable.
Windows 11 Explorer adds an accent colour to otherwise monochrome icons, which does help distinguish them.
I still don't consciously use the icons when picking a menu item though.
Explorer also "promotes" copy/paste commands to the top of the context menu as just icons with no text label, which can be confusing - your instinct is to just to look for a "Copy" or "Paste" item in the menu, but no - for some commands you must learn the icon and the fact that it doesn't appear in the menu proper.
Also the context menu populates slowly with dynamic items depending on the right-clicked file which causes items to dodge out of the way of your cursor, but I don't want to get too deep into a wider discussion of the awfulness of Windows 11 Explorer...
Oh man I hope some of the people putting stuff in the joke-but-real "personal information" box within the burger menu know that clicking the "download" provides the input from everyone. I'm seeing some seemingly real addresses and social security numbers in there.
Additional thought: It's always interesting to see a website linked from HN with a method for user input and a means to see what other users have posted. Just a funny juxtaposition between the buttoned-up ego (not in the pejorative sense) of the HN poster vs the screaming id of that same user on a different platform.
I personally enjoy changes of scenery, but my parents struggle to relearn how to use their computer every time there is a major OS update that revamps the UI. It's seldom better, it's just change for change's sake, resulting in a lot of time lost to relearning. Sticking to the old OS is only viable as long as security updates continue.
I wish that OS developers would provide the option to retain the bulk of the old UI when a new one comes out, implementing the UI like a swappable "theme." People who prefer consistency could keep most of their old UI, and those who prefer the newer UI can have it.
It looks like they made a decision to include icons for every menu item and the developers for each app had to come up with an icon association for all menu items.
I’m sure they realized along the way that this was a bad idea, maybe it was too late.
It's time to try GNOME. It's MacOS-like (without really copying any specific aspect of it), incredibly clean and polished. Add a dock with the Dash to Dock extension if you want to make it even more similar.
Something on this website made my iPhone (16 pro) immediately begin warming up, become hot to the touch, and invoke screen-dimming throttling. I verified by exiting it and reentering, during which the pattern abated and then recurred.
And then you have Sylvio Rizzi (of Reeder fame) just one-shotting the whole Liquid Glass tenet by using the prominent glass element to focus on the actual content instead of that hideous sidebar (a liquid glass element I hate the most, not just for a way it makes Xcode 26 sidebar 1 cm wider than Xcode 18 with the same content).
I would wear the t-shirt with Reeder screenshot to work if I worked at Apple, and would observe who notices it.
I don't understand the point you're trying to make. I clicked on your link to your own post on x.com and found pretty much the same text, plus a screenshot that does not explain anything - potentially because I don't know how to get to a full-screen-sized version of that image, but I actually doubt that would help.
If it can't be explained in words here on this site, could you please tell me what I'm looking at/for in the screenhot?
I'm not intimately familiar with the UI/UX principles behind Liquid Glass so I could be wrong, but the main difference I see here is that in the second screenshot, on the Reeder app on the left, the "floating" section is used for emphasis on the main content area (right hand side), while in the Finder screenshot on the right, it's the navigation menu on the left that is floating, and brings unneeded emphasis to itself.
Looking at it for 30s, I still don't understand what Apple was trying to do. What am I supposed to believe happens to the table as it goes under that floating menu? It clearly doesn't seem to continue all the way to the left edge of the window. Why not? If not, why bother with that whole floating menu concept if the underlying content arbitrarily stops at the menu?
The most surprising part to me is how people keep calling that nonsense "skeuomorphic" when it doesn't replicate any kind of physical intuition known to mankind. It's just made up physics that looks dumb.
The average person can get used to arbitrarily terrible UX. See 87% of the workforce that uses sluggish corporate-bloatware-filled windows laptops every day. It’s only those who have experienced and gotten used to something drastically better that will be sensitive to all the shortcomings.
Apple software used to be that elevated experience for the average person.
Given the lack of basic consistency though, it’s evident that there are no leaders at Apple that care about UX enough to thoroughly design and test the whole software experience anymore. Just a bunch of random teams doing whatever.
I wonder why every large company seems to fall off in the same way?
Some really excellent points, here. I think reading the old HIG documents should be mandatory in UI design, and departure from it should require serious justification.
One small nitpick: the ellipsis reuse in item #8 - that’s actually valid and would have been back in the 1990s as well. A menu item that is followed by an ellipsis indicates that selecting that menu option will open a dialog box. Inconsistently applied, but that’s always been the meaning.
However I guess the real pain is that there's still nowhere to go. Switching to Windows or Linux means giving up the efficiency of M-series chips, losing key apps, and losing the consistent menu-bar. It feels like an abyss.
Much of the problem stems from inconsistent application of icons. This would have gone better if Apple established (and followed!) clear guidelines for exactly which icon to use for which standard action (e.g. search).
That the icons exist is not necessarily a problem, since they can help teach users which buttons in the UI do which actions. (menu bar for discovery, app UI for less mouse travel + contextual options). But that requires consistency, which the current implementation lacks...
This is the second time in just a few weeks I see a post from some UX person complaining about how some major tech company doesn't "understand" design while themselves having a design that is absolutely abysmal. What made this person think that having gigantic snowflakes flying down a page serving only text and images would be a good idea?
_edit_: I'd also like to point out that I know it can be disabled, the question(s) I then have are 1) why is it enabled by default 2) black text on yellow background is yet another obvious mistake
It’s not obvious to me how black on yellow is a mistake. It’s quite readable, the contrast is broad enough for clarity but not so broad the background overwhelms the foreground. Yellow’s a recommended “light” background for visually impaired people so the choice has precedance (although I confess that many other examples of it I’ve seen use a softer pastel yellow which is more comfortable).
The huge area of intense yellow (or any highly saturated color actually) is very jarring. The eyes get tired quickly. It's really a weird choice coming from a person who is apparently into visual communication.
Btw, I'm using a desktop PC with a large browser window. Maybe on a small mobile screen the problem is less apparent.
Sorry to be a bit of a killjoy, but I find the snowflake animation on the page annoying. Nothing serious, of course— I read the article in its entirety ;)
But ironically, in the case of this article about icon design, the icon for the warm/cool color theme toggle button in the site header is a snowflake (and it doesn’t change when switching to warm colors). I initially thought this button was meant to disable the snowflake animation :D
I found it extremely easy to find the "macos sequoia installer" to download from Apple's servers. Literally those search terms will do it; download -> install.
Admittedly it would be "easier" if Apple gave you the choice of which version to upgrade to in macOS, but that's generally not how software is provided.
This makes me think there’s a sort of system level thing applied to pairing icons with menu items, so, with SIP disabled, would it be possible to modify this? I’m already running things like Yabai and Hammerspoon for a lot of mods, might as well look into clearing the clutter of icons next.
These don't seem to be well thought at all. While reading the article, I've started wondering if they were chosen by an LLM after some developers decided it wasn't worth the trouble of going through every single application and choosing icons for every single menu item. That would explain a lot, in my opinion.
What likely happened is that design leadership commanded that everything needs to have an icon, and most of the individual developers tasked with updating the menus just pick the next best icon from the provided icon library, because there exists no further guidance or oversight. There’s probably a designated procedure for requesting new icons, but why bother if nobody is checking your work.
I don’t think Craig gets enough blame. He’s the one who just loves gadget features and shiny stuff. I don’t think Apple has championed a single Mac feature around making your computer more a powerful system for professional work since he has taken over.
I think the first graphic is a bit misleading because it omits the shortcuts in the more legible left hand side. I love menus that reveal shortcuts. I agree with the main thrust of the article though.
Can someone at Apple who's also on HN please forward this to Craig Federighi? Seems this is a bit of regression or someone asleep at the wheel. I'm overall happy with the stability of Tahoe but some of the design is getting a bit sloppy.
Over the years it feels like Federighi’s pleasantness and enthusiasm in those fun videos just don’t translate into the work he oversees. The software mostly work fine but they don’t make me feel “aha” or “this is how it should be done” anymore.
They should add a button to turn off the icons. The new menu icons aren't the only icon annoyance either, their own app icons look worse across the board with few exceptions.
However something should be clear here: the author mentions the UI guidelines from 1992. These are not current. And definitely not some kind of permanent law.
The article starts with this: > Sequoia → Tahoe It’s bad
And I look at the image... And I like it? I agree with the author that it could be better, but most of the icons (new, open recent, close, save, duplicate, print, share etc), do make it easier, faster and more pleasant for my brain to parse the menu vs no icons.
Again, I don't disagree that you could do it better, I just disagree with the premise that the 1992 manual is "the authority". Display density has increased dramatically; people use their computers more and have been accustomed to those interfaces, which makes the relationship of the people with the interfaces different. Quoting a 1992 guideline on interfaces in 2026 feels like quoting the greeks on philosophy while ignoring our understandings of the world since then.
Humans are definitely not the same as in 1992 when it comes to their everyday knowledge of computer interactions.
And even if human cognition itself were unchanged, our understanding of HCI has evolved significantly since then, well beyond what merely “feels right.”
Most UX researchers today can back up their claims with empirical data.
The article goes on at great length about consistency, yet then insists that text transformations require special treatment, with the HIG example looking outright unreadable.
Menu text should remain stable and not mirror or preview what’s happening to the selected text IMHO.
Also, some redundancy is not necessarily a bad thing in UI design, and not all users, for various reasons, can read with a vocabulary that covers the full breadth of what a system provides.
Most UX researchers today can back up their claims with empirical data.
HCI work in 1992 was very heavily based on user research, famously so at Apple. They definitely had the data.
I find myself questioning that today (like, have these horrible Tahoe icons really been tested properly?) although maybe unfairly, as I'm not an HCI expert. It does feel like there are more bad UIs around today, but that doesn't necessarily mean techniques have regressed. Computers just do a hell of a lot more stuff these days, so maybe it's just impossible to avoid additional complexity.
One thing that has definitely changed is the use of automated A/B testing -- is that the "empirical data" you're thinking of? I do wonder if that mostly provides short-term gains while gradually messing up the overall coherency of the UI.
Also, micro-optimizing via A/B testing can lead to frequent UI churn, which is something that I and many others find very annoying and confusing.
Tognazzini and Norman already criticized Appple about this a decade ago, while the have many good points, I cannot shake the feeling that they simply feel like the were used to just brand Apple as user friendly in the 90s and that Apple never actually adopted their principles and just used it as it fit the company's marketing.
Hmmm, I don't quite see where that supports "Apple didn't do empirical validation"? Is it just that it doesn't mention empirical validation at all, instead focusing on designer-imposed UI consistency?
ISTR hearing a lot about how the Mac team did user research back in the 1980s, though I don't have a citation handy. Specific aspects like the one-button mouse and the menu bar at the top of the screen were derived by watching users try out different variations.
I take that to be "empirical validation", but maybe you have a different / stricter meaning in mind?
Admittedly the Apple designers tried to extract general principles from the user studies (like "UI elements should look and behave consistently across different contexts") and then imposed those as top-down design rules. But it's hard to see how you could realistically test those principles. What's the optimal level of consistency vs inconsistency across an entire OS? And is anyone actually testing that sort of thing today?
I cannot shake the feeling that they simply feel like the were used to just brand Apple as user friendly in the 90s and that Apple never actually adopted their principles and just used it as it fit the company's marketing.
I personally think Apple did follow their own guidelines pretty closely in the 90s, but in the OS X era they've been gradually eroded. iOS 7 in particular was probably a big inflexion point -- I think that's when many formerly-crucial principles like borders around buttons were dropped.
The person I replied to said, "that interface designers or even the average computer user understands more than in 1992 is highly implausible on its face"
Think of computer users at the ages of 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, and 80 in 1992. For each group, estimate their computer knowledge when they sat down at a computer in 1992.
Now do the same exercise for the year 2026.
How is it highly implausible on its face that the average computer user in 2026 understands less than the average computer user in 1992?
> The person I replied to said, "that interface designers or even the average computer user understands more than in 1992 is highly implausible on its face"
Yes, I agree with this person.
>How is it highly implausible on its face that the average computer user in 2026 understands less than the average computer user in 1992?
I don't think it is. Particularly with the average user, the bar of understanding is lower now.
> Particularly with the average user, the bar of understanding is lower now.
Can you explain how this is true given that everyone using a computer today has had a lifetime of computer use whereas in 1992 many people were encountering computers for the first time?
1. Computer users were generally well-educated, unlike today.
2. UX designers didn’t inherit any mess and could operate from first principles.
3. The “experience” of modern users—phones, tablets, and software that does everything for you—doesn’t translate the way you think. And it explains why Gen Z seems to have regressed in terms of tech knowledge.
> Can you explain how this is true given that everyone using a computer today has had a lifetime of computer use whereas in 1992 many people were encountering computers for the first time?
The userbase has been watered down with a larger proportion of individuals who are not highly technical.
most of your points are refuted in the article. but I'll pick this one : "Display density has increased dramatically" Yes, it has, and Tahoe does not take advantage of this, infact the icons are smaller, and harder to read, using fewer pixels than windows icons of 25 years ago.
Yet, we can't refute that my subjective opinion evaluation of the opening image looks better (for me) , reads better (for me) and is easier (for me) to parse. Either I don't fit the general guidelines, or the general guidelines need a revision, that's my point overall.
But answer me this. You say "but most [but not all? - interesting] of the icons do make it easier, faster and more pleasant for my brain to parse the menu vs no icons."
How does a list of icons that are used inconsistently, duplicated, used in other places, sometimes used and sometimes not used, not to mention illegible, positioned inconsistently, go directly against the broad (reasoned) rules of the Apple HIG, help 'make it easier' as you say?
This is literally what half the article is explaining and you are just saying - no it's easier to not be able to tell an icon apart, and it's easier to have the icons sometimes be the same or move locations, be so small as to be illegible.
How many did you get when the menu text was removed ? I just don't believe it makes it easier. But who am I to argue against someones 'subjective opinion evaluation' I'm just a guy on the internet.
ps I assume by the opening image, you mean the first screenshot supplied by the author of the article - the Sequoia to Tahoe menu comparison, which he brilliantly posted below a shot of the HIG which literally is explaining the exact same thing and why not to do it the Tahoe way. That in it self is confusing.
It makes no sense why Apple chose to do that with Tahoe?
I'll add a general comment - one of the reasons I use Apple systems was they had the UI stuff nailed down. Stuff was consistent. It looked and behaved in proper ways. It felt like a properly designed, holistic approach to UI design. Lately it's just a mess. This article touch the surface of the issues. My current beef is this stupid 'class of window' that appears now and again which is half-way between a dialog and a window. Best place to see it is immediately after a screenshot - click the thumb that appears. This window type doesn't behave like any other window. Z-order, closing, focus, actions that occur when you click certain things, are all different and inconsistent. But it does look a little like IOS though.
> of the reasons I use Apple systems was they had the UI stuff nailed down (...) Lately it's just a mess
I have never daily driven an Apple device, so I can't comment on this; but from what I seen I do agree that Apple UI has not been as consistent lately.
> ps I assume by the opening image, you mean the first screenshot supplied by the author of the article
> How does a list of icons that are used inconsistently, duplicated, used in other places, sometimes used and sometimes not used, not to mention illegible, positioned inconsistently, go directly against the broad (reasoned) rules of the Apple HIG, help 'make it easier' as you say?
Sure! First of all, I'm only commenting on the FIRST image of the blog. There are no duplicated images in it. The icons appear consistently used in that image (maybe export to PDF looks a bit off, but this is a pattern that I have seen repeated on other apps, so I'm used to it). I'm not sure how the icons would look on the actual display, but they look alright on my 4K display as shown on the blog. I also can't comment on they being used "inconsistently" across other parts because I don't use Apple devices.
I'm making a very narrow claim: On the first image, if I compare the menu on the left, with the menu on the right, I prefer the menu on the right. I have tried to "find X" on a menu on the left and then repeat a similar exercise on the right; I am faster on the right and I am more confident on the right. My brain seems to be using the icons as a "fast lookup" and the text to verify the action.
Now, does this translate to all other menus? No! The "File" example he shows is super confusing.
Also, it's possible I would prefer the less cluttered version with less icons. But for me (all icons) > (no icons) on that specific example.
I have not put enough mental energy to agree with the author on all of his individual suggestions across the article, but they look overall fine on the individual examples he provides. I'm just find the first example... not particularly compelling.
> Well - that's just your --- opinion, man
Well... Yes. But unless we objectively measure how I use the computer, that's the best we have got to evaluate my preference.
All my classes on human-computer interaction and design has always been about "listen to your users".
A few days ago there was a post on year of the Linux desktop due to Windows getting worse. The sense is that MacOS isn't degrading as fast, but it still also is looking its lead to linux in usability.
Looking at the article, I thought, maybe this is Apple's experience of Windows bringing touch to the desktop. Yet, it broke my 2 years of muscle memory on the iPad, I am still considering selling and switching.
The story goes that the looped square icon(⌘) was introduced because Steve Jobs hated to see apples in every menu line. Not only because of the clutter but he thought it diluted the brand.
Is there a recommended modern day, non mac specific, equivalent to those "Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines" linked at the beginning of the article?
What an indictment of not only Apple designers, but the entire "science of UX" It's clear now there is no science, it's just designers making... things. Very similar to other design fields where there is no "logic" just trends & vibes. Several generations of potentially brilliant engineers and designers have wasted their careers building advertising empires with shiny buttons.
Misapplication of the science isn’t proof the science doesn’t exist. Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines used to be fantastic. One of the reasons they’re sucking so bad right now is they’re ignoring their own previously working rules.
That’s what happens when you put in charge arrogant industrial and print designers who think UX and UI are inferior forms of design.
I mean, if there was only 1 engineering firm that made the iBridge, which represented nearly a quarter of all bridges out there, they might last a bit longer. They really made the bridge experience truly inspiring with the all-new glass I-beams!
This is a stunning catalog of UI hypocrisy, a call to action for fans and haters.
But what's interesting is why such hypocrisy persists - in particular, why so bad now?
Yes, designers might need to make work for themselves; yes, a new OS has to seem new, to justify upgrades and convince younglings that this isn't the oldsters' ride; but haventt these always been true?
What's different is Apple's slide into disorganization, as it spreads work around the globe in exchange for market access, and internal leaders coast in their mutual non-aggression pacts.
What remains of the center can issue global orders (adopt the liquid glass aesthetic; put icons on every action) and the periphery can comply - nominally, imperfectly, and inconsistently. Quality issues come to be tolerated like chronic inflammation, and even deployed in passive-aggressive turf battles.
"Back in the day" everyone would be pulled into a rock-tumbler room and grind it out. That's neither possible nor wanted today (as game theory effaced the requisite obliviousness).
What to do? Many YC companies have bonding time, where scattered teams join up for intense periods to restore alignment. Otherwise, the Apple might be ripe for a round of organizational consolidation.
Personally, I think internal competition with some misses and inconsistencies are a good thing long term. Inflammation is not cancer, and there are better ways to tamp it down.
Because it doesn’t noticeably affect revenue (yet?), and because presumably it’s not the “best-in-class” engineers who are making these decisions, but misguided designers and managers, or engineers who don’t know any better.
I was somewhat buying the article until I got to the monstrosity that is the “Special mention”, at which point I flipped to completely agreeing. That really is atrocious.
As it happens I updated to Tahoe a couple days back.
This entire UI refresh strikes me as completely unnecessary. I didn't even notice the menu icons. Thanks for that. Just another thing to be annoyed about.
But really, the glaringly obvious ones are already in your face.
1. There is no setting to get rid of the ridiculously over-rounded corners.
2. The dock, which I put on the left, now has about 10 extra pixels between it and the edge of the screen. 10 pixels that now will never, ever, be usable again.
3. All the icons have been forced into a rounded corner box. As it turns out, the human brain is really good at recognizing silhouettes. This just made that part of my brain useless. It retroactively restyled applications' icons that I've used for over a decade.
I'm sure I'll find others, but it's clear that Apple does not care about users. This all about power. They didn't even include settings to turn any of this off...just "take it like we wanna give it to you, plebes".
Infuriating.
And none of these things matter. Literally none of them are core to how an operating system works, just how it looks. I just don't understand UX people, and at this point I'm starting to hate them.
It's hard to take this rant seriously when the author chose to clutter his rant with snowflakes. If he's looking for more readers he's lucky I run uMatrix and chose to disable javascript instead of just closing the tab and moving on.
Looking at a bunch of developers assume expertise in interface design while shitting all over design as a field used to be a rage bait situation for me, but it’s fruitless. I’ve been both, and I was a developer long before I was a designer. I don’t think you have to be an expert to criticize an interface, and you definitely don’t have to like it, and some number of designers undoubtedly agree. But I encourage you to consider that the osmosis-learned nibbles about design and that Edward Tufte book you enjoyed might not qualify you to judge the competence of the better part of an entire set of professions. Most developers don’t even know what actual problems designers are tasked to solve, let alone evaluate their efficacy. Developers are a lot better at knowing when they know something than realizing when they don’t. NOBODY is good at discussing what they’re used to with what’s objectively good or bad. The “I don’t care what anybody says — this is just objectively bad” attitude is something that arises with literally any interface change in any major product. Developers have a very different usage style than most people and when you get a bunch of people in one place agreeing with each other without any outside voices, that’s an echo chamber at best and a circle jerk at worst. To be clear, I’m not even discussing, let alone defending the design: I’m countering the cocky obnoxious designer hate that pops up in these threads.
PS— Edward Tufte has some interesting perspectives on data visualization but the reason he’s so popular with the engineering crowd is because he was an engineer and he makes cut-and-dried rules about things that are easy to understand without any design education, and explains them in a way that appeals to engineers. Reading that book is better than nothing, but it’s gives laypeople about as much understanding of design as a “[language] cookbook” gives laypeople an understanding of programming.
This is genuinely disheartening. As I continued reading the fine article, disappointment began settling in. Does nobody care about doing a good job anymore? When even multi-trillion-dollar companies cannot execute projects with some baseline level of quality and craft, it paints a disappointing picture. Very sad and disappointing. :(
I miss the time of Exposé and Mission Control, 3 finger drag, touch-to-tap, force click, even natural scrolling, Macbook Air, Magnetic magsafe.
Then something changed.
Touch bar was a miss. LaunchPad was a miss. I don't see a use of "Stage manager". iPad has gone to shit. Widgets came back, on mac... for no reason.
In Tahoe, the new spotlight search is one of the better features of Tahoe but i am fine with Alfred. But by and large, there are more annoyances in Tahoe than improvements.
For the iPhone and liquid glass, I am convinced that it was done to force people to upgrade to a new device. There *has* to be a reason to upgrade, and when hardware and software feature plateau, then we even the planned obsolescence era.
Including the statement "Adding unpleasant, distracting, illegible, messy, cluttered" on a page with unpleasant, distracting, illegible, messy, and cluttered snowfall is certainly a choice.
I have a different theory for the current enshitification we see. When OS updates became free Apple and Microsoft stopped caring about what customers want and what will sell. This allowed them to do whatever they wanted without repercussions. OS updates automatically and the new UI is forced on you along with the terrible UX taped on top. Every app and API was geared to the latest OS version alone for developer simplicity and this added to the pressure on the end customer. I don't know how this loop ends, but this sucks.
Sorry, even though I agree with your piece, the incredible irony of writing about bad design decisions while having fucking snow flying past the text I'm trying to read is just too much...
[edit] I just discovered the snow icon, which does turn off the snow but turns the background into bright yellow. Oh and the other icon which turns your cursor into a ...spotlight? On an otherwise black page? Do I have that right? Which one of those things was a design decision that enhanced usability, or readability, or... anything at all? These choices can best be described as sophomoric. You can disagree with menu icons, but they at least in theory serve a purpose. What purpose is served by any of the gizmos on this site?
> What purpose is served by any of the gizmos on this site?
It's a personal website, it's fun. Comparing someones personal website - where the 'fun' things can be turned off - to a $tn company with hundreds of millions of users who rely on the usability their products is not a great basis for disagreeing with a pretty great write-up with many salient points.
I find the snowflakes equally irritating, but believe there is a huge distinction. This is an individual's blog page, their own corner of the internet, where they can share their opinion and present them in any way they'd like, whereas Apple is designing an Operating System for premium devices used by millions of people that depend on its usability.
They can do whatever they like with their blog, and that's great! But why would I give any weight to the design arguments of someone who designed that thing? It's like if someone comes up to you in a clown costume and starts giving you fashion advice.
Am I the only one confused why an opinion piece criticizing the superfluous and distracting design choices of Tahoe has a continuous and uninterruptable snow animation that makes the entire thing harder to read?
It's not a "reminder" for people who've never been to the site before. Especially not when the icon isn't even visible on some devices, like my phone in portrait.
No you can't, it just turns the background yellow.
EDIT: the snow stops _but after a few seconds_. I toggled it to find out if it would turn off the snow, and the immediate feedback was that it doesn't. That's really _really_ bad UX.
I get the site has a frivolous feel, which I do like. And there's no problem with snow if you can turn it off. But it _seems_ like you can't turn the snow off, at which point it does become annoying.
And it's actually making a serious point about something I care about, so I actually wanted to read the article (which I did through the snow).
It's been a few years since I last used a Mac and the careful design I had known no longer exists. This made me realize the situation even worse than I imagined it to be based on Tahoe's reviews.
Even without a designer's detail-aware eyes, I couldn't stop facepalming with what I saw. I'd be embarrassed to ship that and call it an improvement! Apple icons may look cool and consistent when browsing them all together as part of SF Symbols, but all that disappears when used incorrectly.
I don't work or have ever worked at Apple, so I don't know the full details, but I heard the new design wasn't introduced until very late in the development process, and at a point in time where teams are supposed to focus on polish, not redesigns or introducing new features.
So not only did teams have to rush incroporating this new design, they also didn't get time to think things through and polish. It sounds like they didn't have time to push-back either, and so there was no feedback/iteration loop where they could work out with whomever is in charge of wider system design what works and what doesn't on what apps.
I'm not even going to finish the article. I never want to see these kinds of icons again. You win. Good news is, I'm not seeing a lot of these in GNOME and Gtk+ apps, so I'm already okay. There's only a couple in Firefox. Actually, good luck even locating the menus in GNOME. They keep moving and becoming fewer and fewer with every generation.
> I’m not saying there’s an obvious metaphor for “Open” Apple missed. There isn’t.
Citation needed. The open icon is general a file containing an arrow or a file as a metaphor of taking a file out of a folder. I just tested with MS Windows XP, MS Windows 7, MS Windows 10 and Mate/Gnome 2.
At this point I'm just hoping Cook (who bears ultimate responsibility) or Ternus will see the error of his ways, but I'm not holding my breath. I doubt they understand what's wrong with this or that they even know about the HIG.
The 90s marketplace was very different. Most of Apple’s customers were English speaking with a high reading level. Even in the US market, that is no longer the case.
I agree the icons look cluttered, but they are likely addressing the fact that most users may not comprehend the meaning of those actions.
I just got old iPhone 4s with iOS 9 from drawer, and hour later managed to downgrade to iOS 6, uhh, shapes and colors on these icons is something and it's got 3d dock at the bottom that looks just like dock from OSX 10.7, what a blast from the past.
This article reads like opinions and vibes without a solid grounding in data.
For example:
"Look how much faster you can find Save or Share in the right variant..."
But each variant took me the same amount of time. Or so I think. But that demonstrates the issue: is any of this being measured and analyzed?
My opinion is that much of design is just "convincing opinion wins" (where convincing-ness is often not at all based on measurement of some kind), leading to crappy stuff like ultra flat design and Corporate Memphis.
I see a lot of people talking about the past, but I think this is just a reminder that no matter how successful they become, there will always be these periods where companies and people lose focus.
The exact reason/s for this to happen is hard to figure out. Leadership changes, trends, getting too comfortable, lack of competition, the list goes on...
There's always bad reactions to change, but eventually they fade away because the product turns out to be good and just needs some time to get used to it.
But this time, this is not the case. Liquid glass sucks and so does the UX that came with it.
Apple will eventually fix this mess, they have all the resources in the world to do so.
I agree with the piece but i have a hard time admitting that a site with fake snow falling in front of the screenshots is dispensing sound design advice
The inconsistency and monochrome nature is problematic but imho including your icons alongside the text representation wherever practical is good because it educates the user what those icons mean so that when they see the icon without the context of the text representation they will know.
Including the hotkeys in the menu is good for similar reasons. Does it help me find and click the menu item? No. But does it help me use that action next time without going through the menu? Yes. Icons are same.
Imho the best layout for menu-bars was Windows Phone 7. In WP7, a toolbar of action button icons were shown along the bottom of the screen along with a kebab-button. Clicking the kebab-button would just expand out the bottom-bar into a menu showing the icons in the same order as they were in the toolbar along with a text description. Below the toolbar icons would be all other non-toolbar commands.
It made it clear that the toolbar and the menu were the same thing, just the toolbar is an abbreviated form of the menu for the sake of economy of screen real-estate.
Putting icons throughout menus is kind of a cruder version of same. I like that.
This is brutal. The examples just kept on coming. Halfway through the article I assumed it must have a bunch of comments under it, but nope. More brutal examples
I've found the 'same' (abstract) gripe in related fields: for example, PostgreSQL allows users to extend the language with custom operators that must be composed from multiple punctuation marks; the intended use is so you can write succinct formula-like operations like `case when my_container <@ my_elements then ...` or `set participants = applicants <&&> employees` and so on. The problem with these of course is that it's often very hard to guess what some kind of !!`#+*@ semantics a given grawlix is intended to have; both `case when is_subset_of( my_elements, my_container ) then ...` and `set participants = union_of( applicants, employees )` are much clearer.
Another example are customized extensions of MarkDown syntax. To my mind constructs like `[link title](like_address)` already stretch things and the only justification for having brackets plus parentheses to stand in for link syntax is their ubiquity. One of the downsides of this terse syntax is its resilience to extensibility. For example, when you start with an exclamation mark as in `` now all of a sudden your code is understood as an `<img>` tag, not an `<a>` tag. What if you need extra attributes? There have been multiple suggestions how to extend `` to include desired image dimensions, none have become standard. You probably should fall back to inserting HTML, which I am fine with.
Lastly, when designing a user interface, I have found that having to choose icons is a significant burden, and often one without satisfactory solution. One of my solutions in the past was to fall back to Apollo-era text-only buttons; sure, the texts would have to be localized, but then the entire application is subject to localization anyway. A plus is that each button with a short text instead of a picture already provided the mnemonic, the identifier for that action, something an icon does not do for you.
Great points and my favourite: The menu now draws a blank frame first, then populates it with items. Sometimes taking up to half a second. Nobody noticed this?
Most of the people I work with use Macs and never talk about the UI being good or bad. And boy, do we talk about insignificant crap that pisses us off. They just don’t care about menu icon alignment or whether the design follows 1992 guidelines.
This thread feels like classic HN bikeshedding. The article itself is nearly 5,000 words about menu icons. Menu icons!
Yes, the inconsistencies exist. Yes, they could be better. But the level of outrage here doesn’t match reality. People are acting like Apple has completely lost their way over… inconsistent icon styling in dropdown menus that most users don’t even notice.
The irony is that the examples with 'all the icons' require more reading, since it's now impossible to distinguish the 'important' items, and in a lot of cases the icons are the same or wrong, requiring reading to determine what the icon means.
This violates Hacker News guidelines. HN explicitly asks users to be respectful and avoid personal attacks or insults. Responding with “You can’t read?” is a direct insult, adds no substantive discussion, and detracts from the conversation.
This times 100000. I've been using Mac OS since 1992 and this version (both IOS and MacOS) has had me pulling my hair out more than every other version, and note, I did use OSX 10.0!
The first thing I did with Tahoe was go into the System Preferences to try and turn off as much as possible of the new UI because it's the biggest regression in Mac OS history (at least since I've been using Macs).
I used to mock Windows for the Explorer UI and general GUI experience, now I think I prefer using my Windows 10 PC over my Mac. It's just such a fucking mess, so inconsistent, shitty performance (even on brand new macs and phones), is actively harder to grok, much harder to use for my elderly parents, and doesn't even look "cooler" or "better" in any way. It's just worse on every possible metric, and made me start wondering about an Android phone, which has never happened since I bought an original iPhone.
I am and have been the ultimate Apple fanboy since 1992, but this release fucking sucks balls. I hope you're listening Apple.
Yeah I thought the same thing too. Takes a few moments. A UX suggestion for the author. If a user wants it off, it doesn’t need to be graceful, just quick.
Wow, it turns off the snowflakes, but the ones already falling will stay there and keep falling. I thought it only changed the background color to yellow, so assumed it doesn't actually turn off the snowflakes, wanted to come here and comment how ridiculous that is on an article talking about bad icons, then I saw in the comments that it turns off the snow effect... eventually (like a 10s delay).
It's hilarious that it's a great article about clutter, and yet, the post is on a theme that is so badly cluttered it would have been funny... if I could have read the article...
Flagging a submission just because they added a little whimsy for the holidays to their personal website which you dont like? What a sad, sorry, hate-filled way to go through life.
very nice article of how apple get confuse of a good ui.
is it part of global Enshittification or did big tech forgot all past good rules ?
i guess , steve jobs would have made an heart attack reading your article :)
In what way does it make fun of it? It's simply an example of it. And with no apparent way to turn it off. (Edit: There is a non-apparent way to turn it off. I still think having irritating visual effects doesn't constitute making fun of irritating visual effects.)
The irony here isn't so much that it's the minutiae of the menu design that's wrong, it's the top-bar menus as a whole are a dead paradigm. Nothing uses them anymore. Leave the mac for a moment and go to your windows device. Pull up Chrome. No menu. The file browser, nope. Not in the terminal either. VSCode still has one![1] But the office suite doesn't anymore[2]. And obviously, the proximate cause of that is that most interaction these days is with phones where horizontal text menus are a non-starter.
No one uses menus. So why so get so upset over the mac implementation of a dead paradigm? Because ironically the Macintosh bakes a "menu" into the screen space for you, and has since 1984. Giving up menus on a mac requires that you give up one of the things that make a mac a mac. And that's hard, for marketers even more so than designers. So it persists and festers.
But in the rest of the world, we walked away and never looked back. The icons aren't the problem here.
[1] "Big" apps for experts still get value out of putting their actions into tightly packed text. Photoshop too, etc... But these are increasingly the exception and not the rule, and even there the next generation of big tools (c.f. Cursor) don't have them.
[2] Even worse there, because the tab bar it does have actually looks like a menu but isn't.
> ", it's the top-bar menus as a whole are a dead paradigm."
clearly apple are doing their best to destroy them.
Top menus are good because of infinite size (fitts law)
Discoverability - i can look in a menu add see what options are available to me.
You can tell people either verbally or textually what to do e.g. Choose File Export as PDF instead of something like 'See the small icon that looks like a document with a folded corner, no not that one' yadda
Menu are direct I don't need to open another menu to get to my menus (hamburger menu)
I use menus all the time. I totally agree with the article. You say 'no one uses menus' Not true.
Applies only to an increasingly obscure input device. No one talks about Fitts's Law on phones, because it's fundamentally wrong. The "size" of a control assumes you have a mouse or joystick or something trying to find it. Fingers don't do that, no one worries about moving to a control.
> Discoverability
Equally true of a hamburger menu.
> I use menus all the time
I do too! Because we're dinosaurs.
> You say 'no one uses menus' Not true.
It was hyperbole that I genuinely thought was clear from the text. You know exactly what I meant. Menus are secondary devices at this point only seriously used on one platform, so it's 100% unsurprising that design paradigms for using them are changing ("decaying", I suspect you and the other dinosaurs would say) to reflect patterns used elsewhere in the industry.
> Applies only to an increasingly obscure input device. No one talks about Fitts's Law on phones
I'm not talking about fitts law on phones though, I don't think anyone is. This is about Tahoe/mac OS on Macs.
But I'd hardly call a mouse, or a trackpad 'increasingly obscure' I use the fact that I have an infinite target area with my trackpad everyday. It's one of those things that a user might not consciously notice until it's no longer there. Much like a lot of what we are seeing with Tahoe in general that people like me, you, the author of this article. We are pointing out the UI issues that are suddenly immediately apparent, and the bit that is really astounding us all is --- how on earth are Apple, supposed bastions of UI interface detail, and polish , are making such an almighty meal of all of these things that used to work but now just don't, and not even don't work -- the 'new ways' are objectively worse.
The only criticism of the top menu bar interface is that on big hi res monitors (which are relatively recent in terms of the Mac OS desktop) sometimes have the menu bar 'miles away' from the actual app that may be in a smaller window. But this is where fitts law comes in -- so the choice is shorter distance but you need to be more precise smaller target (windows) or large distance but infinite target. I prefer the latter.
It's probably in some ways almost a direct holdover from the time of 9" screens and single tasking -- apps were usually taking up most of the screen so having a menu bar at the 'top' wasn't that weird. Having multiple menus bars would have been really weird and taken a lot of space.
I mean Apple could offer an option like I used to see on gnome where you could have a global menu bar or a per app menu bar. That would be more useful than stage manager ever has been I'd bet.
> I'm not talking about fitts law on phones though, I don't think anyone is.
I was, in the comment you responded to!
I'm saying that phone-centric UI paradigms completely dominate in the modern world. And by extension, arguments like the linked article dancing on pins over minutiae of the menu bar, are missing the point. Good User Interface design in the coming decades simply is not going to use menu bars, it's not. It exists for dinosaurs like us, not the coming generation of tool users who will be directing AI or whatever and not digging through text.
interesting take. I don't buy it though. But I guess we need to wait and see.
Apple has long been rumoured to be on the path to merging IOS and mac OS (whatever that means) . MS already tried it and failed.
I for one, usually avoid using phone apps and tend to use websites (for example) instead since the phone apps usually have arbitrary limitations enforced by piss poor UI.
The most obvious and egregious example is the number of apps that don't let you open more than one view - e.g. Amazon. I can't look at 2 products in amazon app at the same time. It's just horrendous.
The next obvious one is Youtube -- The app is just terrible. Using a browser is a better experience in every way.
Do you have a cite for that? It's a hamburger menu, which is by far a more common menu paradigm in the modern world. Do you imagine some kind of "casual user" who... doesn't have a phone?
I repeat: the menu bar is a dying abstraction, preserved in a consistent form only on the Macintosh (even iOS has no equivalent), because it's presence is unavoidable. Users of modern apps don't see it used consistently, so it's absolutely not surprising that Apple's designers aren't doing it either.
I think that these icons are a great idea. With the rise of illiteracy, you can no longer count on people being able to read the labels in menus. What better way to ensure that Apple comes out on top in the post-apocalyptic wasteland than the genesis of a new primitive ideographic writing system? 10,000 years from now, when Apple users are grunting and hooting to argue about which icon means "make computer magic remember!", you'll all have been proven wrong.
This article provided a good counterpoint; there is a picture where all text labels in menus have been removed and just the icons are left. It’s worse than having only text labels.
It's hard to take complaints about UI consistency seriously when the cursor is changed for no reason at all (with a barely-different hover state, too).
It's hard to justify Liquid Glass in general. The wastefulness of flat design (in terms of space) married with the visual excess of skeuomorphism, but without even providing any affordances (does the sidebar being raised give you any new information on how to use a sidebar? No).
If you're a designer at a top 10 S&P 500 company making 6 figures, you owe it to yourself to have some love for your craft. If a PM tells you to shove a UI style meant for an unsuccessful VR device onto desktop and mobile platforms, say no. Get your colleagues to say no. Make that PM read everything the Nielsen Norman group has ever written. Read it too.
> If a PM tells you to shove a UI style
More than likely designers are making up work to justify their jobs. Not good for your career if you admit the desktop interface was perfected in ~1995.
100% this. I recall watching their launch video about Liquid Glass. It was filled with ego-driven "we're changing the world here" nonsense. They were designing in a bubble and wanted to do something different so they could justify the work. It was never about the user.
My hot take on this is that there is a business goal to Liquid Glass that extends beyond ego - but it's about the restoration of Apple UI as an exclusive status symbol, not as a usable experience.
Apple looked at innovations in hardware form factor and, rather than trying to out-innovate in that sphere, said, instead: how do we make something in software that nobody would ever try to imitate, and thus position ourselves as the innovators once again?
And the monkey's paw curled and said: Liquid Glass is a set of translucency interactions that are technically near-impossible to imitate, sure, but the real reason nobody will try to imitate is because they are user-hostile to a brand-breaking extent.
And Apple had nobody willing to see this trainwreck happening and press the brakes.
That's interesting and plausible.
It also contributes to obsolescing older hardware.
we saw this exact playbook with ios 7. i don't think you need to attribute malice or read into it much.
ios 7 relied heavily on blurring effects-- a flex at the time due to the efficient graphic pipeline vs android they had. this was coming off the heels of Samsung xerox'ing and they wanted a design that would be too expensive for competitors to emulate without expensive battery hit. liquid glass is following in this tradition.
and similarly to ios 7, the move to flat design was predicated on the introduction of new form factors and screen. flat design lent itself well to new incoming screen sizes and ratios. prior there was really one or two sizes and that was it, easy to target pixel perfect designs against. as apple moves to foldables and more, this design flexibility is once again required.
as for no one trying to emulate it, i'm not so sure, OriginOS 6 ripped it off back in October.
I honestly think they could have done that and still had some taste and considered usability much more than they did.
A design system I am required to use made a recent "major" update announcement: "Styles have been converted to variables. Styles are out and Figma variables are in".
Where what we really needed was a stable release version (now a year late from the original promised date) so we can build out UI components for the content editors to use that don't require constant design tweaks.
You know the designers are:
a) Just fucking around having fun
b) Making busy work to drag it out as long as possible
As it's now 4 years since they began working on the "design system", there's a good chance it will get canned as there's some more modern design they will want to use.
There is a product I have to use that updated its ui design some years ago, only the functionality is partially implemented and the new design has some functional elements that weren't present in the old configuration.
This has been solved with a button that switches the layout between the two designs, when I'm making changes it is sometimes necessary to flip back and forth between the two mid-change.
Material Design?
marketers are not designers and vice versa. of course the press release is going to be melodramatic no matter what the designers thought, or were told
“Marketers are not designers” is fine, except it was the designers themselves pushing the marketing drivel in those videos.
Who was driving that, though? If the project has high-level management buy-in, the people in the scripted videos are going to be on message if they want to stay employed.
You’re not looking far enough ahead. Liquid glass isn’t about Mac. It’s about VisionPro and wearables. This is a strategic play by Apple.
Microsoft totally screwed up the windows interface with windows 8 to suit tablets which they viewed as the future of computing. Not only were they wrong, they also really broke the UX for the users they did have for a new product that hardly sold and still doesn't (windows tablets). Eventually they had to cave in but Apple is more stubborn than Microsoft.
Even if Apple is right, why shoehorn the future into the present on devices unsuitable for its new paradigms? The iOSification also only worsened the macOS UX. It's one of the reasons I moved to Linux with KDE which I can configure as I like.
If they want make the AR OS of the future then make it on the vision pro where it belongs.
Microsoft may have "caved", but we're still stuck with two different settings menus and a start menu that prioritizes ads and search results over your own programs.
2 settings menus? We have every version of Windows from 3.1 all the way to 11 styled settings menus, sometimes multiple styles depending on which settings you want to look at. It's a total shitshow.
Yeah, windows make linux desktop using 3 versions of GTK, QT +motif an gnustep look homogenous in comparison.
Windows is borderline unusable to me without Open Shell / Win 7 settings. I refuse to learn yet another icon idiom, just to have it change 2 years later. Thinking of trying Bazzite for my new upcoming 2nd gaming machine (for daughter) build because I'm tired of Windows. If it goes well, may convert multiple Win 10 HTPC/gaming machines.
It’s not that bad if you configure it. Much like much of Linux…
Apple just reduced Vision Pro production, but Liquid Glass was in motion well before that. What leaves me scratching my head is I never got the impression Apple believed in Vision Pro. It launched because after years of research, management wanted to see if the effort was worth continuing to invest in, but that wasn't a vote of confidence.
I'll have to second this. It's not even on Apple's homepage! I hadn't heard it mentioned for months before today. It had its niche share of users who actually found it useful, but apart from them it seems that the world is not ready for spatial computing (or maybe current spatial computing isn't ready for people, who knows?).
The hardware seems good, but with it being tied to the Apple ecosystem there's just no way.
I'd buy one if I could use it with my Linux (KDE) workstation, but there's no chance I'm going to be using it via a mac.
I'm hoping the new Valve headset will be like, 60% of what the Apple vision is. My boss got the Apple vision on launch day and it is really premier hardware, visuals that are almost exactly like seeing the thing you're looking at in real life, and the hand sensing / interactivity was the best I have experienced, even though it still had flaws.
But being tied to Apple's ecosystem, not being really useful for PC connection, and the fact that at least at the time developers were not making any groundbreaking apps for it all makes it a failure in my book.
If Valve can get 60% of that and be wirelessly PC tied for VR gaming then even if they charge $1800 for their headset it will likely be worth it.
If it weren’t $3500+ I’d love one. The world isn’t ready for that price point.
Exactly. More expensive than a high end desktop or laptop while having less useful software than an iPad. No thanks.
If it were around the $500 point I’d pick one up in a heartbeat. Maybe even $1000. But $3500 is nuts for how little they’re offering. It seems like a toy for the ultra rich.
I assumed the price would eventually come down. But it seems like they’ll just cancel the project entirely. Pity.
I’m assuming Vision Pro is viewed as what the Newton was to the iPhone. It will provide some useful insight way ahead of its time but the mainstream push will only happen after a number of manufacturing breakthroughs happen allowing for a comfortable daily driver UX. Optics and battery tech will need multiple generational leaps to get to a lightweight goggle / sunglasses form factor with Apple-tier visuals, tracking, and battery life…
Apple can afford to improve and cheapify this thing for a decade.
That’s sort of what they did with the Watch.
It has incrementally improved, and gotten cheaper, to the point that I now see them everywhere. When they first came out, they were pretty expensive. Remember the $17,000 gold Watch (which is now obsolete)? The ceramic ones were over a couple of grand.
But the dream of selling Watch apps seems to have died. I think most folks just use the built-in apps.
The $17,000 Apple Watch was a (rather silly) attempt to compete in the high end watch space. However, they also launched the base "Sport" model at US$349.
Not really anything like the watch, the existence of a stupidly expensive "luxury" version doesn't change the fact that the normal one started at $350.
I think the current rumor is that development of a cheaper XR headset has been shelved in favor of working on something to compete with Meta's AI glasses.
Magic Leap 2 and HoloLens 2 proved that we still haven't cracked the code on AR/XR. Similar price point, plenty of feasible enterprise use cases for folks willing to pony up money to hire Unity or Unreal devs. And I'm sure there are enough of them tired of being flogged to death by the gaming industry. But they both went splat.
It's going to take a revolution on miniaturization AND component pricing for XR to be feasible even for enterprise use cases, it seems.
I have a vision pro (obtained on day 1 for development purposes), and have given demos of it to a number of non enthusiast/non techie people.
All of them immediately hate that it’s bulky, it’s heavy, it messes with your hair, messes with your makeup, doesn’t play well with your glasses, it feels hot and sweaty. Everyone wants to take it off after 5-10 minutes at most, and never asks to try it again (even tho the more impressive 3D content does get a “that’s kinda cool” acknowledgment).
The headset form factor is just a complete dud, and it’s 100% clear that Apple knew that but pushed it anyway to show that they were doing “something”.
Did they commit to additional production of the Vision Pro? I read their announcement as quiet cancellation of VR products. They announced some kind of vaporware pivot, but I didn't read a single analyst projection that Apple ever intended to bring another wearable to market. Customer usage statistics of the Vision Pro are so low Apple hasn't even hinted about reporting on them.
Wearable products, outside of headphones, have a decade-long dismal sales record and even more abysmal user retention story. No board is going to approve significant investment in the space unless there's a viable story. 4x resolution and battery life alone is not enough to resuscitate VR/AR for mass adoption.
> outside of headphones, have a decade-long dismal sales record
Outside of headphones and watches
Do they sell many Apple Watches? Maybe it is an euro thing but I only very rarely see people wearing one.
I would see 9 garmins for 1 Apple Watch for instance and many more people wearing cheap casios or no watch at all.
I dunno. I see them all the time here (Seattle). Wikipedia estimates 267 million sold as of 2023.
I'm in India and the Xiaomi watches are everywhere (they probably don't sell those in the States/EU?) But also Apple and Samsung.
Claiming watches, phones and absolutely everything else they make are everywhere in Poland.
I see mostly Apple watches, a few Samsungs, a small smattering of Pixel watches, and then rarely other brands like Garmin and what not around me.
That's probably regional then. In my area most people using watches nowadays are usually into sports.
I must admit I don't understand the point of a smart watch when most people have their smartphone in their hand a significant amount of time a day and said smartphones screen sizes have been increasing over the year because people want to be able to doom scroll at pictures and videos and interact with whatsapp all day. I don't know how you can do that from a tiny screen on a watch.
Those like me who don't subscribe to that way of living don't want distractions and notification so they use regular watches and would see as a regression a device that needs to be charged every few days.
Some people said payments but I see peolle paying with their smartphone all the time since they have it at hands or in a pocket very close anytime having it in a watch doesn't look like a sigmificant improvement. I'd be curious to see a chart of smartwatch adoption by country.
Apple watches have the highest marketshare in a lot of the world's markets. According to this analysis[1], watchOS (Apple watches) make up around half of all smartwatches used in Europe. Global sales puts Apple around 20-30% market share, with brands like Samsung and Garmin around 8% [2]. I haven't found good US-only statistics to show what the market share is of watchOS is, but I'd imagine its probably close to 50% or more.
I do agree though, anecdotal experiences will vary depending on the kind of people you hang out with. For the people I know heavily into running and cycling, brands like Garmin are over represented. Meanwhile lots of other consumers practically don't even know these are options.
[1] https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/europe-s...
[2] https://scoop.market.us/smartwatch-statistics/
They need to workout how to drop the price. I want one. But really can’t justify that price.
Recent moves have convinced me that Apple is getting ready to push Vision Pro substantially harder.
In recent weeks, I’ve been getting push notifications about VP.
They hired Alex Lindsay for a position in Developer Relations.
And there’s the M5 update.
Just remember, it’s a lot cheaper than the original Mac(inflation adjusted). Give it 40 years – hell, given the speed of change in tech these days, it won’t even take 10.
I think they bought the metaverse hype and hurried up. If only they had put half the energy on AI, we'd have a createML with something else than yolov2 in 2026
It doesnt really introduce anything that makes Vision Pro in any way better, though
I think this is the right read in terms of intent but I also feel it offers a lens into the silliness of Apple's current strategy around all this. VisionPro appears to be currently floundering, and no matter how much they try to make it unintrusive and airy and transparent in its interface, it's presently an unwieldy device not designed to leave the home or office. Predicating company-wide design systems on this line being the future feels aspirational at best and delusional at worst. And what good is liquid glass on a Mac? To show me an obscured glimpse of my desktop background and add visual clutter?
(Apologies to @cyberge99 if my tone comes off intense, this is not to come at you but rather is just me venting my frustrations with Apple. I think you are correct in your assessment of the idea here.)
What’s frustrating about the VisionPro is their absolute refusal to address it as a giant screen.
All people I know describe this usecase first: “Will be awesome when it replaces my 2x34" screens”. I described it to the salesman when he asked me why I wanted to try it. He never showed it. Gave him 0/5, he complained, I explained this is specifically what I asked. You can emulate one screen in VisionPro but it’s absolutely obnoxious about making it about apps and iPhotos 3D whatever. Users desire it. Apple is hell-bent in not addressing that usecase, and addressing family usecases first.
Imagine they find a proper UI to visualize an infinite Typescript file. Something like flinch and you find yourself in a method, look elsewhere and you immediately see the other method. Make it viral by making it possible to write files in a way that is not practical to normal-screen users, like the old “max 1 screen height” limit. View your team in the corners of your vision. THE tool for remote working.
Workplaces would look futuristic. Your experience at the workplace would be renewed thanks to Apple.
And then, reuse the desktop’s UI on VisionPro instead of the desktop using VP’s concepts.
But no, Apple prefers killing off VisionPro and imposing LiquidGlass to everyone. (In waiting for my threat letter from Steve Jobs for suggesting ideas now).
> In waiting for my threat letter from Steve Jobs ...
Ummm, you know he died yeah?
>This is a strategic play by Apple
No, this is the fault of a company and industry with way too much money and not knowing what to do with it.
So they hired a bunch of artists who would otherwise be carving wood in a decrepit loft somewhere after taking half a mushroom cap. These people now decide how computers should operate.
I remember watching a documentary from the 80s where Susan Kare explained how every pixel in the Macintosh UI was deliberately put there to help the user in some way. One lady did the whole thing, the whole OS.
Now we have entire teams of people trying to turn your computer into an avant-garde art piece.
> a bunch of artists who would otherwise be carving wood in a decrepit loft somewhere after taking half a mushroom cap. These people now decide how computers should operate.
…brother, you’ve just described the history of the personal computer and the Internet. It’s not the hippie artists causing this problem, I promise you that.
Bill Atkinson designed HyperCard on LSD.
https://www.mondo2000.com/the-inspiration-for-hypercard/
The last decade or so of Apple designers have been as out of their minds on ego and cocaine as Donald Trump Jr.
Not only that, we have teams of people that very obviously (based on OP) dont talk to each other.
. . . so other devices are required to have the same interface? No, they're not. Just because you want to share enough design cues to make people understand they're dealing with the same brand doesn't mean you have to hammer square pegs into round holes.
Not to mention the fact that first, you have to get to a point where AR wearables are commercially viable, and we don't seem to have hit that point yet.
Eh, I would disagree as there's nothing in it where you go "Oh wow, that's why they did it" in the context of Vision Pro or wearables.
It seems much more likely that the driver here was to produce a UI that was resource intensive and hard to replicate unless you control the processors that go into your devices as well as the entire graphics processing stack that sits above that as well. It seems created to flaunt the concept of "go ahead and try to copy this" to Google and Microsoft.
Sounds like Windows 8 designing their touch-first interface for a desktop, with about the same success.
If it's a strategic play, it's a terrible one that douses usability in gasoline and sacrifices it at the altar of visual novelty for no real gain. Apple has spent literal decades working on and refining their Human Interface Guidelines for different devices. Between Tahoe and Liquid Glass, they seem to have just tossed them on the bonfire for no justifiable reason.
VisionPro was meant to literally overlay its interface over your field of vision. That's a very different context and interaction paradigm. Trying to shoehorn the adaptations they made for it into their other, far more popular interfaces for the sake of consistency? It's absurd.
> Apple has spent literal decades working on and refining their Human Interface Guidelines for different devices
Things like “human interface guidelines” get written by nerds who dive deep into user studies to make graphs about how target size correlates to error rate when clicking an item on screen.
Things like Liquid Glass get designed by people who salivate over a button rendering a shader backed gradient while muttering to themselves “did I cook bro???”
They’re just two very orthogonal cultures. The latter is what passes for interface design in software these days.
It's like the KDE developer who reluctantly gave out the script to set "border offset" from a window back to 0 (i.e. how close you could snap/drag the window to the border of the screen). He had defaulted it to something like -5 (i.e. at minimum, 5 pixels between the edge of the screen and the window, no matter WHERE you tried to place it), because "otherwise, how would you use the negative space, bro?". I.e. left-clicking JUST outside the window brought up a context menu for the window. WTF? I've been doing GUIs since 1987. Don't make "clicking outside the window" a way to interact WITH the window. I very nearly threw KDE out before he gave the fix.
This. The Windows 95 interface was optimal in many regards. Given how much faster computers are now, every UI operation should just be instantaneous. It's ridiculous that desktop interfaces and Web pages became heavier as computers got faster, so that a heavy website today does not load meaningfully faster than a plain text webpage in 1995.
Edit: On Linux, you have desktop environments like LXQt for this. Unfortunately, last time I checked, Wayland was not supported.
Beyond that, any lag from Win95 era was probably because of spinning hard drives. Running it on a SSD would be instantaneous. Also, file search might even work, instead of whatever we have now.
I can attest to this one, 6 months ago I had a vintage pc I needed to rehab due to the curse of the proprietary ISA card. Imaged the failing drive to an ssd, sata->IDE adapter. P3 733MHz, 128 mb ram, W98SE, its astonishingly fast and responsive. Boots nearer to my memories of MSDOS 6.22 firing up than anything else.
Acrobat reader still performs like a lead balloon though, even a miracle can't fix that one.
I don't know how I used Windows before I installed Everything.
Deactivate web search via regedit, then it works.
Good advice, but there's still a lot of utility in Everything that is not built into Windows.
A whole installation of Win95 with Office95 is only a few hundred MB and would fit entirely in RAM on a modern system. You can run a VM of it like that to experience the extreme speed. Even a browser these days uses several times that.
The responsiveness of windows 2000 in a vm is insane. It feels like every action happens instantaneously.
Contrast this with the "os" of my LG oled monitor. It seriously takes 5 seconds to open the settings menu.
Contrast this with the "os" of my LG oled monitor. It seriously takes 5 seconds to open the settings menu.
I'm not sure what they use these days, but 10-15 years ago the MCU in a monitor was likely to be a ~10MHz 8051.
Wayland with Sway feels toptier already. Tiling WM is just so simple, clean, fast, and perfect in every way.
Personally, I can't wait till we have webpages that load slower then windows 95 boots.
Even Gnome and KDE can feel much snappier if you remove effects and animations.
Wayland is supported with LXQt, labwc replacing openbox. If anything, UX is snappy.
Loved the win95 interface. I've always wanted it on new Windows box but the existing solutions out there seem lacking.
Wayland being as needful as Liquid Glass itself.
There have been many, many, desktop improvements since 1995, some of which came from the Mac, some came from Windows and some came from UNIX/Linux & friends.
- Arguably the dock, though it's probably contentious - Ubiquitous instant search (e.g. Spotlight) - Gesture-based automatic tiling of windows to left/right side of the screen, tiling presets - Smooth scrolling, either via scroll wheel or trackpad - Gesture-based multi tasking, etc - Virtual desktops/multiple workspaces - Autosave - Folder stacks, grouping of items in file lists - Tabbed windows - Full-screen mode - Separate system-wide light and dark modes - Enhanced IME input for non-latin languages - App stores, automatic updating - Automatic backup, file versioning - Compositing Window Managers (Quartz, Compiz, DWM, modern Wayland compositors...) - The "sources bar" UI pattern - Centralized notification centers - Stack view controlelr style navigation for settings (back/forward buttons) - Multi device clipboard synchronization - Other handoff features - Many accessibility features - The many iteration of Widgets - Installable web apps - Virtual printers ("print to PDF") - Autocomplete/autocorrect - PIP video playback - Tags/Labels - File proxies/"representations" - Built-in clipboard management - Wiggle the mouse to find the pointer
None of these can be said to be at their final/"perfect" form today, and there are hundreds if not thousand of papercuts and refinements that can be made.
The real issue is probably due to management misunderstanding designer's jobs, and allocating them incorrectly. The focus should be more on the interactions and behaviors than necessarily on the visuals.
> Arguably the dock
The Dock came from NeXtSTEP circa 1989. It had square edges and no Happy Mac. (So did Mail.app, TextEdit, some of the OS X Finder, and a whole bunch of other things.)
To the untrained eye it looks like an Apple innovation because most people couldn't afford NeXt computers unless you worked in a university or research lab.
This is the howling insanity that drove Microsoft to kill the start button, then reanimate it, then move it to the center of the task bar.
They also forced us to waste relatively valuable vertical screen space on the task bar, taking away our ability to move it to the left or right screen edges.
... thus falling into the Pitt of failure, where every way out is just a little too far away.
When I started using Linux, I didn't do so because I disliked Windows so much, I just was an insatiably curious nerd.
But since then, each new version of Windows has made me more and more grateful for not having to deal with that dumpster fire on my personal devices.
The saddest part to me is that I have the strong impression it wouldn't take that much work to turn Windows into a much better system. But for whatever reason, Microsoft is not interested in making that happen. Maybe they are incapable of doing so. But the system itself not the reason.
No kidding. “Reverting” to something pretty similar to Mac OS in the late ‘90s, as far as visuals and basic UI behavior (but not removing modern features) would be a big improvement. And once they did that they could just leave it that way. It’d be fine. UI churn sucks enough that it’s not worth it for users unless it’s a huge improvement, and nothing has been.
Though if we could get the newer settings panel of macOS a few versions back, before they inexplicably ruined the best OS GUI settings interface I’ve ever used, that’d be great.
I would say, "Give me Mac OS 9, now" but smartphone-addicted brain-damaged zoomers don't understand what folders are or how file management works.
I don't need or want art, eye candy, or animations. I need to get work done and the rest of the OS to stay tf out of my way.
It’s not just career. Any artistic endeavor suffers from competition with the past, which eventually becomes a guaranteed loss. Negating the frame becomes the primary way to leave a mark.
But for actual art, such as music, constantly doing novel things is kind of the point. Every generation needs its own music that runs counter to what came before.
User interfaces are not art.
> User interfaces are not art.
Do UI designers think that way?
I imagine some see it as engineering - make things work efficiently for the users. Others see it as art. The outcome will depend on which group gains the upper hand.
There's some linguistic ambiguity here if we just say "art", because it includes things we might divide into "artistic choice" versus "craftsmanship", ex:
1. "Picasso, that's the wrong way to depict a human nose."
2. "Picasso, that's the wrong material, that vibrant paint is poisonous and will turn to black flakes within the year and the frame will become warped."
I interpret parent-poster's "interfaces are not art" as meaning they're mostly craftsmanship.
It may not be quantifiable enough to be labeled "engineering", but it's still much less-subjective and more goal-oriented than the "pure art" portion. All these interfaces need to be useful to tasks in the long term. (Or at least long enough for an unscrupulous vendor to take the money and run.)
Style matters, maybe unfortunately depending on the point of view. Products like consumer electronics have a large amount of fashion to them. Just like the t-shirt was perfected in the 1950s people still make new ones with little style changes for no functional reason.
Designers at Balenciaga don't have to justify their jobs when they make oversized t-shirts, neither do the ones at Apple.
Fashion is a very appropriate place for style. Tools, less so.
Corollary: the extent of fashion-driven variability those "tools" support over generations tells us just how little utility those tools provide.
In actual tools, the form and function are strongly connected. Tools of competing brands look pretty much the same, except for color accents, because they can't look any different without sacrificing functionality, performance and safety characteristics.
You don't see power tool vendors trying to differentiate their impact drivers by replacing rubber handles with flat glass because it's more "modern", because it would compromise safety and make the tool unsuitable for most jobs its competitors fulfill. This happens in software mostly because the tools aren't doing much of anything substantial - they're not powerful enough for design to actually matter.
I do see tool vendors often adding their own logos to the tools. They choose non-functional colors for styling. They'll make something more rounded or more squared for aesthetic reasons. For consumer-facing tools there are lots of little non-functional changes they'll choose to do for their own stylistic and branding purposes. They do want to ultimately differentiate their products from competitors, not just be the exact same as all the others on the shelf.
I wish I could remember where I picked up this quote
> No project manager ever got promoted for saying "let's keep things the same".
I can't see how half of the icon choices made in the article would pass internal testing, let alone actual user testing.
Maybe stakeholders were calling the shots and everyone was like, "Fine. If you want us to reuse the same icon for different purposes, you're the boss. We are done trying to explain why this is a bad idea."
Sadly, the desktop interface was not perfect by 1995. It was visually near-perfect, but the UX, acutal ease of interaction, left much to be desired. Sadly, it's the visuals that make pretty screenshots. The actual UX of OSX is quite jarringly bad in many regards 30 years later :( But developing interactions is much harder.
Yes this is always how it's been, especially if you're a front end developer. Changing designs every few months just for the hell of it is what designers do.
Uber, Airbnb, Robinhood all took off because they created easy to use beautiful apps (compared to their predecessors).
The anti-design bias in this forum is genuinely unhinged. I see some saying the entire destruction of the natural world stems from design lol.
I worked at Uber. The UX designers were pretty obsessed with the iPhone app, making sure it was pixel perfect and the little cars in the city view moved smoothly and every transition was crisp and so on. The vast majority of new users at the time were on the comparatively ugly Android app.
Things got pretty bad. More than 95% of all employees (and I'm guessing 99% of designers) were using iPhones at the time. There would be rough edges all over the Android app, but as one of our designers said "people with taste don't use Android".
Imagine knowing that most of your new users were getting a subpar experience, and that not being enough motivation to expense a flagship Android and drive it daily.
But the new users kept coming, and despite mostly being Android users, they still used the product. Turns out that legacy taxis are themselves an ugly interface, and ugliness is relative.
> The vast majority of new users at the time were on the comparatively ugly Android app.
Probably the vast majority of profitable Uber users were still on iOS, though, like most apps?
> but as one of our designers said "people with taste don't use Android".
Based lol
> people with taste don't use Android
Probably true at the time.
I remember excitedly switching to a Nexus 5X and then going back to my old iPhone a few months later because every app felt like a bad port of the ”original” iPhone app.
Using the term "Legacy Taxi" to imply that a taxi you don't summon by phone is somehow out-dated is wild. I understand the reason you would use it, especially at a company like Uber, but it still seems hilariously delusional.
I've never worked for Uber and I see the old model as a barbaric non-starter, why on earth would I want to flag a car down instead
The point is that a taxi is a taxi. It's like calling cash "Legacy Payments"
That statement is just 100% demonstrably false.
I don't think anyone seriously believes Uber, Airbnb and Robinhood won because of "beautiful apps".
"Beautiful" maybe, not "good UX" for sure. Prior to Uber, calling a cab using the phone app was...suboptimal and easier to actually call a taxi company. They also provided much better services, which is what make them stick around.
RH made a lot of investment tool accessible to people that "I just want to buy stock of some company", I used tasty trades for a while, but their mobile app while has all functionality, but realistically you will just look to overview portfolio.
The point still stands. The improvement in "usability" in those three cases did not come from app UI/UX.
Beauty has real value, but usability is far more important.
Unfortunately, most of the SW industry isn't even aware of the difference:
For beauty you hire a graphic designer
For usability you hire a PhD in cognitive psychology
No they took of because they used illegal practices and VC money to undercut competitors.
I think we can pretty safely assume that every large and successful company has done horrible and illegal things to get themselves there. That being said I think design and ease of use still play a significant part in Uber’s success.
Well, I didn't have Balzac on today's HN bingo card, for sure!
"Behind every great fortune is an equally great crime."
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Honore-de-Balzac/La-Com...
Bit of column A, bit of column B.
There’s a huge difference between anti-design bias and calling out Liquid Glass for the garbage human interface design that it is. If anything, it demonstrates a substantial *pro-design* bias because it shows that people actually care about design more than any “party line” here.
This. Every time Apple made Ui changes, I’ve seen negative reactions. People react negatively to change, not to good or bad necessarily. I’ve been using the ne UI since it was in the developer beta, and can’t really tell a practical difference.
Uber very much falls into the category of "useful despite the awful app" for me.
It's slow, bloated, buggy and ugly. Probably one of the worst apps running on my phone.
Nowadays yes, since they need to justify the jobs of hundreds of Javascript developers.
But there was a time when their app was native and was actually quite good.
It's difficult for me to believe that you might be arguing all of the icons in the drop-down menus are beautiful... I know I have found them distracting.
In my opinion, this article had very clear and direct criticisms; they were hardly "anti-design bias". The increase in visual clutter is, for sure, a net loss for MacOS Tahoe.
Design is not just pretty visuals but also solving problems. The design of Tahoe doesn't solve any problems the previous designs didn't but it solves many of the previous problems worse than the designs before.
design for design's sake is bad, and that's what Liquid Glass is. There was no thought behind it.
It is 2026 and UIs are still abysmally slow in many cases. How is that even remotely possible? Now, with that in mind, consider (just for a moment) why people might think that UX people don't know what they're doing.
> It is 2026 and UIs are still abysmally slow in many cases. How is that even remotely possible?
Because UI/X teams were separated from engineering. (Same thing happened with modern building architecture)
It's fundamentally impossible to optimize if you're unaware of physical constraints.
We need to get rid of the "It's okay to be a UI/UX designer who doesn't code" cult. (Looking at you, Adobe and Figma...)
> Same thing happened with modern building architecture
Yes. Yes, it has. I'm currently in the midst of a building project that's ten months behind schedule (and I do not know how many millions of dollars over budget), and I'd blame every one of the problems on that. I - the IT guy - was involved in the design stage, and now in construction (as in, actually doing physical labor on-site), and I'm the only person who straddles the divide.
It's utterly bizarre, because everyone gets things wrong - architects and engineers don't appreciate physical constraints; construction crews don't understand functional or design considerations - so the only way to get things right is for someone to understand both, but (apart from me, in my area - which is why I make sure to participate at both stages) literally no one on the project does.
Seen from a perspective of incentives I guess I can understand how we got here: the architects and engineers don't have to leave their offices, and are more "productive" in that they can work on more projects per year, and the construction crews can keep on cashing their sweet overtime checks. Holy shit, though, is it dispiriting to watch from a somewhat detached perspective.
> We need to get rid of the "It's okay to be a UI/UX designer who doesn't code" cult.
I don’t think designers who don’t code are really a problem. They just need to dogfood, and be lead by someone who cares (and dogfoods as well).
In the case of Apple, I really doubt its designers don't dogfood. Do you expect them to have Android phones and linux desktops?
I would think like you, but then some of their design decision are truly baffling. I like the idea of Liquid Glass, but there are thousands of rough edges that scream lack of care.
I have a strong feeling people working and approving Liquid Glass didn't dog food it in dark mode because it just looked BAD in the first builds available.
I sometimes wonder if anyone in charge at Apple uses Apple devices the way I do. I expect they have one, consistently-apple, high-end setup and it probably works very well for their style. Some things are great but others are insane and it seems like that happens most when using things like non-apple monitors or not typing a certain way on the phone or if you don't drive the same car.
Switching windows between two non apple monitors after waking from sleep is wildly unpredictable and has insane ux like resizing itself after a drag.
My carplay always starts something playing on my car speakers even when I wasn't listening to anything before connecting. It's so off it's comical.
The iPhone alarm will go off like normal, loudly from the speaker, even if you're currently on the phone and have it up to your ear. This has been a problem since my very first iPhone.
There has been a bug about plugged in physical headphones being unrecognized sometimes after waking from sleep even if it worked fine when going into sleep. I checked once in probably 2014 and Apples' official response was that it literally wasn't physically possible despite all of us people experiencing it. The bug was ancient even at that time and >ten years later my m4 macbook pro STILL DOES IT.
Apple and apple fanboys seem to take the stance that these are all user error on my part (remember the "you just aren't a Mac person" era?). I bet some of these are configurable with settings deep in some menu somewhere so from a certain perspective that's right but also underscores my point about the limitations of myopic dogfooding.
As a fun aside, the ux for turning on the "Voice Over" tutorial is the worse thing I've ever experienced on an Apple device. I was laughing out loud trying to figure out how to get out of it instead of finishing the unknown remaining steps. I feel bad for folks who need that accessibility in order to be effective.
Agreed. The further you are away from how a computer works internally, the worse your product for a computer will be.
We have convinced ourselves as an industry that this is not true, but it is true.
None of those companies had predecessors.
My main gripe with Liquid Glass is how distracting it is.
Many top bars have become a group of bubbles over the content, which we’ve been conditioned to see as floating notifications for years. Things shine and move when they don’t require attention, just because.
The end result is that my OS feels like a browser without ad blocker. As much as people hated flat design, at least it didn’t grab your attention with tacky casino tricks.
My main gripe is that the visual shenanigans alone were enough of a change, why rearrange the buttons?! In the early iOS beta, the new tab button was at the top of Safari, as far away from your thumbs as it could be.
Genuinely believe Apple’s design team are rudderless or have unintentionally been forced to produce something to justify someone’s career, because this whole thing is disastrous.
> In the early iOS beta, the new tab button was at the top of Safari, as far away from your thumbs as it could be.
It’s relatively recent in iOS history that Safari’s address bar is at the bottom. There’s a setting to move it back to the top. This specific example is probably as innocent as a default getting accidentally changed during the development process.
> to produce something to justify someone’s career,
This is the curse of being a UI designer for a long lived product. Once a thing has been created and future work consists of 99% code and 1% UI, your UI designer job has evaporated. And so we see that everything changes every major release of an operating system, so the UI people can justify their pay checks.
I think you have cause and effect the wrong way around.
These changes in design are intended to appeal to our magpie brain of wanting the latest, shiniest, things.
You have to understand the vanity of consumers. If every new product looked the same then a lot of people wouldn’t both buying the latest gizmo because there’s no magpie appeal. So when the market stagnates, you need to redesign the product to convince consumers to throw away a perfectly good, working device.
And it usually works as a sales strategy too.
So designers then get told thy has to come up with something that looks newer and more futuristic than the current designs. Regardless of how much those designers might love or hate those current designs.
They come up with this shit not to justify their jobs but because they’re hired exactly to come up with this shit.
If it's coming down from the C suite, that just makes it worse. That's cheap marketing tricks winning priority over lasting intent. It's not just the design folks trying to justify their job at that point, it's the executives surrendering to the "stock must go up during my quarters at all costs" mentality.
Worse in some ways, but understandable an others.
If Company X didn’t reinvigorate their product line then consumers might switch to Company Ys products because they look shiny and new. Which is literally why people switched from BlackBerry et al to iPhones in the previous decade.
Consumers are fickle and want that dopamine hit when they spend money. I know this and even I find myself chasing shiny things. So there’s no way we can change that kind of consumer behaviour.
To be clear, I’m not saying it’s right that companies do this, but I do think they’d go out of business if they didn’t because consumer trends will continue like this regardless of how ethical companies tried to be.
So the problem here isnt that Apple tried to refresh its operating system look. It’s that they completely jumped the shark and created something that was too focused on aesthetics while failing in literally every other metric.
In my experience, it's usually just UX hubris and ignorance about a product's expert users.
UX folks usually have no understanding of the impact of moving a common control and/or keyboard shortcut.
You’re talking about very specific rearrangements of controls. Whereas I was talking about why these big redesign initiatives get green lit to begin with.
> In the early iOS beta, the new tab button was at the top of Safari, as far away from your thumbs as it could be.
Can't you swipe past the end on the tab bar (along the bottom by default) to create a new tab?
Only when you're currently in the rightmost tab, but yes
Yes, I meant past the end of all tabs
Someone posted these settings on HN recently and it has made working on my Mac once again usable: https://imgur.com/a/macos-accessibility-settings-simpler-ret...
Maybe that's why disabilities are on the rise. I went through the MacOS installer yesterday, it asked 3 times if I wanted to configure any a11y options, with cognitive disability featured.
Every distracting visual element of liquid glass looks like a tiny Ad to me which is constantly trying to distract me from what I am doing and trying to grab my attention. Super annoying.
I'm usually in linux (dual boot on a mac) but had to boot into macOS for something. I was utterly confused when I moved my cursor to the top-left and missed clicking the apple menu
I rather like the skeuomorphism ... on the buttons anyway. The distortion effect on the glass is simply annoying, and the overall effect on an already-cramped UI like Safari on a phone is just ... ugh. There's now basically three blobs of mystery meat at the bottom of the screen. So if Liquid Glass was made for mobile first, it's an even bigger failure. It's actually more tolerable on desktop, though the double-border effect on things like the control panel stick out pretty badly.
It’s not how you get promoted though. Plus implementing complex UIs is challenging which engineers like. The incentives are off.
It's not only not how you get promoted, it's a pretty good way to get canned as well. If you don't like the work you're being asked to do, your options are pretty limited to doing it or going elsewhere. There are a million UXers and engineers who'd love to work at Apple and would be happy making whatever their boss suggests.
That's how you know the "culture" and the "vision" really do have to come from the top, and how you know Steve Jobs really was providing value.
Seriously. People got canned for resisting the corporate overlords. That’s capitalism. Corporations run by their employees? Guilds? Cooperatives? Hah! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynbgMKclWWc
Just that usually the forcefed initiatives have to do with corporate profits for shareholders, or trends like shoving AI into everything. Imagine saying no to that!
Even at the supra-corporate and supra-national level, if the organizing principle is competition, no actor not even a CEO or a corporate board or a government can afford to stop racing towards disaster. There is a simple mantra: “If we don’t achieve AGI first, China will and then they’ll dominate.”
Once in a while, the world comes together to successfully ban eg chemical weapons or CFCs, and repair the hole in the ozone layer. Cooperation and restraint takes effort.
Judging by the way we’ve drained all the aquifers, overfished the last fish, destroyed the kelp forests, cut down the rainforsts, bleached the corals, and polluted the world with plastic, I don’t think there is much hope of stopping.
Insects and pollinators are way down, and many larger species are practically extinct, 95% of the world’s animal biomass is humans and their food, and people still pretend environmental catastrophe is all about a few degrees of temperature.
PS: Yes, that escalated quickly. In the real world, it has taken only 80 years… :-/
I don't think corporate profits are the reason Apple has shitty UX because it's hard to argue how shitty UX correlates to higher profit, especially when it costs more to create a shitty UX than to keep the good one you already have.
I reckon it's more that some Apple VP has to justify their million dollar equity package by creating work for their org, because otherwise why should you still have a job?
That’s not capitalism. That’s hierarchy. It didn’t start in the 20th century
Capitalism and competition produce the results I describe further down the comment. It escalates to planetary catastrophe
Let’s focus on the specific claims in your comment.
> People got canned for resisting the corporate overlords. That’s capitalism
Being told to do things by your boss is a problem as old as time. Except with capitalism you can change bosses — a luxury which has not existed throughout history.
Okay great. Now keep going with the rest of my comment and address the rest point by point. You’ll find that it expands from that first point, and describes the consequences of capitalism and competition as an organizing principle.
We are discussing UI/Icon design, not the geopolitical implications of AGI or the Holocene extinction event.
Why should someone that disagrees with you on whether capitalism is uniquely responsible for bad icon design now be forced to defend it for every sin / shortcoming ranging from the social inequity to ecological collapse?
Sure, I guess I’m here.
Why is capitalist competition worse than any other form of competition? Wouldn’t wartime competition over land and sovereignty be far worse? Didn’t the Soviet Union have extreme forms of political competition?
Yeah, software orgs ship their promotion structures.
This explains why all commercial software enshittifies.
And why open source UIs are anarchist. :)
Besides the visual design, I've been thinking about the tech part of it. There's so many bits shifting, morphing and having state, that it sounds antithetical to what a UI is supposed to be: a consistent and unnoticeable tool to interact with software. I do like some of the things they do to free up screen space, but having components being to programmatically complex is bound to cause issues. Besides having your presentation desync with your data, your UI now has opportunities to desync with itself...
It’s an extremely uncomfortable conflict and contradiction between corporate organization, finance “capitalism”, engineering, and creatives; in addition to individual vs group dynamics.
Corporate structure is driven by exploiting and using value for and by a de facto nobility (the c-suite).
Finance “capitalism” seeks to extract value, be it short or long term.
Engineers are motivated by building and creating value.
Creatives are driven by changes for changing’s sake to remain or get a seat at the table.
The uncomfortable reality is that these are inherently conflicting interests that are pulling and pushing each other, but mostly top down.
It’s essentially the “colonialist” exploitative model of existence using creators to leverage rather than extract natural resources, a system that is increasingly not suitable for the modern, technological, commoditized world. AI is a good example of that; it arguably diminishes the value to n degrees of both engineers and creatives, while also leaving the “nobility” and their neo-aristocratic corporate system out in the open exposed as revealing it not only as having no clothes on, but utterly abusive, useless, and downright evil. And no, that’s across the whole political spectrum, not just the opposite of your silly system approved political sport team.
The problem with Apple's execution of Liquid Glass is that the intended audience isn't the iOS user, it's the onlooker watching the iOS user (FOMO). That was an effective strategy when iPhone popularity was growing rapidly. Now that we're in a plateau of market saturation (post-peak Apple), anything directed at the onlooker which detracts for the actual user will hurt their bottom line.
How would this work? The only place I've ever heard of liquid glass is from iPhone users complaining about it incessantly and tutorials on how to turn it off or diminish it. What would I fear missing out on?
I'm merely saying that Apple is cargo-culting their own success formula and it's failing.
I agree, Liquid (Gl)ass is hideous. I'll stick to macOS Sequoia for the time being.
MacOS 26 highlights were... and this was _Apple's_ opening modal...
"Icons that look like shit!"
and
"Notification summaries that may not be correct!"
In general I feel as if Apple's software feels buggier and less solid lately across my iPhone and my computers. Won't be upgrading the personal computer for as long as possible
> Apple's software feels buggier and less solid lately across my iPhone and my computers.
Agreed. Rendering is very flaky. Input events are dropped.
Blinky. Laggy. Two of the Seven Dwarves of Liquid Glass.
Buggy, Flaky, Dropsy, Blinky, Laggy... that's five. How about Wobbly and Gloopy to round out the seven?
Apple has been crashing with increasing frequency for me. Luckily all minor but I’m waiting for the big crapout.
Also what happened to their filters? I get daily spam from Apple email addresses now.
What I love is how their own features don't even play well together anymore...
For instance you can "hide your e-mail" by using Apple's relay, but if you do so... your payments using Apple Pay will fail unless you fill all the information in manually because the e-mail addresses don't match
It's ridiculous how poorly tested everything is, and that combined with their newly entered foray into the world of politics has nearly destroyed three decades of steady Apple use for me. I'll be actively considering other options, not upgrading, and looking elsewhere for products in spaces they're in
I finally talked my company into letting me swap out my MacBook pro for some little Dell. After the last year of updates, my Mac has stopped resuming from sleep reliably, everything is ugly, they took the already barely usable (imo) finder and system settings and found exciting new ways to make them worse. Sadly corporate security means os updates were not optional.
I've never really liked macOS but it feels like someone at Apple was hired just to make it even less likable for me personally lol
> already barely usable (imo) finder
been using a Mac for years, and to this day I don't know how it's possible to navigate directories using Finder. It only has shortcuts for a few folders by default (photos, documents...) and doesn't have a button to navigate to the parent folder. I have literally no idea how to get to my home directory, I need to use the CLI
> doesn't have a button to navigate to the parent folder.
Command + Up Arrow, which is also visible if you click on the "Go" menu. There is also a toolbar button that shows the entire set of enclosing directories; offhand I can't remember whether this is visible by default. There is also "View -> Show Path Bar" which shows all this information at the bottom of the window.
> I have literally no idea how to get to my home directory
Go -> Home, which shows a shortcut key for this, Command-Shift-H.
Off the top of my head, I want to say you can right-click on the current folder name to see (and navigate to) all its ancestors.
Correct - IIRC it's called the "proxy icon"
You can add shortcuts to the sidebar by dragging. You can right click the folder name in the top bar to get a list of parents. You can also View > Show Path Bar and see the the full clickable bread crumbs. Not sure why this is so confusing if you bother to try.
> I have literally no idea how to get to my home directory
Just add it to the sidebar. Finder > Settings > Sidebar > Locations. Or drag it into Favorites.
> doesn't have a button to navigate to the parent folder
View > Show Path Bar. You can also right click on the directory name at the top of the window and it’ll give you the same options.
Even after decades of using macOS I still cannot wrap my head around the fact that Finder has no single button shortcut for opening a file - the most common operation a file manager should do. It’s Cmd+O, and it cannot be changed to anything sane like Enter key.
You can remap it to any shortcut you want (as long as it has a modifier key in it)
>as long as it has a modifier key in it
Why on Earth is this a requirement? When you're navigating through Finder using keyboard, it's very inconvenient to use two keypresses to perform a very basic operation. Using Enter to open a file is how every file manager on every operating system works except Finder. Why would Enter key be hardcoded to a file rename operation instead?
It is a typical Apple behaviour of doing things differently from the rest of the world just for the sake of it, even when it's detrimental to the user experience.
>Why on Earth is this a requirement?
Actually I just checked and it's not, technically you can create key equivalents without modifiers as well [1]. For Finder this doesn't work though, because enter seems to be specifically handled before menu-level key equivalent processing. (Note that it's not guaranteed to work on other apps either, based on [2] seems key equivalents are only dispatched if modifier keys exists. But that might be out of date since it worked for the people in the SE post.)
Option+Enter is the next closest thing.
I agree that their implementation here is not good. In fact there's already a "Rename" menu item, which isn't actually wired to the enter hotkey (this is very un mac like because it means there is no easy way to discover it). The "rename" menu item is actually a fairly recent addition to mac (I think maybe 10.11) while Finder itself is ancient (it was one of the last few apps to be migrated to Cocoa and even today still has lots of legacy warts), and possibly no one bothered cleaning things up.
[1] https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/132984/keyboard-sh...
[2] https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Co...
Space for preview.
I’ve said many times before that I think Finder is the worst default file manager of any popular desktop environment.
I get it’s supposed to be easy to use but so much functionality is hidden behind non-obvious shortcuts. The end result is you either need to memorise a dozen secret handshakes just to perform basic operations, or you give up and revert to 70s technology in the command line.
> I’ve said many times before that I think Finder is the worst default file manager of any popular desktop environment.
[GNOME enters the chat]: "That's nothing, I'm way worse!"
Is it actually though? It’s cool to criticise Nautilus but, at worst, it’s just equally as bad as Finder. Which shouldn’t be surprising given how much it’s styled to look like Finder.
However in my personal opinion Nautilus’s breadcrumb picker does edge it against Finder.
So I stand by my comment that Finder is the worst.
Nautilus opens a new window for every folder you enter. Finder does not.
That used to be a preference, and last I used it, it was not. It is forced on because that’s how the GNOME developers thought you should use it… “Our way or the highway!” — GNOME devs.
Finder wins based on that alone. Finder wins so completely because of that one single thing that I’ll never voluntarily use GNOME again.
When on macOS using Finder I often wish I had something as nice and consistent and usable as Nautilus.
Finder is genuinely horrible. It’s obvious no one at Apple cares about files anymore nor anyone working with them.
We’re all supposed to consume cloud these days or so it seems.
My go to example would be long lasting issues with SMB support in Finder. All operations are very slow, the search is almost unusably so. The operations that are instant on every non-Apple device take ages on a Mac. I first ran into these issues 7 years ago when I set up my NAS, and they present to this day. I tried all random suggestions and terminal commands, but eventually gave up on trying to make it perform as it does on Linux.
With Apple's focus on cloud services, fixing the bugs that prevent the user from working with their local network storage runs contrary to their financial incentives.
Do you like Windows dark patterns more than Mac's shitty designs? Seems like no one wins here. I personally just refrained from upgrading to Tahoe
Edit:typo
I got a new Apple Watch and just getting it set up was a pain. For some reason the passcode input would fail to register key prompts and I had to spam the buttons until something clicked. Then I gave my old Apple Watch to my mom and the setup failed like three times before we managed to get it done. Did make me wonder if anyone at Apple actually tests setting up these devices.
I too have the techie urge to upgrade my software whenever I can, ut after watching the Tahoe demos, I'm staying on Sequoia indefinitely.
I would really appreciate it if the next macOS would be about stability instead of some fancy features barely anyone asked for.
Same. Wish I could go back to Ventura or even Mojave though. There are zero new features I use. Still hate the newish Settings app.
Yeah, me too. The old Settings app was easy and intuitive; I hate the new one.
Same. And finally thinking that our KDE home server doesn’t look too bad, it’s almost comforting.
The major reason to stay on macOS is stability. Hopefully they stop breaking things on the Mac front.
The only "real" justification is that this is a long term play to figure out a UI and interaction shift that will work for general augmented reality devices (aka whatever device Apple releases five years and two iterations from now based on the Vision Pro.)
That’s the same logic that led to the Windows 8 UI being designed tablet first because that’s “where we’re all going”. Fast forward to Windows 10 where MS had to concede that, no, turns out it isn’t where we’re all going and rolled most of it back.
It's somewhat understandable.
A lot of us felt at the time that surely laptops and tablets would converge. Otherwise, what a waste of hardware.
But it hasn't really happened. From a hardware perspective, things have gotten closer with the iPad's magnetic keyboard. But, I still find that the iPad as laptop replacement to be a compromise that I may tolerate for travel but don't love for a lot of laptop work.
Magnetic keyboard on the iPad is such a lose. Some Thai hacker got full macOS running on his iPhone over Christmas. Apple are cowards collecting dividends.
The magnetic keyboard lets you use the iPad without it having to be resting on a solid surface like basically every tablet/keyboard combination out there. Microsoft has tried various hybrid laptop/tablet arrangements that did both things mediocrely. I have zero interest in what someone has hacked together.
iPads are great devices for non-tech savvy people who need a computer for stuff like writing and reading documents and e-mails, planning travel and making reservations, keeping in touch with people on messaging and social media.
That's a gigantic market segment, and Apple has to be very careful to not make those devices complicated or vulnerable.
Exactly. I tend not to use my iPad that much except when traveling--partly because I have an old MacBook that lives on my dining room table. If I didn't have that I would certainly use my iPad more (and would doubtless get more comfortable using it for more purposes).
I struggle to find any use case at all for my iPad. Even when traveling, I use my phone most of the time and when I want something bigger, I have the MacBook Air in my bag, which doesn't feel any more cumbersome to have with me than an iPad.
I won't really argue much. I can get by with just my iPhone. I think a MacBook (don't have an Air) is better for a lot of things even if the iPad is better for media on a plane. The weight difference is minimal if you count the keyboard. I don't draw so don't need an iPad for that. A Kindle weighs nothing so I can always bring that for reading.
Not sure I'll buy another iPad given my current lifestyle.
That will be part of it. The main driver though that they've been working on for years is trying to figure out how to add just enough desktop to UIKit to allow them to kill off AppKit as a separate thing.
That isn’t a justification for fucking up the icons or using single retina pixels to differentiate them.
It’s just stupid people doing stupid things.
Without hyperbole, Liquid Glass on Mac OS is visually the worst commercial desktop UX I have ever had the displeasure of using. It is amateurish and frankly, ill advised to have even tried to unify the aesthetic across devices so universally. I think much of what is on the phone works fine. There are some pain points and some bits that are visually awkward, but generally it works and is new and fresh, but on the Mac it is as if no one really cared. And that reflects really poorly on where Apple is at, because if nothing else, Apple seemed like the company that always really cared about the user experience.
There are some things that are nice. The dock looks nice. The transparent menu bar is nice enough too and there is a toggle off switch if it doesn't work for you. Spotlight looks fine. But the rest is so bad that I just cannot fathom how someone at Apple did not stop it before release. I would be throwing a fit to stop it from being released if I was in Apple and had any sway at all. I assume the executive team was all looking at it and using it before release. So how did this happen? The new side bar and the new tool bars are abominations. I cringe every time I have to use the finder; it is just a blob of various shades of white or, if you prefer, dark mode, grey.
My hope is that if nothing else they roll back the sidebar and the tool bar changes or do a complete rethink on how they are implemented. If they rolled back the extra rounded corners I wouldn't complain either.
Clearly a generation of mobile-first designers not understanding how desktops are used.
It’s dreadful, it still blows my mind that out of Windows, macOS and Linux, my Linux desktop with KDE has the most premium experience now.
Even on mobile it took a few iterations from when the design was first introduced for it to be usable. Not good mind you, just usable.
Even Apple's own marketing material had screenshots where text was near impossible to read, even for someone with good eyesight: grey text on top of highly transparent glass... what were they thinking!?
>Spotlight looks fine.
Keyword “looks”. Because considering behavior, there’s tons of delay introduced and results change under your finger as you’re selecting them, causing you to get the wrong thing.
I agree.
My first rebuttal was going to be Windows 8, but that was actually a lot better.
A lot of Windows 8 I liked, but Windows perpetually suffers from needing to support older versions of Windowing systems, or some corporate usecase from the early 90s that carries too much money to ever say no to implementing.
Windows 11 is, I think, worse than MacOS these days, half for still dragging the past along with it, and half for introducing a second start menu just for ads.
I think Windows greatest strength is their greatest weakness, which is backwards compatibility. MacOS greatest weakness is their UX, which has slowly been going downhill for the past few years and on this release took a nose dive. It is a wild reversal from the mid 2000s when Apple's UX was so far superior to anything else that it felt revelatory to switch from Windows XP to OSX.
Oh geez, I forgot about Windows 8. Visually it looked nice enough, though. Once you got out of the insane touch first overlay it was fine, but I reinstalled Windows 7 so fast I never had to spend much time with it. I guess by that measure Windows 8 was worse.
Windows 8's alternative UI was very snappy and fluid. It was not great because it was completely disconnected from the normal UI.
I'd say this is a pretty unhelpful, demanding, and borderline damaging take to spread. I've learned from experience that it's unlikely "a designer" should follow this advice or accept the archaic guilt-trip "because you make six figures" whatever that means.
If you run your own design agency, you've got your own company's reputation and yours on the line, so be as opinionated as you find necessary, but otherwise if you're just an employee without an inordinate amount of clear authority within the scope of your discipline at the large company (you know if you do or don't) then don't try and create a mutiny, it will more than likely be a childish assumption of personal risk on your part, much more so than it costs the company, much more so than anyone else needs to care, because someone on a forum told you to be passionate about round rects or small icons or whatever. If you need to tell your boss "google NN group", you probably don't have the trust or experience to be successful with such a play.
It's okay to have a personal hatred of it and do what you can to steer the work appropriately, but when you're tasked with a dumbass plan, let it be the decision-makers' dumbass plan, unless it's your decision to make. Let it be the project we tried and it didn't and couldn't have worked out, which sometimes happens, but you learn and then leave if it's pervasive and you have other options.
It would be remarkably stupid to single yourself out as the person who thinks of themselves as the reincarnation of Steve Jobs and risk your livelihood to save Apple's reputation. The unlikely upside is that you get your way and that can boost your confidence, but the downside is that you fumble your best shot at financial security for the rest of your life because you thought you'd be received well.
That's not to say you shouldn't say no to nothing, or have love for your craft, just don't pretend it's your job to, unless it is, which it's probably not. Disagree and let it be a failure if it's going to be, feel vindicated if it is, but the money is there for you if not. The people who worked on the Vision Pro aren't responsible for it being a dud product, and they can be proud of what they did design-wise and technologically despite that.
I think your take is unhelpful, demanding, and damaging to engineering ethics. If you want to live in a 90s corporate workplace hierarchy model, that's your value system. But it is untenable and harms people in the long run.
Ethically speaking, the parent seemed to be demanding that some hypothetical designer put their livelihood on the line because good taste in UI design is paramount, we're not talking about building a skyscraper in a swamp out of twigs. Pat yourself on the back I guess if you want to volunteer to be a trillion dollar company's human meat shield, and relish in the virtue of being unemployed in a very bad market due to having a volatile emotional temperament, but I'd just recommend not doing that.
In the long run, no you don't want to set that much of your taste or expertise aside forever, but you shouldn't have to, it comes with all the things I said, trust & agency.
Dont worry, there are thousands of aspiring artists that will gladly do it for a 6 figure salary. The person that manages your salary, they determine what you work on. Dont like the work, walk away …
Tour de force article...well done! (except the snow was highly distracting)
Also absurd is that tabs and menus are not attached to their elements.
Alan Dye ruined everything at Apple, no idea how he clung on for so long. You know he designed the horrible ios7 as well?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSzjcVZXolc
https://tjkelly.com/blog/ios-7-sucks/
And he also takes credit for the dynamic island. It is an assault on my senses to see everything constantly moving around on my screen.
I have been working with Macs since 1995, but this year is my first using Pixel with GrapheneOS, that is how done I am with Apple. Unfortunately I know the UI will not change for years and I just could not take it.
You know he designed the horrible ios7 as well?
I don't think that's fully accurate, unless you have a link that confirms it? That Dye designed it, I mean, not that it was horrible...
Jony Ive was the head of design at that point (both hardware and UI). Wikipedia says Dye "contributed greatly to the design language of iOS 7" but Ive would have had final say. Certainly at the time as I recall it, iOS 7 was seen as Ive's baby.
Also, I'm not defending iOS 7, but I reckon its visual design was a lot more influential than it gets credit for. Think of those ubiquitous Prime bottles, with their bright saturated color gradients; the first place I remember seeing that style was iOS 7. I bet they picked that style for Prime because kids liked it, and kids liked it because kids like iPhones.
Edit to add: "bright saturated colors" goes back a long way to Fisher Price toys and the like, of course, but it's the gradients specifically that I think iOS 7 popularized.
I've heard rumors that part of why iOS 7 was so garish is because Dye's background was in product packaging so his team were doing design reviews on paper and didn't realize that the colors would look different on device due to CMYK vs RGB. Not sure if it's ever been confirmed but it would explain a lot.
I was in the room for a few design reviews for my part of iOS 7 (I was an engineer writing the new screens). Everything was done on a 90+ inch HDTV that we AirPlayed from our Macs or iPhones to for the room to view. Not printed, though the design studio walls were covered in printed explorations of variations of concepts, that is true.
Dye was the senior rep of the Design org present and commenting on all our software progress. I never once encountered Ive.
Thanks for the clarification! Out of curiosity, do you have any other insight into how/why iOS 7 turned out the way it did? What was the internal attitude towards it like?
I find it hard to believe that Dye would be so incompetent to not even know about CMYK vs RGB. How did he even get hired by Apple?
Dye was a symptom, not the cause. At a widespread organizational level, Apple just does not give a shit.
>Alan Dye ruined everything at Apple, no idea how he clung on for so long
Cook doesn't seem to a have any taste for product design, isn't he a logistics guy?
Yup. He is, by all accounts, a great supply-chain guy. eg. As far as I can tell, there were no significant breaks in Apple's supplies during COVID.
But he clearly falls afoul of Steve Jobs'warning about leaders with no taste.
This is even an understatement.
It’s not a stretch to say that Tim Cook created the whole Shenzhen microelectronics industry. The thousands of specialist component vendors and large integrators that assemble products trace to his instigation with Compaq and then Apple. The iPod, Macs, iPhone, copied the Swiss Watch model of vast redundant networks of component competetors working as an ecosystem to drive down costs.
This created the skill and machinery base that made it possible for other western design companies (such as Android vendors that were not Samsung or Japanese) to make clones of the iPhone quickly and easily. (Let’s be real, every smartphone is an iPhone 1 clone)
China owes a lot to this work.
Tim Cook needs to drop some acid. He has no creativity what so ever.
You'd think a supply chain guy would be able to get ahold of some psychedelics too...
I will take the bottom bar of iOS7 Safari any day over the wretched mess that it is now.
Is it just me, or does answering a Facetime call now require pressing buttons at the opposite top and bottom corners of the screen?
How does that benefit anyone?
Is he the one responsible for the 2016 MBP? It took Apple like 6 years to fix everything about that
Thank god he left for Meta
Really? Same guy? OUFF. What a track record...
I agree, the Liquid Glass isn’t working out for Mac OS.
Few days ago I booted a very old device running High Sierra and the UI and old Dock look so clean.
That desktop was peak for me, and the age starts showing a bit in Finder, but it's still more usable than today's versions.
Nielsen Norman used to be quoted constantly during UX discussions at various places I worked. Seems like UX folks and Information Architects have slowly been replaced by a general purpose “designer”
Just a note on Vision Pro - as it’s been priced at $3,500 - I’m not sure I’d say it’s unsuccessful.
I bet they’ve sold approx as many as they thought they would.
This product is a placeholder for a cheaper and lighter one in the future.
There seems to be two takes on the whole liquid glass thing.
- UI/UX pros who understand this stuff: “I hate it” - everyone else: “I didn’t notice until you pointed it out”
I don't mind Liquid Glass. What annoys me is how it's seemingly someone's full-time job at Apple to periodically make me relearn how to find my photos or open Safari tabs.
I also don't really understand where the raised sidebar gets its color tint from. Wouldn't the desktop background be underneath everything else?
I generally don't place "conspiratorial" motivations to explain the decisions of tech companies, but I can't help but think this is a move from apple to keep their ludicrously powerful M-chips busy with mundane UI because the average user will never need to otherwise upgrade past an M1.
These directions come from above the PMs, especially at a place as design-focused as Apple.
Unpopular opinion, but I find Liquid Glass incredibly satisfying (I set it to Tinded though). The transitions are just really well done. The glass effect itself is a fun gadget, but unnecessary. I dislike how it must waste my battery. Give me the transitions of Liquid Glass with a basic frosted glass material and I would be perfectly happy, but the current state is fine too.
> If you're a designer at a top 10 S&P 500 company making 6 figures,
... your career requires constantly chasing after what amounts to fashion trends every few years, otherwise it's a solved problem and probably does not provide much of a career
The justification is that they feel it necessary to make obvious, superficial changes in pursuit of differentiation between software versions to help keep the upgrade treadmill running.
The only UI change that I've found useful since Yosemite was Mojave's introduction of a dark mode. They made the fonts look worse on non-Retina displays, threw out the Preference pane in favor of a weird list that can only be resized vertically, added transparent everything, and banned any icon that's not in a squircle. Such UI, many differentiation, much insanely great, wow!
Anyway, I bought a ThinkPad.
> If you're a designer at a top 10 S&P 500 company making 6 figures, you owe it to yourself to have some love for your craft.
I think you've unintentionally illustrated the root of the problem here.
People motivated by profit are not incentivized to produce high-quality results. Rather, people motivated by profit are only incentivized to do the least effort that they can get away with.
People motivated by pride are those who are incentivized to produce good results, because the result reflects on them personally.
Which is all to say, pride motives produce a race to the top, whereas profit motives produce a race to the bottom. It's no wonder our modern economy can only produce slop.
This is an excellent article.
Apple has been rudderless on the interaction design front for over a decade now. The windowing mess is evidence of it. We now have the cmd+tab (app switcher), Spaces, Mission Control, (full screen) split screen, Stage Manager, and now tiled window control. None of those interaction metaphors have been expanded upon since their initial launch.
I'm a "mac guy". I understood why Apple initially eschewed windows style alt-tab, given the emphasis on app-centricism. But now, they've created a thousand different ways to switch windows without giving us a proper window switcher. There are apps that bring alt-tab to Mac, but they are all bad because Apple doesn't give developers access to the low-level APIs to create performant and fully featured window management.
Before, Apple had an endless well of great ideas to tap. That's how we got the term "Sherlocked". However, now that they've locked down macOS so much, they've suffocated themselves of new ideas.
I strongly believe we need to return to the drawing board and design a Window Environment from scratch because we've gone so far down the "everything's a mess" route that it's impossible to work our way out again.
Here's an example: panes, tabs, windows, apps, spaces. These things all fight against each other, have their own little silos, get treated differently by every single app, etc, etc.
> Here's an example: panes, tabs, windows, apps, spaces. These things all fight against each other, have their own little silos, get treated differently by every single app, etc, etc.
Disagree. The fact that these are independent is a huge organizational boon for those who know how to apply some combination of them.
Example: I set up spaces (virtual desktops) to have themes: one of general web, one for iOS dev, one for Android dev, etc. within that, it’s useful to be able to further organize with windows and tabs — windows can represent projects for example, and tabs can represent files. These work together to prevent a Cambrian explosion of windows that would be impossible to manage no matter how your environment works.
It’s useful for apps to be distinct from windows, too. This allows things like moving all windows belonging to a particular app between screens, or minimizing/maximizing them all, hiding them all, etc. Panes in most circumstances are an entirely different beast than tabs and windows… it wouldn’t be useful to turn an inspector palette into a tab.
They work together as long as one’s mental model isn’t overly simplistic.
I didn't really explain my objections very well in such a throwaway statement. My issue isn't that those things exist; pretty much the opposite. I think it's good that they exist and they almost certainly always should. My problem is when app A implements tabs differently from app B, app C uses the same shortcut for switching windows that app D uses for switching tabs, etc. It just all seems so disjointed.
What I want is for an OS that treats things like tabs as first-class citizens, not a byproduct that each app implements in its own way.
macOS actually has native tab support built in. It supports everything you’d expect from a tab system, including merging windows into tabs and splitting them back out. All third party devs have to do is opt in and tell the OS which windows are intended to participate. It’s been a feature for a long time now.
Problem is that most third party apps don’t opt in and instead reimplement tabs themselves. It’s mostly native Mac apps made by small boutique developers that use native tabs.
Is it enabled by default?
I only very recently changed my System Settings > Desktop & Dock > Windows > Prefer tabs when opening documents to "Always". I'm pretty sure the default is "In Full Screen".
Now, something like TextEdit creates new files in new tabs rather than new windows. It's great! But by default, everything on macOS seems to use windows rather than tabs. I don't even think most people know about the "Prefer tabs" option at all.
Tab support is definitely enabled by default — eg cmd-T in finder to make a new tab
I'm not talking about Finder. I'm talking about default behavior across all relevant apps, apps like TextEdit.
When you create a new document, does it open in a new tab or new window by default?
You're welcome to use Cosmic desktop then... ;-)
I say this only half in jest, as it's what I'm using on my personal desktop. It's far from perfect though, for some reason the taskbar/launchpad just feels awkwardly shaped, some of the keyboard based navigation gets a little wonky sometimes. And I feel that there's a few areas where the split brain between docking regions and windows isn't quite as polished as it needs to be.
On the plus side, it performs better than Gnome, and is slightly more consistent than a lot of Linux desktop options. In the end, I do think that OSes need to expose a bit more details in a somewhat consistent way as cross-platform apps and even electron-like options are boing to become more common place as people jump between and need to support Window, Linux and MacOS targets, with the variances they all have.
Personally, there are a lot of things I like and dislike between all of them.. I spent a large amount of time tweaking Budgie to be almost exactly what I want at one point, and an update borked my setup... I just switched to Pop/Cosmic and dealt with it from there.
Agreed. Lots of conflicting principles. Like, it doesnt make sense to increase the padding across the UI and at the same time, push quarter-screen layouts. I'm almost begging Apple to create something that I don't like, but in a way that's thoughtful and committed to that bit.
I agree. If you (or anyone else who shares your sentiment) hasn't tried it before, you might enjoy "distro hopping" across different Linux distros, using something like Ventoy to make it easy to try out different desktop environments.
There's a veritable zoo to try out. KDE, COSMIC, XFCE, GNOME and its many derivatives (like Pantheon or the previous COSMIC), Unity, etc. Also interesting are the old XMotif based ones like CDE (which has the delightful "chiseled marble" look of 90s-era DEs).
Windows also has its own share of alternative shells, but AFAIK only Cairo DE is actively supported and developed.
I feel like there are a million reasons why this is the wrong choice. There are probably 10 xkcd comics alone that explain why this is a bad idea.
"Let's throw every away and start from scratch" is a tempting idea, but it rarely works. Even taking your example of panes, windows, tabs, apps, and spaces, each of those have a separate and identifiable use case that, IMO, is valid. At least in my mind, I have a mental model around where panes, windows, tabs, and apps are appropriate, and I personally rarely use spaces (though I certainly understand people who like them), and they've never bother me because I can safely ignore them.
And when you look at the issues identified in the article, they all seem very fixable to me. Fixable starting with Apple getting new design leadership, and given the guy responsible for Liquid Glass jumped to Meta, sounds like it was a good thing for Apple.
I misworded that. See my other comment; tldr, I want windows, tabs, etc. to be properly implemented by the OS, to a standard, rather than in many different conflicting ways.
Cmd+~ switches windows of a given app in case you didn't know (not disagreeing with you but it is one shortcut I find super useful and it helps switch windows).
My hate for this behavior grows with each passing year as more and more of the "apps" I use become browser windows.
This is why I regard ChromeOS with fear. Because it really does feel like everything is just converging on the browser as the OS, and a browser is not a goddamn OS.
The browser is effectively an OS - and it’s not very productive to cling to the notion that it isn’t one
It's not very productive to build an entire OS on top of and JIT compiled on top of my already mature and functional OS. It's a waste of my time.
And if it is an OS, it's also just not one where I can be very productive.
It is productive though because it’s a universal platform. The economics of it are unavoidable
I have a non-ANSI keyboard so tilde is in a super weird place for that (next to left shift). I swapped the shortcut to Option+Tab, makes much more intuitive sense.
For some reason it's currently broken for Firefox on Mac, at least on my end.
Works fine for me
I heavily use this one actually.
On Linux I miss it and create a hybrid super-tilde action that cycles through apps of the same kind as the focused app.
Me too, in fact watching my hands for a moment, it's the only way I switch applications now
I have to say I've never found anything wrong with the alt-tab app I use on macOS. I wonder if you're referring the permissions it has to ask for?
https://github.com/lwouis/alt-tab-macos
Alt tab is okay but it has performance issues (sometimes window switching is instant, sometimes there's a slight but perceptible delay). The devs have acknowledged it and said that it cannot be fixed.
Other pet peeves include the smallest window thumbnails are enormous and enabling mouse hover to switch windows causes me to switch to the wrong window, and thumbnails are often stale.
You can change the window size in settings
I did. It's set to small and still much too large for me.
I think MacOS would be much more unusable without alt-tab, like this app is a critical piece of software that has to be installed on any MacOS machine I'm using. But it does sometimes miss a window, like it doesn't show up in the window list in alt-tab even though it is open. And then I have to use the three finger swipe up thing to find it. Not a huge deal but occasionally annoying, and I assume it is because they are limited in the access they have to this information, which Apple could make available if they wanted, but have decided not to.
This isn't the only aspect of Tahoe that seems amateurishly designed by someone following "wrong rules", the wrong rule here being "for consistency, let's assign an icon to every action.
Another wrong rules I've seen blindly followed is making everything an edge-to-edge canvas, so that the sidebar floats on top. Having a full-window canvas with floating sidebars can make sense for applications where content is expansive and inherently spatial (like say, Figma) or applications where the sidebar is an actual floating element that can be moved around (like Photoshop once was).
It doesn't make sense in Finder, or Reminders, where the content is ultimately just a list. Forcing the sidebar "to float on top of the content" yields no benefit because the content wont ever scroll under it, and because it can't be moved anyway, but it does lead to wasted space, that ugly "double border", etc.
This is what happens when the people issuing the orders (assign an icon for every task) are not the ones doing the task.
And the ones doing it have no say in how it's done.
Being involved and in the loop is how great software is made. Otherwise you can just outsource and have tickets completed.
> This is what happens when the people issuing the orders (assign an icon for every task) are not the ones doing the task.
No, this is what happens when the people in charge of UI design have no clue what they're doing.
In theory, the problems highlighted in the article would have become apparent shortly into the process of assigning an icon to every menu item. Forging ahead despite the impossibility of doing a good job on the task is a sign of orders being issued from top to bottom without feedback working its way from the bottom to the top.
Top down micromanaging of design is how Apple has always worked. It's not what's different now.
Yeah, if anything it seems like there is not enough top-down micromanaging. Especially with the icon consistency parts.
The difference is the lack of top-down QA and taste.
I'm afraid you both may be right in this case. "Make it blue!" - stakeholder. "Ok, but then we'll have to change everything for consistency." - VP of UI. Produces the horror that we have today.
If your UI designers can get this much crap past upper management, the managers have officially become the problem.
It's like what Miyamoto warned: a delayed UI is eventually good, but a rushed UI is forever bad.
I hadn't noticed, but I checked. One tiny correction: content can flow under the floating sidebar in Finder.
but being too lazy to even globally coordinate the icons is some deep rot.
They've got the SF Symbols font, and probably assumed that's enough. Everyone has the same set of icons available, technically.
It seems that Apple has nobody left who has all three at the same time: taste, attention to detail, and authority to demand fixes. Having lots of people who have max two out of these three gives you designs of Microsoft and Glass Apple.
I despise SF Symbols. Cheap, lame, boring, flat little hieroglyphics do not make good icons. They're just cheap.
If rather have a boring but consistent and usable UI than something jazzy but inconsistent and broken.
Every app should not be its own little universe as if it was a videogame.
"Usable" being the key word. 12 or 14 pixel square hieroglyphics are not good icons, end of story.
SF Symbols is not a bitmap font.
I’ve always respected macOS for being the 'stable' choice for not-as-techy people. But recent versions feel like a mess. Running Tahoe on my 2019 Mac Pro (Yes the cheese grater one) has been surprisingly frustrating. Simple things are broken: Ableton couldn't even trigger a microphone permission prompt, forcing me to meddle with a SQLite database, which is definitely not meant for end users to touch, just to get it working.
Logitech’s software is also stuck in a loop denying it has Bluetooth access (Which it has). And with the added graphical glitches (Apple likes to call them liquid glass) and weird window artifacts (For some reason, all my windows had a black, rectangular border one day), it’s honestly less reliable than my macOS-style Linux rice from 2015. But I'm still stuck with MacOS since I NEED Adobe Lightroom for my work and there is still now way to run that with GPU acceleration on Linux. But if there was, there would be no device running Windows/MacOS left in my household
I've also recently come upon this talk by an ex-apple UI/UX engineer: https://youtu.be/1fZTOjd_bOQ I think what he's talking about is precisely what got lost at apple.
Edit: In case someone stumbles upon this after experiencing the same problem with ableton, here is the command I executed:
sqlite3 ~/Library/Application\ Support/com.apple.TCC/TCC.db "INSERT OR REPLACE INTO access VALUES('kTCCServiceMicrophone','com.ableton.live',0,2,4,1,NULL,NULL,0,'UNUSED',NULL,0,1725000000,NULL,NULL,'default',0);"
Disclaimer: I have absolutely no Idea what it does, as it was generated by Gemini. I do not have anything super important on this computer so I just executed it, but please don't touch obscure system files if you have data to lose.
Your Ableton and Logitech issues seem to be the same: screwed up access permissions. Not your fault, macOS has been sucking at it for a while. It’s not unheard of for System Settings to show you some app has some permissions, but in practice it doesn’t.
What usually works is fully resetting permissions for an app:
To find the bundle ID for an app:There definitely is something weird with Tahoe permission system. I was trying to learn Swift and after a couple keystrokes, the banner asking for the permission to access other's app data pops up without fail. Making it almost impossible to use Swift Playground. And it's been like that for a couple months now.
https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/808758
https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/811796
The System Settings panel for TCC permissions has been fucked since Ventura. It never reflects reality properly and won't show managed settings either (like those granted or denyed outright by a configuration profile). So users have no idea that Firefox can't access their microphone because their device administrator explicitly denied that. The redesign of System Preferences should have raised far more alarm bells than it did, and it did raise a fuck ton of alarm bells that something utterly broken is happening in Cupertino. Along the same line as the another comment in here said, it's just that some amateur is following the "wrong rules". Like, oh, we have to have the macOS settings app look and work exactly like iOS', despite being a far more complex system with a lot more legacy components.
I am literally writing a bug report right now for 26.2, because on my Mac, for whatever reason, running tccutil reset All on com.apple.Terminal isn't removing Full Disk Access. It removes everything else (screen recording, specific folder domain access, but not FDA).
> screwed up access permissions
Bane of my existence. I have wasted so much time on various apps not having some access they need.
I did try that amongst other things. Launching Ableton via Terminal also brought up the microphone permission pop-up...for the Terminal app. One has to wonder if a System that regularly "forgets" permissions is even secure at all.
TCC permissions are always evaluated by whether the parent process has the permission if it isn't being spawned by LaunchServices.
> One has to wonder if a System that regularly "forgets" permissions is even secure at all.
It does not "forget", the permissions are limited to 30 days. So you have to re-grant them periodically.
Oh, and if you miss the popup (because sometimes it pops _under_ other windows) then you just start getting silent failures. With absolutely NO indication in the UI that something is wrong. There is literally no way to find that out without looking directly into the TCC database.
Yeah I'm hopeful that they spend the next software update atoning for their UI sins.
I remember being really excited for Liquid Glass, because it felt like a return to the good old days of Skeuomorphism, at least in some spirit. In reality, it was a botched delivery, I suspect for two reasons:
1. Trying to unify all of their design (in one year no less) against one style -- developed primarily on Apple Watch & the now defunct Vision Pro -- was a colossal undertaking.
2. There's so much goddamn software packed into each OS that you're going to inevitably be stuck with bloated menus. Imagine Apple releasing OS 27 this year and saying "we're stripping you down to the bare bones. It's going to feel like Snow Leopard, but we're going to give you customization menus to alter that experience." I would lose my mind with joy. I'd be so excited to be able to operate my fucking phone again.
No, Liquid Glass was stunted from its conception. Any UI designer worth his salt could have pointed out the legibility issues immediately.
The fact that no one (in power) saw a problem with Liquid Glass shows that Jobs was right, that letting the MBAs take the power never works out. And he was wrong for appointing Cook. Remember that Jobs made MacBooks "expensive" (no more expensive or even cheaper than a Vaio or Portege) because he wanted to make great devices with a great UX and UI, which needed a certain level of investment. Jobs loved his users. Cook only loves his shareholders.
> software update atoning for their UI sins
But how would they do that without scrapping the whole version?
Their marketing for this year heavily relies on liquid glass but if they remove the shiny stuff, it’s not very pretty, it’s just functional. Functional is what people with work to do appreciate, marketing people will want the shiny back now that it was introduced.
I really don't think the shininess is the issue at hand. It's interface clutter. My iPhone is so cluttered. It's packed full of software I'll never use. I wade through menu options I'll never use.
I like the look of Liquid Glass and I'm generally for it. It just needs to be organized better.
> just functional
This is ultimately what I disagree with. I think iOS/macOS have become entirely dysfunctional. Software is broken, webpages are broken simply because they're running from OS 26. Alarms and calendar events either run randomly or not at all. The system preferences menu is hardly navigable. I could go on. Maybe I'm just getting old and crusty, and yearn for the days when Steve Jobs was running the ship.
They just pack needless software in and do nothing to keep it organized/usable.
Imagine using "Apple" and "featuritis" in the same sentence.
Make a Ballmer CEO...
> But how would they do that without scrapping the whole version?
There is a way for them to fix this while saving face. You see, Liquid Glass™ was just the first of their incredible new Material Design paradigm. Now introducing Apple Stone™, Apple Paper™, Apple Linen™ and Apple Brushed Metal™. All just as realistic as Liquid Glass™.
I’d be very happy if we returned to the Brushed Metal era, when they actually followed their own UI guidelines.
> Yeah I'm hopeful that they spend the next software update atoning for their UI sins.
I have heard Liquid Glass was in development for two years, so I see no hope of them spending all that money over again. Nevermind all the developers who have redesigned apps for IOS26.
They could just re-release IOS 18, but that would piss me off as a developer.
This is why I left the Apple Ecosystem last month, I see no hope.
They bailed on the touch strip, and that was built into the hardware and required every app developer to integrate with it.
The off-ramp for liquid glass is what they’ve already been doing: repeatedly nerf it until it’s just tinted glass again.
That’s on point - it really reminds me of a Linux distro that someone went a bit too overboard on customizing. The inconsistencies are so familiar from cobbling different OS and window themes and icon sets etc together. One more reason to move away from MacOS since they don’t have that anymore either
The bug with the outlined windows really threw me back a decade. It's exactly how a bad KDE MacOS rice looked back then lol
I know someone who works on the macOS permission system. If you submit a bug report and share the feedback number, I will send it their way https://bugreport.apple.com/
>Simple things are broken: Ableton couldn't even trigger a microphone permission prompt, forcing me to meddle with a SQLite database, which is definitely not meant for end users to touch, just to get it working.
You shouldn't have to do any of that. Even if Live couldn't trigger the permission prompt, you should be able to give it a microphone permission in Settings.
For whatever reason, apps need to request the microphone permission first to show up in the settings menu. For other permissions you can drag/drop the application into the settings window, but not for the microphone permission.
Tahoe broke trackpad scrolling in Safari on my 2023 MBP. Other users have been experiencing and reporting the issue for months. Apple still hasn’t fixed it in any of its updates or addressed it. Pretty bad.
Biggest downside of Mac OS has always been this. It doesn't provide a stable platform for third-party anything.
The talk you cited is excellent. I recommend it if anyone is interested in design, UIs and UX :P
It recently made the rounds on HN with discussion[1].
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46256834
I wonder if this is a symptom of a broader shift away from cathedral-style "owned" software toward bazaar-style free software, perhaps due to the ascendant SaaS model sucking investment away from traditionally shipped product teams, or if Apple is just sleepwalking down the slope of mediocrity.
What you are describing is a symptom of a system already in the process of breaking. The "OG Hacker Mentality" is a thing of the past, corporations are run by executives looking at money, maybe at shareholders but never at users. Most companies have internal processes with complexity comparable to government processes and outsourcing/using a SaaS for everything is just what managers do to get a short term win and thereby a promotion. UI/UX design on the other hand has to be done by a small group, with a very thought out concept and lots of freedom and no financial pressure. However, executives see UI/UX developers as glorified icon-generators. They are already talking about doing UI/UX design with AI. Tell me, when has an AI ever cared for usability?
A UI/UX Dev has two choices in 2026: 1. Try to execute their own vision and get shot down into burnout by management 2. Just make everything look shiny and modern, create demos that look great and get promoted
from what i've read on macrumors, Tahoe on the 2019 MP is quite messy. A lot of people complain about the UIs being sluggish.
I guess they only work on Apple Silicon software by now and only do the absolute minimum on Intel/AMD support. It's getting phased out anyway next update, which is also a shame for a machine that 5 years ago cost more than a pretty great car.
What's crazy is that it's still a pretty good Windows machine even after MacOS stops getting updates. The irony.
Liquid Glass is horrible on my iPhone SE 2020. Slow and looks weird on the smaller screen. I tried to turn most effects off but it still is just worse in every way
I had a 16E and it was buggy, cramped, confusing, and drained my battery. My fault for being poor and not wanting to spend the extra $400 for a 16.
IOS26 broke my device, and what recourse do I have? None.
> what recourse do I have?
Buy a Pixel 9a for $399, flash GrapheneOS.
Already did. :)
That’s the case on larger screens as well.
It's sluggish on a 2023 M3 Pro!
That's weird; almost the only issue I don't have with Tahoe on a 2023 M2 Mini is its performance. Do you have transparency enabled?
Yes, I have 'reduce transparency' set to true. Overnight after upgrade the UI became noticably sluggish.
The outstanding example is Spotlight. For years since the M1 release I have been able to bring the bar up and type C-H-R then Enter, in ~500ms I guess, and I would always get Chrome.
Now, I have to wait another 1-2 seconds for it to think. If I hit enter before it has finished thinking, Spotlight goes away and nothing else happens!
The UI and Spotlight are still fine on my 2020 M1 Air running Sequioa
Fair enough. With Tahoe's removal of Launchpad, I assume you're talking about Spotlight in the sense of what appears when you press the Launchpad icon (F4)? Anyway, I can confirm that I also get very weird laggy behaviour from it—sometimes a double-press is interpreted as two presses, sometimes as just one.
I hadn't noticed that they killed Launchpad! On my M3's keyboard, F4 is a magnifying glass icon for Spotlight. I've always used cmd+space, which has been around for a while.
What's even worse is I have disabled all search categories for Spotlight except Apps and System Settings. It's searching a list of 40 apps and idk maybe 200 settings, and it still sucks.
I also never had a problem launching apps from Launchpad (I guess because that was its sole purpose, and it did it well) while I think it was pretty much day 1 that I encountered an app that just refused to show up in the Spotlight replacement.
At this point why even use spotlight? Raycast or a list of other maybe more minimalistic replacements would work great.
Can even vibe code your own like I did.
Claude Code wrote a single file AppKit program that uses 30mb memory (avoid SwiftUI).
Extended it with dictionary, quick translations, and more. Since I use it every day, I keep polishing it without writing code.
This sounds great. Anything on GitHub I can take inspo from?
totally possible it’s Tahoe but I’d rule some other potential issues out as well if you haven’t already
Most MacOS major versions slow down older (but perfectly competent) hardware ("hehe whoopsie daisy")
>In case someone stumbles upon this after experiencing the same problem with ableton, here is the command I executed:
And back to your point, a large reason people buy Apple in the first place is so they never have to read this sentence/try this solution!
Exactly. The whole permissions system, while nice in theory, just does not work in practice most of the time. Apple needs to understand, that unifying experience across mobile/desktop is neither possible nor the right thing to do.
Yeah I really don’t get it at the end of the day. Laptop/desktop screen and the couple of inches on my phone cannot operate the same way anymore than a car and a motorized scooter can. They’re just not the same thing.
Tahoe and Liquid Glass™ solidified for me the idea that Apple completely dropped the ball when it comes to design. Clearly they needed an a-hole in charge, Jobs would've crucified a few people.
It's painful to see the decay, update after update, into a more confusing, cluttered, and tacky experience.
Liquid Glass was actually a big surprise for me, and it was a shock to see Apple moving forward with this and nobody stopping it. Microsoft did that with Vista back in 2006 and they stopped doing this. So Apple is copying a 2006 design? From Microsoft? Where even Microsoft stopped doing it because of all the known issues? So many questions...
Even Vista did not have nearly as many problems as Liquid Glass. Most of the elements were static images, and the "aero" effects could be disabled, as well as the "Fluent Design" effects in later Windows 10.
Liquid Glass - with its wobbling jiggling jerking, shimmering and flashing, blurry and difficult-to-read, shifting and unpredictable design, and battery-demolishing performance - is so much worse. It's mindblowing how bad it is.
I would be very tempted to place a bet that nobody in the decision making chain used Vista or Compiz to any degree.
Commercial software coding glorifies denying anything older than 10 years exist outside of museums, let alone learn anything from it. The same has merely infected design world.
This is why we need more old timers in charge. We've been around the block and seen how all these things play out already.
Now they just promote the youngsters that say the word AI a lot instead of those of us who actually care about the craft.
But they did use early builds of liquid glass and that should've triggered nausea and someone must've said "Don't"... yet they still did. You don't have to have gone through Windows Vista time to understand UI/UX (least of all, Apple Designers).
> But they did use early builds of liquid glass
Is this known to be true or speculated? I don't know how this process is handled at Apple specifically, however, generally decision-makers are highly detached from UX. One would think that, especially for an overhaul initiative, "important" people would daily-drive dev/nightly builds to wear off the cool factor and experience the not so pleasant annoyances, but generally they shield themselves from that and mostly look at the "cool demos".
Regardless, as far as I am aware Apple has a tight product release cadence and ties feature gates to that. Obviously hardware readiness gates are much earlier than software, but I can easily imagine situations where "yes men" report "good enough" at gates relevant for marketing, feature gets greenlit, but then gets half-assed for the actual release. Recall iphones crashing at the initial release demo? Might as well be history rhyming.
> ..Jobs would've crucified a few people
And rightfully so. Tahoe is not just a step back, but it throws away so many good design elements that have been there for ages - and for no good reason.
I really hope they revert most of the design changes in macOS 27. I don't mind the Liquid Glass - the other changes they made to expose/highlight Liquid Glass are the real issue.
IMO we reached peak design in 2013 with Mavericks.
The golden rule from Apple in 2007 when they changed to flat design was icon or text - never both together.
Apple abandoned enforcing HIG for app developers around 2012 (Facebook tiled menu, modal abuse, and hamburger) but now seems to have given up on standards entirely.
The wall to wall interaction pattern is terrible too. Every time my hand brushes my phone some unexpected (and sometimes unknown) interaction occurs. Classic example is changing orientation while watching YT where accidental contact with the bottom-left (becoming top-right) part of the screen as you move the phone selects a new video. It’s becoming slop.
Steve Jobs died 14 years ago. If we're attributing this to those in charge, Jony Ive's departure is much more correlated.
Apple's UI design started going downhill with the iOS 7 "flat design" release which was very shortly after Steve's death, and seemed to correspond to Ive being given a little too much free rein in the leadership vacuum that followed.
Jobs had his own flaws, but he was definitely a huge part of why Apple's UI design (and product design in general) has historically been as good as it has.
> Apple's UI design started going downhill with the iOS 7 "flat design" release which was very shortly after Steve's death, and seemed to correspond to Ive being given a little too much free rein in the leadership vacuum that followed.
This was so obvious to me. The damage done to Apple by losing Jobs as their most vicious editor was almost instantly noticeable.
I agree. Jobs being around for the birth of the GUI probably played a big role in that. Pushing past text-based terminals to graphical interfaces meant having to spend every moment thinking about purposeful interaction and design.
Maybe we could use Vison Pro to recreate a visit to Xerox Parc in 1979 to inspire the current designers to use UI patterns that gave been working well for fifty years.
Pretty sure iOS 7 was regarded as awful on launch and then a little while later people decided it was amazing and lovely to look at once the kinks were ironed out.
People just don't like new things that change what they are used to.
Apple spent the next several years walking lots of the changes back, in particular the thin text and overdone translucency
One thing I'll definitely give Apple is that they have walked back some design decisions that were total flops in the past, such as the butterfly keyboard and the touchbar (though I found it more than a bit annoying when I'd see reviews saying how great and visionary Apple was for simply undoing bad decisions - it deserved an "OK, good" not an "OMG Apple is amazing!!)
I like this article because it points out how undeniably awful some of these decisions were in a "this signifies something is seriously, fundamentally wrong with Apple design" way. I really hope Apple listens a does a major course correction.
Count me as someone who never turned around on the iOS 7+ flat design being a usability degradation.
> then a little while later people decided it was amazing and lovely to look at
Sorry, who decided this? Which people exactly?
Alan Dye designed IOS7 as well.
Jony Ive’s elevation was the problem: neither he nor his protege Alan Dye (who worked on the boxes) had UI training or experience and that has shown since iOS 7 where the focus shifted to things which looked nicer on the side of the iPhone box than they are in actual use - stuff like Liquid Glass shipping with an illegible lock screen keyboard is possible because they never put the lock screen in a presentation or product screenshot.
As a complete outsider, my impression is that this started slow because they had to politically overpower Apple’s actual UI group. Liquid Glass probably managed that with a unified look across all devices pitch which should’ve weighted the relative impact on the popular platforms much higher than the niche Vision Pro.
I don’t think it’s about being an a hole, but someone who deeply cares about the product is needed.
The experience right now is bad. It’s frustrating and there is no overarching vision or clear focus on the user.
>Jobs would've crucified a few people
Jobs liked to talk this side of the business up because creatives were the substantial part of the business. Now they sell to everybody it doesn't matter so much. The average person won't even notice the complaints in the original article. They aren't sensitive to it in the way that creative people are.
They don't notice, but they can _feel_ it. My aging mother, god bless, doesn't give a crap about design.. but she updated her iPhone and asked me what I thought about it because she hates it. And it wasn't nitpicking design choices - she just said 'it's so hard for me to do anything now and know where anything is'
They might not _notice_ but that doesn't mean it's not affecting their ability to use their computer smoothly.
With computers such a huge part of almost everyone's lives now, it's a travesty for one of the largest companies in the world to inflict something so subpar on so many old-style
I consider myself above average with UI design, but I still got confused with that dang "i" icon in the Preview app just yesterday.
I had to add my signature and write in the date so it looks like it was handwritten. So the plan was to just draw the date with a pencil tool and if that failed use the text tool to write the date.
First I instinctively clicked the pencil icon which turned out to be a highlighter. That's a great example where if they had added color for the tip and line it would have clearly looked like a highlighter. After that failed, I clicked that "i" icon because it looks like it's for inserting text. Honestly I was in such a rush I didn't even see the info pane popping up and was dang confused when nothing was happening.
I'm very familiar with info icons and have used them in my own apps, yet I had never seen one without the circle around it.
I'll chime in with the others to say that "amateur" users still notice, even if my dad isn't calling me to say "Son, why does this new MacOS version have different icons for the `New` action across apps?"
I had to help him "get his bookmarks back" meaning see his bookmarks toolbar in Firefox. He must have hit a keyboard combo on accident. Since Firefox hides the menus by default, I had to tell him to tap Alt to see the menu, after which he was easily guided to View > Toolbars > Bookmarks Toolbar.
Bad UI design for novices is felt, if not conveyed outright.
This release of MacOS is the most retrograde backwards step I've seen Apple make.
To use a famous movie quote: "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, that they didn't stop to think if they should"
Just because you have HDPI and opacity, doesn't mean that you have to use it by default, everywhere.
Reminds me of how OSX used to treat opacity in app icons as not part of the hithox. So I'd accidentally click the hole in the "O" for Outlook and it wouldn't open, haha.
No one might be Job-level ahole, but I'm certain Cook ain't less ruthless. It's a matter of priorities, not attitude.
> Jobs would've crucified a few people.
Steve Jobs had good taste in many areas, but he also approved the puck mouse.
Everyone makes mistakes every now and then. He also approved the Ping "music social network", and a few other nonsense products that no one wanted or liked.
But when you see mistakes made consistently, year after year, you know the problem is systemic.
I haven’t updated to the new OS because the liquid glass experience made me think of historic UI elements that were more novelty than substance.
It's hard to justify snowflake animations on your website...
The audacity to critique Apple's use of icons (which is objectively justified critique, IMO) while having animated snowflakes falling over the text and images on the site is something on an entirely different level.
Thank goodness for Firefox reader mode. That animation is so incredibly distracting.
It is a personal blog. I would not apply the same kind of criticism to a personal blog, even though it does sound ironic. Moreover, turning off JS was an easy solution. There is no solution right now for apple's UI mess (except not updating).
Personal blog or no, I think the UX and usability critiques are equally valid.
Whether or not the author cares will certainly be influenced by the fact it’s just a personal blog. I wouldn’t expect them to change anything for that reason alone, but the criticism stands nonetheless.
An author of a personal blog does not have to care about judgements of usability vs what they find appealing. A personal blog is a place of self-expression firstmost, not a public service nor a product that targets users. When usability is not the primary goal, you may take unconventional design decisions. If the author likes snowflakes all over the canvas, snowflakes it is. They put an easy way to disable them, I did it in <1 second through disabling JS before I even noticed there was a switch, that's all. Similarly, I would not care about the design choices of apple if I could just disable them even if it took me 5 minutes to do so.
I agree that the author has the right to self express. But in this case, I think the point being made is that it's less about what the author cares about, and more about the author's topic. They're writing about usability and design, while using (arguably) poor judgment and taste for both. It would be a little bit like an extremely out-of-shape person criticizing a marathon running program as being too hard on someone's body, or a homeless person writing that active investing is better than Vanguard's low-fee indexing model. The person's context doesn't make their arguments right or wrong, it just lowers their authority and believability.
> It would be a little bit like an extremely out-of-shape person criticizing a marathon running program as being too hard on someone's body, or a homeless person writing that active investing is better than Vanguard's low-fee indexing model. The person's context doesn't make their arguments right or wrong, it just lowers their authority and believability.
it absolutely would not, it would be more akin to someone wearing a fat-suite for a joke and criticizing someone for running with bad form
but you are taking this so seriously I can't quite tell if you're joking anyway
Yeah. I immediately went to the snowflake icon at the top of the page thinking it would turn the animation off. Instead, it changed the background color :-(
I can't stand animations while I'm trying to read something, and this one is particularly egregious.
It change the background color AND turns off the animation.
(TBF, it slowly fades the animation out, probably for aesthetic reasons, to avoid a jarring sudden stop. I do agree, though, that a sudden stop would probably be more appropriate in this context)
Ohhh thank you! I thought the same as the parent comment: I expected that button to turn off the animation immediately. I guess the author wanted the yellow background to "melt" the snowflakes?
> I can't stand animations while I'm trying to read something, and this one is particularly egregious.
Let me introduce you to "neko"...
Please do! You put an ellipsis where an interesting explanation could go.
Japanese for "cat". Small programs to add a tiny cat that runs to your cursor and then naps - until another cursor move.
There's also JS to add a neko to a webpage.
Cute, but also not good when trying to focus on reading.
I’ve seen some blogs linked here on HN that do that. It’s so incredibly obnoxious if you have any difficulties with visual processing.
I’m trying to read but my eyes keep jumping to the movement and I lose my place.
I understand people think it’s “fun” but I think it’s just so disrespectful to the reader.
Hah, that's a blast from the past! You've reminded me of "Ameko", which added a little cat to the Amiga Workbench, walking around over the windows. I think I had it from a magazine coverdisk.
A personal blog is not the same as the UI of an operating system. More expressiveness is to be expected in a personal blog. That said it’s so easy to turn off that I was distracted for less than 5 seconds. How easy is it to turn off icons in the menu bar in Tahoe?
I agreed at first, but that the blog has bad UX doesn't make the message it conveys wrong though.
In my opinion, I can be a worst UX expert in the world, and I still reserve the right to criticize bad UX elsewhere: the fact that you are a bad "creator" does not mean that you are a stupid "user".
Yes, it is a bit hypocritical, but you can look at the content of the message and judge it without judging the presentation of the message, even if it talks about usability of interfaces in computer software.
Sure. But as Ray Dalio suggests in Principles (https://www.principles.com/principles/633d5d13-8610-425f-ad6...), you will be more likely to succeed at your task if you believability-weight the information you receive. When considering a military strategy, you should probably weigh the advice from a 4-star general who's served in similar circumstances over the advice of a 4-year-old boy who is relying on his experience watching Paw Patrol.
As the worst UX expert in the world, you can obviously feel free to criticize others, but you're probably going to lose a lot of people after the first sentence if you're using 2003 MySpace-style blinking text and animated GIFs to make your point.
Certainly!
But, if a 4-year old boy finds "there's more of them with bigger guns", and a general has a personal interest in hurting someone without you knowing that, you'd be unwise to not consider the words of the boy as you prep your military strategy.
Note that you were careful to establish hard-to-prove circumstances ("served in similar circumstances"), which seems to say that you don't want to discount what the non-expert is saying too easily either.
Sometimes you need an animation to turn your site into a special snowflake of a site, and what better way to do that than to use a snowflake animation? TBF, you can turn it off by clicking on the snowflake icon in the top right corner. But then the background turns from blue into an annoying shade of yellow. Ok, you can click on the sun icon to fix it by switching to night mode. But then... aaaaargh!
It seems like the author went out of their way to prove they can make an even worse UI than Apple. I suspect they succeeded.
This is exactly my thoughts. If you are reading this, author, please either make the snowflakes less distracting or toggleable. They are a pain on mobile.
> author, please either make the snowflakes less distracting or toggleable
They already did, as the grandparent comment already explained:
>> TBF, you can turn it off by clicking on the snowflake icon in the top right corner.
Did you see what happens when you do? I wouldn’t say it improves readability.
Yup: all the animation stops, the overlaid snowflakes disappear, and the background changes from blue to yellow. I haven't bothered to check the foreground/background contrast of the two versions, but I suspect that, although the yellow version will have less contrast, the removal of the snowflakes will make for a net benefit to readability for the average person.
Button doesn't do anything for me.
This is the biggest mistake, imo. The snowflakes should disappear immediately...
>Ok, you can click on the sun icon to fix it by switching to night mode, but then... aaaaargh!
TBF, I felt so perfectly trolled with this one I couldn't help but chuckle... :)
I genuinely went looking for an "off" button, and was very confused when the snowflake icon changed the background color instead. I didn't even notice that the snow stops being generated until I read your comment and tried again. I'm both impressed and annoyed.
> Sometimes you need an animation to turn your site into a special snowflake of a site, and what better way to do that than to use a snowflake animation?
<blink>
The dark mode action got an audible chuckle out of me.
The site has a history of trolling people, it used to be the cursor background.
Also do check his privacy policy https://tonsky.me/personal-information/
It's Christmas, lighten up. I think the animation adds a glorious bit of irony: "look, here's a horribly distracting effect that is almost designed to make it difficult to read the article, and it's still not as egregious as Apple's Tahoe design!"
Design is about how it works (my phone went 100% —> 84% while reading this, almost certainly thanks to the snow)
It's a shame the author didn't test on mobile, but I think we should cut them some slack. It would be understandable for this particular article's audience to mostly be viewing on desktop.
Well, it is kinda cool in my room, so i guess the extra warmth from my mobile was helpful.
And it got noticeably warm.
The animation is not only on the linked article so no, it's not about the irony.
I couldn't tell if the author was being ironic or just breathtakingly hypocritical.
Even if they were being hypocritical, I think the impact of briefly-bad UI on someone's blog post pales in comparison with bad UI in a product of macOS scale.
I don't know, I figure with a billion dollars Apple should be able to do much better at being awful than this. More proactive rather than accidental awfulness. Something that isn't just bad but capital intensive at the same time. Anyone can build a bad UX on a few menus, or a whole system incrementally over time. But to really lean in? Maybe commission famous artists with eye watering fees for each icon, truly over the top marketing campaigns, really get the cash-fired furnaces going. Really just go full-potlatch on things.
This is hypocrisy in the same way that a rock star complaining about construction noise outside his home is hypocrisy. Context is everything.
The rage bait on HN works like clockwork. Usually it's the "dark mode" feature of that website that triggers this comment.
tonsky.me is a troll site that should be banned from being posted on HN
Or you could just lighten up and get a sense of humor...
What's trollish about his blog ?
Author seems to enjoy writing posts that get lots of votes on site that I would describe as eye-rending, especially the "normal" yellow color scheme. It's aggressively unpleasant to read.
How is it trolling, though? Annoying, sure. But the content here is valid and worth reading, even if the medium is suboptimal.
It's easy to justify: it's cute. Just like the other options up at the top. If you click the sun it turns out the lights and turns your cursor into a flashlight. And it has an actual hamburger as the icon for the menu.
Cute AND annoying. Like a racoon. Please don't fling racoons at people, not even for christmas.
The site has also an amazing night mode. Everyone should try it!
Well, I guess you haven't tried its "dark mode" yet
The animation isn't even in the background...
It also immediately eats 5% of the raw compute on my RTX 4080 Super, which is more than a dozen tabs in chrome and 3 active youtube videos running, run in each of Chrome, Firefox, Edge-- all combined, which was 3% before loading this page (which is 5% on its own) up to 9% total.
That explains my other comment, which speculated the snow as the cause for my iPhone instantly overheating, followed by screen-dimming throttling.
Also: this is not a plea to stop putting snow/etc on pages. I miss the days of such things in earlier internet. I'd trade back janky plugins and Flash player crashes for the humanizing & personalized touch many sites had back then.
I was starting to wonder why my iPhone got crazy hot. I’m using reader mode and it appears to continue running the web page and animation in the background… crazy.
I decided to believe it was parody. Snowstorm ruining your visibility. Article on bad UX hamming up the bad UX.
That snowflakes were the author’s preference? That’s too much madness for one day.
I found this kinda funny. The content of the page is something I strongly agree with. But then the page itself was just so distracting. I saw the snow flake icon so I tapped it but it just turned my snow into the dreaded yellow snow.
A very distracting one that masks text as well. But to be fair, there's a very explicit icon in the header to deactivate them
or changing my mouse pointer
I was wondering why my phone was turning hot in my hand...
At least there’s a button to turn it off. But yes, I agree.
Confusingly, because it stops the "particle spawning" but not the animation! At first I thought it just changed the background to orange.
It helps to reload, as the setting is sticky.
The detail on the animations is, as usual, top notch, including the way snow doesn't just immediately turn off but stops falling slowly. I love it.
> including the way snow doesn't just immediately turn off but stops falling slowly. I love it.
Funny, i disliked this exact detail. I thought turning it off hadn't worked for a few seconds and i retoggled it on and off a bunch of times before i got it
I think OP was sarcastic. (I hope!)
:-) and while doing this, the background turns yellow — why? how annoying it would be if something like this existed in real life - turning off the fan switches on the lights, and turning off the lights switches on the fan.
Lookup the Mitch Hedberg bit about hotel lamps with 3 way switches
Can people actually read it with the snowflakes? The motion draws my eyes and makes it extremely unpleasant trying to read the underlying text. Very poorly thought out decoration.
And yes, I did think "this is terrible, there must be a way to change it", clicking the snowflake icon. The colour changed to a new colour but otherwise it didn't seem to change, so I just clicked back.
Because, as you noted, the snowflakes slowly end, which I didn't realize until seeing your comment.
It's fun. Looks neat. It's an extremely poor idea for a site trying to convey textual information.
I did notice it, but had no trouble reading windowed on a large screen (43" 4K screen).
Hot take: The snowflakes are fun and when blogs integrate fun things they make me feel joy like when I was throwing marquee elements all over my geocities site in grade school. In an era where most of the content I read is written by AI, the more personal a blog feels to me, the better.
Needs some Alanis Morissette background music.
It'd be fine if it didn't lag horribly
The irony of an article about design being on such a badly designed page is not lost on me.
It's very annoying, but you can turn it off (snowflake icon, although then you get a yellow background), and IMO the article content is worth reading.
I tried that then discarded it, because it doesn't immediately hide the snowflakes that are already on screen.
The article is good but the choice of distracting snowflakes or radioactive piss burning your retina is not a welcome one.
It takes over 10 seconds to turn off fully. I had to go back and try it after your comment, because I thought that button just turned the page yellow, which was worse than the blue.
I ended up using reader mode to read the page. The whole site design undermined the point being made. One of the first things mentioned is not to be distracting. Yet they went out of their way to make their own site distracting. "Do as I say, not as I do."
The snowflake icon that disappears off-screen the instant you scroll down past the obnoxiously large header image to read the actual content?
I literally didn't notice that the snowflake icon turned it off:
Came here to say the same. Not only is it redundant and distracting, destroying the reading experience, it even makes the fucking fan turn on and make noise because apparently it’s a lot of work for the video card. A presentation of valid arguments destroyed by something completely superfluous and ironically the same kind of stupidity that’s the target of the criticism made.
It felt quite ironic reading a complaint about icons and UI consistency through a hail of snowflakes that made it hard to even see the icons.
lost 4% battery while reading the blog post
ah this is why I heard my coolers spin up
And now my phone is hot
it is an interesting thought: run a vanity fluid sim on your website to filter out everyone without discrete GPUs...
Scrooge
Why? Its just a silly personal website
Do you not realize that the stakes are different between that and a whole OS?
It's an annoying website, but luckily you can just enable reader view and all problems are fixed.
i thought it was very funny :) - try the dark mode
Yeah, on an article ranting about clutter in the macOS UI, this is a mindboggling design choice.
Once you try the dark mode, you'll realize the irony is done on purpose.
Edit: I'm not implying it's a good thing.
It's a joke that did not drop. Given the audience is trying to read text. And he's making it annoying to read text.
It's like a stand-up comedian telling a joke, in a wild accent; where the audience cannot discern what he's saying.
It's a joke for this specific topic, that is on the entire website, and has been for almost a month prior[1] to this post being published?
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20251207071946/https://tonsky.me...
"I’m Niki. Here I write about programming and UI design"
I'd imagine he thought the blog was mostly going to be about UI. "Haha, a blog talking about UI, with bad UI. Isn't that funny!"
Like there's no way the flashlight UI was done for usability purposes. It has to be a joke.
Yes can people stop doing this, it was cute 20 years ago now it’s just annoying and obnoxious.
FWIW, while I'm complaining about this site I'm actually adding a nice easy-on-the eyes particle system in the background of a point-and-click online game. You don't put it in front of the content or behind text people are supposed to read.
This is such a common failure mode with coders who do their own design. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.
That reminds me of this classic: https://www.angelfire.com/super/badwebs/
A hint to the site developer: add an option to purchase the Weather Control Pack Platinum Pro+ to get to choose your site weather any way you like. It would fity nicely next to that 'Personal Information' section. Who knows, someone might even 'purchase' it since that seems to the thing to do in the Cult of the Fruit.
It seems like Apple's hardware design is universally loved with much acclaim, why is their software getting progressively worse?
It's not Microsoft-add-all-the-bloatware-and-adverts-we-can worse, but it's 20-year-old-operating-systems-were-better-designed worse.
We're getting to a point where I think Linux windowing systems like KDE are better designed. And it seems that all they had to do was not change much over the span of a few decades.
Or am I out of touch? It feels like I could use a computer better back when XP was the mainstay.
It's quite simple: Most people who work in software now aren't actually very good at their jobs, at least in terms of how that job would have been defined 15 years ago.
This is because incentives have changed such that being good at your job in your average mega-corp has very little to do with the outcome: To climb their ladder, you optimise for impact and move before you have to deal with the consequences.
When company is small and the leader is competent, it's easy to weed out incompetent employees. But beyond certain size, or when the leader themselves is incompetent, this becomes impossible, and the whole company starts to rot.
The other issue is the general organizational challenge of ensuring people good at their jobs are stacked into every part of your organization.
The default is that it’s not the case, and it requires eternal vigilance to do otherwise. Everything good is a fluke.
Maybe Apple just got so many things right early on, then the people with experience slowly left and inexperienced people kept showing up and they felt compelled to keep making changes to justify their jobs. How do they justify their job if they can't roll out huge visible changes? So they rationalize whatever change they wanna make and keep advocating for it until they get the green light, regardless of whether or not it's a good idea. The best part is that cleaning up this mess will probably lead to a whole bunch of promotions, even if just ends up circling back to what they should've already known.
I think a lot of key lessons that were studied and learned back in the day weren't adequately transferred to the new generation.
>How do they justify their job if they can't roll out huge visible changes?
This is the core rotting value in so much of big tech. So much of your bonus, performance review, promotion package, etc is hinging on "delivering impact" (ie: doing the flashy stuff). Imagine a world where some internal R&D team took a risk on liquid design but then thought it was okay to not ship it because it didn't work out.
To push the problem up a level, why can’t the company change the incentives to “happy customers”?
Problem is that “the same” isn’t good enough. To get a promotion, you’d need to somehow prove that your specific change was so good that more customers are happy now than before.
To prove that, you need some data to compare before/after. Hm, how about how much time people send in the software? Seems like a decent proxy. Well, plenty of people are very unhappily addicted to social media. and yet that’s what companies and investors frequently look at.
It’s very hard to come up with an incentive where just keeping things the same is acceptable. I mean it’s basically an admission that you as a company cannot innovate or invent better ways for people to interact with a computer.
The issue is that so long as you play the "performance" game, you'll run into Goodhart's law:
> When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
All this data driven BS about impact is really just that. So much of it is just gaming the system.
We used to treat macOS and Windows like direct competitors. They used to channel their efforts into competing for market share and routing one another from weak customer-bases. For a while, they did give us better operating systems.
Today, both software products are treated like monopolies. macOS is satisfied being an insular underdog, and Microsoft has no motivation to compete if Apple won't get off their ass.
When a feature reaches maturity, you have to be willing to shrink the team.
Yeah I think this is a well known problem. Humans tend to get a lot of stuff right on the first try, and then it's subsequently thrown away in the name of "progress".
It used to be the opposite! From the end of the PowerPC era throughout most of the Intel era, the Mac OS X was the main selling point, while the hardware was slow, overpriced and overheating (they've had some nice touches like MagSafe and "ears" on power supplies for the cable, but that didn't make up for everything else).
People used to build hackintoshes to get Mac OS X without paying Apple's RAM tax or suffer having mid-range laptop GPUs in the top-of-the-line desktops.
Apple's outstanding success with their ARM chips is more of an exception than the rule.
To be fair, they also made several infamous hardware design choices back in 2016, all of which they’ve later reverted.
Yes, we can all look forward to the breathless bots lauding Apple's visionary hardware prowess when they remove that damned stupid notch ten years from now, while replacing it with something equally egregious.
I’m optimistic that will happen soon.
My personal theory is that making the menu bar transparent by default (and shifting/ritating backgrounds) on Tahoe is preparing for OLED laptops and displays, which maybe will get under screen cameras or just a nicer cutout.
Not all reverted. Still waiting for my USB-A ports and the SD card reader, on laptops described as "Pro". It's as if Apple forgot that "Pro" is a shorthand for "professional" instead of a meaningless marketing term.
All 14" and 16" MacBook Pros (which is all Apple Silicon MacBook Pros except the 13" ones with base M1 or M2) have an SD card reader.
Did not know that, thanks for the info. But Apple lost me as a customer 10 years ago with their hostile actions. Even if they added back USB-A, I wouldn't go back.
I'm hopeful Apple will correct course about all these awful UI decisions but it'll take some time.
Hardware improvements are easier to quantify and progress naturally comes in incremental steps.
Software however especially from UX point of view, is more likely to be more or less ready at some point. Any improvements are marginal and subjective. What are the large UX teams at Apple going to do if not redesigns for the sake of redesigning? I wish it would happen, but it’s hard to imagine Apple shipping an annual OS release without noticeable visual changes.
> It seems like Apple's hardware design is universally loved with much acclaim, why is their software getting progressively worse?
It's not so different from the rationale for many consumer electronics products: novelty for marketing's sake rather than functionality. Similarly, notice the ridiculous trend of removing most physical buttons from car dashboards, started by Tesla and mindlessly aped by the other carmakers.
There's plenty to criticize them for on the hardware front. Why design round edges on your macbook pro and then put cheese grater vent holes on the sides where you're most likely to pick it up? Same goes for the Apple TV remote.
I'm feeling they're veering towards a "common ui" where every action is an icon like on a phone where every app is an icon.
Maybe someday they'll completely remove the text to just keep the icons like the Office ribbon did, and I'm still confused with it.
In the early 2000s I helped an engineering from transitioning from the CAD software CATIAv4 to v5.
While v4 was pretty much text based in early v5 every item and action had an icon, often only an icon. The manual read something like this:
"To do ⌘ you navigate from the ⌙ page to the ⌟, while holding the middle mouse button. The⌇will open and you will see the ⌆."
I think they did that with good intentions. CATIA being a French product sold all over Europe and beyond, localization must have been a significant line item. The result was a nightmare though and they to toned the reliance on symbols down in subsequent versions.
Imagine how usable computers will be once we remove every instance of text!
As a user of OLauncher on android, it's hard to imagine.
> with every extreme of inventiveness of visualization in its most exaggerated form, what did we have every fifteen seconds? An utter halt to the action, while words flashed on the screen.
"The Ancient and The Ultimate"
https://archive.org/details/Fantasy_Science_Fiction_v044n01_...
> It seems like Apple's hardware design is universally loved.
To be fair, the bar is really really low in terms of mobile hardware. It’s just really hard (and expensive) for new players to design, build and manufacture hardware with competitive processing power.
It's just enshittification.
Going to continue to get worse as time goes on.
Even the hardware will go at some point I'm betting.
It's just entropy. It takes a special kind of person to be able to fight it in a big org. Jobs, Musk et. al. are assholes but they do manage to push their vision through. Probably because they are assholes.
It seems like apple is missing a design dictator
Jobs and Musk are CEOs; of course they can push their visions!
> It's just enshittification.
That’s not what enshittification means.
Somehow its usage has quickly devolved from a very specific pattern companies used to squeeze “value” out of their customers over time into just “something getting worse in any way” or even just “something I don’t like now but I did before” which is not at all the point.
Liquid Glass has worse performance implications, which is bad for older devices with slow processors, and older devices with older batteries. It's also very difficult to use on older devices with smaller screens, like the 2022 iPhone SE. Further, Apple stopped making it possible to upgrade to minor releases for security patches.
All these give someone a reason to replace their otherwise perfectly-working iPhone sooner.
Last time pointed that out here, Cory Doctorow himself popped up to tell me it's okay, we don't need to word police other people.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44776712
Man I really disliked him for creating that word that got so overused that I saw it in practically every single comment thread this past year. Now I dislike him even more for actively promoting its overuse. Ugh.
So let's run this shit into the ground then until it's meaningless. Got it.
It’s the enshittification of the word, to use the new definition
I never disliked an OS as much as I dislike what Apple is doing with MacOS (and iOS by extension). I've been with MacOS for 20 years, but I've switched at home to Linux full time 2 years ago and I don't regret it. At work I'm forced to be on MacOS. It's concerning how Apple doesn't care anymore about user needs, usability, design and consistency. Where it was the best OS in the past for me, it's not anymore. Other OSes are better suited for where I'm at in my life.
Consider yourself lucky to have been on that side of the fence instead of suffering the vagaries of Windows since ME.
I thought that was supposed to be Apple’s thing. “We decide how to make it and you decide to buy it or not.”
It makes it seem like they’re designing for you until they’re not.
Importantly, that philosophy relies on the result having merit, and working cohesively on its own terms, even if it's not your preference. Like, if I go to a restaurant that refuses me sugar for my tea, it better be darn good tea.
> Like, if I go to a restaurant that refuses me sugar for my tea, it better be darn good tea.
But if you demand sugar in your tea it doesn't matter how good the tea is, right? You are not going to like that restaurant.
> Importantly, that philosophy relies on the result having merit, and working cohesively on its own terms, even if it's not your preference
I am too dumb to understand what this means.
I might prefer my tea with sugar, given the choice, but I'll still be satisfied if the tea is very good (this metaphor assumes I don't demand sugar, but merely prefer sugar). I might prefer that Apple products work differently, but if they work well, I'll tolerate that they don't work exactly how I want. In either case, I'm willing to adapt my preferences a bit to an expertly made product.
> I thought that was supposed to be Apple’s thing. “We decide how to make it and you decide to buy it or not.”
This was Apple; your customization options were limited, but things were well designed and cohesive. If you were willing to adapt to their design paradigms, you'd benefit from their expertise, and also have to put in less effort tweaking. Plus you could pick up any random new Apple product and be up to speed immediately.
But to extend the metaphor, if the tea sucks, I'll stop going to that restaurant. If Apple makes their UIs both immutable and bad, I'll use something else.
> but things were well designed and cohesive.
This is an opinion, though. macOS did do certain things better than Windows, but it also did a lot of things markedly worse. The Mac market share never overtook the Windows market, on-merit it was considered a worse product. You or I might think it was a decent system at some point, but the evidence is really just anecdotal.
I agree with the parent comment, Apple's "thing" was their financial skill and not their manufacturing or internal processes. Once the IIc left the mainstream, people stopped appreciating the craftsmanship that went into making the Apple computer. It was (smartly) coopted by flashy marketing and droves of meaningless press releases, documented as the "reality distortion field" even as far back as the 1980s.
How is that different with other companies? Like with Windows? Do you have a choice of UI when loading the OS? Are there ways to remove the taskbar and replace it with a third-party one? Can you change all the core OS shortcuts?
The fact Apple makes and sells the only hardware to run macOS does not mean the software is fundamentally different from the rest of the industry. Apple has deprioritized backwards compatibility, not user choice.
> Apple has deprioritized backwards compatibility, not user choice.
¿Por qué no los dos?
> does not mean the software is fundamentally different from the rest of the industry.
I bet you wish that was the case. XServe existed though, and for all of Apple's confidence in the product it was (and is) treated like a second-class citizen that doesn't compete with free alternatives.
There is literally nothing that stops macOS from falling into the same pit of irrelevance besides first-party hubris. How much do you trust Apple to make smart, responsive decisions?
Seriously? UX in Linux is awful, there's no single desktop metaphor. You have hundreds of distros each with their quirks. There is no "Linux" other than the kernel.
There's a lot more consistency in the Apple ecosystem.
Don't get me started on the other crap with Linux distros: power management doesn't work, audio barely works, heck even though both Linux and MacOS use CUPS for printing, in MacOS it works way better.
But Linux is getting better each year (seriously, KDE is amazing, Gnome works well if you like it), made by hundreds of independent people, while Mac is getting worse, made by one focused company.
I've had no problem whatsoever with 2 laptops regarding power management or audio.
Get a major distro and major software if you don't want to wander into problems.
Judging from this article, Linux seems to have more consistency between the thousands of applications all built by different people with no guidelines than MacOS right now.
At least half of those complaints on the article have standard, close to universally agreed icons.
> there's no single desktop metaphor
I use both Linux (home) and Mac (work) and I don't see one in Mac either. Also over time Linux has been getting more consistent, and Mac less.
Your experiences are not universal. I'm sorry that happened to you, but I've personally never had a power management, audio, or printing problems with Linux in 17 years of using it.
Having no single desktop is a huge bonus. If you don't like one distro, you might like another. "Consistency" is a poor way to restate, "Windows or MacOS might be bad, but at least someone can unilaterally make it worse against your will."
I'd rather choose a drink from a soda fountain than get a more consistent flavor from a urinal. But to each their own.
It looks like an old comment from 5 years ago. I bet you haven't tried Linux lately. Yes there are many flavors of this OS, and that's alright. Everyone will find what it needs. As for the other crap that doesn't work: again, install and use any popular distro. You'll see for yourself. Most recent hardware is perfectly supported and things just work™.
if you have routing issues with your primary dns server, you will not be able to perform a clean shutdown (or run anything with sudo, apparently)
The other way is true too. I’m reading for about 20 years quite often that Linux is perfect at last, no issues exist at all, and it improved immensely the year before, because “back then” (ie one year before) it was terrible. And of course if you mention a problem under an article mentioning problems, you obviously just somebody who doesn’t know anything. You just need to “configure” it bro, because a famously unreliable thing cannot be unreliable, because it worked for them in a completely different setup. And probably I will read these in 5 years too.
CUPS has "just worked" on Ubuntu for me for like, as long as I can remember. If you use only GTK apps and either gnome or cinnamon, things are a lot more consistent than Windows (like, windows itself, not even 3rd party stuff)
I don't understand why this comment is downvoted, it is undeniably true.
GNOME and KDE have stepped up with their design and user experience. I recommend you give them another try.
Whereas on my laptop and my distro it works. And a lot of other people probably feel the same way. I use Linux at work and have never had issues with it in the last 6 years. Prior to that, yes.
Because for most of us, it's simply not true. It's as stable, if more, than MacOS, by far.
The word "stable" literally does not appear in the comment to which I was responding.
Maybe I'm just scarred from laboring much too hard in the 90s and aughts to get desktop and laptop Linux working, but here is my current take:
- Yes there is fragmentation. Perhaps there are not hundreds of Linux distros but, off the top of my head: Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, RHEL, CentOS, Rocky, Alma, Arch, Manjaro, openSUSE, Kali, PopOS, elementary OS, Zorin, Gentoo, Alpine, NixOS are all viable options. Next, pick a desktop: GNOME, KDE Plasma, Xfce, LXQt, Cinnamon, MATE, Budgie, Pantheon, Deepin, Enlightenment. Each has different UX conventions, configuration systems, and integration quality. There is no single Linux desktop and its bewildering. - Power management now "works" in the sense that, when you close your laptop lid and re-open it, yay! the machine (mostly) comes back to life instead of just crashing. It took us at least 15 years to get to that point. However, PM does not work in the sense that battery like on my M4 Macbook Air is literally 2x what I would get from a comparably priced Linux laptop. Part of that is better hardware, but _a lot_ of that is better power management. - Audio now mostly works without glitching, just like it did in OS X circa 2002. But God help you if you're not using a well-supported setup and find yourself manually having to dick around with kernel drivers, ALSA, Pulseaudio. (Just typing these words gives me PTSD.) Here is a typical "solution" from *within the past year* for audio troubles in Linux: https://www.linux.org/threads/troubleshooting-audio-problems.... There are thousands more threads like this to be found online. For typical, 99%-of-the-time use cases, experiences of this sort are rarely if ever encountered on Mac. - Printing is arguably the closest because, as previously noted, they are both using the same underlying system. But printing, thanks to AirPrint, is still smoother and more pain-free on Mac than on Linux. - Don't even get me started on Bluetooth.
It's not that I'm anti-Linux, I wanted sooo bad for Linux on the desktop and laptop to succeed, for a variety of reasons. But Steve J came along 25-30 years and completely pulled that rug out from under us.
Often, when we don't understand something, asking questions helps us learn. Happy to answer any you might have, to help you understand.
what distro are you running at home?
ive had the most success with fedora x11 / xwayland but lately wayland has been pretty solid
I've used Mint for a long time. Extremely solid, stable and simple. In the last three months I've been on Arch (through Omarchy) and it's also very stable and so powerful. Everything just works. I have a pretty beefy computer and even my favorite game of all times (Path of Exile 1) runs fantastically on it.
XWayland runs on top of Wayland, and is a way for X11-only applications to still work. It does not run inside a native X11 session.
if they're going to just crap on their software, I'd be far happier with just neglect.
They did desperately need a distraction from the complete bedshitting mess they've made of AI though. Regardless of whether you think AI is good or wildly overpromised, getting on stage and lying through your teeth about what your AI does is what C-tier companies do, not Apple. Except they do now.
Nowadays AI can help with Linux. For example AI helped setup my bluetooth mouse and set up an action for each of the extra buttons.
Looking at the old Microsoft menu gave me a pang of nostalgia for what we lost. It was so clear and readable. The icons were clearly colored and so easy to understand.
I think the key issue with macOS is that they don't seem to have someone who is looking at the whole ecosystem holistically to make sure that there's consistency and integration across experiences. You probably have development silos for different applications and they don't really integrate with each other. There should really be a role like Integration Emperor that exists outside of the traditional corporate hierarchy who can go to different teams to push for increased consistency.
>I think the key issue with macOS is that they don't seem to have someone who is looking at the whole ecosystem holistically to make sure that there's consistency and integration across experiences.
That person died in 2011.
Rose tinted glasses. Have a look through Jobs era UI again.
The complaints were that the UI was not customisable, with limited functionality, stubbornly did things the Mac way even if that was confusing to Windows users. The implementation was often slow and sometimes buggy.
But it had taste and attention to detail. It followed Apple's own HIG (design guidelines). The UI had some flashy details, but they had a purpose or at least didn't get in the way. I don't feel any of this in the current Apple designs.
Oh yes Mountain Lion was very very bad.
UI was simple, maybe too simple, but it made sense. The only complaint from that era was the thin scroll bars and the flipped scroll direction, both of which are forgotten about and accepted nowadays.
As someone whose primary interaction with her computer is via her drawing tablet stylus I still loathe the thin scroll bars; I've turned them off in prefs but I still regularly encounter apps and websites that force them and they have to be really special to overcome that.
Say what you want about the design of Mountain Lion, at least it's an ethos.
They do have a culture of silos and secrecy where employees are not allowed to talk to each other. This is actively enforced to prevent leaks but this also gets you this.
I used to be a die hard UI perfectionist. I thought there were perfect UIs, and that you could go more or less away from or toward perfection with choices.
But lately, over the past 5 or 10 years, it seems to me that perfection in UI is just as arbitrary and mutable as people's tastes and preferences.
It's hard to admit it to myself, but I think my love for the early Mac OS and Windows 9x UIs was mere puppy love at first sight, and now is simply nostalgia.
To me, it seems very related to the idea of how to fall in love with a person. There seems to be nothing you can measure it against. You simply either do or do not feel a connection with the person, an inexplicable infatuation. And if you do, then that love cools and settles into something more subtle but just as real over decades, until you're holding hands on your deathbeds. Yet I can't for the life of me figure out how it begins, or what its metrics are, or where its catylists come from. I suppose this is what Randall Monroe wondered all those years ago when he came up with his blog's subtitle. If only I could ask him, perhaps I would have the answers to everything.
"Perfection" is an irrelevant concept here, but "principled" is not. The reason people favored certain older OS UIs is because they were substantially more principled in their designs, not because the executions of those principles looked a particular specific way.
The Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines, especially the old ones, were seriously well thought out. Apple just doesn't follow them anymore, and that leads to demonstrably poor design choices. "Consistency" is still one of the three banner concepts (see https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...), and Apple just fails wildly at paying attention to itself.
Windows 2000 and Mac OS 9.x.x were contemporary with each other, are both considered to be strong examples of principled interface execution, and they were very different from each other in both behavior and appearance. They were also notably both the last generations of iterative executions of principled designs before both companies started veering off into the wilderness.
There is a big nostalgia factor which I think corresponds to the UIs you grew up with and are most familiar (would be Windows 2000 and XP for me) however I think it doesn't explain everything.
By that logic, you shouldn't have any particular preference for newer UIs (apart from how similar they are to your "primed" UIs) and you shouldn't ever able to discover new UI patterns you particularly like. You should also be unable to articulate why certain UIs are good or bad, or your reasons should be wildly inconsistent.
I don't think this is generally the case. There lots of articles like this one, and usually the takeaways are similar: UIs should be predictable and consistent and allow the user to reliably find actions and elements. Ideally they should also have markers and "fast paths" to allow more experienced users to find and do an action quickly. They should not overwhelm the user with too much irrelevant things.
That's the very high-level gist of it. There is actually lots of research in the details of it, which you can get a glimpse of in books like "The Design of Everyday Things".
They just don't seem to have a very high priority in current tech development for some reason.
That a good part of the industry seems to have essentially given up on GUIs, left them to the fashionistas and engagement maximizers and retreated to the command line and TUIs instead also doesn't bode well.
I don't trust such books and research. The fundamental thing in question here is what makes Beauty beautiful, which I think is indefinitely mysterious and perpetually elusive. If anyone claims to have grasped at a few concrete conclusions or tangible expertise, I think they're just trying to sell it. The concepts of beauty apply equally to all forms of art, which includes GUIs.
I do agree that Steve was somewhat revolutionary in this, bringing his personal quest for beauty into early GUIs through his (overly) perfectionistic command. I remember a decade or more ago being struck by just how genius it was for him to bring professional typography into personal computers, complete with kerning and everything.
> The fundamental thing in question here is what makes Beauty beautiful
GUIs are tools first and art second.
Any GUI that looks good, but gets in the way, or fails to make the task at hand easy is not a good GUI.
The books and research are about making GUIs functional in an effective way. No one is claiming that a GUI that follows all the principles will look good. However it will make the task at hand easier to perform than it otherwise would be.
The problem is when people in charge of GUIs focus exclusively on Graphic Design instead of UI design. They are different fields, with different goals that only sometimes overlap.
I don't disagree with much of what you said. Form and function have to be married harmoniously, which inherently increases beauty. When form decreases function, so does beauty dissipate. And I think GUIs have gone in that direction. They have not maintained the principles that would help bring proper balance.
I've seen this logic (and similar) posted often and i disagree. By this logic, for example, i should find Windows 3.1 the best UI but actually i think Windows 2000 was peak Windows. Similarly i think Snow Leopard to be peak Mac OS X (i include macOS here) and while it was the first Mac OS X i used, i think i was old enough at the time to not be affected by nostalgia much (and it wasn't that long ago).
Also there are certainly better UIs than others, otherwise people wouldn't complain about software having bad UIs (see GIMP, older versions of Blender, etc).
I wonder how much of it is the seeds of principles of beauty being planted, then watered over time, and finally sprouting at a ripe age.
For example, I also am old enough to have used DOS before Windows 3.1 came out, which was my first GUI. When Windows 95 came out, it was a clear improvement, but retained the same principles as Windows 3.1 began. Windows 98 iterated on it, and Windows 2k perfected it in my eyes.
So that when Windows XP came out, it abandoned the principles, going for a look that felt cartoonish and childish to me, but for others was perhaps casual and inviting. It was during this time that I discovered Compiz and other Linux eye candy, and although it abandoned the fundamental principles that Win 3.1 planted, it almost admitted this with pride, submitting a new set of principles altogether.
So when Windows Vista came out, clearly trying to compete in the arena of that new set of principles of beauty, I was ambivalent but mostly impressed. That's when I found out about Mac OS X, which Compiz et al. were clumsily imitating, and I fell in love with them, which I realized had perfected those principles before Microsoft and Linux even began to imitate them.
It almost seems like the same concept as the original purpose of MMA (mixed martial arts). There is a perfection particularly to a set of principles. You can be the best at boxing, or the best at Brazilian Jui-Jitsu, and it's almost comparing apples to oranges because they're so fundamentally different that they don't actually mix well (the current UFC being proof that the experiment has failed and created a monster).
It's the same reason movies exist like Home Front: it's that age old question, "who would win if ...", in this case London gangsters vs Southern American gangsters. Or Freddy vs Jason, or Alien vs Predator. I wish I could remember more, because those are some of the most interesting types of movies, with different real human cultures being pit against each other. Like David and Goliath, the top champions of two cultures facing off for the world to see.
I think MacPaint is one of the most beautifully designed GUIs ever created.
Individual style choices (e.g. whether to use a shadow or not) are always going to be opinionated. Even if one choice is objectively better, it's not going to be so 100% of the time, in every context, to all users.
Consistency is always better. App A and App B should use the same save icon, without any caveats, regardless of what it actually is. If you offer me a consistent experience, I'll take it whether it's Windows 95 or Tahoe.
Perfection doesn't exist, but you can measure outcomes. For example, how quickly users are able to complete a certain task, or how many mistakes they make while trying to complete a certain task, etc.
Based on the measurement of these outcomes you can absolutely say whether an interface is better or worse than another.
Anyone in software design in the 90s/early 00s was quite familiar with this subfield of human factors. Very few people making software today are. As vibe coded UIs become more and more widespread, it's only going to get worse.
I fell in love with early macos as well, but it was the enormous amount of care they put into it that got me. Maybe it was actually the same thing for you, not puppy love.
> But lately, over the past 5 or 10 years, it seems to me that perfection in UI is just as arbitrary and mutable as people's tastes and preferences.
No. Perfection exists, but it's not how something works or looks. Perfection is stability. A bad solution that you know inside and out is preferable to a "better" solution that you have to spend time to think about every time you use it.
Stability is certainly a quality in itself, but how it works is pretty important as well. And how it looks also has some effect on how it works.
One issue of the recent redesigns is that they degrade rather than improve “how it works”.
No, it's not. Otherwise any old solution that does not change would be good.
> No, it's not.
Yes, it is. UI is not not about stable form, alone.
> Otherwise any old solution that does not change would be good.
UI design is nuanced, regardless of the large number of people who dismiss it as borderline irrelevant. eg The most common used elements should be the easiest to recognize and access. Culture driving change is the most useful, while random association is less useful and statistically worse for user experience.
Apple has taken a great leap in misinterpreting that if the most common functions benefit from iconography, there must be a benefit the icons convey, as opposed to the other way around. It's disturbing.
Imagine if Apple snuck into your house at night and rearranged your partner's face.
I don't know if this was intended, but in case it wasn't, rearranging someone's face is an idiom that means violent bodily harm.
> In menus, the ellipsis character means that the user must provide more information before a command will operate.
More specifically, to the user it means they’ll still have the opportunity to back out of the operation; that it won’t take effect immediately upon clicking the menu item. It allows the user to “explore” the command without committing to its execution yet. For that reason, IMO the ellipses in “Attach Files…” and “Add Link…” are appropriate.
What I’m seeing more often in practice is that menu items that should have an ellipsis don’t. They make you wonder what the immediate effect of the command would possibly be.
Indeed, the ellipsis means some kind of dialog box will open. Regarding the wording "the user must provide more information", that's what that dialog box is for, while also providing a "cancel" option so that as you say, the user can back out. Surely "Attach Files..." brings up a file requestor, so it's exactly the correct use. I can't see why the blogger thinks otherwise.
It's just a small nitpick though. The article generally seems to do a good job of highlighting some frankly shocking (and worrying amateurish) problems in these menus.
It's pretty wild how the best screenshot of a usable menu is from, like, Office 2000. What the hell have we been doing for the past 25 years?
Technology moved from being a tool to an ad delivery vehicle.
Tools' success metric is how much they make your task easier/faster. Ad delivery machines' success metric is how much of your time they waste.
Shitty UI making you spend more time in front of the screen is considered a good thing according to those "designers"' performance metrics.
> What the hell have we been doing for the past 25 years?
For the last ~20 years: designing software for mobile devices
If you would like to spend some time in awe, you might fondly regard the screenshots in the GUIdebook gallery: https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots
It's chock full of old screenshots from a variety of old desktops.
Check out this actual book that used to come with a computer about how to use the desktop: https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19253-01/806-4743/806-4743.pdf
And modern desktops do not even documentation, there are all sorts of shortcuts and small features in Windows, for example, that seem to be passed around between people like computer game cheats instead of being documented somewhere :-P
UI OS for ordinary people peaked with Windows NT (1993).
Web technologies took off, web giants emerged, and the desktop monopoly maintaining rough standardization and being forced into steady ease of use improvements was hobbled.
Microsoft’s desktop dominance was challenged by Google Docs and Facebook apps in parallel, Microsoft had to jump to web tech late, and the last few decades have been them reconciling their stack to the fact they missed the web and mobile despite pioneering key user-facing tech for both. Then they entered catchup-mode for client and search tech, only to later realize maybe they don’t care because the cloud catchup efforts blossoming into MS-consultant orthodoxy for every-darned-thing made their cloud offerings the most profitable bit… Ads and desktop stagnation pulled Windows into a weird OSX-at-home territory everyone kinda hates. And then LLMania took off, entrenching MS cloud and AI strategies into all of it, all the time. Pushing so hard that they’re gonna spend billions distancing their semi-Enterprise office brand from the term‘Microslop’.
TLDR: the rush to the web/mobile moved the focus off thick clients and desktop affordances, the money is elsewhere, a universal GUI toolkit isn’t obvious for anyone, and SaaS feels better online
Computers became a necessity. You have no choice but to own a computer, so there's no evolutionary pressure to prevent their enshittification.
500+ comments and no one's mentioned the jack of all trades "share" button? I would really love to see the internal metrics around how many users press share because they're actually sharing something versus wanting to use any one of the myriad of other functions it hides.
Exhibit A: In Safari I had to "share" this page to use the "Find on Page" feature to search whether anyone had mentioned the share button yet. Bonkers.
> Exhibit A: In Safari I had to "share" this page to use the "Find on Page" feature to search whether anyone had mentioned the share button yet
Or type your search in the address bar, scroll to the bottom to the "On this page Find ..." functionality.
A rare example of two different ways to do the same thing on iPhone
> Exhibit A: In Safari I had to "share" this page to use the "Find on Page" feature to search whether anyone had mentioned the share button yet. Bonkers.
You can also long-press on the address bar to see a whole slew of even more hidden functionality
It's very hard to reply without making a snarky sarcastic comment at Apple's expense. Thanks for sharing that super intuitive interface trick, it's so obvious now I know it's there.
(seriously though, thanks).
Is this specific to mobile?
Feels like this could be a riff on Android's 'Share' functionality, which is actually the user-friendly name for "send an Intent". And that means that any inter-app handling ends up stuffed into a "Share" menu that pretends only social media apps exist. So you do "Share -> Edit with Photoshop" or similar.
Sounds like Android's share button is exactly as ambiguous as the one on macOS/iOS... A dumping ground for all the misfit utilities and functions that couldn't find a home anywhere else on the system.
Yep also ran into this while trying to search the article. It’s maddening when the share action is now also hidden within a context menu.
The surface area of the Apple suite is now enormous. We now have an incredible array of devices, physical environments, and purposes. It's really quite staggering: just look at the spans between a) checking the UV index on Apple Watch and writing code in Xcode on Mac, b) tracking an outdoor run and navigating with Car Play and watching a movie on Apple TV, and c) messaging and maneuvering spreadsheets and designing/building. Huge expanse across each spectrum.
Apple's effort to maintain some semblance of consistency across this incredible array is laudable. (Which is not the same as letting the grievances highlighted in this article slide; I agree with the author 100%.) We all want consistency (probably to a degree greater than Apple is capable of delivering) simply so that we can use the metaphors we're familiar with.
I imagine Apple has dozens of design teams, each of which cannot talk to more than a sliver of the others, with probably not a single person aware of exactly how many design teams exist at once. There was probably a period in Apple's history – and probably not that long ago – when a single employee could assess the iconography across the entire suite. Those days are over.
My question: beyond preventing the obvious and severe transgressions (Liquid Glass), what systemic solutions are available on a scale like Apple's to maintain high-quality and strong consistency?
(I appreciate that Apple does generally one design refresh per year, in contrast to the continuous zero-utility tinkering observable in Google's products, for example.)
> We all want consistency (probably to a degree greater than Apple is capable of delivering)
This thinking is the fatal poison of the tech industry. The further you repeat it, the faster the industry dies. Watch:
"We all want privacy, probably to a greater degree than Facebook is capable of providing."
"We all want browser competition, probably to a greater degree than Microsoft is willing to provide."
"We all want advertisement options, probably to a greater degree than Google can tolerate."
See what's happening here? You're not making a concession, you're flat-out accepting their failure. Apple can provide consistency, they're a trillion-dollar business that has every incentive to compete on their own merits. Instead they carve out arbitrary and harmful rules for each platform and then steelman it when any authority of any kind suggests that they're wrong.
This isn't a "perfect being the enemy of good" situation, it's degraded into "good being the enemy of intolerable defaults" instead.
My question "what systemic solutions are available on a scale like Apple's to maintain high-quality and strong consistency?" was sincere.
I'm neither complacent (as you seemed to imply) nor magically hand-waiving a "just do it" notion (as you seem to exemplify). I'm seriously interested in what it takes to effectively manage complexity as this scale.
Ever since I first tried a modern Mac (around the time of M1 MacBook Pros with Max coming out: work mandated, or I wouldn't), I could easily see inconsistencies all around the system, and could never get to grips to why people cling to the belief that it has consistent, simple UI. It was as inconsistent as GNOME (which I mainly use), and sometimes more so (though this could be my personal bias, since I've used GNOME since before 2.0 days, so 2003 or so -- though, I'd note that 2.x series was significantly more consistent, especially with Sun-contributed GNOME HIG, than 3.x still is).
Not to even mention hardware support, as I had a lot of issues with Realtek external USB network devices randomly disconnecting (and they are in many USB-C hubs, including inside USB-C monitors), with no such issues under Ubuntu.
I imagine there is some history around MacOS being similarly much better in the past, but I've never seen anything great about MacOS UI/UX in comparison to GNOME.
I do like their performance and battery life, but the "shells" it's stuck in also sucks (until recently, only glossy screens; shallow keyboards with sharp palmrest edges; either heavy or passively cooled; no touchpad buttons...). Putting some of this hardware into a new Thinkpad X1 Carbon case would be amazing, though I'd want to run Linux on it.
Good that Alan Dye is no longer at apple. Liquid Glass on macOS is a mass. The icons, the floating side menus, the inconsistent corners, the new tabs in Safari..
On iOS it's totally fine, but on macOS it's a disaster. I've only updated one machine so far and will keep all others on Sequoia until this mess is resolved.
You can get away with sloppy, cluttered and inconsistent UI on mobile when everything runs serially, full-screen.
But bring that to desktop, where your UI is windowed and appears alongside (or overlapping) other windows, and you end up with chaos.
The floating sidebars are a prime example of this. Why should I have to expend mental energy to differentiate what's an actual window -vs- what's just a novelty round-rect with a shadow (oh, and and window controls for the parent round-rect, which is a window)?
> Good that Alan Dye is no longer at apple.
Yeah, but I doubt that would change much; the amount of damage done would be difficult to roll back. What do you think Apple is going to do for the next macOS: "Look we told you to design all these extra icons last year. Guess what, this year we want you to remove them."
I just can't imagine that happening. This is the fundamental thing that is wrong with this. They had the OSes in beta for a few months, barely listened to feedback, and now we're stuck with the damage. For how many more OS iterations?
I really wish they had at least macOS in a different cycle than iOS (and with the idiotic year version names, they've brazenly signed themselves up for the yearly schedules.) I really couldn't care less about what damage they do to iOS after iOS 7, but I still haven't upgraded to Tahoe and I won't do so until they roll this design back entirely...which I don't see happening.
Maybe I'm just pessimistic about Apple at this point but I feel like no amount of criticism is going to change their design trajectory now, unless it affects their bottom-line.
Same here. I think my next upgrade cycle is going to be
- framework laptop or similar Linux machine
- graphene os phone
- ditch the apple watch, go back to a watch-watch
I hope with change in leadership correction of these things will be possible again. Not just Alan Dye, but Tim Cook is rumored to leave in the next year too.
>will keep all others on Sequoia until this mess is resolved
Good for you, unless Apple changes its mind my MBPro from 2019 will be stuck on Tahoe forever.
Hah, really? If you enter recovery mode and install an OS via network it installs the OS the device originally shipped with, right?
On an Intel-based Mac:
- If you used Option-Command-R to start up from Internet Recovery, you might get the latest macOS that is compatible with your Mac.
- If you used Shift-Option-Command-R to start up from Internet Recovery, you might get the macOS that came with your Mac, or the closest version still available.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/102655
Ah yes, of course I can install an older version. I meant that it won't get new updates to future (and hopefully better) versions :(
But it wasn't just Alan Dye. He's not tunning the MacOS division. He's not running tge iOS division. There are literally dozens senior management people and several people of the same rank who could've pointed out all the issues and stopped this.
Instead they were all on stage praising it.
My hope is that the new generation of designers/UX people question and reject many of the UI/UX patterns made popular in the past 15 years and go back to the 90s for inspiration. Resources like the Apple Design Guidelines from 1992 linked in the OP is excellent!
Perhaps my biggest gripe is that many of these terrible UI/UX patterns are built in at such a low level, it is near impossible for developers to override them in the software they build. For example, I really dislike flat UI and particularly flat scrollbars. But it is near impossible to add scrollbars that look like these in any Windows or Mac app I build: https://flowingdata.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/evolution...
Usability has become theatre across Apple products. The sad part is that since Microsoft just seems to copy Apple, over time Windows usability has also degraded severely. I am so frustrated by what Apple, Microsoft and Google have done.
IMHO, the "new generation" of designers is the problem. Same goes for the "new generation" of developers. Want to make a basic HTML page with a contact form? Better get React + 300 dependencies, require the backend to provide a REST endpoint... fast forward six months...
Why has this happened? Everything is too easy. You used to have to have pretty good intelligence to break into UI design and software development. Now, anyone can do it with 30 minutes of "e-learning", and, therefore, the average IQ of a UI designer/or software engineer has decreased, dramatically.
Fair enough. But tides do shift. A lot of today’s terrible patterns (like flat design) were born in the late 2000s and early 2010s. The current generation of UI and UX folks—for simplicity, designers in their 20s—who are empowered to make both big and small decisions at Big Tech are largely riding that inherited wave. There’s still time for their taste to evolve as their confidence and seniority grow.
Have to say, it’s quite wild to me that one of the design blunders of macOS Tahoe could be a pages long blog post.
I’d actually forgotten about the menu icons in Tahoe (I tried Tahoe during the beta period and lasted less than a day) and at first thought this would just be a pretty short piece on Tahoe’s new application icons.
Going back to the article though: another amusing detail is that the one menu where having icons is actually helpful (the Move & Resize menu) actually had those icons before Tahoe.
It is incredible just how widely held the view is that Win2k (or XP in classic mode) was close to peak desktop UI. (Contenders also being Tiger to Snow Leopard and Windows 7).
A key problem is that big US corps have always had a product design mentality that can produce monstrosities like your average cable TV remote and think it is in any way a good solution. That was clearly already an influence on things like XP.
Classic Mac OS' Platinum is also a contender for pre-2000 peaks. I actually never grew up with a Mac, my first one ran Tiger when I was in high school. But over the years I have collected rare or interesting Macs of yore, from before my time and come to adore Platinum and the classic Finder.
Win XP was excellent, as was Win 7 I thought. However, since then KDE has in my opinion, gone even further and become even better. So, the peak is not gone, it has just moved to KDe.
Little UI elements like that are generally inconsequential. I agree they have changed for the worse in a negligible way.
The reason for all this change is simple.
The first reason is planned obsolescence. The GUI has to change enough such that it looks like there’s constant progress so users think the company is moving forward when in reality GUI design plateaued decades ago.
The second reason is designers need to stay employed. So they change inconsequential things and make up reasoning to justify it. Liquid Glass is one of these things.
I also want to note that the most useable GUI is not the prettiest GUI. The current MAC GUI looks more modern and better then he one in the OPs guideline example. So gui design isn’t just about usability, it’s about manipulating consumer psychology.
As consumers ourselves There’s two traps here that people fall for. The first is aforementioned it’s that it looks better and feels flashier (like Liquid Glass) but isn’t rationally or logically better (in fact it can be worse). Most HNers don’t fall for this trap.
The second trap is to think these changes actually matter. Liquid Glass barely changed anything. More icons barely changed anything. This entire blog post is making it out to be a bigger deal than it is when in actual reality the difference is so minor it’s negligible. Every HNer falls for this trap.
> The second reason is designers need to stay employed. So they change inconsequential things and make up reasoning to justify it. Liquid Glass is one of these things.
Working at BigTech, this is the answer. ICs need to find their own impact. That's how you get things like Material Design 3 which talked about how "Bold" it made a brand look - "Boldness" is something you can measure with user tests, and designers need something they can point to and call success; even if everyone knows it's stupid.
I agree, but this concept of updating a design every year was actually a business decision. Planned obsolescence. You see cars do it when they update every year with a new look.
It is as much of an actual business strategy as it is a method used to stay relevant in the company.
For any bureaucratic system, the system will slowly transition away from the reason it was put into place and towards self preservation.
The snowflakes are a clever engagement hack. They doubled the amount of comments here. I find it funny for the moment, but I hope this will not become the norm for hn posts.
I like the article content but it's ironic that I needed to switch to Safari reader-mode to be able to comfortably read it.
> I was reading Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines from 1992 and found this nice illustration: > Fast forward to 2025
The past wasn't as rosy: while the left column is purposefully confusing (the icons don't match the description), the lack of keyboard shortcuts is just bad design "for the sake of emptiness". It degrades, rather than enhances, the "usability of the interface"
And re. icons: while this is correct
> The main function of an icon is to help you find what you are looking for faster.
The following isn't as straight-forward
> Perhaps counter-intuitively, adding an icon to everything is exactly the wrong thing to do. To stand out, things need to be different. But if everything has an icon, nothing stands out.
Not really, there is plenty of difference - length, the presense of ... ellipsis ..., the presence of a keyboard shortcut, the icon itself. This combo gives visual cues without reading, so improves the ease of finding. Yes, it would be better to have colors here and there, but then you have the following fundamental issue:
> Look how much faster you can find Save or Share in the right variant:
But "Save" is something I do NOT want to find fast, I never use that menu item! So I'd prefer the slighly worse (but not bad) busy version rather than a highlight of useless menu items and no icons for the menus I'd actually use!
Of course, there is an easy way out - user customization to match user needs (maybe you never use shortcuts, fine, remove the "noise" then; maybe you don't care about "Save", fine, remove the icon there), but that was anathema even in 1992.
(but otherwise very good criticism of the basic design fails like tiny size, inconsistency, lack of vertical alignment, bad metaphors, etc.)
I've just gone through the rather painful and protracted process of reverting from Tahoe to Sequoia.'Reverting' rather than 'downgrading' since Tahoe is in no sense an upgrade.
I consider myself quite tolerant of UX quirks, iPhones are still pleasant to use, particularly if you select 'reduce motion' from the accessibility settings.
Tahoe though, bugs aside, is just genuinely unpleasant to use and interact with. By far the most offensive thing to me is the pointless rounded rectangle thing. It delivers absolutely no value at all to the user and defies any form of justification. How in any form is this a decision designed to improve things for the user?
The other multiple weirdnesses commented on elsewhere while unpleasant are more liveable with, but I honestly never found a single change that improved my interactions with the computer. How on earth can you have spent a whole year on this and why didn't anyone have the authority to pull the plug?
I would no longer recommend a new mac to my anyone. A second hand model running a previous operating system makes far more sense.
Did you follow a guide to revert black?
Sort of, but be warned it wont automatically revert a time machine backup of your Tahoe files to a Sequoia system, you have to manually copy them. Similarly you have to recovery boot into disk utility to flatten your hard drive before installing Sequoia from (say) a memory stick.
It all seems a bit needlessly tricky. Frankly though - for me at least - it's worth the trouble.
Tahoe feels like at some level a manager had said "the rule is every menu item needs an icon" and just left individual engineers to figure out what to use.
A lot of these actually feel like unifying on a swift UI component library that has a "menu item" component which has a non-nullable icon as a parameter.
I bet it’s simpler than that: I reckon the management don’t give a shit, and the engineers just got away with whatever they (incorrectly) thought was right because nobody whatsoever was critiquing their work.
As a fan of pictograms in general and very much a visual learner, I don't mind Tahoe icons or menu icons in general. By default I look to those first and then the text, it works for me.
That said, Apple's Liquid Glass is really poor UI. It works okay on my Macbook but feel like it's basically broken a couple features of my second gen iPhone SE, which is kind of untenable imo. Apple also clearly seems to design for larger devices now, which I get but... am I any less of a customer because I use an older device? why should I be de-prioritized?
Lastly, speaking of UI/UX - this blog's website was really bad! Ironic that a blog on UI/UX would have bubbles floating down the screen interfering with text readability and no way to turn them off!
Im also starting to slowly suffer as a fellow iPhone SE enjoyer. Every month another app or website has some UI update that doesnt take the SE screen size into account and is either awkward to use or sometimes impossible because they dont allow scrolling.
I thought I was going to disagree with this; on the surface I think the icons are something of an improvement, but the rest of the post is persuasive.
This is a bad sign for design at Apple. It suggests a fundamental lack of attention to detail that would have been harder to imagine a few years ago.
What's driving it?
Download your personal data, there's a lot of fun messages in there.
Leadership doesn’t understand and/or care anymore.
> These are OS basics, these are foundational. Every app has them, and they are always in the same place. They shouldn’t look different!
This is the key point for me. I think I go further than the OP, though; I would almost force apps to use the stock menu items. Declare that your app has to save stuff, and the OS can take care of supplying a 'File -> Save' menu item, a Save toolbar icon, and a Save keyboard shortcut.
I guess the more 'liberal' way of doing this would be to make it so easy to do the above that you would really have to go very far out of your way to purposefully deliver a worse experience. But you're free to do that if you're so inclined.
Given the headline, the article took longer to deal with the alignment issue that I was expecting! However, I noticed that some of the screenshots were less affected than I remembered, so I checked my own OS. It turns out that Apple has, sort of, addressed the mismatched alignment problem in its own apps.
Oh, but Google hasn't, so Chrome's icons are still all over the place. Apparently, that's not for the OS to sort out, but every single individual app.
Oh, while some of the menus in Preview are fixed (File, Edit), others aren't (View, Tools). So it's not just down to each app to manage its own icon alignment, but each menu!
28 days ago. 334 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46196688
Thanks, I was thinking I was having a deja vu because I was sure I had read something like this recently.
I feel like modern design, in so many cases, missed the science for the symptoms.
"It shouldn't look cluttered" --> "Apply ever increasing amounts of padding/margin everywhere"
"keep it simple" --> "monochrome is the happy place", etc
etc
That Windows 9x menu screenshot made me realize how far we’ve fallen. This entire post is a great enumeration of many of the problems I have with Tahoe and Liquid Glass
Wow, this article is a tour de force in menu and icon design, I learned a lot. For anyone who wants to understand the design world better, or wants a glimpse into the brain of a design-minded person, this is a great article. Incredibly accessible, incredibly insightful, and just overall a gem.
As a Mac newcomer from Ubuntu, I find it baffling to see this much controversy around minor UI semi-issues while everyone seems to be fully content with the way macOS litters the filesystem, external included, with dot files.
Ah least partly I believe the inconsistencies are due to the design of SF Symbols. That is, they are named after what they look like, rather than what they represent. E.g.: “square.and.arrow.up” rather than “share”.
I do prefer this approach because it makes the symbols generally more useful for everything else than menu/toolbar icons. However as the article makes very obvious, unless a consistent scheme is placed in place, program developers will choose whatever they want to represent common actions.
There seems to be a large issue with Tahoe styling, it seems fine to me. This article seems like someone has nothing else to focus on. If you don’t like the styling, switch OS?
Hard to justify snow falling in front of the text on a blog post about how a redesign isn’t helpful design.
I had to open the dev tools and pause the code in the debugger before I could tolerate reading the whole article.
On mobile there’s a snowflake toggle button in the top left corner. I only noticed this after reading the whole article in reader mode and wondering why my iPhone was on fire…
There's a toggle button at the top of the page
The irony did not lost on me that an article about superfluous visual elements is overlayed by an unnecessary distraction. But maybe the point is to not be 100% utilitarian but to weave in a "warm" feeling of the season. It did give me that a fuzzy feeling for the first few second. Then I was bored; then annoyed. Which pretty much follow my feeling of using Tahoe: Cool -> Meh -> Uggg!
This is why it's important for consumer devices to be "hackable". I'm not saying provide 15 different stock themes for the OS. I'm saying open up the OS interfaces/APIs enough for the community to build their own themes. Give some control back to the power users.
Indeed, hackable is the solution: don't that one icon? Fn + Right click on it and select to hide it, also changing the menu description in the process.
But also do provide 15 different themes for the OS and make sharing themes trivial and built-in so that you can upvote a theme you like (or even a specific icon you like), downvote the one you don't, install the most popular theme in few clicks.
Low quality, inconsistent software is a result of a lack of standards, QA, internal communication and rigged corporate processes that are serving the private interests of managers trying to satisfy the board, not the users.
This is a symptom of no strong leadership that's capable of enforcing standards, Apple downslide as a whole firm where departments and people are fighting each other for resources.
Apple design has a designer problem. For far too long they worshiped the Ives of design, distilled it until there was no flavor left, and then lost their Oracle. Ever since, they have produced sub-par UX/UI experiences. They don't follow their own guiding principals, and they let shareholders and executives tell them what they should do. They figured they mastered remote work before anyone else and rested on their laurels while the industry innovated itself beyond. What was once the pinnacle of user experience is now sub-standard. It takes an extra second to unlock my phone now because of the stupid icon animations. The glass effect on the desktop doesn't look good at all. It didn't in 2006 with Vista, it doesn't now. The only thing keeping me on the Mac is the unified memory M series chips and *nix pedigree.
Soon, I'll get my hands on one of those fancy AMD AI Max's and go Linux everywhere.
The issue is that on Linux, unless you are really careful and fastidious in lowering your expectations, there is no desktop environment that comes close to the experience on macOS (despite its now numerous flaws and horrible regressions).
I disagree entirely when we have ravynos. MacOS isn’t a great experience, it’s a walled garden.
It's a blunt instrument, but this is how I would justify the Tahoe icons:
OT (but funny) when looking for a good icon for translation I couldn't find anything obvious so I went with 译 I've since considered if their icon set isn't simply 3000 years ahead? They adopted our numeric system because it was simply better. Are our icons simply better than theirs? We could color it too. Can use manila yellow to make 存 (save) look like a folder.
The number of elements and their behaviors should be limited
Reading that as an animation of snow completely blocks my ability to read
That article almost made me cry. I was reading the NewtonOS 2.0 Human Interface Guidelines yesterday and it was so clear, so well-thought. The mess we find ourselves into in macOS Tahoe is impossible to excuse. I have no idea how that got out of the door.
I suspect the icons have to do with a non-english or reading disabilities accessibility requirement.
I'd argue it's not comparable to the 1992 standards because there's not clutter on the right due to dimming for the hotkey labels. These guidelines were written only slightly through Mac OS's colour era, with an extensive install base of monochrome Macintoshes where you could only depict dimming with hard-to-read dithering. Now that colour is ubiquitous, this gives designers the option to fade or tint UI items to make them look less distracting or to deemphasise them.
By 1992, the Mac had supported color for almost twice as long (5 years) as it had been a monochrome-only system (3 years).
This is nice. People are finally noticing.
New Design, New Features, New Programming Language, New Products or even New Sector. It is like Apple without Steve Jobs again the first time around. None of them were done because it is better for the customers, but do so because it is better for paid promotion, justify their existing department budget or increasing it, and simply for profits.
In many ways Apple is still best of the pack, but they are no longer the same.
Someone managed to read that article? With the constantly falling snowflakes? Dang, his UI choices seem worse than any he might be criticizing..
It was intentionally done as a parody, I reckon.
it's a seasonal theme that can be turned off with one click
Agreed 100 %, but the snow kept me from reading the whole article. Would've thought the snow icon turned it off, but instead it changed the background color… Liquid Glass is bad, but not _that_ bad.
I suppose I wouldn't mind much either way, apart from the misaligned text maybe now that you brought my attention to it.
I agree that colors could help.
Don't hesitate to give KDE/Qt a try, it apparently happens to get all these things right according to this article from a quick glance: everything is correctly aligned, even when in the same menu some items both have an icon and a checkbox, and some don't have anything; icons are mostly meaningful, some icons are colored (most are monochrome though, there's a move to this), and not all items have icons.
I guess it's the kind of things that are hard to get right for a hobby OS like macOS that lacks professional UX designers. :-)
Is there a reason Apple can’t focus on system improvements instead of constantly tweaking with their UI so thoroughly every couple years? I don’t disagree the OS UI needs to be revamped periodically, but it seems they do it too often.
> constantly tweaking with their UI so thoroughly every couple years
Between any of the big 3 companies putting out major OSes (Apple, Microsoft, Google), Apple is the best for sticking to tried and true designs. It's certainly gotten worse the past couple of years (like the Photos app redesign they immediately changed again in iOS 26) and I hope with their new design lead he can pull things back to somewhere sensible, but compared to Android or Windows it's not even close. I used Android for the better part of a decade and every year they'd completely redesign the notification shade, the settings app, they'd switch the SMS app out for Hangouts, then put you back on Messages, then rename it, then change the logo/branding, then redesign it again, etc. Everything was endless changes for no reason, felt like a constant beta.
If you look at the basic iPhone apps - Messages, Settings, Notes - prior to Liquid Glass it's been pretty much exactly as it was when Jobs showed it off at the iPhone reveal 19 years ago.
It's a damned if you don't, damned if you do. Apple could release a new system with zero UI updates and tons of internal improvements and people would call it 'old' and 'dated' and 'lack of innovation'.
It's a bit like adding new emojis in an OS release. There's been reports that new emojis are one of the drivers for getting people to upgrade. No one cares about a zero day security flaw, but that new kiss emoji everyone wants.
> Apple could release a new system with zero UI updates and tons of internal improvements and people would call it 'old' and 'dated' and 'lack of innovation'.
Apple has released incremental upgrades to macOS for years, and I've never heard this criticism of them. On the contrary, I ofter hear people missing Leopard design, and when UI has changed I've heard pushback (ie, when System Settings was renamed and redesigned). On macOS people care about the apps and interactions, not wether the buttons got a new look.
> There's been reports that new emojis are one of the drivers for getting people to upgrade. No one cares about a zero day security flaw, but that new kiss emoji everyone wants.
I agree with this. New emojis are new functionality; you can now express something you couldn't. A zero day security flaw brings no new functionality. Equally, updates to to apps and interactions bring new functionality. A re-skin of the OS doesn't.
It's been 16 years since Snow Leopard. I think we're ready for another one.
I agree, but I'm pointing out why UI changes happen. Apple could certainly do UI changes as part of a cleanup release though. Basically start with getting back to consistency pointed out in the article.
But, having worked with users I've seen first hand out tons of internal improvements are ignored while one small UI change makes 'everything seem new'.
Don't you feel that the circumstances are similar though? There was a pressure (expectation and competition) for new features. There were rapid changes in the UI and UX. But also bugs. And IIRC Mac OS X upgrades were still paid-for.
It was a brave move to spend a major release without adding feature. And people were grateful for it, once it happened.
I'm all about them spending a major release bug fixing. I've been on their side with a much smaller project and see what users say though.
The analogy I use is that no one thinks about plumbing until it's not working. I could stand up and tell people we have the best plumbing ever, it's been improved, is less likely to break, etc... and as long as it works at a surface level it seems the vast majority of user don't care. We actually save little UI tweaks/fixes to point to when doing major behind the scenes upgrades so users 'see' we're doing something. It's silly, but /shrug.
KPI and corp revenue I guess. There was a time I heard that Apple had an only fix bugs release.
The bosses who are actually in charge likely don’t even use their Macs (and when they do, they only use the web browser) and only care about how the OS is going to look in the demo, not how it works.
What makes you think they don't use macs? What else would they use?
Pretty sure Tim Cook has said before he does most of his work on the iPad; it doesn't seem like an unreasonable guess that too many of the C-suites do the same and don't use Macs enough.
Fixing bugs isn't going to give you a promotion.
Love Tonsky's articles. My favorite is about centering things: https://tonsky.me/blog/centering/
He has a knack for putting words to the vague frustrations I feel but can't quite articulate. How does he find so many perfect examples that nail exactly what's wrong?
The old guidelines assumes the user is literate. Apple's focus has changed since then. I'm not saying it's working well, but this vision leads to things like this.
I love this article. It sums up everything I think it's wrong in our line of work.
Things have become very... Amateurish. Think of the way these apps got to where they are-who decided to put all those icons? Probably someone who hasn't a good understanding of usability but maybe - like someone with not enough domain knowledge - looked at other apps and thought that the icons look pretty, while having a small amount of understanding of their purpose.
Why is that happening? I have theories... Hypothesis. Maybe too many managerial types are calling the shots. Maybe we needed more workers than we where able to educate and the average skill dropped (a lot). Maybe companies realized that poor quality doesn't matter, because either customers don't have other choices or the choices that there are are as bad.
Every few months, I will get tired of the current look of my status bar in i3 (or sway on my laptop). For the icons I will go to https://www.nerdfonts.com/, search for ones that look cool, and copy paste them to the relevant-ish sections.
Apparently I'm qualified to be a designer for Apple.
I fully agree with the article, but the snow effect on the site is more distracting to readability than the shitty menu icons in Tahoe...
The story in the patterns book about architecture: the architect got tired of arguing with the bishops about a church, so they put a hot tub in the corner on the next design. The bishops agreed that the hot tub must go, and the design was approved.
I think all the icon „bloat“ is from the designers that needed to stay relevant. They learned to use pictures instead of text from some professors and wanted to show how much they are worth. The picture for text pattern is valid if you want to replace one or two words in a commercial but not if you have about 200 icons on your page. Also the trend to a flat black and white design makes the icons just to blend together
Are they really trying to tell me how bad the icons on a Mac are while presenting the website with a constant snow animation, which when turned off turns into a horrible bright yellow colour, and the dark mode toggle is a joke turning the website into a pitch black nothing where your mouse becomes a torch...
What's your suggestion to deal with Apple's current fail? Wait until Tahoe's successor(s) or leave for good? When Jony Ive left, Apple managed to listen to their customers and quickly got rid of the Touch Bar thing, reintroduced a physical Esc key, etc. so there's hope left, isn't there?
> Apple managed to listen to their customers and quickly got rid of the Touch Bar thing, reintroduced a physical Esc key, etc. so
Those are all hardware upgrades that Apple profits from. What incentive does Apple have to make the App Store better, or improve the visual clarity in the iOS and macOS interface? Shouldn't we be seeing downward pressure there too, if innovation can be generalized to software?
Most users don't have a say in the matter, and Apple has exploited their ambivalence for decades. If you're the sort of person who cares, you're not Apple's target audience.
I am very glad I have maintained my hesitance to update the operating systems on my Apple devices. The Liquid Glass announcement from the jump seemed really just like 1. a transparent (no pun intended) ploy to answer broad anti flat design sentiments from the public, without any expressed functional benefit and 2. a way to normalize this sort of design with an eye on a future of wearables and AR devices, something they seemed fairly invested in with the release of the Vision Pro. All of this is at the cost of immediate visual clarity, as it only adds more visual noise to the interface and removes (or at least inhibits) color as a core visual differentiator.
This new system of icons is something I was entirely unaware of until now, since I haven't updated or had to use an updated MacOS device. I've in the past been a defender of MacOS, but it really does feel like the decision making is completely off the rails and has no consideration of the most basic principles of design. Baffling.
I'm still on Sequoia, almost 100% of the reason is how bad OSX26 looks. There's absolutely nothing compelling me to update right now
Same. All my colleagues had to update, and I feel dread just looking at their screens. There is something very deeply disturbing in this new design that I cannot even pinpoint.
I wait and hope that some point apple will revert certain changes, or at least give more options for disabling some stuff.
Funnily enough, I find icons an improvement overall - even if those are inconsistent, it feels like it gives me more points to anchor my eyes on when skimming through an unknown menu and gives me any context.
Starting to use Mac ~3 years ago, I often encountered giant blocks of text in right-click menus and while pleasing aesthetically, those were a chore to actually parse. For someone who daily drives macOS for, I assume, multiple years more than me, it probably comes down to memorisation, and how it looks becomes more important (with Tahoe breaking habits), but I find the inconsistencies and icons something that actually helps me find my ground.
Granted, the execution leaves a lot to be improved, I won't argue against it. Tahoe in some places feels downright amateurish. Despite that, I'll still take what Tahoe added over no icons at all... I feel like color icons + using them more sparingly would certainly be better though.
I guess a justification for Tahoe icons on my end is - those help me navigate the UI despite all their shortcomings (and ugliness they bring in many places).
It’s best when only some of the items in a menu (like maybe a third of them) have icons, preferably the most important commands. This gives the menus a visual structure and can also help in better recognizing groups of related items.
The classic Windows menu from the article is a good example: https://tonsky.me/blog/tahoe-icons/word@2x.webp?t=1767611340
I agree, that would be ideal, mentioned that above (so used sparingly + colors is what I would love to see). The linked example I saw in the article is what I had in mind and agree with it being the best way to go.
Though even the visual clutter of everything having icons I find faster to scan with my eyes on the first "visit", as those usually suggest the functionality I might be looking for at least. Even if not perfectly distinct, I find iconography faster to parse and guide me towards what I seek. I don't even particularly mind reused ones, as those usually mark a "section" of their own.
However I understand that some people would probably take no icons at all rather than every option having one... or whatever Apple decided to do in a given menu, considering Tahoe's inconsistency all over the place).
I don't even look at them, they're just visual clutter to me.
^ This.
I couldn't quite formulate the exact reason why I disliked the Tahoe menus compared to previous versions, but this article nailed it.
One of the touted advantages when Microsoft introduced the Office product suite was the integration and consistency of the apps. Whether you opened Word, Excel or Powerpoint, when the user wanted to quit the app, they'd use the same command - they didn't need to realize that the Quit command at a certain location in one menu had the same functionality as the Exit menu that was positioned in another location in another menu in another app.
Same name, same menu location, same shortcut key.
Much easier to train yourself or your employees - learn one app and you'd be familiar with the other apps in the Microsoft Office product line.
Other companies that tried to create Office-like suites didn't/couldn't create the consistency amongst the apps since they had to acquire the missing apps from other software makers to complete their own Office-like suite.
But this consistency was tempered by common sense.
The goal of shortcut keys was to make common actions quickly accessible to users. But for consistency, the same shortcut key should be used across apps.
When Mail/Outlook was introduced, users found that CTRL-F was bound to the Find command. Makes sense on first thought. But what's the most common command in an email app - is it "Find" or is it "Forward email". Especially when the prevailing standard for CTRL-F in email apps was CTRL-F.
When Bill Gates angrily complains that he's always invoking the Find command by mistake, Program Managers are willing to make exceptions to dogma.
It'd be interesting to compare the menus in Apple's iWork suite (Pages / Numbers / Keynote) to see if their menu items /shortcut keys are consistent or unique.
Note that this Microsoft Office suite consistency didn't necessarily extend to other Microsoft apps. There's no one managing menu item consistency company-wide at Microsoft, just within Office.
Look at where it came from. Excel was a Macintosh app. By 1989, Microsoft had designed one or two Mac applications to blend seamlessly with MacPaint, MacWrite, and MacDraw. (MacProject became MS Project IIRC.) Word on Mac was a native GUI while Word remained DOS based and Word for Windows was still launched from DOS by typing WINWORD.EXE.
Apple Human Interface Guidelines were foundational to Win 3.1. At the same time, doing UI on Unix I was always asked to solve problems by “doing it the Apple Way.” My secret was the MITRE Corp UI book which surveyed best practices from all platforms and underlined the reasoning.
This makes me think of QGIS. I've recently been learning it for a couple different projects. It's an incredibly powerful and configurable tool, but its learning curve is incredibly steep. A big reason for this is that the UI is almost entirely toolbar+button based -- but the meaning of all of the button icons are completely opaque to a new user. And, making things worse, there's no way to change the UI to show text next to buttons. So every time a user wants to do something, even if following instructions that say "click the add feature button", they have to hunt around for it.
QGIS is free software, so it can be somewhat excused vs a billion dollar company. But they could really benefit from some UX expertise...
I'm not going to take design advice from somebody who animates snow falling over the text and images of his blog
I've yet to upgrade from Sequoia and having read this _excellent_ article, I'm going to hold off as long as Apple let me.
I really hope the recent changes at Apple mean this will get completely overhauled and they'll return to their roots as design leaders. It will be such a shame if this mess is allowed to continue
I tend to disagree with the author on this. Reading actual words takes time (and, for me, mental energy). I have to look at each character, say the word in my head, then visualize what action that word means. Where as icons have a lot more built in meaning (but lack specificity). I tend to use them as a _local_ fuzzy filter (unless it's a common, well known icon like share) then read the words to understand exactly what they mean.
In other words, I'm not using icons to find a single action. I'm using icons to quickly understand the available options to me. Meaning, they're only there to help me compare and contrast options within the same visual context. It's fine for the same action to have different icons in different places. When I'm looking at the "File" menu, I'm not really concerned what the action looks like on the toolbar (let alone a different app).
> Reading actual words takes time (and, for me, mental energy). I have to look at each character, say the word in my head, then visualize what action that word means.
It might sound flippant but I'm asking in good faith: do you have a reading disability (like dyslexia)? I (and I think this is generally the case) don't consciously read words character by character or say them in my head, it feels more like my brain pattern-recognizes whole words and I understand them "at a glance".
I don’t believe I have dyslexia, but I’m an incredibly slow reader. By contrast, I’m an extremely good skimmer - but in a are much easier for me than text.
But that's the author's point, no? Icons are great when used as visual shortcuts, but the way they're implemented makes absolutely no sense to the point of being detracting. They're inconsistent from menu to menu, even in the same application, and don't even necessarily represent the action they're assigned to.
> They're inconsistent from menu to menu, even in the same application, and don't even necessarily represent the action they're assigned to.
My point is that none of that matters. They just need to represent something within the context they're being used.
That's different from how menu icons apart have been used clasically. In e.g. Microsoft Office the save icon was present in the File menu along the text, and also the toolbar, stand-alone.
And it was clear enough that you would trust the stand-alone save icon to perform the action you expected. Icons were also selectively chosen for common actions.
If icons are considered non-deterministic and non-canonical, then they can't [confidently] be used stand-alone.
Also, I'll meet your data point of 1 with mine. I have an iPhone and find it far easier to pick an app from the list of names than pick an icon. I frequently mix them up (and I only use a dozen routinely)
The funny thing is the most clear example of useful icons, the eight top/left/bottom/right/corners options, could be more helpfully replaced by a single image where you click on it in the place you want the stuff, and remove the text entirely (other than for screen reader support).
Does anyone have a good method for avoiding accidentally accepting an "upgrade" notification from Sequoia to Tahoe?
With the potential to set off the installation flow with the wrong click (when its being shown over-and-over again), it makes me anxious and feel like I'm not even in control of my own computer anymore.
For the time being, I've installed a management profile to defer updates, disabled the Settings options for automatic updates, and used "Quiet You!" to try and keep the notifications at bay.
But the maximum deferral time for profiles is 90 days, so if anyone knows of a better solution or work-around, please let me know
Make sure to keep a backup of your Sequoia install
It's hard to justify a blog post about unnecessary and distracting visual elements when the you're peering at the article through a freaking blizzard on the screen lol.
I love that I'm reading this on a site that has decided to obscure the content with falling snow for the holidays
Some people (like myself) derive enormous contextual object-recognition and GUI navigation assistance from iconography of any kind (such as emojis that prepend any sort of list item). But others find the same exact thing wildly distracting. We're all wired differently. Hence: why not just make menu bar icons an OS-level setting?
I suspect this sort of thing starts to happen when UX decision-making gets decentralized. No single god-king would allow six or more different new icons; the lack of uniformity is obviously nonsensical to anybody, but not necessarily to a disorganized collective of anybodies.
To all the people whining about the Snow, click the buttons at the top of the page, come on now.
To all the people also whining about the snow, as if it invalidates the opinions written in the article, again, PLEASE click the buttons at the top of the page.
The author is clearly going for a fun, whimsical, playful vibe that works perfectly fine on a personal blog. Expecting something different from a workstation operating system made by one of the Fortune 10, especially one who heavily markets their design "prowess", is perfectly reasonable.
Windows 11 Explorer adds an accent colour to otherwise monochrome icons, which does help distinguish them. I still don't consciously use the icons when picking a menu item though.
Explorer also "promotes" copy/paste commands to the top of the context menu as just icons with no text label, which can be confusing - your instinct is to just to look for a "Copy" or "Paste" item in the menu, but no - for some commands you must learn the icon and the fact that it doesn't appear in the menu proper.
Also the context menu populates slowly with dynamic items depending on the right-clicked file which causes items to dodge out of the way of your cursor, but I don't want to get too deep into a wider discussion of the awfulness of Windows 11 Explorer...
Oh MacOS Sequoia the menu items will dodge away as you navigate a right-click menu.
Oh man I hope some of the people putting stuff in the joke-but-real "personal information" box within the burger menu know that clicking the "download" provides the input from everyone. I'm seeing some seemingly real addresses and social security numbers in there.
Additional thought: It's always interesting to see a website linked from HN with a method for user input and a means to see what other users have posted. Just a funny juxtaposition between the buttoned-up ego (not in the pejorative sense) of the HN poster vs the screaming id of that same user on a different platform.
I personally enjoy changes of scenery, but my parents struggle to relearn how to use their computer every time there is a major OS update that revamps the UI. It's seldom better, it's just change for change's sake, resulting in a lot of time lost to relearning. Sticking to the old OS is only viable as long as security updates continue.
I wish that OS developers would provide the option to retain the bulk of the old UI when a new one comes out, implementing the UI like a swappable "theme." People who prefer consistency could keep most of their old UI, and those who prefer the newer UI can have it.
It looks like they made a decision to include icons for every menu item and the developers for each app had to come up with an icon association for all menu items. I’m sure they realized along the way that this was a bad idea, maybe it was too late.
It's time to try GNOME. It's MacOS-like (without really copying any specific aspect of it), incredibly clean and polished. Add a dock with the Dash to Dock extension if you want to make it even more similar.
Something on this website made my iPhone (16 pro) immediately begin warming up, become hot to the touch, and invoke screen-dimming throttling. I verified by exiting it and reentering, during which the pattern abated and then recurred.
The snow? Something else?
You can turn the snow off in the toolbar.
And then you have Sylvio Rizzi (of Reeder fame) just one-shotting the whole Liquid Glass tenet by using the prominent glass element to focus on the actual content instead of that hideous sidebar (a liquid glass element I hate the most, not just for a way it makes Xcode 26 sidebar 1 cm wider than Xcode 18 with the same content).
I would wear the t-shirt with Reeder screenshot to work if I worked at Apple, and would observe who notices it.
https://x.com/tomaskafka/status/2008168483608293873
I don't understand the point you're trying to make. I clicked on your link to your own post on x.com and found pretty much the same text, plus a screenshot that does not explain anything - potentially because I don't know how to get to a full-screen-sized version of that image, but I actually doubt that would help.
If it can't be explained in words here on this site, could you please tell me what I'm looking at/for in the screenhot?
I'm not intimately familiar with the UI/UX principles behind Liquid Glass so I could be wrong, but the main difference I see here is that in the second screenshot, on the Reeder app on the left, the "floating" section is used for emphasis on the main content area (right hand side), while in the Finder screenshot on the right, it's the navigation menu on the left that is floating, and brings unneeded emphasis to itself.
Looking at it for 30s, I still don't understand what Apple was trying to do. What am I supposed to believe happens to the table as it goes under that floating menu? It clearly doesn't seem to continue all the way to the left edge of the window. Why not? If not, why bother with that whole floating menu concept if the underlying content arbitrarily stops at the menu?
The most surprising part to me is how people keep calling that nonsense "skeuomorphic" when it doesn't replicate any kind of physical intuition known to mankind. It's just made up physics that looks dumb.
X displays a cut down post preview to people who aren't members of the site. There's no context, no comments.
It seems like the preview for not-fans-of-Elon is also missing a screenshot?
The average person can get used to arbitrarily terrible UX. See 87% of the workforce that uses sluggish corporate-bloatware-filled windows laptops every day. It’s only those who have experienced and gotten used to something drastically better that will be sensitive to all the shortcomings.
Apple software used to be that elevated experience for the average person.
Given the lack of basic consistency though, it’s evident that there are no leaders at Apple that care about UX enough to thoroughly design and test the whole software experience anymore. Just a bunch of random teams doing whatever.
I wonder why every large company seems to fall off in the same way?
Funny thing is that i didn't see that "icon" that disables snow effect.
that part looks to be a parody of bad ui. the burger icon, the dark mode switch, the snow thing all are purposely built to subvert common expectation.
Some really excellent points, here. I think reading the old HIG documents should be mandatory in UI design, and departure from it should require serious justification.
One small nitpick: the ellipsis reuse in item #8 - that’s actually valid and would have been back in the 1990s as well. A menu item that is followed by an ellipsis indicates that selecting that menu option will open a dialog box. Inconsistently applied, but that’s always been the meaning.
This is a good article.
However I guess the real pain is that there's still nowhere to go. Switching to Windows or Linux means giving up the efficiency of M-series chips, losing key apps, and losing the consistent menu-bar. It feels like an abyss.
Much of the problem stems from inconsistent application of icons. This would have gone better if Apple established (and followed!) clear guidelines for exactly which icon to use for which standard action (e.g. search).
That the icons exist is not necessarily a problem, since they can help teach users which buttons in the UI do which actions. (menu bar for discovery, app UI for less mouse travel + contextual options). But that requires consistency, which the current implementation lacks...
This is the second time in just a few weeks I see a post from some UX person complaining about how some major tech company doesn't "understand" design while themselves having a design that is absolutely abysmal. What made this person think that having gigantic snowflakes flying down a page serving only text and images would be a good idea?
_edit_: I'd also like to point out that I know it can be disabled, the question(s) I then have are 1) why is it enabled by default 2) black text on yellow background is yet another obvious mistake
It’s not obvious to me how black on yellow is a mistake. It’s quite readable, the contrast is broad enough for clarity but not so broad the background overwhelms the foreground. Yellow’s a recommended “light” background for visually impaired people so the choice has precedance (although I confess that many other examples of it I’ve seen use a softer pastel yellow which is more comfortable).
The huge area of intense yellow (or any highly saturated color actually) is very jarring. The eyes get tired quickly. It's really a weird choice coming from a person who is apparently into visual communication.
Btw, I'm using a desktop PC with a large browser window. Maybe on a small mobile screen the problem is less apparent.
It is enabled by default so you can enjoy the snowflakes.
Sorry to be a bit of a killjoy, but I find the snowflake animation on the page annoying. Nothing serious, of course— I read the article in its entirety ;) But ironically, in the case of this article about icon design, the icon for the warm/cool color theme toggle button in the site header is a snowflake (and it doesn’t change when switching to warm colors). I initially thought this button was meant to disable the snowflake animation :D
Good Riddance to Alan Dye.
Tim Cook- if you do one thing before you retire- promote the right person to fix both MacOS and iOS. They're both in need of a lot of work to fix.
I'm still on Sonoma (14). And it pisses me off that there's no easy way to upgrade to Sequoia (15). I really don't want to touch Tahoe at all.
I found it extremely easy to find the "macos sequoia installer" to download from Apple's servers. Literally those search terms will do it; download -> install.
Admittedly it would be "easier" if Apple gave you the choice of which version to upgrade to in macOS, but that's generally not how software is provided.
> And it pisses me off that there's no easy way to upgrade to Sequoia (15).
Open the Mac App Store and search for Sequoia.
https://apps.apple.com/app/macos-sequoia/id6596773750
This doesn't work for me. I see it in the App Store but it says not available for my system and redirects me to the Tahoe update.
edit: worked after second attempt (via macappstores://apps.apple.com/app/macos-sequoia/id6596773750?mt=12 )
Article is alright but the website itself induces a LOT of lag. The heavy particle use is very distracting and makes the article hard to read.
Great article, once you find how to deactivate the snowflakes.
This is only an opinion, but it feels like UX in general is moving towards making things cute rather than usable. Liquid glass is a case in point.
This is useful to a point, in the same sense that one might beauty, but when this is all you care about, it becomes a problem.
This makes me think there’s a sort of system level thing applied to pairing icons with menu items, so, with SIP disabled, would it be possible to modify this? I’m already running things like Yabai and Hammerspoon for a lot of mods, might as well look into clearing the clutter of icons next.
Apple has been poisoning the design space the last 5-10 years, they're not just doing it to themselves.
These don't seem to be well thought at all. While reading the article, I've started wondering if they were chosen by an LLM after some developers decided it wasn't worth the trouble of going through every single application and choosing icons for every single menu item. That would explain a lot, in my opinion.
What likely happened is that design leadership commanded that everything needs to have an icon, and most of the individual developers tasked with updating the menus just pick the next best icon from the provided icon library, because there exists no further guidance or oversight. There’s probably a designated procedure for requesting new icons, but why bother if nobody is checking your work.
I don’t think Craig gets enough blame. He’s the one who just loves gadget features and shiny stuff. I don’t think Apple has championed a single Mac feature around making your computer more a powerful system for professional work since he has taken over.
Wow: horrifying. I've been delaying the upgrade, and looks like I'm going to keep right on delaying it.
I've decided to completely skip it. I'm not gonna upgrade to Tahoe, unless it's something very vital. This is a UI abomination to me.
This talk by Scott Jenson is just fantastic and he explains some nuances and missed opportunities
https://youtu.be/1fZTOjd_bOQ?si=Kiyy_W3Zg3jkCWLG
https://web.archive.org/web/20121225011818/http://www.useit....
Old but gold
I think the first graphic is a bit misleading because it omits the shortcuts in the more legible left hand side. I love menus that reveal shortcuts. I agree with the main thrust of the article though.
Ironically adding a snowfall CSS effect to this blog also makes it difficult to read and use.
Those who want to complain about the snowflake animations, wait till you try out the dark mode
Can someone at Apple who's also on HN please forward this to Craig Federighi? Seems this is a bit of regression or someone asleep at the wheel. I'm overall happy with the stability of Tahoe but some of the design is getting a bit sloppy.
Over the years it feels like Federighi’s pleasantness and enthusiasm in those fun videos just don’t translate into the work he oversees. The software mostly work fine but they don’t make me feel “aha” or “this is how it should be done” anymore.
I don’t think it’s a good idea to require an icon for everything, some actions are hard to depict with an icon.
But on the other hand, I think 95% of the icons in the first menu in this article are clear and probably help most people navigate faster.
Excellent article. What really got my respect was the fact that his videos listed at https://tonsky.me/talks/ are not hosted on YouTube.
This one better hurt the Apple employees who still cares:
"On the upside: it’s not that hard anymore to design better than Apple!"
Also why-o-why is the close menu item directly next to the save item?
Imagine wanting to save and accidentally click close....
> Or two-letter As that only slightly differ in the font size:
In that one case having a large A for bigger and smaller A for smaller makes sense.
They should add a button to turn off the icons. The new menu icons aren't the only icon annoyance either, their own app icons look worse across the board with few exceptions.
However something should be clear here: the author mentions the UI guidelines from 1992. These are not current. And definitely not some kind of permanent law.
Similar discussion on similar blog post from last month: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46196688
Interesting.
The article starts with this: > Sequoia → Tahoe It’s bad
And I look at the image... And I like it? I agree with the author that it could be better, but most of the icons (new, open recent, close, save, duplicate, print, share etc), do make it easier, faster and more pleasant for my brain to parse the menu vs no icons.
Again, I don't disagree that you could do it better, I just disagree with the premise that the 1992 manual is "the authority". Display density has increased dramatically; people use their computers more and have been accustomed to those interfaces, which makes the relationship of the people with the interfaces different. Quoting a 1992 guideline on interfaces in 2026 feels like quoting the greeks on philosophy while ignoring our understandings of the world since then.
If you haven’t done so, I’d suggest reading that HIG. It is clear thinking, expressed well, and it stands the test of time.
I wouldn't take too much into a book about optimising database storage written for 90s-era hard disks and CPUs.
But a file menu is still a file menu, and save is still save. In fact it's remarkable how little that has changed since 1983.
The author addresses this. Humans are the same in 2026 as 1992.
Besides, that interface designers or even the average computer user understands more than in 1992 is highly implausible on its face.
Humans are definitely not the same as in 1992 when it comes to their everyday knowledge of computer interactions.
And even if human cognition itself were unchanged, our understanding of HCI has evolved significantly since then, well beyond what merely “feels right.”
Most UX researchers today can back up their claims with empirical data.
The article goes on at great length about consistency, yet then insists that text transformations require special treatment, with the HIG example looking outright unreadable.
Menu text should remain stable and not mirror or preview what’s happening to the selected text IMHO.
Also, some redundancy is not necessarily a bad thing in UI design, and not all users, for various reasons, can read with a vocabulary that covers the full breadth of what a system provides.
Most UX researchers today can back up their claims with empirical data.
HCI work in 1992 was very heavily based on user research, famously so at Apple. They definitely had the data.
I find myself questioning that today (like, have these horrible Tahoe icons really been tested properly?) although maybe unfairly, as I'm not an HCI expert. It does feel like there are more bad UIs around today, but that doesn't necessarily mean techniques have regressed. Computers just do a hell of a lot more stuff these days, so maybe it's just impossible to avoid additional complexity.
One thing that has definitely changed is the use of automated A/B testing -- is that the "empirical data" you're thinking of? I do wonder if that mostly provides short-term gains while gradually messing up the overall coherency of the UI.
Also, micro-optimizing via A/B testing can lead to frequent UI churn, which is something that I and many others find very annoying and confusing.
I there not any user testing as we know it today, mostly top down application of priciples.
This was all experts driven in that time to my knowledge.
Empirical validiton did not really take off until the late 00s.
https://hci.stanford.edu/publications/bds/4p-guidelines.html
Don had the explicit expert knowledge first stance in 2006 and 2011, nothing inherently wrong with that, but it's defenitly no research driven.
"Always be researching. Always be acting."
https://jnd.org/act-first-do-the-research-later/
Tognazzini and Norman already criticized Appple about this a decade ago, while the have many good points, I cannot shake the feeling that they simply feel like the were used to just brand Apple as user friendly in the 90s and that Apple never actually adopted their principles and just used it as it fit the company's marketing.
https://www.fastcompany.com/3053406/how-apple-is-giving-desi...
there are a bunch of discussions on this
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10559387 [2015] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19887519 [2019]
That's interesting, I hadn't heard that point of view before.
Empirical validiton did not really take off until the late 00s.
https://hci.stanford.edu/publications/bds/4p-guidelines.html
Hmmm, I don't quite see where that supports "Apple didn't do empirical validation"? Is it just that it doesn't mention empirical validation at all, instead focusing on designer-imposed UI consistency?
ISTR hearing a lot about how the Mac team did user research back in the 1980s, though I don't have a citation handy. Specific aspects like the one-button mouse and the menu bar at the top of the screen were derived by watching users try out different variations.
I take that to be "empirical validation", but maybe you have a different / stricter meaning in mind?
Admittedly the Apple designers tried to extract general principles from the user studies (like "UI elements should look and behave consistently across different contexts") and then imposed those as top-down design rules. But it's hard to see how you could realistically test those principles. What's the optimal level of consistency vs inconsistency across an entire OS? And is anyone actually testing that sort of thing today?
I cannot shake the feeling that they simply feel like the were used to just brand Apple as user friendly in the 90s and that Apple never actually adopted their principles and just used it as it fit the company's marketing.
I personally think Apple did follow their own guidelines pretty closely in the 90s, but in the OS X era they've been gradually eroded. iOS 7 in particular was probably a big inflexion point -- I think that's when many formerly-crucial principles like borders around buttons were dropped.
Like the whole recoverability paradigm, seems more like a feature from developer perspective looking for a reason to exist, than a true user demand.
You have state management for debugging purposes already, so why not expose it to the user.
As an example in photoshop no non-professional users care about non-destructive workflows, these things have to be learned as a skill.
Undo is nice to have in most situations, but you can really only trust your own saves and version management with anything serious.
Sonething as simple as a clipboard history is still nowhere to be found as built in feature in MacOS, yet somehow made it's way into Windows.
Why is it highly implausible on its face other than the fact it makes arguing against him harder?
Why would UX be getting worse across the board if there is greater understanding now?
Did you mean to reply to me?
The person I replied to said, "that interface designers or even the average computer user understands more than in 1992 is highly implausible on its face"
Think of computer users at the ages of 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, and 80 in 1992. For each group, estimate their computer knowledge when they sat down at a computer in 1992.
Now do the same exercise for the year 2026.
How is it highly implausible on its face that the average computer user in 2026 understands less than the average computer user in 1992?
> Did you mean to reply to me?
I think so.
> The person I replied to said, "that interface designers or even the average computer user understands more than in 1992 is highly implausible on its face"
Yes, I agree with this person.
>How is it highly implausible on its face that the average computer user in 2026 understands less than the average computer user in 1992?
I don't think it is. Particularly with the average user, the bar of understanding is lower now.
> Particularly with the average user, the bar of understanding is lower now.
Can you explain how this is true given that everyone using a computer today has had a lifetime of computer use whereas in 1992 many people were encountering computers for the first time?
Here are a few perfectly acceptable explanations.
1. Computer users were generally well-educated, unlike today.
2. UX designers didn’t inherit any mess and could operate from first principles.
3. The “experience” of modern users—phones, tablets, and software that does everything for you—doesn’t translate the way you think. And it explains why Gen Z seems to have regressed in terms of tech knowledge.
> Can you explain how this is true given that everyone using a computer today has had a lifetime of computer use whereas in 1992 many people were encountering computers for the first time?
The userbase has been watered down with a larger proportion of individuals who are not highly technical.
Oh that statement is so 1992. Millions of people getting a Dell or a Gateway and annoying their techie friend “So now what do I do with this?”
Or 1982.
Users are always non-technical.
most of your points are refuted in the article. but I'll pick this one : "Display density has increased dramatically" Yes, it has, and Tahoe does not take advantage of this, infact the icons are smaller, and harder to read, using fewer pixels than windows icons of 25 years ago.
> most of your points are refuted in the article
Sure, we can debate about the general points.
Yet, we can't refute that my subjective opinion evaluation of the opening image looks better (for me) , reads better (for me) and is easier (for me) to parse. Either I don't fit the general guidelines, or the general guidelines need a revision, that's my point overall.
Well - that's just your --- opinion, man.
But answer me this. You say "but most [but not all? - interesting] of the icons do make it easier, faster and more pleasant for my brain to parse the menu vs no icons."
How does a list of icons that are used inconsistently, duplicated, used in other places, sometimes used and sometimes not used, not to mention illegible, positioned inconsistently, go directly against the broad (reasoned) rules of the Apple HIG, help 'make it easier' as you say?
This is literally what half the article is explaining and you are just saying - no it's easier to not be able to tell an icon apart, and it's easier to have the icons sometimes be the same or move locations, be so small as to be illegible.
How many did you get when the menu text was removed ? I just don't believe it makes it easier. But who am I to argue against someones 'subjective opinion evaluation' I'm just a guy on the internet.
ps I assume by the opening image, you mean the first screenshot supplied by the author of the article - the Sequoia to Tahoe menu comparison, which he brilliantly posted below a shot of the HIG which literally is explaining the exact same thing and why not to do it the Tahoe way. That in it self is confusing.
It makes no sense why Apple chose to do that with Tahoe?
I'll add a general comment - one of the reasons I use Apple systems was they had the UI stuff nailed down. Stuff was consistent. It looked and behaved in proper ways. It felt like a properly designed, holistic approach to UI design. Lately it's just a mess. This article touch the surface of the issues. My current beef is this stupid 'class of window' that appears now and again which is half-way between a dialog and a window. Best place to see it is immediately after a screenshot - click the thumb that appears. This window type doesn't behave like any other window. Z-order, closing, focus, actions that occur when you click certain things, are all different and inconsistent. But it does look a little like IOS though.
> of the reasons I use Apple systems was they had the UI stuff nailed down (...) Lately it's just a mess
I have never daily driven an Apple device, so I can't comment on this; but from what I seen I do agree that Apple UI has not been as consistent lately.
> ps I assume by the opening image, you mean the first screenshot supplied by the author of the article
Yeah, sorry about that; that's correct, that's what I'm referring to. To remove ambiguity: https://tonsky.me/blog/tahoe-icons/sequoia_tahoe_textedit@2x...
> How does a list of icons that are used inconsistently, duplicated, used in other places, sometimes used and sometimes not used, not to mention illegible, positioned inconsistently, go directly against the broad (reasoned) rules of the Apple HIG, help 'make it easier' as you say?
Sure! First of all, I'm only commenting on the FIRST image of the blog. There are no duplicated images in it. The icons appear consistently used in that image (maybe export to PDF looks a bit off, but this is a pattern that I have seen repeated on other apps, so I'm used to it). I'm not sure how the icons would look on the actual display, but they look alright on my 4K display as shown on the blog. I also can't comment on they being used "inconsistently" across other parts because I don't use Apple devices.
I'm making a very narrow claim: On the first image, if I compare the menu on the left, with the menu on the right, I prefer the menu on the right. I have tried to "find X" on a menu on the left and then repeat a similar exercise on the right; I am faster on the right and I am more confident on the right. My brain seems to be using the icons as a "fast lookup" and the text to verify the action.
Now, does this translate to all other menus? No! The "File" example he shows is super confusing. Also, it's possible I would prefer the less cluttered version with less icons. But for me (all icons) > (no icons) on that specific example.
I have not put enough mental energy to agree with the author on all of his individual suggestions across the article, but they look overall fine on the individual examples he provides. I'm just find the first example... not particularly compelling.
> Well - that's just your --- opinion, man
Well... Yes. But unless we objectively measure how I use the computer, that's the best we have got to evaluate my preference.
All my classes on human-computer interaction and design has always been about "listen to your users".
A few days ago there was a post on year of the Linux desktop due to Windows getting worse. The sense is that MacOS isn't degrading as fast, but it still also is looking its lead to linux in usability.
Looking at the article, I thought, maybe this is Apple's experience of Windows bringing touch to the desktop. Yet, it broke my 2 years of muscle memory on the iPad, I am still considering selling and switching.
The story goes that the looped square icon(⌘) was introduced because Steve Jobs hated to see apples in every menu line. Not only because of the clutter but he thought it diluted the brand.
The icons are another symptom.
A brand new Apple iPhone 17 Pro.
Constantly lagging and locking up in preparation for another transparent animation that absolutely no one asked for.
Feeling like Apple just mugged me and stole $1,000.
It's hard to take a post about UX and accessibility seriously when there's a crappy snow effect precipitously eroding my will to read.
Edit: Oh there is an icon to disable it, but still.
Page about usability has distracting snow all over the page :)
It looks good. I think they could be doing this to help people recognize iOS icons which don’t have any text (a far worse “classic HIG” crime IIRC).
The world is full of incredibly smart and talented developers…
But where are they? Because they’re not leaving their imprint on any of the big tech companies in recent years.
All Apple software just randomly changes UI with every iteration.
It's the software equivalent of fast fashion.
Just avoid it and stay with true and tried staples instead.
Is there a recommended modern day, non mac specific, equivalent to those "Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines" linked at the beginning of the article?
It’s hard to justify the snow effect on that web page too…
Why are Close and Save so next to each other?
Agreed about the icons, but sweet mercy, that was a challenging read with the snowflakes falling in front of the text.
ok right?! i was getting motion sick trying to read it. really ironic given the content of the article.
I hope with Alan Dye now out of Apple they will revisit a lot of what just happened. There’s been a lot of places where things have just become worse
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46196688
My iPhone got really hot reading this. It’s either from Steve Jobs turning in his grave, or the snow CSS eating all my CPU cycles.
On my phone that website had some ash rain animation all over it, making it unreadable without reader mode. WTF.
Reminds me of me when I started building gui applications. Hopefully they'll get over it.
A bit ironic that the website complaining about UI has virtual snow on it making reading hard.
What an indictment of not only Apple designers, but the entire "science of UX" It's clear now there is no science, it's just designers making... things. Very similar to other design fields where there is no "logic" just trends & vibes. Several generations of potentially brilliant engineers and designers have wasted their careers building advertising empires with shiny buttons.
Misapplication of the science isn’t proof the science doesn’t exist. Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines used to be fantastic. One of the reasons they’re sucking so bad right now is they’re ignoring their own previously working rules.
That’s what happens when you put in charge arrogant industrial and print designers who think UX and UI are inferior forms of design.
Isn’t this in robust support of science in UX?
I dunno, is it "science" if the top designers in the industry can completely ignore it? Engineers can't ignore physics (for long).
I mean, if there was only 1 engineering firm that made the iBridge, which represented nearly a quarter of all bridges out there, they might last a bit longer. They really made the bridge experience truly inspiring with the all-new glass I-beams!
This is a stunning catalog of UI hypocrisy, a call to action for fans and haters.
But what's interesting is why such hypocrisy persists - in particular, why so bad now?
Yes, designers might need to make work for themselves; yes, a new OS has to seem new, to justify upgrades and convince younglings that this isn't the oldsters' ride; but haventt these always been true?
What's different is Apple's slide into disorganization, as it spreads work around the globe in exchange for market access, and internal leaders coast in their mutual non-aggression pacts.
What remains of the center can issue global orders (adopt the liquid glass aesthetic; put icons on every action) and the periphery can comply - nominally, imperfectly, and inconsistently. Quality issues come to be tolerated like chronic inflammation, and even deployed in passive-aggressive turf battles.
"Back in the day" everyone would be pulled into a rock-tumbler room and grind it out. That's neither possible nor wanted today (as game theory effaced the requisite obliviousness).
What to do? Many YC companies have bonding time, where scattered teams join up for intense periods to restore alignment. Otherwise, the Apple might be ripe for a round of organizational consolidation.
Personally, I think internal competition with some misses and inconsistencies are a good thing long term. Inflammation is not cancer, and there are better ways to tamp it down.
What is with the annoying snow going over the text? That is a pretty “arbitrary” graphic element
Oh, that snow backdrop really hits hard while talking about other people's UI failures...
I don't mind the icons, but the snow effect on the website makes it much harder to read.
Well at least lots of designers at apple can now claim "I created icons for mac os"
...as if they were Susan Kare.
Apple still get quite good revenue and best in class engineers, how does this allowed to happen?
Because it doesn’t noticeably affect revenue (yet?), and because presumably it’s not the “best-in-class” engineers who are making these decisions, but misguided designers and managers, or engineers who don’t know any better.
So much effort is spent in the computer industry to un-solve previously solved problems.
It’s hard to justify the UI rant when there is annoying snowflakes animation on top of it.
The snow falling in front of the text here really drives the point home
Introduce UX problems today —> enables a big win when you remove them next version.
"Introducing macOS 27 'Snowy Tahoe' with 0 New Features!"
Next article should be about snow on web page and readability.
Oh god, collecting these screenshots must've magnified the pain so much.
Sorry, it's because they are busy with marketing liquid glass theme.
I was somewhat buying the article until I got to the monstrosity that is the “Special mention”, at which point I flipped to completely agreeing. That really is atrocious.
Man that pre-XP Windows menu really had soul. I miss it.
As it happens I updated to Tahoe a couple days back.
This entire UI refresh strikes me as completely unnecessary. I didn't even notice the menu icons. Thanks for that. Just another thing to be annoyed about.
But really, the glaringly obvious ones are already in your face.
1. There is no setting to get rid of the ridiculously over-rounded corners.
2. The dock, which I put on the left, now has about 10 extra pixels between it and the edge of the screen. 10 pixels that now will never, ever, be usable again.
3. All the icons have been forced into a rounded corner box. As it turns out, the human brain is really good at recognizing silhouettes. This just made that part of my brain useless. It retroactively restyled applications' icons that I've used for over a decade.
I'm sure I'll find others, but it's clear that Apple does not care about users. This all about power. They didn't even include settings to turn any of this off...just "take it like we wanna give it to you, plebes".
Infuriating.
And none of these things matter. Literally none of them are core to how an operating system works, just how it looks. I just don't understand UX people, and at this point I'm starting to hate them.
It's hard to take this rant seriously when the author chose to clutter his rant with snowflakes. If he's looking for more readers he's lucky I run uMatrix and chose to disable javascript instead of just closing the tab and moving on.
It's lacking taste, as is everything from Apple these days.
Looking at a bunch of developers assume expertise in interface design while shitting all over design as a field used to be a rage bait situation for me, but it’s fruitless. I’ve been both, and I was a developer long before I was a designer. I don’t think you have to be an expert to criticize an interface, and you definitely don’t have to like it, and some number of designers undoubtedly agree. But I encourage you to consider that the osmosis-learned nibbles about design and that Edward Tufte book you enjoyed might not qualify you to judge the competence of the better part of an entire set of professions. Most developers don’t even know what actual problems designers are tasked to solve, let alone evaluate their efficacy. Developers are a lot better at knowing when they know something than realizing when they don’t. NOBODY is good at discussing what they’re used to with what’s objectively good or bad. The “I don’t care what anybody says — this is just objectively bad” attitude is something that arises with literally any interface change in any major product. Developers have a very different usage style than most people and when you get a bunch of people in one place agreeing with each other without any outside voices, that’s an echo chamber at best and a circle jerk at worst. To be clear, I’m not even discussing, let alone defending the design: I’m countering the cocky obnoxious designer hate that pops up in these threads.
PS— Edward Tufte has some interesting perspectives on data visualization but the reason he’s so popular with the engineering crowd is because he was an engineer and he makes cut-and-dried rules about things that are easy to understand without any design education, and explains them in a way that appeals to engineers. Reading that book is better than nothing, but it’s gives laypeople about as much understanding of design as a “[language] cookbook” gives laypeople an understanding of programming.
do posts like this ever reach the higher up at Apple say Tim Cook ? or they're buried at the lower levels so the next level boss can't look bad.
maybe apple or ex-apple people can comment ?
No, they don’t. Issues just get closed.
The snow effect made it unbearable for me to finish reading
This is genuinely disheartening. As I continued reading the fine article, disappointment began settling in. Does nobody care about doing a good job anymore? When even multi-trillion-dollar companies cannot execute projects with some baseline level of quality and craft, it paints a disappointing picture. Very sad and disappointing. :(
I miss the time of Exposé and Mission Control, 3 finger drag, touch-to-tap, force click, even natural scrolling, Macbook Air, Magnetic magsafe.
Then something changed.
Touch bar was a miss. LaunchPad was a miss. I don't see a use of "Stage manager". iPad has gone to shit. Widgets came back, on mac... for no reason.
In Tahoe, the new spotlight search is one of the better features of Tahoe but i am fine with Alfred. But by and large, there are more annoyances in Tahoe than improvements.
For the iPhone and liquid glass, I am convinced that it was done to force people to upgrade to a new device. There *has* to be a reason to upgrade, and when hardware and software feature plateau, then we even the planned obsolescence era.
I'll voice the unpopular opinion: As someone who can parse images faster than text, I tend to find what I'm looking for faster in macOS Tahoe.
Still, my primary OS is Linux, but for laptops I prefer macOS, and it's still in acceptable shape.
However, I'll agree that Tahoe has far more papercuts than its predecessors. It needs a "Snow Tahoe" version.
Very much agree! Apple has been dropping the ball lately
Including the statement "Adding unpleasant, distracting, illegible, messy, cluttered" on a page with unpleasant, distracting, illegible, messy, and cluttered snowfall is certainly a choice.
I have a different theory for the current enshitification we see. When OS updates became free Apple and Microsoft stopped caring about what customers want and what will sell. This allowed them to do whatever they wanted without repercussions. OS updates automatically and the new UI is forced on you along with the terrible UX taped on top. Every app and API was geared to the latest OS version alone for developer simplicity and this added to the pressure on the end customer. I don't know how this loop ends, but this sucks.
I love this post. Had me laughing quite a bit.
All the icons look easily center-justified to me!
Sorry, even though I agree with your piece, the incredible irony of writing about bad design decisions while having fucking snow flying past the text I'm trying to read is just too much...
[edit] I just discovered the snow icon, which does turn off the snow but turns the background into bright yellow. Oh and the other icon which turns your cursor into a ...spotlight? On an otherwise black page? Do I have that right? Which one of those things was a design decision that enhanced usability, or readability, or... anything at all? These choices can best be described as sophomoric. You can disagree with menu icons, but they at least in theory serve a purpose. What purpose is served by any of the gizmos on this site?
> What purpose is served by any of the gizmos on this site?
It's a personal website, it's fun. Comparing someones personal website - where the 'fun' things can be turned off - to a $tn company with hundreds of millions of users who rely on the usability their products is not a great basis for disagreeing with a pretty great write-up with many salient points.
I find the snowflakes equally irritating, but believe there is a huge distinction. This is an individual's blog page, their own corner of the internet, where they can share their opinion and present them in any way they'd like, whereas Apple is designing an Operating System for premium devices used by millions of people that depend on its usability.
They can do whatever they like with their blog, and that's great! But why would I give any weight to the design arguments of someone who designed that thing? It's like if someone comes up to you in a clown costume and starts giving you fashion advice.
Making HN readers angry is its own reward.
I wonder if JWZ still has the red carpet for HN users. Let’s test: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2026/01/dali-clock-in-the-wild/
EDIT: Yep, still works!
It is called "making fun of" not "irony".
It's ironic if it's unintentional. If the grotesque design was intended as sarcasm, I guess it went over my head.
Am I the only one confused why an opinion piece criticizing the superfluous and distracting design choices of Tahoe has a continuous and uninterruptable snow animation that makes the entire thing harder to read?
There's a button at the top of the page to disable it.
Reminder, you can turn off the animated snow effect with the snowflake icon at the top
Sure, if you don't mind having your eyeballs seared by the brightest orange on record.
At least he didn’t use the trick to make the background HDR bright.
It's not a "reminder" for people who've never been to the site before. Especially not when the icon isn't even visible on some devices, like my phone in portrait.
No you can't, it just turns the background yellow.
EDIT: the snow stops _but after a few seconds_. I toggled it to find out if it would turn off the snow, and the immediate feedback was that it doesn't. That's really _really_ bad UX.
It's a fun little winter feature. People need to give it a break.
fwiw I went through the whole article with the snow effect on and found it just fine too.
I get the site has a frivolous feel, which I do like. And there's no problem with snow if you can turn it off. But it _seems_ like you can't turn the snow off, at which point it does become annoying.
And it's actually making a serious point about something I care about, so I actually wanted to read the article (which I did through the snow).
It's been a few years since I last used a Mac and the careful design I had known no longer exists. This made me realize the situation even worse than I imagined it to be based on Tahoe's reviews.
Even without a designer's detail-aware eyes, I couldn't stop facepalming with what I saw. I'd be embarrassed to ship that and call it an improvement! Apple icons may look cool and consistent when browsing them all together as part of SF Symbols, but all that disappears when used incorrectly.
I just think it's funny he has an obnoxious snow animation all over his screed against arbitrary graphic elements.
This is so well written
Big words coming from the guy rendering dense falling snow over the entire article content.
If there is ever a leaked insider story of how whatever Tahoe is supposed to be got cooked up and released that would be my read of the year.
I don't work or have ever worked at Apple, so I don't know the full details, but I heard the new design wasn't introduced until very late in the development process, and at a point in time where teams are supposed to focus on polish, not redesigns or introducing new features.
So not only did teams have to rush incroporating this new design, they also didn't get time to think things through and polish. It sounds like they didn't have time to push-back either, and so there was no feedback/iteration loop where they could work out with whomever is in charge of wider system design what works and what doesn't on what apps.
I'm not even going to finish the article. I never want to see these kinds of icons again. You win. Good news is, I'm not seeing a lot of these in GNOME and Gtk+ apps, so I'm already okay. There's only a couple in Firefox. Actually, good luck even locating the menus in GNOME. They keep moving and becoming fewer and fewer with every generation.
no cuz its easier to read that context menu with icons
> I’m not saying there’s an obvious metaphor for “Open” Apple missed. There isn’t.
Citation needed. The open icon is general a file containing an arrow or a file as a metaphor of taking a file out of a folder. I just tested with MS Windows XP, MS Windows 7, MS Windows 10 and Mate/Gnome 2.
It's hard to justify caring about one company's cosmetic design decisions.
At this point I'm just hoping Cook (who bears ultimate responsibility) or Ternus will see the error of his ways, but I'm not holding my breath. I doubt they understand what's wrong with this or that they even know about the HIG.
The 90s marketplace was very different. Most of Apple’s customers were English speaking with a high reading level. Even in the US market, that is no longer the case.
I agree the icons look cluttered, but they are likely addressing the fact that most users may not comprehend the meaning of those actions.
The irony is that Tahoe ships with a new screen saver that celebrates the simplicity and elegance of the original Mac's user interface design.
You know what's the other thing that's hard to justify - the incredibly distracting falling snow background.
The snow flakes of the website are really bad for UX, just saying.
I just got old iPhone 4s with iOS 9 from drawer, and hour later managed to downgrade to iOS 6, uhh, shapes and colors on these icons is something and it's got 3d dock at the bottom that looks just like dock from OSX 10.7, what a blast from the past.
links for those interested in downgrading:
https://github.com/LukeZGD/Legacy-iOS-Kit/wiki/How-to-Use
https://github.com/LukeZGD/Legacy-iOS-Kit/wiki/Restore-32-bi...
https://github.com/LukeZGD/EverPwnage
https://sideloadly.io
Disgusting. I couldn't even read through to the end.
Are there some perverse incentives to having the OS upgrades be free? Is that what is causing this? Do they simply have no taste?
This article reads like opinions and vibes without a solid grounding in data.
For example: "Look how much faster you can find Save or Share in the right variant..."
But each variant took me the same amount of time. Or so I think. But that demonstrates the issue: is any of this being measured and analyzed?
My opinion is that much of design is just "convincing opinion wins" (where convincing-ness is often not at all based on measurement of some kind), leading to crappy stuff like ultra flat design and Corporate Memphis.
I see a lot of people talking about the past, but I think this is just a reminder that no matter how successful they become, there will always be these periods where companies and people lose focus.
The exact reason/s for this to happen is hard to figure out. Leadership changes, trends, getting too comfortable, lack of competition, the list goes on...
There's always bad reactions to change, but eventually they fade away because the product turns out to be good and just needs some time to get used to it. But this time, this is not the case. Liquid glass sucks and so does the UX that came with it.
Apple will eventually fix this mess, they have all the resources in the world to do so.
I agree with the piece but i have a hard time admitting that a site with fake snow falling in front of the screenshots is dispensing sound design advice
Posting about the finer points of UX while your whole page has a geocities snow animation.
The inconsistency and monochrome nature is problematic but imho including your icons alongside the text representation wherever practical is good because it educates the user what those icons mean so that when they see the icon without the context of the text representation they will know.
Including the hotkeys in the menu is good for similar reasons. Does it help me find and click the menu item? No. But does it help me use that action next time without going through the menu? Yes. Icons are same.
Imho the best layout for menu-bars was Windows Phone 7. In WP7, a toolbar of action button icons were shown along the bottom of the screen along with a kebab-button. Clicking the kebab-button would just expand out the bottom-bar into a menu showing the icons in the same order as they were in the toolbar along with a text description. Below the toolbar icons would be all other non-toolbar commands.
It made it clear that the toolbar and the menu were the same thing, just the toolbar is an abbreviated form of the menu for the sake of economy of screen real-estate.
Putting icons throughout menus is kind of a cruder version of same. I like that.
I love the snow on the web page, it highlights the message really well!
yes
This is brutal. The examples just kept on coming. Halfway through the article I assumed it must have a bunch of comments under it, but nope. More brutal examples
I've found the 'same' (abstract) gripe in related fields: for example, PostgreSQL allows users to extend the language with custom operators that must be composed from multiple punctuation marks; the intended use is so you can write succinct formula-like operations like `case when my_container <@ my_elements then ...` or `set participants = applicants <&&> employees` and so on. The problem with these of course is that it's often very hard to guess what some kind of !!`#+*@ semantics a given grawlix is intended to have; both `case when is_subset_of( my_elements, my_container ) then ...` and `set participants = union_of( applicants, employees )` are much clearer.
Another example are customized extensions of MarkDown syntax. To my mind constructs like `[link title](like_address)` already stretch things and the only justification for having brackets plus parentheses to stand in for link syntax is their ubiquity. One of the downsides of this terse syntax is its resilience to extensibility. For example, when you start with an exclamation mark as in `` now all of a sudden your code is understood as an `<img>` tag, not an `<a>` tag. What if you need extra attributes? There have been multiple suggestions how to extend `` to include desired image dimensions, none have become standard. You probably should fall back to inserting HTML, which I am fine with.
Lastly, when designing a user interface, I have found that having to choose icons is a significant burden, and often one without satisfactory solution. One of my solutions in the past was to fall back to Apollo-era text-only buttons; sure, the texts would have to be localized, but then the entire application is subject to localization anyway. A plus is that each button with a short text instead of a picture already provided the mnemonic, the identifier for that action, something an icon does not do for you.
Great points and my favourite: The menu now draws a blank frame first, then populates it with items. Sometimes taking up to half a second. Nobody noticed this?
Most of the people I work with use Macs and never talk about the UI being good or bad. And boy, do we talk about insignificant crap that pisses us off. They just don’t care about menu icon alignment or whether the design follows 1992 guidelines.
This thread feels like classic HN bikeshedding. The article itself is nearly 5,000 words about menu icons. Menu icons! Yes, the inconsistencies exist. Yes, they could be better. But the level of outrage here doesn’t match reality. People are acting like Apple has completely lost their way over… inconsistent icon styling in dropdown menus that most users don’t even notice.
One of the core values distilled by Steve Jobs for all Apple employees is “Obsess over the user experience.” (2011)
It’s been inherent in The Macintosh Way from the beginning.
Apple’s “way” for many years included a maniacal focus on nailing the details.
I like seeing the icons. It helps me pick the right thing without reading. Seems easier for me.
The irony is that the examples with 'all the icons' require more reading, since it's now impossible to distinguish the 'important' items, and in a lot of cases the icons are the same or wrong, requiring reading to determine what the icon means.
You can’t read?
This violates Hacker News guidelines. HN explicitly asks users to be respectful and avoid personal attacks or insults. Responding with “You can’t read?” is a direct insult, adds no substantive discussion, and detracts from the conversation.
Try harder.
Tahoe needs a serious rethink and fixing the problems it created.
Apple (software) has lost its way and needs to return to whatever made them great and different.
Isn’t this post a bit ironic given all the random snow on the page?!
This times 100000. I've been using Mac OS since 1992 and this version (both IOS and MacOS) has had me pulling my hair out more than every other version, and note, I did use OSX 10.0!
The first thing I did with Tahoe was go into the System Preferences to try and turn off as much as possible of the new UI because it's the biggest regression in Mac OS history (at least since I've been using Macs).
I used to mock Windows for the Explorer UI and general GUI experience, now I think I prefer using my Windows 10 PC over my Mac. It's just such a fucking mess, so inconsistent, shitty performance (even on brand new macs and phones), is actively harder to grok, much harder to use for my elderly parents, and doesn't even look "cooler" or "better" in any way. It's just worse on every possible metric, and made me start wondering about an Android phone, which has never happened since I bought an original iPhone.
I am and have been the ultimate Apple fanboy since 1992, but this release fucking sucks balls. I hope you're listening Apple.
I hate to be that guy, but there's some irony in putting a full screen animated snow effect over an article about unnecessary, distracting clutter.
True, but you can turn it off with the snowflake icon at the top.
Ah, so you can. I tried that but the particles don't disappear immediately so I thought it was just toggling the colour scheme.
Yeah I thought the same thing too. Takes a few moments. A UX suggestion for the author. If a user wants it off, it doesn’t need to be graceful, just quick.
Yeah, I wasted 60 seconds of my life on that stupidity. Makes me much less inclined to read another article by the same author.
Wow, it turns off the snowflakes, but the ones already falling will stay there and keep falling. I thought it only changed the background color to yellow, so assumed it doesn't actually turn off the snowflakes, wanted to come here and comment how ridiculous that is on an article talking about bad icons, then I saw in the comments that it turns off the snow effect... eventually (like a 10s delay).
It's hilarious that it's a great article about clutter, and yet, the post is on a theme that is so badly cluttered it would have been funny... if I could have read the article...
Which also changes the background color to yellow for some reason. And then the "night mode" is.. what is that, a lantern? Jeez.
True, but the site owner clearly despises their prospective readers. I found it more prudent to close the tab and flag the submission.
Flagging a submission just because they added a little whimsy for the holidays to their personal website which you dont like? What a sad, sorry, hate-filled way to go through life.
"Hate"? For flagging a UX-hostile submission. Who is overreacting here?
Nah, the irony is that you think that this was not done on purpose. E.g. look at the hamburger menu on the top right.
lol, I really liked this article.
But yeah, maybe it helps that I have the scripting turned off.
I thought the article was great, but nearing the end I noticed my phone was incredibly hot and realized it must be the snow effect.
If you hate to be that guy, why did you decide to be that guy?
So that the role is occupied already
Nobody loves to be that guy more than the guy that hates to be that guy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wfg1c8dyZYM
It's also `position: fixed` which breaks all scroll optimizations and makes scrolling feel terrible.
Now I am more afraid than ever to upgrade to Tahoe.
very nice article of how apple get confuse of a good ui. is it part of global Enshittification or did big tech forgot all past good rules ? i guess , steve jobs would have made an heart attack reading your article :)
Are the annoying little white circles falling part of the critique?
For someone critical of UI, he has an awful lot of animated bullshit on that site.
Which is very much on purpose to make fun of exactly that. Try some of the other settings in the top right, e.g. the literal hamburger menu.
In what way does it make fun of it? It's simply an example of it. And with no apparent way to turn it off. (Edit: There is a non-apparent way to turn it off. I still think having irritating visual effects doesn't constitute making fun of irritating visual effects.)
Tried that. Does nothing regarding snowflakes that make article next to unreadable.
Typical growing pains for a 4 trillion dollar company.
I hate liquid glass a lot but it's hard to take seriously this when there are snowflakes falling in front of the text.
It's hard to take anything this author says seriously when it's snowing all over their text.
Another great one from Tonsky:
https://tonsky.me/blog/disenchantment/
The irony here isn't so much that it's the minutiae of the menu design that's wrong, it's the top-bar menus as a whole are a dead paradigm. Nothing uses them anymore. Leave the mac for a moment and go to your windows device. Pull up Chrome. No menu. The file browser, nope. Not in the terminal either. VSCode still has one![1] But the office suite doesn't anymore[2]. And obviously, the proximate cause of that is that most interaction these days is with phones where horizontal text menus are a non-starter.
No one uses menus. So why so get so upset over the mac implementation of a dead paradigm? Because ironically the Macintosh bakes a "menu" into the screen space for you, and has since 1984. Giving up menus on a mac requires that you give up one of the things that make a mac a mac. And that's hard, for marketers even more so than designers. So it persists and festers.
But in the rest of the world, we walked away and never looked back. The icons aren't the problem here.
[1] "Big" apps for experts still get value out of putting their actions into tightly packed text. Photoshop too, etc... But these are increasingly the exception and not the rule, and even there the next generation of big tools (c.f. Cursor) don't have them.
[2] Even worse there, because the tab bar it does have actually looks like a menu but isn't.
> ", it's the top-bar menus as a whole are a dead paradigm."
clearly apple are doing their best to destroy them.
Top menus are good because of infinite size (fitts law) Discoverability - i can look in a menu add see what options are available to me. You can tell people either verbally or textually what to do e.g. Choose File Export as PDF instead of something like 'See the small icon that looks like a document with a folded corner, no not that one' yadda Menu are direct I don't need to open another menu to get to my menus (hamburger menu)
I use menus all the time. I totally agree with the article. You say 'no one uses menus' Not true.
> fitts law
Applies only to an increasingly obscure input device. No one talks about Fitts's Law on phones, because it's fundamentally wrong. The "size" of a control assumes you have a mouse or joystick or something trying to find it. Fingers don't do that, no one worries about moving to a control.
> Discoverability
Equally true of a hamburger menu.
> I use menus all the time
I do too! Because we're dinosaurs.
> You say 'no one uses menus' Not true.
It was hyperbole that I genuinely thought was clear from the text. You know exactly what I meant. Menus are secondary devices at this point only seriously used on one platform, so it's 100% unsurprising that design paradigms for using them are changing ("decaying", I suspect you and the other dinosaurs would say) to reflect patterns used elsewhere in the industry.
> Applies only to an increasingly obscure input device. No one talks about Fitts's Law on phones
I'm not talking about fitts law on phones though, I don't think anyone is. This is about Tahoe/mac OS on Macs.
But I'd hardly call a mouse, or a trackpad 'increasingly obscure' I use the fact that I have an infinite target area with my trackpad everyday. It's one of those things that a user might not consciously notice until it's no longer there. Much like a lot of what we are seeing with Tahoe in general that people like me, you, the author of this article. We are pointing out the UI issues that are suddenly immediately apparent, and the bit that is really astounding us all is --- how on earth are Apple, supposed bastions of UI interface detail, and polish , are making such an almighty meal of all of these things that used to work but now just don't, and not even don't work -- the 'new ways' are objectively worse.
The only criticism of the top menu bar interface is that on big hi res monitors (which are relatively recent in terms of the Mac OS desktop) sometimes have the menu bar 'miles away' from the actual app that may be in a smaller window. But this is where fitts law comes in -- so the choice is shorter distance but you need to be more precise smaller target (windows) or large distance but infinite target. I prefer the latter.
It's probably in some ways almost a direct holdover from the time of 9" screens and single tasking -- apps were usually taking up most of the screen so having a menu bar at the 'top' wasn't that weird. Having multiple menus bars would have been really weird and taken a lot of space.
I mean Apple could offer an option like I used to see on gnome where you could have a global menu bar or a per app menu bar. That would be more useful than stage manager ever has been I'd bet.
> I'm not talking about fitts law on phones though, I don't think anyone is.
I was, in the comment you responded to!
I'm saying that phone-centric UI paradigms completely dominate in the modern world. And by extension, arguments like the linked article dancing on pins over minutiae of the menu bar, are missing the point. Good User Interface design in the coming decades simply is not going to use menu bars, it's not. It exists for dinosaurs like us, not the coming generation of tool users who will be directing AI or whatever and not digging through text.
interesting take. I don't buy it though. But I guess we need to wait and see.
Apple has long been rumoured to be on the path to merging IOS and mac OS (whatever that means) . MS already tried it and failed.
The most obvious and egregious example is the number of apps that don't let you open more than one view - e.g. Amazon. I can't look at 2 products in amazon app at the same time. It's just horrendous.The next obvious one is Youtube -- The app is just terrible. Using a browser is a better experience in every way.
The top menu is not necessarily for common functions. Nor is it true that no one uses it.
Chrome’s unique buried menu breaks user expectations. Casual users have trouble finding it.
Do you have a cite for that? It's a hamburger menu, which is by far a more common menu paradigm in the modern world. Do you imagine some kind of "casual user" who... doesn't have a phone?
I repeat: the menu bar is a dying abstraction, preserved in a consistent form only on the Macintosh (even iOS has no equivalent), because it's presence is unavoidable. Users of modern apps don't see it used consistently, so it's absolutely not surprising that Apple's designers aren't doing it either.
I use menus all the time...
I much prefer text to inscrutable icons.
Firefox has the option to display the menu bar. I like it.
am i the only one who likes liquid glass
I think that these icons are a great idea. With the rise of illiteracy, you can no longer count on people being able to read the labels in menus. What better way to ensure that Apple comes out on top in the post-apocalyptic wasteland than the genesis of a new primitive ideographic writing system? 10,000 years from now, when Apple users are grunting and hooting to argue about which icon means "make computer magic remember!", you'll all have been proven wrong.
This article provided a good counterpoint; there is a picture where all text labels in menus have been removed and just the icons are left. It’s worse than having only text labels.
The end of the world would not be complete without the death of humor.
It's hard to take complaints about UI consistency seriously when the cursor is changed for no reason at all (with a barely-different hover state, too).