Tahoe is a macOS mis-step on par with Windows 8 or Windows Vista. If you’re from Apple and reading this, my feedback is pretty succinct: “I don’t recommend others upgrade. I wish I didn’t.”
Luckily for Apple, Windows 11 is not exactly in a position to attract switchers.
Let’s see if Apple can turn things around. iOS 8+ did improve on iOS 7’s worst bits.
One of the most annoying things after installing Tahoe for me, that for no good reason an ordinary app would randomly lose its focus. In the midst of my typing. This is unbelievably preposterous and I just can't stop hating Apple for this crap. How the fuck this is acceptable? I just have no words. What makes it even worse that I couldn't even complain about it on their support pages - they just keep removing my comments for being "non-constructive". This is some random bug, and many people have complained about it, how am I suppose to make it "more constructive"? Send them the exact configuration of constellations, the number of monitors I use and their positioning angles, log the keyboard rate and delay, the latency, the level of magnetic interference caused by my Bluetooth devices, etc.?
I appreciate your frustration, but at the same time what is Apple supposed to do? If it's affecting only a tiny number of users, and you just happen to be an unlucky one, and they don't know how to reproduce it, and you can't help them reproduce it, then what? I think they just have to wait until somebody (such as yourself) is able to figure out with some kind of logging what is happening. E.g. the first question to answer is probably what actually gets the focus, if anything? To produce a bug report that at least suggests which area of code might be responsible.
I had a similar problem at one point, then finally figured out it was when I accidentally hit the fn button which triggered the emoji picker window and moved focus to it (IIRC), but it was off-screen because I'd previously used it on a secondary monitor. Reconnecting the monitor and moving the window back to my primary display fixed it. (Obviously, it's a bug to show a picker window outside of visible coordinates, and I think it got fixed eventually.)
But it also might not be Apple at all, if it's some third-party background utility with a bug. E.g. if that were happening to me, my first thought would be that it might be a Logitech bug or a Karabiner-Elements bug. Uninstalling any non-Apple background processes or utilities seems like a necessary first step.
I wonder whether this could be a touchpad malfunction, causing phantom clicks that move focus. To diagnose, you could temporarily disable it and use an external mouse.
Focus stealing has been an issue in windowed multi-tasking environments from the beginning. It's certainly been an issue in all macOS/OS X versions I've used since I started in 2011.
> how am I suppose to make it "more constructive"?
Obviously by shutting the hell up, you ungrateful serf. The beatings will continue until morale improves.
Seriously, though, if you want this to stop, people like you are going to have to start voting with their wallets.
I finally pulled the plug on macOS a couple years ago for Linux, and I haven't been unhappy about it. However, I did make a point of buying a laptop that was well supported on Linux (a Lenovo X1 Carbon that was in the same price class as an equivalent Mac).
> Luckily for Apple, Windows 11 is not exactly in a position to attract switchers.
Yes, but Linux is finally in that position, not to mention we're seeing silicon from intel and amd that can compete with the M series on mobile devices.
Linux isn't in position regarding display/UI. It doesn't handles HiDPI (e.g 4K) screen uniformly, leading to a lot of blurry apps depending on the display abstraction used (Wayland/X11) and compositor (GNOME, KDE, etc, all behave differently).
Let's not even talk about the case when you have monitors that have different DPI, something that is handled seamlessly by MacOS, unlike Linux where it feels like a d20 roll depending on your distro.
I expect most desktop MacOS users to have a HiDPI screen in 2026 (it's just...better), so going to Linux may feel like a serious downgrade, or at least a waste of time if you want to get every config "right". I wish it was differently, honestly - the rest of the OS is great, and the diversity between distros is refreshing.
> Linux isn't in position regarding display/UI. It doesn't handles HiDPI (e.g 4K) screen uniformly, leading to a lot of blurry apps depending on the display abstraction used (Wayland/X11) and compositor (GNOME, KDE, etc, all behave differently).
I have been using a 4K display for years on Linux without issues. The scaling issue with non-native apps is a problem that Windows also struggles with btw.
I recently bought a MacStudio with 512GB of RAM and connected it to a LG 5k2k monitor. For some reason there was no way to change the font size (they removed the text size "Larger Text ... More Space" continuum from the Display section of settings) so I ended up with either super small or super large fonts without anything in-between. In the end I had to install some 3rd party software and mix my own scaled resolution with acceptable font size. This has never been a problem on Linux in the past 10 years, all I needed to do at worst when it wasn't done out of the box was to set scale somewhere and that was it.
> Linux isn't in position regarding display/UI. It doesn't handles HiDPI (e.g 4K) screen uniformly, leading to a lot of blurry apps depending on the display abstraction used (Wayland/X11) and compositor (GNOME, KDE, etc, all behave differently).
Meanwhile on MacOS my displays may work. Or they might not work. Or they might work but randomly locked to 30hz. It depends on what order they wake up in or get plugged in.
I suspect the root of the problem is one of them is a very high refresh rate monitor (1440p360hz) and probably related to the display bandwidth limitations that provide a relatively low monitor limit for such a high cost machine.
I am a full time KDE/Arch user and since Plasma 6 haven't had any HiDPI issues including monitors with different DPI or X11 apps - of which there are very few nowadays.
I use linux at home (with a HiDPI screen) and MacOS for work. The screen works well with both computers. I mostly just use a text editor, a browser, and a terminal though.
Linux has bugs, bug MacOS does too. I feel like for a dev like me, the linux setup is more comfortable.
Same here. I stick to 100% scaling and side step the whole hi dpi issue. I even have a single USB type c cable that connects my laptop to the laptop stand and that laptop stand is what connects to the monitor, keyboard, and mouse.
I know people will say meh but coming from the world of hurt with drivers and windows based soft modems — I was on dial up even as late as 2005! — I think the idea that everything works plug and play is amazing.
Compare with my experience on Windows — maybe I did something wrong, I don't know but the external monitor didn't work over HDMI when I installed windows without s network connection and maybe it was a coincidence but it didn't work until I connected to the Internet.
My dude, It's been more than capable for years. I have an ultrawide OLED monitor (3440x1440@165hz) paired with a 4K@144hz monitor. Both HDR, different capabilities. Both have different DPIs set, 125% for one, 200% for the other. My setup required less configuration than Windows does. Right click -> Display Configuration -> Set Alignment (monitor position) -> Set refresh rate -> Set HDR -> Set DPI -> Apply. Done.
Don't knock it unless you've tried it.
This was CachyOS btw. Windows actually required MORE work because I had to install drivers, connect to the internet during setup, get nagged about using a Microsoft account, etc.
CachyOS was basically boot -> verify partitions are correct -> decide on defaults -> create account/password -> wait for files to copy -> done. Drivers, including the latest NVIDIA drivers, auto installed/working.
Sure, you can find some obscure DEs that don't handle that well yet. Or you could just use Plasma and have it all work just fine, like it did for many years now.
It also doesn't offer a Mac-style desktop environment, which is one of the things keeping me away. KDE/Cinnamon/XFCE lean more Windows-style, GNOME/Pantheon (Elementary) is more like iPadOS/Android in desktop mode. My productivity takes a big hit in Windows-style environments and I just don't enjoy using them.
I hope to put my money where my mouth is and contribute to one of the tiny handful of nascent Mac-like environment projects out there once some spare time opens up, but until then…
So apparently when Canonical was the gorilla in desktop Linux, they had a push to have apps make their menus accessible via API. KDE supports that protocol. There are KDE widgets that will draw a Mac-style menu bar from it.
That means you can take the standard KDE "panel" and split it in two halves: a dock for the bottom edge, and a menus/wifi settings/clock bar for the top edge.
There are some things I don't know how to work around - like Chrome defaulting to Windows-style close buttons and keybindings, but if the Start menu copy is the thing keeping you off Linux, you can mod it more than you think you can.
Yep, I've played with it. Things might've changed but I couldn't get KDE's global menubar to work at all under Wayland, and under X11 a lot of apps don't populate it.
GNOME still has some problems with fractional scaling, but KDE works perfectly. I'm using two displays, one with 150% and one with 100%. No blurry apps and absolutely no issues. Have you tried it recently?
Can you independently set desktop wallpapers on the two screens? I know this seems nitpicky but it's literally impossible with Ubuntu/Gnome as far as I know; I have one vertical and one horizontal and have to just go with a solid color background to make that work.
KDE is in better shape than GNOME, but there are still some nits. Nearly all the available third party themes for example are blurry or otherwise render incorrectly with fractional scaling on.
To my understanding, doing that wouldn't be helpful due to hard technical limits that can't be reconciled. Most window chrome themes are Aurora themes, which don't play nice with HiDPI, and to change that they'd need to be rewritten as C++ themes (like the default Breeze theme is), which is beyond the capabilities of most people publishing themes.
MacOS doesn't handle HiDPI screens that well either. The most common and affordable high res monitors are 27" 4K monitors and those don't mesh well with the way macOS does HiDPI. You either have a perfect 2x but giant 1080p like display or a blurryish non-integer scale that's more usable.
And god forbid you still have low DPI monitor still!
KWin/Xorg AFAIK has been on maintanence duty (i.e. fixes mostly come from XWayland) for >5 years now. KDE has expulsed the Xorg codebase of KWin into a seperate repo in preparation of a Wayland only future.
Even if KDE/Xorg is a stable experience is true now, it will not be true in the medium to short term. And a distro like Kubuntu might be 2 years out from merging a "perfect" KDE Plasma experience if it arrived right now.
Tahoe is uniquely bad in so many ways, so I tried the Asahi Fedora Remix with Gnome on my M2 Mac Mini. Aesthetically I was more attracted to Gnome, it feels like what we lost with Tahoe. Tahoe to me feels like a really chopped Android skin or something. I made it a few weeks on the Fedora Remix but ended up having to switch back to Mac over missing webcam drivers and other random hardware issues. Plus there’s little OS things that Mac does that make it really hard to go elsewhere.
>ended up having to switch back to Mac over missing webcam drivers and other random hardware issues
This has been my experience every time I try Linux. If I had to guess, tracing down all these little things is just that last mile that is so hard and isn't the fun stuff to do in making an OS, which is why it is always ignored. If Linux ever did it, it would keep me.
One solution to this problem is to buy from a vendor that installs Linux for you (e.g. System76). Much like with Apple, they can sell you a fully functional computer that way.
My understanding is that the asahi team have been doing incredible work exactly with doing the non-fun bits. They just chose to do it on the hardware of a company that's extremely hostile to this kind of effort.
I have to say that almost everything worked out of the box. The webcam is known to not mesh great with Asahi quite yet. Otherwise:
- Machine failed to wake from suspend almost 50% of the time (with both wired and BT peripherals)
- WiFi speed was SIGNIFICANTLY slower. Easily a fraction of what it was on Mac
- USB C display was no-op
- Magic trackpad velocity is wild across apps
- Window management shortcuts varied across apps (seems Gnome changes a lot, frequently)
- Machine did not feel quicker, in fact generally felt slower than Tahoe but granted I did not benchmark anything
I would happily try it again when the project is further along
I think this is true with an arm mac (and would be tricky to fix that, props to the Asahi folks for doing so much) but for a lot of other hardware (recent dell/asus/lenovo, framework, byo desktops) I find Linux complete. I'm sure there is hardware out there that with struggles but I've not had to deal with any issues for a few years now myself.
Bringing random hardware from vendors who never intended to support an OS is a weird criterion to judge an OS' "readiness" by— and one no one seems to apply to macOS or Windows.
It can be very device specific unfortunately. Thinkpad tend to work quote well. I had a Framework that my wife took from me and it's truly fantastic, works out of the box.
I fell down the Nix hole this weekend, getting my corp Mac and my SteamOS Legion Go sharing a config. My corp device is a 5k iMac Pro that is going to be kicked off of the network when ARM-only Tahoe becomes mandatory later this year.
I work at Google, which issued a Gubuntu workstation by default when I joined. I exchanged it for a Mac, which I've spent a literal lifetime using, because I didn't wanna fall down a Linux tinkering hole trying to make Gubuntu feel like home. Every corp device I've had has been a Mac.
I'm reading this from a coffee shop. On my walk here, I was idly wondering if I should give Glinux (as its now called) a try when I'm forced to replace the iMac. SteamOS is making Linux my default environment in the same way Mac was for decades prior.
As a long-term Linux user, and a regular macOS user, I must say that the motion is mutual. Linux has become way better, and macOS, somehow worse. But resizing and moving windows nearly , and switching between windows (not whole apps) has always been problematic in plain macOS, for reasons mysterious to me.
Apple software has noticeably declined from my experience, both iOS and macOS. I find the lifecycle of Apple products to be offensively short, also.
If I buy a product and the hardware is good for 10 years (because I looked after it), I expect the software to also run just as well as when I purchased it - that is the case with Linux, why isn't it the case with macOS?
Every year the software upgrades invariably degrade system performance. Outrageous.
> I find the lifecycle of Apple products to be offensively short, also.
Apple is miles ahead of Android when it comes to phones and tablets, most in the Android ecosystem is e-waste four or five years in, while Apple stuff can still be re-sold for actual money at that time assuming you didn't bust your screen.
For laptops, Apple is so far ahead it can't even be described. Most Windows laptops physically break apart before macOS ceases to support any Apple laptop.
Only thing we can maybe talk about is desktop PCs ever since the switch to M that basically made meaningful upgrades impossible, but eh, in my attic there's a 2009 Mac Pro still chugging along as my homelab server + gaming rig.
Maybe you didn’t catch this yet, but Apple pulled their latest iOS 18.7.3 update and they seem to only promote iOS 26 now. They really want everyone off iOS 18 :/
> Still on iOS 18 and macOS 15 (Sequoia). I was a day one upgrader up until now, never had any regrets but this time things seemed very different.
I've tried and returned the iPhone 17 Pro. Love the hardware (especially the camera), but iOS 26 is inefficient (for lack of a better term), and the new camera UI hides too many things.
One huge benefit of Tahoe for me is that you can now hide any menubar icon, even if they don't explicitly support hiding. It's a small thing but that alone makes the upgrade worth it for me
I still remember Snow Leopard - I think that's when I started using Mac.
Most of the upgrades since then I have resisted and not enjoyed, though I seem to recall liking Mavericks.
A lot of the big features each time seem to be about tieing further into the Apple ecosystem, which doesn't interest me at all, since I have no other devices and don't use iCloud.
Yeah, OS X was definitely the nicest native development experience at the time. Apple's documentation was considerably better and more searchable back then than it is now (especially as it is now for desktop). And even though they've introduced lots of niceties (including Swift), as Apple's piled additional features and APIs into Cocoa/Xcode I find the overall experience quite a bit less coherent or intuitive or ergonomic than it used to be.
I'm not mac dev but wasn't apple all in on objc back then and these days it's more swift? that is pretty big shift, I'd assume for the better for most parts.
I prefer Swift as a language, but Apple's developer documentation back then was clear, detailed, and overall excellent. Occasionally I felt like I was reading a classic CS text rather than a manual. I could always find the guide on the particular facet I was looking for within a few clicks.
I switched from Windows 11 to macOS after a disastrous upgrade experience and drastic downgrade in performance on my Windows laptop.
I mean Windows 10 wasn't great but I got used to the taskbar searching the web somehow and the dual config menus everywhere and so on. But 11 was just terrible.
macOS has its pain points but man oh man what a disaster Windows is.
I have had Linux on my personal desktop and laptop forever so that hasn't been an issue, only used Windows for work.
first time i used tahoe to help a friend w/ their laptop i legit thought it was like a knockoff macos or something, genuinely the ugliest macos version and even in the brief time that i've used it, i've encountered annoying bugs, QC at apple is dead lowkey
I had to upgrade my iPhone to iOS 26 to setup my watch. I wish I had never done it. Nothing is where it's supposed to be from a UI perspective. Stuff breaks often. I can't use my contact search bar to search contacts. It only searches past calls. What the hell.
> Tahoe is a macOS mis-step on par with Windows 8 or Windows Vista.
Other than that weird resize thing written about here (which I didn't notice, thanks SizeUp for providing me with hotkeys remarkably similar to Windows) - why? Vista and 8 were immediately obvious changes in the UI, but in general it still looks and feels just like macOS has for well over a decade now.
New icons, new fonts, but... that's it?
Oh and HyperSwitch for some reason can't switch to Finder windows any more, but that's probably because HyperSwitch hasn't seen an upgrade in years...
Can't you do a factory reset/recovery on Mac that lands on the version of macos shipped with the device? Then you could re-upgrade to the os you wanted, without trying it it seems Sequoia is still available in the app store
Yes, you can install any version of macOS that was ever supported for your Mac. (It’s been a long time since they used System Enablers.) I’m so frustrated with Tahoe that I’m about to do this.
But you cannot, in general, migrate your data backwards. Apple's system apps will upgrade their data stores forward only. This isn't a problem if you are willing to e.g. re-download all of your (Mail.app) mail.
Yep, though you can mitigate it a little bit in various ways. For one weird example, I keep my main user Home folder on my NAS and mount it via iSCSI. Mostly that's for data integrity/size/backup purposes, but it does also make it free to snapshot before trying out a system upgrade. If I hate it I can rollback my entire set of user data along with the OS.
Though amongst many other wonderful things lost in the mysts of Mac history I still desperately miss NetBoot/NetInstall and ultra easy clone/boot with something like CCC and TDM. It's so fucking miserable now in comparison to do reinstalls/testing/restores.
Microsoft's Copilot AI software has been integrated in every corner of the operating system, from the start menu to the notepad to settings. Beyond the intrusiveness of it, it also does not work very well. Other AI mishaps include Recall, which takes screenshots of your desktop every so often, and the original version of Recall stored these in an unencrypted, insecure database.
On top of that, the OS feels more bloated and disorganized than ever, with something like six different UI frameworks all present in various spots on the OS; system settings are scattered across the Settings app (new) and various legacy panels like Control Panel and Network Connections.
What else... Microsoft now requires an online connection and Microsoft account to sign in to your PC; no more local-only accounts allowed.
I'm sure there's more I'm missing. It's not a pleasant operating system.
I added a local-only account to a Win 11 Pro box just two days ago. Nothing seems different to me—the usual horsing around with the no online account stuff but it let me create the account.
Off the top of my head: Windows Vista was slow and unstable on a lot of hardware of the time due to significantly higher system requirements than XP and a new display driver model that worked poorly at first, had a very polarizing look, and had quite overbearing UAC -- where XP would just let you do the thing, Vista would ask you three times if you're really really sure you wanted to authorize it.
It had decent bones though -- arguably a lot of its bad reputation was due to hardware/third party driver issues and people trying to run it on old hardware that just couldn't hack it. Windows 7 was well received and is basically the same thing with small improvements and some of the UX issues smoothed over (i.e. less annoying UAC)
The Vista comparison is unfair. I think a lot of the bad rap Vista got was from trying to run it on underpowered hardware thanks to marketing XP-era machines as "Windows Vista Capable". I actually ran it on good HW (the kind that could run Crysis) and I didn't have anything bad to say.
Yes, UAC could be considered as annoyance by some but it's no different than "sudo" on single-user Linux machines and we seemingly have no problems with that (I wish we'd move on past that because it is damn annoying and offers no security benefit).
Comparing Vista to modern macOS is insulting. Vista didn't have that level of jank and the UIs were actually quite good, consistent and with reasonable information density, unlike "System Settings" or shitty Catalyst apps.
> Yes, UAC could be considered as annoyance by some but it's no different than "sudo" on single-user Linux machines and we seemingly have no problems with that (I wish we'd move on past that because it is damn annoying and offers no security benefit).
It was wild to me when I was testing out if I wanted to move over to Linux as my full-time desktop OS how much it was asking for my password. And it didn't even have a mechanism to make it a little less painful such as requesting a short PIN (which I think is a fine option as long as a few incorrect PIN entries forces full password input).
You had way more issues than that on launch, performance of 3d games sucked compared to XP with the same hardware (I remember at least a 30% decrease of FPS) and usb file transfers were so borked you probably had half of the speed of XP transfering on a usb key (which was the primary method of transfering files at the time).
The UAC wasn't even the main problem, the overall performance of Vista was, everything was so much slower.
yet there is no way to get my iPhone to stop auto-switching bluetooth audio between my devices. Any time I get in my car, my headphones connect to the car and I have to switch it back. So annoying
Windows 8 was when Microsoft tried to cater more towards Windows-on-tablet use cases. Which lead to everyone, including desktop users, having a fullscreen phone-style app menu take the place of the old start menu. This, for desktop use, is obviously quite disruptive and was hated by everyone.
They addressed most issues in the 8.1 update, like a year later I think.
You know what was worse than desktop users? Server users via RDP.
There was no start button. There are no screen edges to swipe in from. Hot corners are really hard to hit. I still can't believe somebody said "yes, good idea" to using that UI for Server 2012.
I RDP'd into a Windows Server VM a year or so ago and got a full-screen popup for Edge or some shit like that.
If that wasn't bad enough, the popup was a web view, meaning none of RDP's acceleration/client-side compositing was in play and I was greeted with a ~1fps slideshow.
MetroUI in Windows 8 was pretty universally panned. I thought it was pretty good on tablets and such, but it left a lot to be desired on desktops and hid a lot of functionality, it went too mobile for a lot of people's tastes.
Disclaimer: I was one of the dozens who used a windows phone. The Nokia Lumia 920 was great, you can fight me.
Wrong. There was full app compat of WP7 apps in WP8 and Win10 Mobile, and for WP8 apps in W10M. The only full backward app compat break was from WM6.5/WP6.5 to WP7.
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're thinking of the lack of device OS upgrades: from WP6.5 to WP7, from WP7 to WP8, and from older WP8 devices to W10M. So no forward compat, but absolutely yes to backward compat.
You joke, but I honestly wonder if this period and projects didn't involve a bunch of Microsoft employees who got a little overexcited when they were told that they didn't need to maintain the insane, sometimes bug-for-bug, compatibility layers with 20-40 year old software that they had had to deal with their entire career there.
Must have felt incredibly liberating, and maybe they got a little too into the whole idea of "fresh start"(s).
Vista had the right direction, Windows 7 merely continued on it and it became one of the best operating systems ever.
Windows 8 design wasn't bad per se, but they shipped the start screen when it lacks even the most basic features, so you'll return to legacy desktop the moment you want to do anything.
Windows 8 featured a notable paradigm shift from a menuing launcher (click start, programs, then the program you want, as an example), to a full screen launcher (Think Android and iOS). And also switched from floating windows (The default for most Linux distros and for Mac AFAIK) to rudimentary tiling windows (Think Android and iOS)
It also - as seen in that screenshot, had large, always visible scrollbars where it was easy to see how far down you were in a folder or document, and could easily click and drag to scroll to where you needed. Now in the service of minimalism we have scrollbars that consist of a thin, semi-transparent line that fades out after half a second and is nearly impossible to click and drag due to how small it is.
> Now in the service of minimalism we have scrollbars that consist of a thin, semi-transparent line that fades out after half a second and is nearly impossible to click and drag due to how small it is.
You can make them always on still. I've done so ever since their disappearing act started. It's not even much hidden, it's in the "Appearance" setting pane.
They're still too small and too light. Some times when a document is big enough I'm actually not able to find the scroll thumb on macOS Sequoia. Some times wiggling the scroll thumb around by scrolling slightly back and forth with my mousewheel/trackpad helps to make it visually appear, but other times I just have to give up.
Classic Macs were designed for the mouse or trackball. Modern Macs are designed for multitouch scrolling. When it's easy to get the scrolling infrastructure on demand, the desktop might not need the same click-first affordances.
Better in that it was clear, but worse that you had to resize from the bottom right. Made expanding to the left, or up, very annoying. I'd take the current situation over this.
True, but not a 1:1 comparison, because Classic Mac OS windows were much better at staying where you put them, even between sessions. John Siracusa wrote a lot about how this was missing from Mac OS X: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/
Yeah that is also true. I have had that experience with certain CD-ROMs (maybe like two or three ever but has happened) on my PowerBook 2400c. If the authoring machine had a higher display resolution than my machine, and the author had the writable source folder's window open to a place outside my screen resolution, and the window positions got saved to the DesktopDB/DesktopDF, and the DesktopDB/DesktopDF got written to the CD-ROM, then it would open in the position outside my screen resolution every time my own DesktopDB/DesktopDF got erased.
I swear, this reign of visual artists as dictators has to stop.
I'm sure people noticed this issue internally and brought it up but some thing by some designer was seen as biblically sacred and overruled all reason.
I've been at companies were you get severely punished... sometimes fired for subordination for fixing an obviously broken spec by a designer emperor.
It's normal to be "I guess 2+2=5 here, whatever" as if the designer went in a tiny room, had a seance with the divine...
Yo, newsflash, everyone makes mistakes. Failure is when you force them to stay uncorrected.
I've met some great designers as well. They usually come from more modest backgrounds.
It's kinda the rule for programmes too.
The ones that went to a small liberal arts school you've never heard of programming as their second career are usually more effective to work with then the Stanford/MIT crowd.
The problems start I think, when you have an expectation that your collaborators are somehow either superhuman or subhuman and not peers.
Yea, the programmers aren’t to blame here. In fact some of the visual effects they have achieved are pretty cool. The designers are at fault because they prioritized visuals over usability. Literally nobody I know thinks “Liquid Glass” has been an improvement. The feedback is universally negative.
>I'm sure people noticed this issue internally and brought it up but some thing by some designer was seen as biblically sacred and overruled all reason.
I disagree. Seems more like the group that implemented border radius at the OS UI implementation level did not work with the group that handles window sizing. Not everything is a conspiracy.
> I swear, this reign of visual artists as dictators has to stop.
> I'm sure people noticed this issue internally and brought it up but some thing by some designer was seen as biblically sacred and overruled all reason.
Funny how Apple went from Jony Ive sacrificing hardware usability for "beauty" (touch bars and butterfly switches) to Alan Dye mucking up macOS and iOS with Liquid glAss.
In my experience,
part of the problem lies in visual artists not wanting to iterate the way software development does.
Sure, they might iterate on the design as they work on it,
but once they've found their final design,
they strongly resist changing it,
even as the actual development and testing of the software to implement it iterates and finds problems.
Wasn’t Jobs the one that set that dynamic up, where Ive was basically the #2 at Apple? It seemed to work as long as Jobs was there are the final quality filter.
Yep, Jobs knew what he wanted and he generally had good taste. He would push everyone until he got what he thought was right and spend extra to get it. Supposedly he sent the original iPod team scrambling to find a new headphone jack just before launch because he didn’t like the mushy tactile feel of the jack they had selected. He wanted a very tactile “click” as the headphones snapped in.
This post is very well presented and it highlights how absolutely bizarre the latest update was. The video demonstration was also very well done.
I remember a few years ago, people complained when Apple merely made the entire operating system uglier. (Something about a gradient on the battery?) A lot of people would talk hyperbolically ("apple KILLED macos!"), and that's indistinguishable to an outsider when an update like this brings other people out of the woodwork to say, "Hey, these changes are genuinely bizarre and absurd, what happened?"
Call me cynical but I think designers need to occasionally break things that were already solved long ago to justify their continued relevance. Explains a lot of redesigns that make things only worse, reshuffling interfaces, hiding things behind menus in form over function redesigns, etc.
Non-tech people tend to think similarly about developers, breaking things that worked fine until yesterday / last week / last month, for no user-visible benefit.
This is probably not a coincidence. I can pretty much guarantee you a developer said something to a designer like "hey, most of this is outside the window, is that fine?" and the designer said back "well, I think so, but let's check what Windows did," and then they okayed the decision at least in part because Windows did it.
Windows Vista may have been plagued by programs assuming administrator access for everything but at least it isolated the security prompt.
You can verify that you're interacting with a real UAC prompt (by pressing ctrl+alt+delete for instance, which can be configured to he required before approving a prompt).
Any program can replicate the macOS security dialogs. You just have to hope that you can safely enter the password to your account into one, or activate TouchID when prompted.
Engineers (hopefully) come to learn the value of Chesterton's Fence young, because engineering failures tend to make themselves known quickly and loudly.
Designers probably have perverse incentives. Showy new designs get promotions. Even when they hurt usability, it's often only in insidious ways.
IIRC, win8 was the last windows to have thick graphical window borders, and that was after they got rid of the texture/aero look from vista/7, so at that point you at least had something graphical to grab onto which (mostly?) matched where the cursor was. Then in win10 onwards they shrunk the border down to one pixel with the zone around it where you can click off the window but still affect it.
On the back of my mind I think part of this was the move to fit scaling to large resolution monitors (i.e. 4k+) work better, as a graphical border of a fixed pixel width will shrink proportionally compared to a border that is as thin as it can be. For a while I've felt that it's a missed opportunity on high res displays to not use more detailed art for window chrome as pixel wide will only get smaller and more difficult to distinguish, such as the minimize/maximize/close icons which remain pixel wide line art even at big scaling.
Fun fact: NEXTSTEP went 10 years without shipping a basic design refresh, except in prereleases (4.0PR1 and traces in 4.0PR2.) This was because it was a good fucking GUI that did its fucking job, and had "usability before aesthetics" as a core design tenet in its developer documentation.
Steve's brain fell out when he got back his throne at Apple. Aqua was a mistake.
History always repeats itself. The young generation always thinks the old generation was rubbish and they have nothing to learn from them and can do better.
> overall, the young copy the elders and contend hotly with them in words and in deeds, while the elders, lowering themselves to the level of the young, sate themselves with pleasantries and wit, mimicking the young in order not to look unpleasant and despotic.
"Socrates", in Plato's Republic
None of us are immune to cycles in fashion, and the need to differentiate ourselves and our work from what came before, even if what came before was pretty much a solved problem.
Maybe it's humanity's way of escaping local minima, or maybe it's an endless curse which every generation must bemoan.
> None of us are immune to cycles in fashion, and the need to differentiate ourselves and our work from what came before, even if what came before was pretty much a solved problem.
I am. If it isn't broke, I don't fix it. And I suspect others are as well. The problem is that too many people are not immune, so it doesn't matter if some are.
I love how this information is produced. Succinct, excellent and simple visuals, clear argument, and a solid amount of sarcasm and cynicism to keep us entertained and to provide an air of senior technical person.
MacOS always had its own quirks, but it had a good intuitive design that was well thought out.
All the Apple engineers and other visual designers get quite defensive really quick when we mention that Tahoe really screwed things up, because it's more than just a transition into glass design, but a complete dismissal of design principles, to the point that the entire system is slowly becoming user hostile.
Every critique of the 26 series can be explained like this article with really in depth design principles, which is already engraved in Apple design guidelines, but Apple itself just dismissed it all. Everything from being able to clearly distinguish UI elements, to general accessibility, to discoverability, everything got worse.
Operating Systems are one of the most complicated systems we created, not because they're a collection of processes and thread, but because everything is built on top of them and creating something that's well thought out and stable, and intuitive is really hard. Designers just randomly creating visual elements just because it looks cool and not paying attention how people are going to use it is simply half assing the whole thing.
That's still one of the reasons I believe Alan Dye was let go, fired in a sense, he had power over the company, but with that power he screwed things so much that we need to rediscover all the things related to usability in very high detail as if we're rediscovering the wheel, just so that we can get back to square one.
Does anyone know if Stephen Lemay replacing Dye will potentially "save" the increasing mess that is OSX, at least UX wise, or is it more of a meaningless figurehead swap in a big org?
Tahoe is tragically bad by almost every UX measure, and following various Apple subreddits i wonder if they just don't care anymore - since the majority of people are shocked by the amateurishness of both bugs and design choices in the latest update - this comes on top of literally every major bug being ignored from the alpha to releasing anyway then continuing to ignore feedback.
He will prevent it from getting much worse than it would have under another decade of Dye, but I don't think he can totally reverse the trend.
I think this is just what happens to companies as they get older. Most of the people who pioneered the Human Interface Guidelines aren't at the company anymore, and management doesn't see much financial growth in Mac sales compared to AI and services.
Lemay's appointment was widely celebrated, but he'd been at apple since 1999 and never got the gig. My guess is that there are valid reasons for that that may not be design-related.
I worked on Finder/TimeMachine/Spotlight/iOS at Apple from 2000-2007. I worked closely with Bas Ording, Stephen Lemay, Marcel van Os, Imran Chaudry, Don Lindsey and Greg Christie. I have no experience with any of the designers who arrived in the post-Steve era. During my time, Jony Ive didn't figure prominently in the UI design, although echoes of his industrial design appeared in various ways in the graphic design of the widgets. Kevin Tiene and Scott Forstall had more influence for better or worse, extreme skeumorphism for example.
The UX group would present work to Steve J. every Thursday and Steve quickly passed judgement often harshly and without a lot of feedback, leading to even longer meetings afterward to try and determine course corrections. Steve J. and Bas were on the same wavelength and a lot of what Bas would show had been worked on directly with Steve before hand. Other things would be presented for the first time, and Steve could be pretty harsh. Don, Greg, Scott, Kevin would push back and get abused, but they took the abuse and could make in-roads.
Here is my snapshot of Stephen from the time. He presented the UI ideas for the intial tabbed window interface in Safari. He had multiple design ideas and Steve dismissed them quickly and harshly. Me recollection was that Steve said something like No, next, worse, next, even worse, next, no. Why don't you come back next week with something better. Stephen didn't push back, say much, just went ok and that was that. I think Greg was the team manager at the time and pushed Steve for more input and maybe got some. This was my general observation of how Stephen was over 20 years ago.
I am skeptical and doubtful about Stephen's ability to make a change unless he is facilitated greatly by someone else or has somehow changed drastically. The fact that he has been on the team while the general opinion of Apple UX quality has degraded to the current point of the Tahoe disaster is telling. Several team members paid dearly in emotional abuse under Steve and decided to leave rather than deal with the environment post Steve's death. Stephen is a SJ-era original and should have been able to push hard against what many of us perceive as very poor decisons. He either agreed with those decisions, or did not, and choose to go with the flow and enjoy the benefits of working at Apple. This is fine I guess. Many people are just fine going with the flow and not rocking the boat. It may be even easier when you have Apple-level comp and benefits.
My opinon; unless Stephen gets a very strong push from other forces, I don't see that he has the will or fortitude to make the changes that he himself has approved in one way or another. Who will push him? Tim Cook, Craig Federighi, Eddy Cue, Phil Schiller? The perceived mess of Tahoe happened on the watch of all of these Apple leaders.
I use easy-move-resize [1] to resize windows from anywhere inside the area of the window, using a modifier key. In my case I like using cmd + middle mouse button + drag.
This is standard in Gnome and a must for me back when I switch to MacOS for work.
I don't really care if it's because of bizarro designer hegemony, device unification, cost cutting, bad developers or something else, but it's astonoshing how far the desktop paradigm has fallen (and not just in MacOS). What baffles me the most about things like this isn't that crap slips through, it's that crap accumulates in an alarming rate and that apparently tech-savvy people aren't just seemingly fine with stuff like this, but will happily step up and defend it.
When resizing, I expect to drag from the edge of a window. This is exactly how it works in macOS Tahoe, with a sufficient drag zone on the both sides. The only "strangeness" is that the drag zone extends further outside the window in the corner zone. IMO this is nice.
All that said, I REALLY would love to have a hotkey combo I can beep pressed down to resize anywhere over the window. Just like in many Unix/Linux window managers.
Yeah, I have to agree. The blog post seems convincing when you look at the images, but now that I've actually been playing with it, I can always drag the corner to resize. In fact, the corner provides much more draggable area than the window edges do. There's no problem.
So I agree it's strange that the drag zone extends so far beyond, but that's not really something to complain about...? Everywhere inside the corner where it feels reasonable to resize, it resizes. The article is expecting an absurd level of a drag zone on the inside.
Again, the large drag zone outside the corner is kinda weird. But honestly that's more just an understandable artifact of the corner drag zone being a square. If it were me, I probably wouldn't bother to round off one corner of the drag zone either.
There's a lot of stuff to criticize about Tahoe, but this would be about last on my list...
My biggest peeve with macOS Tahoe is the App Launcher redesign.
It seems like a clear regression in usability. By moving from a high-density, full-screen experience to a constrained, scrolling window, they’ve increased the interaction cost for launching apps via the mouse. It feels like a 'unification tax. Sacrificing desktop utility to align with non-Desktop modalilties. Does anyone see a functional upside here, or is this purely aesthetic consistency?
I was shocked when I first hit this. I'm also confused as to why the settings app constrains the window size but I think it did that in the previous version too - not a justification!
I complained about it to a team mate and he thought it was fine and I was weird for using the app launcher and not cmd-space. Although on Windows I always use win-r to run stuff.
Tahoe UI changes and LG are such a mistake and Apple being Apple will probably just double down on it.
It’s a great analogy but I wish, in the video, he had been grabbing the plate and it somehow didn’t move. Then, when he grabbed the air outside of the plate it should have magically moved. That would have highlighted how crazy Tahoe is.
I find it very ironic that Apple's Mac hardware is the best it's ever been, and some of the best (if not the best) in the entire industry, yet their software team seems intent on burning down their entire reputation. Maybe they think that's better than getting fired over the laughingstock that is Apple Intelligence
Cars have similar UX issues as well. See the whole touchscreen saga.
It's also an issue on Linux, to an extent. GNOME has a tendency of forcing UIs on users, and Ubuntu with Unity, now GNOME again, etc. Though, thankfully, since the user is free to choose their own desktop environment and window manager, it's not as pressing of an issue.
I realized many years ago that simpler UIs deliver the best UX. This is a large reason why I love the command line so much. Most programs have a fixed and stable interface, and can be composed to do what I want. For graphical programs I prefer using a simple window manager like bspwm on X, and niri on Wayland. These don't draw window decorations, and are primarily keyboard-driven, so I don't need superfluous graphics. I only need a simple status bar that shows my workspaces, active window, and some system information. I recently configured it with Quickshell[1], and couldn't be happier. I plan to use this setup for years to come, and it gives me great peace of mind knowing that no company can take that away from me. I will have to maintain it myself, but there shouldn't be any changes in the programs I use to break this in a major way.
I'd like to see a Super Bowl ad sponsored by one or more of the big Linux players.
"Hi, I'm a Mac."
"And I'm a PC. Wow, you suck, Mac. What the hell happened?"
"Yo momma, PC."
<wild gesticulating and arguing ensues for 20-30 seconds>
"Hi, I'm Linux. Neither of these people care anything about you. You see, you're not their customer anymore. When you're ready to make computing personal again, check us out."
The tl;dw is that copying UX lets others invest energy in identifying the paradigm. Linux, which tends to be starved for resources, has historically been reasonably well served by letting Apple and Microsoft define UX, while Linux focuses on implementing it. However, those headlining companies haven't been investing in desktop UX excellence in recent years. It's time for open source projects to embrace experimentation and take the mantle of cutting edge UX, because Apple et. al. aren't paving the way anymore.
Rounded corners are ironically symbolic of the dumbing-down that's affected the software industry. Instead of the sharp precision of 90-degree corners, we get vague curves that don't make sense anymore as though the corners have been worn away.
Maybe I'm too old and every modern computer is a marvel to me, but as someone switching between win/macos/linux all these complaints amuse me. While in windows I'm using powertoys and I can move/resize windows using any space inside a window. It's the same with linux/gnome - a couple of config settings. Then, when I started using macos I looked for a similar solution - found BetterSnapTool and just started using it.
I get your point and think it is a matter of when things are relatively "perfectly" done as in iOS/MacOS, every little anthill seems like an eruption volcano, but let's also not make excuses for some of the rather disgusting issues in Tahoe that Steve Jobs' would have never allowed to ship.
I can't recall them all right off the top of my head, but I waited til 26.2 to update because of all the comments I saw about glitziness, and this resizing issue is just one of the quirks I have noticed are still not resolved; not to mention that my M4 Mac has not crawled and locked up as often as it has since I updated to 26.2. But again, to put it in perspective, that's only been very little hassle compared to what seems to be nothing but misery, suffering, and existential questions suffered by the wretched souls condemned to Windows.
Edit: another issue I have noticed in iOS is that now things like saving bookmarks in Safari is no longer a two step/tap process using long-press, it's a three step/tap process....WHY?? Same with "add to home screen". Also, the long press horizontal context menu (i.e., copy, paste) now does not slide left to reveal more options, it just changes mode to a vertical list. What is going on??? That's sickening...in my opinion. Horizontal, vertical? Pick one.
Second Edit: I just experienced another Tahoe glitch in at least Safari, where hyperlinks become un-clickable and the only way to resolve that is to seemingly restart safari. I don't find that acceptable in Safari of all places.
Apple is at the point where they need a Jobs-ian correction again.
Steve Jobs would have had a fit over this product line. As '97 era Jobs put it, "The products suck! There's no sex in them anymore!"
My modest proposal for Apple diehards (especially employees) is to feed all the data that exists on Jobs into a multi-modal model so that Apple can hear just how much their shit sucks from Jobs' digital ghost.
>"The products suck! There's no sex in them anymore!"
Enter "Lickable Pixels" -- the phrase that stuck to describe the Aqua era.
Introducing Mac OS X's Aqua interface, Jobs said at Macworld in January 2000: "We made the buttons on the screen look so good you'll want to lick them."
Then there was the red hot irresistibly sexy and well designed IBM Thinkpad TrackPoint -AKA- Keyboard Clitoris -AKA- Joy Button, and IBM's explicitly lascivious "So Hot, We Had To Make It Red" ad.
Ted Selker, the inventor of the TrackPoint, told me the story of how that ad got written and refined by focus groups: He slyly suggested the slogan, and IBM's ad designers begrudgingly put it on the page in small text in the corner, below the photo and ad copy. Then they A/B tested it with the text a little bigger, then a bit bolder, then even higher, and it finally worked its way up to the top of the page in BIG HUGE BOLD TEXT!
Ted Selker fondly reminds me of "Mr. Lossoff" the "Button Man" in "A Nero Wolfe Mystery” episode “The Mother Hunt”, where Archie drops in on "Mister Lossoff’s Distinguished Buttons” in the garment district of New York:
He's totally THAT enthusiastic, a distinguished expert fiendishly obsessed with buttons! He even carries around a big bag of replacement Joy Buttons that he hands out for free like candy to anyone who’s worn theirs out.
I know this from personal experience: Ted and his wife Ellen once ran into me working on my Thinkpad at some coffee shop in Mountain View, and Ted noticed my worn out Joy Button. He excused himself to run out to his car to fetch his Button Bag, while Ellen smiled at me and rolled her eyes up into her head and shrugged, and we hung out and talked until he got back. I really appreciated a nice new crisp one with fresh bumpy texture, because mine was totally worn down, and it made his day to get rid of a few. (I imagine their house has hoards of boxes and piles of bags full of them!)
The common thread: design that makes you come. Back for more, that is. Buttons to lick till they click. Nubs to rub till they're bald. Products you touched obsessively until they're worn smooth. Tahoe gives us clownish corners we can't even grab. Apple dropped the ball -- and frankly, it's a kick in the nuts.
After using Tahoe for a week, I've found I leave it in my bag. Window operations are painful and it feels like a bad try at a tablet os without a stylus or touch screen. Fortunately, my Mac is now the auxiliary laptop and I can do everything I need to do with my linux laptop.
Apple really screwed the pooch on this last set of UI upgrades. They have been known as UI experts for decades and then they produced this unusable mess. I’ve upgraded my iPhone and iPad, but I’ve been delaying upgrading MacOS, hoping that they will fix most of the mess before I switch. If I was Tim Cook, I’d be looking for a scalp. This is as bad as the butterfly keyboard mess in terms of usability, IMO.
I actually wish macOS would clone Alt-dragging from anywhere to drag and Alt-right clicking to resize from anywhere from Linux (at least GNOME and KDE Plasma have this built-in). That would certainly solve most of the complaints in the original post.
Shortly after Windows 10 came out I was joking that Microsoft finally made a Linux distribution (by replicating all the jankiness we usually associate with it).
I believe the parent is referring to how GNOME 3.0 had some really bad resizing grabs. Single-pixel widths at the edges, and almost impossible to hit corners.
Also the resize cursor is completely unreliable, the cursor often doesn't change to the resize one when the mouse is over the correct resize areg. So it's even harder to tell if your cursor is in the right place before clicking. If you click in the wrong place it can have frustrating consequences, like activating another window or even clicking something inside it.
I have had issues with resizing Quick Look windows with their rounded corners on macOS for the last several major versions, well before Tahoe. The resize cursor indicator there also doesn't seem to appear at the correct location for the actual resize handles.
Just this week it also dawned on me the impracticality of the large corners after twice in a row failing to grab the corner of a window. Tahoe is absolute amateur hour.
This controversy could have been avoided if the GUI changes in Tahoe had been opt-in only. In other words, the Sequoia GUI should have remained the default, with the option of choosing to switch to Liquid Glass.
I thought this was going to talk about the struggle of sizing windows to arbitrary widths. I often try to keep slack and my email windows side by side and Mac OS seems to go out of its way these days to frustrate my efforts and maximize the one window or the other.
The resize corners grab area is also very frustrating though.
That's funny. I perceive resizing windows as easier now, because the cursor change is more dramatic when it gets in the resizing area. Pre-Tahoe, the diagonal one in particular looked almost the same, except with an arrow end in the bottom. Now it splits into two triangles.
I still operate off muscle memory, so it's not actually easier or harder, of course.
Yeah the really misleading part of the screenshots in this article is that it doesn't show the "resize cursor", which basically makes this a non issue.
Also, for anyone reading this who hates the general aesthetic, go into Accessibility and hit "reduce transparency". This has been a desirable setting for last few OSX versions.
Seems very clear now that we are going to see touch screen MacBooks. Which is a very silly idea. But explains why the UI "snaps" like an iPad, and everything is designed for touch.
I've only owned macbook laptops but have run Linux at work since 2002. The lack of cohesion and non-stop changes in Linux is just as tiring and this MacOS Tahoe stuff. Gnome 3 cared just as little for users. FreeBSD + KDE Plasma is pretty good now, but lacks feeling and design.
I haven’t had to move the mouse near a window corner to resize it in years — I just hold down the Shift and Fn keys and the window under my mouse resizes as I move it. Strongly recommend getting BetterTouchTool for this - changed my life.
I game on windows because of anti cheat software requirements. Windows is garbage. The windows + tab order is never consistent. Not having a good built in shell and don't get me started if you ever have to edit the registry for anything. Super poor experience.
Unrelated but iOS 26 is so bad and janky that I've finally decided to switch to an android phone. I hate it so much. Thank god I haven't upgraded to Tahoe.
I didn't realize it was moom giving me my "move app to other monitor" hotkey, and moom didn't launch on startup after upgrading to tahoe. I've been using that hotkey for years.
That's when I realized there's no default hotkey for moving an app to an external monitor. That is absolutely wild. (Happy to be wrong)
> Since upgrading to macOS Tahoe, I’ve noticed that quite often my attempts to resize a window are failing.
That should nudge users away from this rather primitive method of window resizing using tiny 19px corners and instead set up a productivity app where your can use the full 33% of the window size (so conveniently huge! and of course customizable) to resize via an extra trigger (for example, using a modifier key)
I disagree. I generally don't get too upset by UI changes - having been programming since before Windows I've seen many of them - but LG is a loser.
I upgraded my mac to Tahoe and I don't like any change to the UI that I have noticed.
I upgraded my phone the other day, thinking it was just an update to whatever it already had, and ended up with LG on there and it is a disaster. I enabled the 'more opaque' feature and it did almost nothing.
LG is an awful experiment IMO. I'd put it at worse than Vista (which I skipped) and Gnome 3 which didn't bother me because I don't expect anything from linux desktops. I also skipped Windows 8 so not sure about the ranking there. But I'd say it's that level of disaster.
I’ve been more and more confused by Apple’s product positioning for MacOS. They still have a sizeable “pro” market that spans across a very aspirational set of careers: Film, YouTubers, developers, photographers, artists, musicians, etc.
Considering how many people only buy a MacBook PRO no matter what they plan on doing with it, they really need to keep the actual salary-earning pros happy with it or else it’ll lose all credibility. A Mac in a recording booth has a look to it that sells well, but that aesthetic won’t last if you stop seeing them. Being an effective tool for the pro minority should honestly be the priority for MacOS, even at the cost of making it incongruous from iPadOS/iOS. *
* disclaimer: what do I know honestly haha, I’m sure they’ll print money anyway.
Question for people who have installed Tahoe. Of the regions in the article, which bring window focus / key window? Is it area clipped to the round rect? Or is it similarly weird?
If there was a background window in that area outside the corner, would it receive the click event?
> Of the regions in the article, which bring window focus
Just did a quick test in a VM, and it seems all of them. I.e. if you could resize the window, clicking that space (even if empty) brings it into focus. But then I also tested on Sequoia and the same happens.
It seems then that basically everything remained the same except for the visual presentation of the corner.
I wish I found out about it earlier. Aerospace is a tiling window manager for MacOS. As someone who prefers keyboard navigation over mouse navigation, I can't recommend it enough.
Apple's window management has always sucked, with the absurdly crippled resizing being a longstanding embarrassment.
Into the 2000s, the only way you could resize a window on the Mac was to drag its lower-right corner. That is it. NO other corner, and no edge. So if the lower-right corner happened to be off-screen because the window was bigger than the screen, you were kind of screwed. You had to fiddle with the maximize & restore gumdrops to trick the OS into resizing the window to make that ONE corner accessible. Then you had to move the corner, then roll all the way up to the title bar and move the window, then roll back down to the corner... until you had the window sized and positioned as you wanted.
When Apple grudgingly added proper window-resizing, it made it as obscure as possible. Since Apple remains ignorant of the value of window FRAMES, there is no obvious zone within which the resizing cursor should take effect. There is no visual target for the user. This has always made an important and fundamental part of a windowed GUI a ridiculous pain in the ass on Macs.
And as the author here notes, it has gotten even worse. Not only will the window often refuse to resize, but you'll wind up activating whatever app lies behind the window you're trying to resize... hiding the one you were dealing with.
Maybe you don't use the mouse because it just doesn't work as expected? ;)
> So I am wondering, are people fighting using a Mac in the most effective way simply because of old patterns and habit
"Most effective" doesn't mean "most intuitive". I don't want to learn keyboard shortcuts just to move or resize a window. That's the entire premise of graphical user interfaces.
What if your needs aren't as simple and you want to increase the size just a bit to fit more text than the tile permits and you don't want to waste the whole screen for that?
>Living on this planet for quite a few decades, I have learned that it rarely works to grab things if you don’t actually touch them:
Yes, but that is skeuomorphic design, which is old and ugly. We live in the era of anti-skeuomorphic design, where nothing makes any sense but it looks sleek.
I started with an Apple Lisa. I’ve never enjoyed Apple products less than I do right now. And there were some rough days in the 90s! I switched from a AW Ultra 3 to a Garmin. Considering an S26 because of the semi-matte screen. The Mac, though, I probably can’t replace, but man Tahoe/Liquid Glass sucks.
I don’t have this issue at all. I have a very generous amount of space to grab the corner with and it changes mouse pointer to the diagonal arrow.
Edit: despite all the negative feedback, I’m quite happy with Tahoe and I enjoy the visual changes. I think some of the subtler changes is more intuitive and Spotlight’s improvement is quite nice.
The utter user-interface butchery happening to Safari on the Mac is once again the work of people who put iOS first. People who by now think in iOS terms. People who view the venerable Mac OS user interface as an older person whose traits must be experimented upon, plastic surgery after plastic surgery, until this person looks younger. Unfortunately the effect is more like this person ends up looking… weird.
These people look at the Mac’s UI and (that’s the impression, at least) don’t really understand it. Its foundations come from a past that almost seems inscrutable to them. Usability cues and features are all wrinkles to them. iOS and iPadOS don’t have these strange wrinkles, they muse. We must hide them. We’ll make this spectacular facelift and we’ll hide them, one by one. Mac OS will look as young (and foolish, cough) as iOS!
--- end quote ---
At the time it was only Safari that they wanted to "modernize". Now it's the full OS.
On windows at least, I almost always use 'alt+space; x' to maximise windows, as well as winkey+left/right/up/down, which is really the only resizing I do. Having to use the mouse is a pain.
Tahoe is a macOS mis-step on par with Windows 8 or Windows Vista. If you’re from Apple and reading this, my feedback is pretty succinct: “I don’t recommend others upgrade. I wish I didn’t.”
Luckily for Apple, Windows 11 is not exactly in a position to attract switchers.
Let’s see if Apple can turn things around. iOS 8+ did improve on iOS 7’s worst bits.
One of the most annoying things after installing Tahoe for me, that for no good reason an ordinary app would randomly lose its focus. In the midst of my typing. This is unbelievably preposterous and I just can't stop hating Apple for this crap. How the fuck this is acceptable? I just have no words. What makes it even worse that I couldn't even complain about it on their support pages - they just keep removing my comments for being "non-constructive". This is some random bug, and many people have complained about it, how am I suppose to make it "more constructive"? Send them the exact configuration of constellations, the number of monitors I use and their positioning angles, log the keyboard rate and delay, the latency, the level of magnetic interference caused by my Bluetooth devices, etc.?
I appreciate your frustration, but at the same time what is Apple supposed to do? If it's affecting only a tiny number of users, and you just happen to be an unlucky one, and they don't know how to reproduce it, and you can't help them reproduce it, then what? I think they just have to wait until somebody (such as yourself) is able to figure out with some kind of logging what is happening. E.g. the first question to answer is probably what actually gets the focus, if anything? To produce a bug report that at least suggests which area of code might be responsible.
I had a similar problem at one point, then finally figured out it was when I accidentally hit the fn button which triggered the emoji picker window and moved focus to it (IIRC), but it was off-screen because I'd previously used it on a secondary monitor. Reconnecting the monitor and moving the window back to my primary display fixed it. (Obviously, it's a bug to show a picker window outside of visible coordinates, and I think it got fixed eventually.)
But it also might not be Apple at all, if it's some third-party background utility with a bug. E.g. if that were happening to me, my first thought would be that it might be a Logitech bug or a Karabiner-Elements bug. Uninstalling any non-Apple background processes or utilities seems like a necessary first step.
I wonder whether this could be a touchpad malfunction, causing phantom clicks that move focus. To diagnose, you could temporarily disable it and use an external mouse.
External mice also suck with macOS though.
Interesting. This is exactly the problem I've begun to have on my 14" M2 MB Air. I'm on 15.7.3. The issue started with 15.7.1.
Here I've been thinking it's a hardware problem, like some sort of mechanical intermittent. Maybe not.
Focus stealing has been an issue in windowed multi-tasking environments from the beginning. It's certainly been an issue in all macOS/OS X versions I've used since I started in 2011.
> how am I suppose to make it "more constructive"?
Obviously by shutting the hell up, you ungrateful serf. The beatings will continue until morale improves.
Seriously, though, if you want this to stop, people like you are going to have to start voting with their wallets.
I finally pulled the plug on macOS a couple years ago for Linux, and I haven't been unhappy about it. However, I did make a point of buying a laptop that was well supported on Linux (a Lenovo X1 Carbon that was in the same price class as an equivalent Mac).
> Luckily for Apple, Windows 11 is not exactly in a position to attract switchers.
Yes, but Linux is finally in that position, not to mention we're seeing silicon from intel and amd that can compete with the M series on mobile devices.
Linux isn't in position regarding display/UI. It doesn't handles HiDPI (e.g 4K) screen uniformly, leading to a lot of blurry apps depending on the display abstraction used (Wayland/X11) and compositor (GNOME, KDE, etc, all behave differently).
Let's not even talk about the case when you have monitors that have different DPI, something that is handled seamlessly by MacOS, unlike Linux where it feels like a d20 roll depending on your distro.
I expect most desktop MacOS users to have a HiDPI screen in 2026 (it's just...better), so going to Linux may feel like a serious downgrade, or at least a waste of time if you want to get every config "right". I wish it was differently, honestly - the rest of the OS is great, and the diversity between distros is refreshing.
> Linux isn't in position regarding display/UI. It doesn't handles HiDPI (e.g 4K) screen uniformly, leading to a lot of blurry apps depending on the display abstraction used (Wayland/X11) and compositor (GNOME, KDE, etc, all behave differently).
I have been using a 4K display for years on Linux without issues. The scaling issue with non-native apps is a problem that Windows also struggles with btw.
I recently bought a MacStudio with 512GB of RAM and connected it to a LG 5k2k monitor. For some reason there was no way to change the font size (they removed the text size "Larger Text ... More Space" continuum from the Display section of settings) so I ended up with either super small or super large fonts without anything in-between. In the end I had to install some 3rd party software and mix my own scaled resolution with acceptable font size. This has never been a problem on Linux in the past 10 years, all I needed to do at worst when it wasn't done out of the box was to set scale somewhere and that was it.
Curious what software; I've used "SwitchResX" in the past and it met all my needs...
> Linux isn't in position regarding display/UI. It doesn't handles HiDPI (e.g 4K) screen uniformly, leading to a lot of blurry apps depending on the display abstraction used (Wayland/X11) and compositor (GNOME, KDE, etc, all behave differently).
Meanwhile on MacOS my displays may work. Or they might not work. Or they might work but randomly locked to 30hz. It depends on what order they wake up in or get plugged in.
I suspect the root of the problem is one of them is a very high refresh rate monitor (1440p360hz) and probably related to the display bandwidth limitations that provide a relatively low monitor limit for such a high cost machine.
I am a full time KDE/Arch user and since Plasma 6 haven't had any HiDPI issues including monitors with different DPI or X11 apps - of which there are very few nowadays.
I use linux at home (with a HiDPI screen) and MacOS for work. The screen works well with both computers. I mostly just use a text editor, a browser, and a terminal though.
Linux has bugs, bug MacOS does too. I feel like for a dev like me, the linux setup is more comfortable.
Same here. I stick to 100% scaling and side step the whole hi dpi issue. I even have a single USB type c cable that connects my laptop to the laptop stand and that laptop stand is what connects to the monitor, keyboard, and mouse.
I know people will say meh but coming from the world of hurt with drivers and windows based soft modems — I was on dial up even as late as 2005! — I think the idea that everything works plug and play is amazing.
Compare with my experience on Windows — maybe I did something wrong, I don't know but the external monitor didn't work over HDMI when I installed windows without s network connection and maybe it was a coincidence but it didn't work until I connected to the Internet.
My dude, It's been more than capable for years. I have an ultrawide OLED monitor (3440x1440@165hz) paired with a 4K@144hz monitor. Both HDR, different capabilities. Both have different DPIs set, 125% for one, 200% for the other. My setup required less configuration than Windows does. Right click -> Display Configuration -> Set Alignment (monitor position) -> Set refresh rate -> Set HDR -> Set DPI -> Apply. Done.
Don't knock it unless you've tried it.
This was CachyOS btw. Windows actually required MORE work because I had to install drivers, connect to the internet during setup, get nagged about using a Microsoft account, etc.
CachyOS was basically boot -> verify partitions are correct -> decide on defaults -> create account/password -> wait for files to copy -> done. Drivers, including the latest NVIDIA drivers, auto installed/working.
Sure, you can find some obscure DEs that don't handle that well yet. Or you could just use Plasma and have it all work just fine, like it did for many years now.
It also doesn't offer a Mac-style desktop environment, which is one of the things keeping me away. KDE/Cinnamon/XFCE lean more Windows-style, GNOME/Pantheon (Elementary) is more like iPadOS/Android in desktop mode. My productivity takes a big hit in Windows-style environments and I just don't enjoy using them.
I hope to put my money where my mouth is and contribute to one of the tiny handful of nascent Mac-like environment projects out there once some spare time opens up, but until then…
So apparently when Canonical was the gorilla in desktop Linux, they had a push to have apps make their menus accessible via API. KDE supports that protocol. There are KDE widgets that will draw a Mac-style menu bar from it.
That means you can take the standard KDE "panel" and split it in two halves: a dock for the bottom edge, and a menus/wifi settings/clock bar for the top edge.
There are some things I don't know how to work around - like Chrome defaulting to Windows-style close buttons and keybindings, but if the Start menu copy is the thing keeping you off Linux, you can mod it more than you think you can.
Yep, I've played with it. Things might've changed but I couldn't get KDE's global menubar to work at all under Wayland, and under X11 a lot of apps don't populate it.
GNOME still has some problems with fractional scaling, but KDE works perfectly. I'm using two displays, one with 150% and one with 100%. No blurry apps and absolutely no issues. Have you tried it recently?
Can you independently set desktop wallpapers on the two screens? I know this seems nitpicky but it's literally impossible with Ubuntu/Gnome as far as I know; I have one vertical and one horizontal and have to just go with a solid color background to make that work.
KDE is in better shape than GNOME, but there are still some nits. Nearly all the available third party themes for example are blurry or otherwise render incorrectly with fractional scaling on.
So don't use a third party theme.
Problem is, the stock themes aren't to my taste at all.
Why not send a pull request to one of your theme maintainers?
To my understanding, doing that wouldn't be helpful due to hard technical limits that can't be reconciled. Most window chrome themes are Aurora themes, which don't play nice with HiDPI, and to change that they'd need to be rewritten as C++ themes (like the default Breeze theme is), which is beyond the capabilities of most people publishing themes.
Not a problem on my Fedora Silverblue 43 machine with dual 4K 27" screens at 125% scaling. Zero blurry apps, including XWayland ones.
Boy, does that fractional scaling should look like shit on any vector graphics.
That’s why Apple used 4k on 22”, 5k on 27 and 6k on 32 to make it crispy always on 200%
MacOS doesn't handle HiDPI screens that well either. The most common and affordable high res monitors are 27" 4K monitors and those don't mesh well with the way macOS does HiDPI. You either have a perfect 2x but giant 1080p like display or a blurryish non-integer scale that's more usable.
And god forbid you still have low DPI monitor still!
Blows my minded that a 4k 27" monitor that was $500 a dozen years ago is still near top tier now.
5k has been surprisingly stagnant.
At some point additional resolution is a dimishing return. The human eye has limits.
5K 27” looks usefully better than 4K 27” to my middle aged eyes.
I’d prefer that to not be so, because 5K panels are so much more expensive. But in a side by side comparison it’s very obvious.
But the market has spoken: a quality 4K display is very good, certainly good enough, and the value for money is great.
I’m ok with spending more on a better display that I spend so much time with. The cost per use-hour is still very, very low.
We're approaching that point but are not there yet
You're supposed to use KDE with Xorg if you want things to just work. KDE with Wayland if you're adventurous.
Therefore newcomers should use Kubuntu or the likes of it
KWin/Xorg AFAIK has been on maintanence duty (i.e. fixes mostly come from XWayland) for >5 years now. KDE has expulsed the Xorg codebase of KWin into a seperate repo in preparation of a Wayland only future.
Even if KDE/Xorg is a stable experience is true now, it will not be true in the medium to short term. And a distro like Kubuntu might be 2 years out from merging a "perfect" KDE Plasma experience if it arrived right now.
Tahoe is uniquely bad in so many ways, so I tried the Asahi Fedora Remix with Gnome on my M2 Mac Mini. Aesthetically I was more attracted to Gnome, it feels like what we lost with Tahoe. Tahoe to me feels like a really chopped Android skin or something. I made it a few weeks on the Fedora Remix but ended up having to switch back to Mac over missing webcam drivers and other random hardware issues. Plus there’s little OS things that Mac does that make it really hard to go elsewhere.
Could you list some of these little things that macOS does and that you miss?
(I usually miss the little Linux-specific things that macOS does not.)
>ended up having to switch back to Mac over missing webcam drivers and other random hardware issues
This has been my experience every time I try Linux. If I had to guess, tracing down all these little things is just that last mile that is so hard and isn't the fun stuff to do in making an OS, which is why it is always ignored. If Linux ever did it, it would keep me.
One solution to this problem is to buy from a vendor that installs Linux for you (e.g. System76). Much like with Apple, they can sell you a fully functional computer that way.
My understanding is that the asahi team have been doing incredible work exactly with doing the non-fun bits. They just chose to do it on the hardware of a company that's extremely hostile to this kind of effort.
I have to say that almost everything worked out of the box. The webcam is known to not mesh great with Asahi quite yet. Otherwise:
- Machine failed to wake from suspend almost 50% of the time (with both wired and BT peripherals) - WiFi speed was SIGNIFICANTLY slower. Easily a fraction of what it was on Mac - USB C display was no-op - Magic trackpad velocity is wild across apps - Window management shortcuts varied across apps (seems Gnome changes a lot, frequently) - Machine did not feel quicker, in fact generally felt slower than Tahoe but granted I did not benchmark anything
I would happily try it again when the project is further along
I think this is true with an arm mac (and would be tricky to fix that, props to the Asahi folks for doing so much) but for a lot of other hardware (recent dell/asus/lenovo, framework, byo desktops) I find Linux complete. I'm sure there is hardware out there that with struggles but I've not had to deal with any issues for a few years now myself.
Bringing random hardware from vendors who never intended to support an OS is a weird criterion to judge an OS' "readiness" by— and one no one seems to apply to macOS or Windows.
It can be very device specific unfortunately. Thinkpad tend to work quote well. I had a Framework that my wife took from me and it's truly fantastic, works out of the box.
I fell down the Nix hole this weekend, getting my corp Mac and my SteamOS Legion Go sharing a config. My corp device is a 5k iMac Pro that is going to be kicked off of the network when ARM-only Tahoe becomes mandatory later this year.
I work at Google, which issued a Gubuntu workstation by default when I joined. I exchanged it for a Mac, which I've spent a literal lifetime using, because I didn't wanna fall down a Linux tinkering hole trying to make Gubuntu feel like home. Every corp device I've had has been a Mac.
I'm reading this from a coffee shop. On my walk here, I was idly wondering if I should give Glinux (as its now called) a try when I'm forced to replace the iMac. SteamOS is making Linux my default environment in the same way Mac was for decades prior.
No, it is not. Apple went down to the same level of Linux, not Linux that became as good as Apple.
Unfortunately today it is a race to the bottom.
As a long-term Linux user, and a regular macOS user, I must say that the motion is mutual. Linux has become way better, and macOS, somehow worse. But resizing and moving windows nearly , and switching between windows (not whole apps) has always been problematic in plain macOS, for reasons mysterious to me.
Yeah, and gaming aside from anti-cheat isn't a broken mess anymore either. Valve has made sure of that.
Linux doesn't have much in the way of quality apps for people who aren't programmers, server administrators, or gamers.
Most people want to get productive work done with their computer, and OS X has top tier apps for every need possible.
No good e-mail app, no good office apps, no good calendar app, no good invoicing app, no good photo editing app, no good designer app, etc
> not to mention we're seeing silicon from intel and amd that can compete with the M series on mobile devices.
[[citation needed]], benchmarks please, incl battery life, not promises. "We are seeing" implies reality
Apple software has noticeably declined from my experience, both iOS and macOS. I find the lifecycle of Apple products to be offensively short, also.
If I buy a product and the hardware is good for 10 years (because I looked after it), I expect the software to also run just as well as when I purchased it - that is the case with Linux, why isn't it the case with macOS?
Every year the software upgrades invariably degrade system performance. Outrageous.
> I find the lifecycle of Apple products to be offensively short, also.
Apple is miles ahead of Android when it comes to phones and tablets, most in the Android ecosystem is e-waste four or five years in, while Apple stuff can still be re-sold for actual money at that time assuming you didn't bust your screen.
For laptops, Apple is so far ahead it can't even be described. Most Windows laptops physically break apart before macOS ceases to support any Apple laptop.
Only thing we can maybe talk about is desktop PCs ever since the switch to M that basically made meaningful upgrades impossible, but eh, in my attic there's a 2009 Mac Pro still chugging along as my homelab server + gaming rig.
Not to beat on my own drum but as a mac convert from the days of Tiger I saw the writing on the wall from miles away.
Still on iOS 18 and macOS 15 (Sequoia). I was a day one upgrader up until now, never had any regrets but this time things seemed very different.
It's worrisome but all is not lost, I'll start sweating for real if next year's releases don't improve things substantially.
Maybe you didn’t catch this yet, but Apple pulled their latest iOS 18.7.3 update and they seem to only promote iOS 26 now. They really want everyone off iOS 18 :/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2026/01/07/hundreds-...
You can sign up for Apple beta and keep doing iOS 18 updates.
> Still on iOS 18 and macOS 15 (Sequoia). I was a day one upgrader up until now, never had any regrets but this time things seemed very different.
I've tried and returned the iPhone 17 Pro. Love the hardware (especially the camera), but iOS 26 is inefficient (for lack of a better term), and the new camera UI hides too many things.
Same I'm on iOS 26 and it's reasonably bad but I figured I might as well pull of the band-aid and have app compatibility.
I can't see a single reason to upgrade to Tahoe. We'll see what 2026 brings.
One huge benefit of Tahoe for me is that you can now hide any menubar icon, even if they don't explicitly support hiding. It's a small thing but that alone makes the upgrade worth it for me
The Tiger to Snow Leopard era was fantastic. Things were simple and worked.
There was also a great boutique apps ecosystem.
Right now, it seems that macOS is going through its enshittification phase, sadly.
I still remember Snow Leopard - I think that's when I started using Mac.
Most of the upgrades since then I have resisted and not enjoyed, though I seem to recall liking Mavericks.
A lot of the big features each time seem to be about tieing further into the Apple ecosystem, which doesn't interest me at all, since I have no other devices and don't use iCloud.
I think also that Snow Leopard era (unibody) MacBook Pro design was peak Mac. It was really full-featured while also having clean intentional design.
> Tiger to Snow Leopard era was fantastic. Things were simple and worked
Was it also great for developers? (Genuine question.)
Yeah, OS X was definitely the nicest native development experience at the time. Apple's documentation was considerably better and more searchable back then than it is now (especially as it is now for desktop). And even though they've introduced lots of niceties (including Swift), as Apple's piled additional features and APIs into Cocoa/Xcode I find the overall experience quite a bit less coherent or intuitive or ergonomic than it used to be.
I'm not mac dev but wasn't apple all in on objc back then and these days it's more swift? that is pretty big shift, I'd assume for the better for most parts.
I prefer Swift as a language, but Apple's developer documentation back then was clear, detailed, and overall excellent. Occasionally I felt like I was reading a classic CS text rather than a manual. I could always find the guide on the particular facet I was looking for within a few clicks.
xcode has been getting better bit-by-bit. No major regression.
I agree. This is the first time I regret updating macOs.
I hoped the .1 or .2 would fix things, but I'm still seeing glitches and even random freezes.
Microsoft is a disaster right now, but if the new intel processor can compete on battery life with mac I might go back to linux.
I switched from Windows 11 to macOS after a disastrous upgrade experience and drastic downgrade in performance on my Windows laptop.
I mean Windows 10 wasn't great but I got used to the taskbar searching the web somehow and the dual config menus everywhere and so on. But 11 was just terrible.
macOS has its pain points but man oh man what a disaster Windows is.
I have had Linux on my personal desktop and laptop forever so that hasn't been an issue, only used Windows for work.
first time i used tahoe to help a friend w/ their laptop i legit thought it was like a knockoff macos or something, genuinely the ugliest macos version and even in the brief time that i've used it, i've encountered annoying bugs, QC at apple is dead lowkey
I had to upgrade my iPhone to iOS 26 to setup my watch. I wish I had never done it. Nothing is where it's supposed to be from a UI perspective. Stuff breaks often. I can't use my contact search bar to search contacts. It only searches past calls. What the hell.
> Tahoe is a macOS mis-step on par with Windows 8 or Windows Vista.
Other than that weird resize thing written about here (which I didn't notice, thanks SizeUp for providing me with hotkeys remarkably similar to Windows) - why? Vista and 8 were immediately obvious changes in the UI, but in general it still looks and feels just like macOS has for well over a decade now.
New icons, new fonts, but... that's it?
Oh and HyperSwitch for some reason can't switch to Finder windows any more, but that's probably because HyperSwitch hasn't seen an upgrade in years...
> "I wish I didn’t.”
Can't you do a factory reset/recovery on Mac that lands on the version of macos shipped with the device? Then you could re-upgrade to the os you wanted, without trying it it seems Sequoia is still available in the app store
Yes, you can install any version of macOS that was ever supported for your Mac. (It’s been a long time since they used System Enablers.) I’m so frustrated with Tahoe that I’m about to do this.
Safari can't be upgraded past a certain point on older versions of macOS. That can cause certain websites to break. Minor but annoying.
But you cannot, in general, migrate your data backwards. Apple's system apps will upgrade their data stores forward only. This isn't a problem if you are willing to e.g. re-download all of your (Mail.app) mail.
Yep, though you can mitigate it a little bit in various ways. For one weird example, I keep my main user Home folder on my NAS and mount it via iSCSI. Mostly that's for data integrity/size/backup purposes, but it does also make it free to snapshot before trying out a system upgrade. If I hate it I can rollback my entire set of user data along with the OS.
Though amongst many other wonderful things lost in the mysts of Mac history I still desperately miss NetBoot/NetInstall and ultra easy clone/boot with something like CCC and TDM. It's so fucking miserable now in comparison to do reinstalls/testing/restores.
> But you cannot, in general, migrate your data backwards. Apple's system apps will upgrade their data stores forward only.
One huge reason to use third-party programs where possible. I dislike Apple's tight coupling of utilities as it is.
Yep, that's a great workaround, as long as you have third-party apps you're happy with.
I generally just “reload” everything.
At least on Windows 11 it’s possible to disable the rounded corners.
Thanks for the advise. I have not upgraded, and have no plan to.
Can you interpret this comment for those of us that haven't used windows? All i can recall from "vista" is that it looked good
Microsoft's Copilot AI software has been integrated in every corner of the operating system, from the start menu to the notepad to settings. Beyond the intrusiveness of it, it also does not work very well. Other AI mishaps include Recall, which takes screenshots of your desktop every so often, and the original version of Recall stored these in an unencrypted, insecure database.
On top of that, the OS feels more bloated and disorganized than ever, with something like six different UI frameworks all present in various spots on the OS; system settings are scattered across the Settings app (new) and various legacy panels like Control Panel and Network Connections.
What else... Microsoft now requires an online connection and Microsoft account to sign in to your PC; no more local-only accounts allowed.
I'm sure there's more I'm missing. It's not a pleasant operating system.
I added a local-only account to a Win 11 Pro box just two days ago. Nothing seems different to me—the usual horsing around with the no online account stuff but it let me create the account.
Pro will allow it. Home which is what comes with most computers, does not now.
I find that it is quite a pleasant operating system!
Recall is turned off by default and Copilot never nags you to use it (like Gemini on Chromebooks/Google Search/Google Docs does).
I completely agree with the UI frameworks thing though. They really need to remove the Control Panel.
> They really need to remove the Control Panel.
... they really need to provide 100% coverage to all the same settings, THEN remove the control panel.
I don't have Copilot in my start menu. It's in Notepad, but that is the only place I've found it. This is on 25H2.
> original version of Recall stored these in an unencrypted, insecure database.
Why do you bother mentioning it, given that's been long rectified and that particular version never made it to the production ring?
> six different UI frameworks all present in various spots on the OS
Windows has always been like this. It wasn't until Windows 11 that the Font dialog was upgraded from a Win 3.x look and feel.
> no more local-only accounts allowed.
Just false.
Off the top of my head: Windows Vista was slow and unstable on a lot of hardware of the time due to significantly higher system requirements than XP and a new display driver model that worked poorly at first, had a very polarizing look, and had quite overbearing UAC -- where XP would just let you do the thing, Vista would ask you three times if you're really really sure you wanted to authorize it.
It had decent bones though -- arguably a lot of its bad reputation was due to hardware/third party driver issues and people trying to run it on old hardware that just couldn't hack it. Windows 7 was well received and is basically the same thing with small improvements and some of the UX issues smoothed over (i.e. less annoying UAC)
Windows Vista was also notorious for going overboard with translucency effects in the default "Aero" style
My memory is that it was named "Aero Glass" which heightens the irony of "Liquid Glass" sucking.
But I see many references to it being called just "Aero", but some call it "Aero Glass" [1]
Does anyone know the truth?
[1] https://www.pcmag.com/archive/rip-aero-glass-windows-8-stick...
The Vista comparison is unfair. I think a lot of the bad rap Vista got was from trying to run it on underpowered hardware thanks to marketing XP-era machines as "Windows Vista Capable". I actually ran it on good HW (the kind that could run Crysis) and I didn't have anything bad to say.
Yes, UAC could be considered as annoyance by some but it's no different than "sudo" on single-user Linux machines and we seemingly have no problems with that (I wish we'd move on past that because it is damn annoying and offers no security benefit).
Comparing Vista to modern macOS is insulting. Vista didn't have that level of jank and the UIs were actually quite good, consistent and with reasonable information density, unlike "System Settings" or shitty Catalyst apps.
> Yes, UAC could be considered as annoyance by some but it's no different than "sudo" on single-user Linux machines and we seemingly have no problems with that (I wish we'd move on past that because it is damn annoying and offers no security benefit).
It was wild to me when I was testing out if I wanted to move over to Linux as my full-time desktop OS how much it was asking for my password. And it didn't even have a mechanism to make it a little less painful such as requesting a short PIN (which I think is a fine option as long as a few incorrect PIN entries forces full password input).
Give your user NOPASSWD if it's really that bothersome. You can also potentially set it up to use a fingerprint reader if you have that hardware.
You had way more issues than that on launch, performance of 3d games sucked compared to XP with the same hardware (I remember at least a 30% decrease of FPS) and usb file transfers were so borked you probably had half of the speed of XP transfering on a usb key (which was the primary method of transfering files at the time).
The UAC wasn't even the main problem, the overall performance of Vista was, everything was so much slower.
Apple had one of the most successful and known ad campaigns "I'm a mac and I'm a PC" ridiculing Windows Vista, they pretty much summed it up in those.
Getting to Windows 11 today, they have ads in the Start menu. Not exactly appealing to the Apple crowd…
They also ridiculed the permissions popups. But now when I plug my AirPods to charge on my MacBook it opens a permissions popup.
yet there is no way to get my iPhone to stop auto-switching bluetooth audio between my devices. Any time I get in my car, my headphones connect to the car and I have to switch it back. So annoying
Windows 8 was when Microsoft tried to cater more towards Windows-on-tablet use cases. Which lead to everyone, including desktop users, having a fullscreen phone-style app menu take the place of the old start menu. This, for desktop use, is obviously quite disruptive and was hated by everyone.
They addressed most issues in the 8.1 update, like a year later I think.
You know what was worse than desktop users? Server users via RDP.
There was no start button. There are no screen edges to swipe in from. Hot corners are really hard to hit. I still can't believe somebody said "yes, good idea" to using that UI for Server 2012.
I RDP'd into a Windows Server VM a year or so ago and got a full-screen popup for Edge or some shit like that.
If that wasn't bad enough, the popup was a web view, meaning none of RDP's acceleration/client-side compositing was in play and I was greeted with a ~1fps slideshow.
MetroUI in Windows 8 was pretty universally panned. I thought it was pretty good on tablets and such, but it left a lot to be desired on desktops and hid a lot of functionality, it went too mobile for a lot of people's tastes.
Disclaimer: I was one of the dozens who used a windows phone. The Nokia Lumia 920 was great, you can fight me.
I think a lot of people liked the Windows mobile experience. Shame it didn't quite get enough market share.
Resetting the app ecosystem 3 fucking times by breaking app compatibility didn't help. Windows Phone 7 - Windows Phone 8 -> Windows (Phone?) 10.
Wrong. There was full app compat of WP7 apps in WP8 and Win10 Mobile, and for WP8 apps in W10M. The only full backward app compat break was from WM6.5/WP6.5 to WP7.
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're thinking of the lack of device OS upgrades: from WP6.5 to WP7, from WP7 to WP8, and from older WP8 devices to W10M. So no forward compat, but absolutely yes to backward compat.
i guess they needed to release all that pent up backwards incompatibility
You joke, but I honestly wonder if this period and projects didn't involve a bunch of Microsoft employees who got a little overexcited when they were told that they didn't need to maintain the insane, sometimes bug-for-bug, compatibility layers with 20-40 year old software that they had had to deal with their entire career there.
Must have felt incredibly liberating, and maybe they got a little too into the whole idea of "fresh start"(s).
See also Windows RT.
Vista had the right direction, Windows 7 merely continued on it and it became one of the best operating systems ever.
Windows 8 design wasn't bad per se, but they shipped the start screen when it lacks even the most basic features, so you'll return to legacy desktop the moment you want to do anything.
I don't think any of them are like Tahoe TBH.
Windows 8 featured a notable paradigm shift from a menuing launcher (click start, programs, then the program you want, as an example), to a full screen launcher (Think Android and iOS). And also switched from floating windows (The default for most Linux distros and for Mac AFAIK) to rudimentary tiling windows (Think Android and iOS)
https://youtu.be/RuuqEZnvEoU?t=30
from my own personal experience, Vista was very slow and buggy at launch, but it did get better over time
Compare to Aqua and Platinum where every resizable window/pane had a big square drag target clearly labeled as such with some diagonal lines:
https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/system/managers/filema...
https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/system/managers/filema...
It also - as seen in that screenshot, had large, always visible scrollbars where it was easy to see how far down you were in a folder or document, and could easily click and drag to scroll to where you needed. Now in the service of minimalism we have scrollbars that consist of a thin, semi-transparent line that fades out after half a second and is nearly impossible to click and drag due to how small it is.
> Now in the service of minimalism we have scrollbars that consist of a thin, semi-transparent line that fades out after half a second and is nearly impossible to click and drag due to how small it is.
You can make them always on still. I've done so ever since their disappearing act started. It's not even much hidden, it's in the "Appearance" setting pane.
They're still too small and too light. Some times when a document is big enough I'm actually not able to find the scroll thumb on macOS Sequoia. Some times wiggling the scroll thumb around by scrolling slightly back and forth with my mousewheel/trackpad helps to make it visually appear, but other times I just have to give up.
Also I've noticed sometimes things don't even work correctly with "always on". Some developers don't test it because it's not the default.
These developers also haven't bothered to test with any mouse other than an Apple Trackpad, which turns the scrollbars on by default.
Of course we all make mistakes, but anyone who has made this mistake should really fix it!
The default modality changed.
Classic Macs were designed for the mouse or trackball. Modern Macs are designed for multitouch scrolling. When it's easy to get the scrolling infrastructure on demand, the desktop might not need the same click-first affordances.
Note that downside: you could only resize from that bottom right corner, not from any other edge!
I do think that was better overall, and it's something I miss about Snow Leopard, but I can see why they changed it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46581813
It should be noted the drag handle was removed back in Lion. And the square cutout was removed in Panther, both of which were iterations of Aqua.
(and yes Lion was garbage, first upgrade I skipped since Tiger, and definitely the first "what the fuck are they doing").
Windows also used to have a "grip" indicator. Nowadays I only see this in resziable textboxes in browsers...
Better in that it was clear, but worse that you had to resize from the bottom right. Made expanding to the left, or up, very annoying. I'd take the current situation over this.
True, but not a 1:1 comparison, because Classic Mac OS windows were much better at staying where you put them, even between sessions. John Siracusa wrote a lot about how this was missing from Mac OS X: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/
People also didn't regularly plug classic Macs into external monitors, changing the screen resolution temporarily.
For this and many other reasons, I just don't think the paradigm would work today. It's philosophically smart but limiting in too many other ways.
Yeah that is also true. I have had that experience with certain CD-ROMs (maybe like two or three ever but has happened) on my PowerBook 2400c. If the authoring machine had a higher display resolution than my machine, and the author had the writable source folder's window open to a place outside my screen resolution, and the window positions got saved to the DesktopDB/DesktopDF, and the DesktopDB/DesktopDF got written to the CD-ROM, then it would open in the position outside my screen resolution every time my own DesktopDB/DesktopDF got erased.
Relevant TA: https://web.archive.org/web/20090625152558/http://support.ap...
I swear, this reign of visual artists as dictators has to stop.
I'm sure people noticed this issue internally and brought it up but some thing by some designer was seen as biblically sacred and overruled all reason.
I've been at companies were you get severely punished... sometimes fired for subordination for fixing an obviously broken spec by a designer emperor.
It's normal to be "I guess 2+2=5 here, whatever" as if the designer went in a tiny room, had a seance with the divine...
Yo, newsflash, everyone makes mistakes. Failure is when you force them to stay uncorrected.
I know enough people at Apple who are at the mercy of the overlord design teams, and it sounds exactly like what you described
I've met some great designers as well. They usually come from more modest backgrounds.
It's kinda the rule for programmes too.
The ones that went to a small liberal arts school you've never heard of programming as their second career are usually more effective to work with then the Stanford/MIT crowd.
The problems start I think, when you have an expectation that your collaborators are somehow either superhuman or subhuman and not peers.
Humility and mutual respect gets things done.
Yea, the programmers aren’t to blame here. In fact some of the visual effects they have achieved are pretty cool. The designers are at fault because they prioritized visuals over usability. Literally nobody I know thinks “Liquid Glass” has been an improvement. The feedback is universally negative.
>I'm sure people noticed this issue internally and brought it up but some thing by some designer was seen as biblically sacred and overruled all reason.
I disagree. Seems more like the group that implemented border radius at the OS UI implementation level did not work with the group that handles window sizing. Not everything is a conspiracy.
> I swear, this reign of visual artists as dictators has to stop.
> I'm sure people noticed this issue internally and brought it up but some thing by some designer was seen as biblically sacred and overruled all reason.
Funny how Apple went from Jony Ive sacrificing hardware usability for "beauty" (touch bars and butterfly switches) to Alan Dye mucking up macOS and iOS with Liquid glAss.
>I swear, this reign of visual artists as dictators has to stop.
Visual artists and graphic/ux designers weren’t exactly claiming for Tahoe either.
The point is that Apple's own design team was.
In my experience, part of the problem lies in visual artists not wanting to iterate the way software development does. Sure, they might iterate on the design as they work on it, but once they've found their final design, they strongly resist changing it, even as the actual development and testing of the software to implement it iterates and finds problems.
It's a throwback to BDUF.
I think the mistake comes from when UI/UX started calling themselves a part of product leadership, vs basically being one of the team.
Wasn’t Jobs the one that set that dynamic up, where Ive was basically the #2 at Apple? It seemed to work as long as Jobs was there are the final quality filter.
Yep, Jobs knew what he wanted and he generally had good taste. He would push everyone until he got what he thought was right and spend extra to get it. Supposedly he sent the original iPod team scrambling to find a new headphone jack just before launch because he didn’t like the mushy tactile feel of the jack they had selected. He wanted a very tactile “click” as the headphones snapped in.
This post is very well presented and it highlights how absolutely bizarre the latest update was. The video demonstration was also very well done.
I remember a few years ago, people complained when Apple merely made the entire operating system uglier. (Something about a gradient on the battery?) A lot of people would talk hyperbolically ("apple KILLED macos!"), and that's indistinguishable to an outsider when an update like this brings other people out of the woodwork to say, "Hey, these changes are genuinely bizarre and absurd, what happened?"
I especially liked the part with the hand trying to grab the plate. Perfect imagery.
I laughed at the animation quite hard - it’s the perfect analogy for the issue at hand!
Me too, made me chuckle :)
This behavior is similar to Windows 11. You have to position the mouse just outside the window. It is non-intuitive and awful.
These are problems humanity solved over 35 years ago (see NeXTSTEP). Why are these designers breaking basic features that worked for over 35 years?
Call me cynical but I think designers need to occasionally break things that were already solved long ago to justify their continued relevance. Explains a lot of redesigns that make things only worse, reshuffling interfaces, hiding things behind menus in form over function redesigns, etc.
Non-tech people tend to think similarly about developers, breaking things that worked fine until yesterday / last week / last month, for no user-visible benefit.
Sometimes that's true.
This is probably not a coincidence. I can pretty much guarantee you a developer said something to a designer like "hey, most of this is outside the window, is that fine?" and the designer said back "well, I think so, but let's check what Windows did," and then they okayed the decision at least in part because Windows did it.
Which is all the more bizarre, because historically it was usually Windows which copied MacOS ;)
That the roles got reversed became painfully clear when macOS copied the Windows Vista style popup mess for access permissions.
The macOS style popups are arguably worse.
Windows Vista may have been plagued by programs assuming administrator access for everything but at least it isolated the security prompt.
You can verify that you're interacting with a real UAC prompt (by pressing ctrl+alt+delete for instance, which can be configured to he required before approving a prompt).
Any program can replicate the macOS security dialogs. You just have to hope that you can safely enter the password to your account into one, or activate TouchID when prompted.
Engineers (hopefully) come to learn the value of Chesterton's Fence young, because engineering failures tend to make themselves known quickly and loudly.
Designers probably have perverse incentives. Showy new designs get promotions. Even when they hurt usability, it's often only in insidious ways.
IIRC, win8 was the last windows to have thick graphical window borders, and that was after they got rid of the texture/aero look from vista/7, so at that point you at least had something graphical to grab onto which (mostly?) matched where the cursor was. Then in win10 onwards they shrunk the border down to one pixel with the zone around it where you can click off the window but still affect it.
On the back of my mind I think part of this was the move to fit scaling to large resolution monitors (i.e. 4k+) work better, as a graphical border of a fixed pixel width will shrink proportionally compared to a border that is as thin as it can be. For a while I've felt that it's a missed opportunity on high res displays to not use more detailed art for window chrome as pixel wide will only get smaller and more difficult to distinguish, such as the minimize/maximize/close icons which remain pixel wide line art even at big scaling.
Fun fact: NEXTSTEP went 10 years without shipping a basic design refresh, except in prereleases (4.0PR1 and traces in 4.0PR2.) This was because it was a good fucking GUI that did its fucking job, and had "usability before aesthetics" as a core design tenet in its developer documentation.
Steve's brain fell out when he got back his throne at Apple. Aqua was a mistake.
History always repeats itself. The young generation always thinks the old generation was rubbish and they have nothing to learn from them and can do better.
> overall, the young copy the elders and contend hotly with them in words and in deeds, while the elders, lowering themselves to the level of the young, sate themselves with pleasantries and wit, mimicking the young in order not to look unpleasant and despotic.
"Socrates", in Plato's Republic
None of us are immune to cycles in fashion, and the need to differentiate ourselves and our work from what came before, even if what came before was pretty much a solved problem.
Maybe it's humanity's way of escaping local minima, or maybe it's an endless curse which every generation must bemoan.
> None of us are immune to cycles in fashion, and the need to differentiate ourselves and our work from what came before, even if what came before was pretty much a solved problem.
I am. If it isn't broke, I don't fix it. And I suspect others are as well. The problem is that too many people are not immune, so it doesn't matter if some are.
And the elder generation is always convinced that the young generation is degenerate, incompetent, and destined for ruin.
Yup! And the cycle continues.
the inability to just hold win+mouse1 to move or win+mouse2 to resize is driving me insane compared to KDE
I love how this information is produced. Succinct, excellent and simple visuals, clear argument, and a solid amount of sarcasm and cynicism to keep us entertained and to provide an air of senior technical person.
MacOS always had its own quirks, but it had a good intuitive design that was well thought out.
All the Apple engineers and other visual designers get quite defensive really quick when we mention that Tahoe really screwed things up, because it's more than just a transition into glass design, but a complete dismissal of design principles, to the point that the entire system is slowly becoming user hostile.
Every critique of the 26 series can be explained like this article with really in depth design principles, which is already engraved in Apple design guidelines, but Apple itself just dismissed it all. Everything from being able to clearly distinguish UI elements, to general accessibility, to discoverability, everything got worse.
Operating Systems are one of the most complicated systems we created, not because they're a collection of processes and thread, but because everything is built on top of them and creating something that's well thought out and stable, and intuitive is really hard. Designers just randomly creating visual elements just because it looks cool and not paying attention how people are going to use it is simply half assing the whole thing.
That's still one of the reasons I believe Alan Dye was let go, fired in a sense, he had power over the company, but with that power he screwed things so much that we need to rediscover all the things related to usability in very high detail as if we're rediscovering the wheel, just so that we can get back to square one.
Does anyone know if Stephen Lemay replacing Dye will potentially "save" the increasing mess that is OSX, at least UX wise, or is it more of a meaningless figurehead swap in a big org?
Tahoe is tragically bad by almost every UX measure, and following various Apple subreddits i wonder if they just don't care anymore - since the majority of people are shocked by the amateurishness of both bugs and design choices in the latest update - this comes on top of literally every major bug being ignored from the alpha to releasing anyway then continuing to ignore feedback.
He will prevent it from getting much worse than it would have under another decade of Dye, but I don't think he can totally reverse the trend.
I think this is just what happens to companies as they get older. Most of the people who pioneered the Human Interface Guidelines aren't at the company anymore, and management doesn't see much financial growth in Mac sales compared to AI and services.
> compared to AI and services
It's probably the services (Care, iCloud, Music, and even TV), Apple's AI isn't on the overall map at all compared to the competition.
Lemay's appointment was widely celebrated, but he'd been at apple since 1999 and never got the gig. My guess is that there are valid reasons for that that may not be design-related.
I worked on Finder/TimeMachine/Spotlight/iOS at Apple from 2000-2007. I worked closely with Bas Ording, Stephen Lemay, Marcel van Os, Imran Chaudry, Don Lindsey and Greg Christie. I have no experience with any of the designers who arrived in the post-Steve era. During my time, Jony Ive didn't figure prominently in the UI design, although echoes of his industrial design appeared in various ways in the graphic design of the widgets. Kevin Tiene and Scott Forstall had more influence for better or worse, extreme skeumorphism for example.
The UX group would present work to Steve J. every Thursday and Steve quickly passed judgement often harshly and without a lot of feedback, leading to even longer meetings afterward to try and determine course corrections. Steve J. and Bas were on the same wavelength and a lot of what Bas would show had been worked on directly with Steve before hand. Other things would be presented for the first time, and Steve could be pretty harsh. Don, Greg, Scott, Kevin would push back and get abused, but they took the abuse and could make in-roads.
Here is my snapshot of Stephen from the time. He presented the UI ideas for the intial tabbed window interface in Safari. He had multiple design ideas and Steve dismissed them quickly and harshly. Me recollection was that Steve said something like No, next, worse, next, even worse, next, no. Why don't you come back next week with something better. Stephen didn't push back, say much, just went ok and that was that. I think Greg was the team manager at the time and pushed Steve for more input and maybe got some. This was my general observation of how Stephen was over 20 years ago.
I am skeptical and doubtful about Stephen's ability to make a change unless he is facilitated greatly by someone else or has somehow changed drastically. The fact that he has been on the team while the general opinion of Apple UX quality has degraded to the current point of the Tahoe disaster is telling. Several team members paid dearly in emotional abuse under Steve and decided to leave rather than deal with the environment post Steve's death. Stephen is a SJ-era original and should have been able to push hard against what many of us perceive as very poor decisons. He either agreed with those decisions, or did not, and choose to go with the flow and enjoy the benefits of working at Apple. This is fine I guess. Many people are just fine going with the flow and not rocking the boat. It may be even easier when you have Apple-level comp and benefits.
My opinon; unless Stephen gets a very strong push from other forces, I don't see that he has the will or fortitude to make the changes that he himself has approved in one way or another. Who will push him? Tim Cook, Craig Federighi, Eddy Cue, Phil Schiller? The perceived mess of Tahoe happened on the watch of all of these Apple leaders.
I use easy-move-resize [1] to resize windows from anywhere inside the area of the window, using a modifier key. In my case I like using cmd + middle mouse button + drag.
This is standard in Gnome and a must for me back when I switch to MacOS for work.
[1] https://github.com/dmarcotte/easy-move-resize
I don't really care if it's because of bizarro designer hegemony, device unification, cost cutting, bad developers or something else, but it's astonoshing how far the desktop paradigm has fallen (and not just in MacOS). What baffles me the most about things like this isn't that crap slips through, it's that crap accumulates in an alarming rate and that apparently tech-savvy people aren't just seemingly fine with stuff like this, but will happily step up and defend it.
When resizing, I expect to drag from the edge of a window. This is exactly how it works in macOS Tahoe, with a sufficient drag zone on the both sides. The only "strangeness" is that the drag zone extends further outside the window in the corner zone. IMO this is nice.
All that said, I REALLY would love to have a hotkey combo I can beep pressed down to resize anywhere over the window. Just like in many Unix/Linux window managers.
Yeah, I have to agree. The blog post seems convincing when you look at the images, but now that I've actually been playing with it, I can always drag the corner to resize. In fact, the corner provides much more draggable area than the window edges do. There's no problem.
So I agree it's strange that the drag zone extends so far beyond, but that's not really something to complain about...? Everywhere inside the corner where it feels reasonable to resize, it resizes. The article is expecting an absurd level of a drag zone on the inside.
Again, the large drag zone outside the corner is kinda weird. But honestly that's more just an understandable artifact of the corner drag zone being a square. If it were me, I probably wouldn't bother to round off one corner of the drag zone either.
There's a lot of stuff to criticize about Tahoe, but this would be about last on my list...
Use rectangle and this will never be a problem for you.
https://rectangleapp.com/
My biggest peeve with macOS Tahoe is the App Launcher redesign.
It seems like a clear regression in usability. By moving from a high-density, full-screen experience to a constrained, scrolling window, they’ve increased the interaction cost for launching apps via the mouse. It feels like a 'unification tax. Sacrificing desktop utility to align with non-Desktop modalilties. Does anyone see a functional upside here, or is this purely aesthetic consistency?
I was shocked when I first hit this. I'm also confused as to why the settings app constrains the window size but I think it did that in the previous version too - not a justification!
I complained about it to a team mate and he thought it was fine and I was weird for using the app launcher and not cmd-space. Although on Windows I always use win-r to run stuff.
Tahoe UI changes and LG are such a mistake and Apple being Apple will probably just double down on it.
It’s consistency with the rest of Spotlight. I imagine they want to enhance it, but getting people to use it might be the first step.
Yep. I hate it. Its easier to open the Finder and use the shortcut to open the application folder.
That egg scramble plate GIF is pure gold.
Yeah, but to be fair to Apple, the guy wasn't even trying to grab the shadow of the plate.
It’s a great analogy but I wish, in the video, he had been grabbing the plate and it somehow didn’t move. Then, when he grabbed the air outside of the plate it should have magically moved. That would have highlighted how crazy Tahoe is.
I find it very ironic that Apple's Mac hardware is the best it's ever been, and some of the best (if not the best) in the entire industry, yet their software team seems intent on burning down their entire reputation. Maybe they think that's better than getting fired over the laughingstock that is Apple Intelligence
Why does the UI have to change all the time? Can't they just keep it the same?
If cars were like computers, the steering wheel would be in a different place after every maintenance check.
Anyway, I'm on Linux, using Gnome Classic as my WM, and I don't have these stupid "everything is suddenly different now" issues.
Car designs do change all the time, mostly just for novelty too.
Cars have similar UX issues as well. See the whole touchscreen saga.
It's also an issue on Linux, to an extent. GNOME has a tendency of forcing UIs on users, and Ubuntu with Unity, now GNOME again, etc. Though, thankfully, since the user is free to choose their own desktop environment and window manager, it's not as pressing of an issue.
I realized many years ago that simpler UIs deliver the best UX. This is a large reason why I love the command line so much. Most programs have a fixed and stable interface, and can be composed to do what I want. For graphical programs I prefer using a simple window manager like bspwm on X, and niri on Wayland. These don't draw window decorations, and are primarily keyboard-driven, so I don't need superfluous graphics. I only need a simple status bar that shows my workspaces, active window, and some system information. I recently configured it with Quickshell[1], and couldn't be happier. I plan to use this setup for years to come, and it gives me great peace of mind knowing that no company can take that away from me. I will have to maintain it myself, but there shouldn't be any changes in the programs I use to break this in a major way.
[1]: https://github.com/imiric/quickshell-niri/tree/main/fancy-ba...
I just saw the upgrade notification and thought to myself "no, thank you".
Still running Sonoma on my MBP and iOS17 on my phone.
Should we crowdfund some billboards in Cupertino expressing how big a misstep we collectively think Tahoe/iOS 26/Liquid glAss was?
No. Direct that money to open source projects and let Apple ruin itself.
If you do, make them play that scrambled egg GIF from TFA in an endless loop. They'll eventually get it.
Yes, I would gladly contribute $25. You can rent partial time on an electronic billboard on Highway 101 for under $2K per month.
If they didn’t realize how broken things are by themselves, mere pressure from the outside won’t be turning the ship around.
Are there even any billboards in Cupertino?
I'd like to see a Super Bowl ad sponsored by one or more of the big Linux players.
"Hi, I'm a Mac."
"And I'm a PC. Wow, you suck, Mac. What the hell happened?"
"Yo momma, PC."
<wild gesticulating and arguing ensues for 20-30 seconds>
"Hi, I'm Linux. Neither of these people care anything about you. You see, you're not their customer anymore. When you're ready to make computing personal again, check us out."
please yes, they could use some real world roasting
I mean, I don’t hate it, but it seems like a clear step back.
Tahoe is proof is that UX for desktop has finally jumped the shark.
In all my years using computers I have never been so disappointed so profoundly by a 36 gigabyte operating system upgrade.
I'm so glad I haven't updated.
Are we reaching the death of UI design? Feel like we're now at the point where being mid-bad makes something one of the best for many.
I miss Windows 7 and OS X.
Scott Jenson - who worked on the classic Mac for Apple, and Android for Google - recently gave a talk on this:
https://youtu.be/1fZTOjd_bOQ?si=BVOxUPjoULhwiclE
The tl;dw is that copying UX lets others invest energy in identifying the paradigm. Linux, which tends to be starved for resources, has historically been reasonably well served by letting Apple and Microsoft define UX, while Linux focuses on implementing it. However, those headlining companies haven't been investing in desktop UX excellence in recent years. It's time for open source projects to embrace experimentation and take the mantle of cutting edge UX, because Apple et. al. aren't paving the way anymore.
I think we need to call it as what it is, half assed design.
Rounded corners are ironically symbolic of the dumbing-down that's affected the software industry. Instead of the sharp precision of 90-degree corners, we get vague curves that don't make sense anymore as though the corners have been worn away.
Maybe I'm too old and every modern computer is a marvel to me, but as someone switching between win/macos/linux all these complaints amuse me. While in windows I'm using powertoys and I can move/resize windows using any space inside a window. It's the same with linux/gnome - a couple of config settings. Then, when I started using macos I looked for a similar solution - found BetterSnapTool and just started using it.
I get your point and think it is a matter of when things are relatively "perfectly" done as in iOS/MacOS, every little anthill seems like an eruption volcano, but let's also not make excuses for some of the rather disgusting issues in Tahoe that Steve Jobs' would have never allowed to ship.
I can't recall them all right off the top of my head, but I waited til 26.2 to update because of all the comments I saw about glitziness, and this resizing issue is just one of the quirks I have noticed are still not resolved; not to mention that my M4 Mac has not crawled and locked up as often as it has since I updated to 26.2. But again, to put it in perspective, that's only been very little hassle compared to what seems to be nothing but misery, suffering, and existential questions suffered by the wretched souls condemned to Windows.
Edit: another issue I have noticed in iOS is that now things like saving bookmarks in Safari is no longer a two step/tap process using long-press, it's a three step/tap process....WHY?? Same with "add to home screen". Also, the long press horizontal context menu (i.e., copy, paste) now does not slide left to reveal more options, it just changes mode to a vertical list. What is going on??? That's sickening...in my opinion. Horizontal, vertical? Pick one.
Second Edit: I just experienced another Tahoe glitch in at least Safari, where hyperlinks become un-clickable and the only way to resolve that is to seemingly restart safari. I don't find that acceptable in Safari of all places.
FWIW: option double click sny corner to make any window full-screen without going into full screen mode.
Double click any side or corner to move it to the edge of the screen, and hold down option to make the effect symmetric.
Ah yes, the classic Apple move of hiding basic functionality behind obscure shortcuts. Thanks for the tip.
Apple is at the point where they need a Jobs-ian correction again.
Steve Jobs would have had a fit over this product line. As '97 era Jobs put it, "The products suck! There's no sex in them anymore!"
My modest proposal for Apple diehards (especially employees) is to feed all the data that exists on Jobs into a multi-modal model so that Apple can hear just how much their shit sucks from Jobs' digital ghost.
A good starting point would be the https://stevejobsarchive.com/
>"The products suck! There's no sex in them anymore!"
Enter "Lickable Pixels" -- the phrase that stuck to describe the Aqua era.
Introducing Mac OS X's Aqua interface, Jobs said at Macworld in January 2000: "We made the buttons on the screen look so good you'll want to lick them."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_(user_interface)
Then there was the red hot irresistibly sexy and well designed IBM Thinkpad TrackPoint -AKA- Keyboard Clitoris -AKA- Joy Button, and IBM's explicitly lascivious "So Hot, We Had To Make It Red" ad.
https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/hodidb/so_hot_we_...
Ted Selker, the inventor of the TrackPoint, told me the story of how that ad got written and refined by focus groups: He slyly suggested the slogan, and IBM's ad designers begrudgingly put it on the page in small text in the corner, below the photo and ad copy. Then they A/B tested it with the text a little bigger, then a bit bolder, then even higher, and it finally worked its way up to the top of the page in BIG HUGE BOLD TEXT!
More about Ted's work:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34425576
Ted Selker fondly reminds me of "Mr. Lossoff" the "Button Man" in "A Nero Wolfe Mystery” episode “The Mother Hunt”, where Archie drops in on "Mister Lossoff’s Distinguished Buttons” in the garment district of New York:
https://youtu.be/h-QgWOSVKm4?t=724
He's totally THAT enthusiastic, a distinguished expert fiendishly obsessed with buttons! He even carries around a big bag of replacement Joy Buttons that he hands out for free like candy to anyone who’s worn theirs out.
I know this from personal experience: Ted and his wife Ellen once ran into me working on my Thinkpad at some coffee shop in Mountain View, and Ted noticed my worn out Joy Button. He excused himself to run out to his car to fetch his Button Bag, while Ellen smiled at me and rolled her eyes up into her head and shrugged, and we hung out and talked until he got back. I really appreciated a nice new crisp one with fresh bumpy texture, because mine was totally worn down, and it made his day to get rid of a few. (I imagine their house has hoards of boxes and piles of bags full of them!)
The common thread: design that makes you come. Back for more, that is. Buttons to lick till they click. Nubs to rub till they're bald. Products you touched obsessively until they're worn smooth. Tahoe gives us clownish corners we can't even grab. Apple dropped the ball -- and frankly, it's a kick in the nuts.
After using Tahoe for a week, I've found I leave it in my bag. Window operations are painful and it feels like a bad try at a tablet os without a stylus or touch screen. Fortunately, my Mac is now the auxiliary laptop and I can do everything I need to do with my linux laptop.
I highly recommend Moves, which makes it possible to resize with a modifier key drag within any part of the window: https://mikkelmalmberg.com/moves
Never noticed this change, but unlike the blogger I never try to grab the window inside the corner. I tend to aim for the edge itself.
Apple really screwed the pooch on this last set of UI upgrades. They have been known as UI experts for decades and then they produced this unusable mess. I’ve upgraded my iPhone and iPad, but I’ve been delaying upgrading MacOS, hoping that they will fix most of the mess before I switch. If I was Tim Cook, I’d be looking for a scalp. This is as bad as the butterfly keyboard mess in terms of usability, IMO.
Of all the Linux features to copy, they chose this.
I actually wish macOS would clone Alt-dragging from anywhere to drag and Alt-right clicking to resize from anywhere from Linux (at least GNOME and KDE Plasma have this built-in). That would certainly solve most of the complaints in the original post.
macOS has Cmd + Ctrl + drag to move windows. Alt + drag seems unlikely given that it's already often used for "copy" actions.
I just tried that on Tahoe (26.2) and it didn't drag the window with Ctrl+Cmd+drag. Is it supposed to work on all windows?
Oddly, the one thing it doesn't work on for me is the main area of the System Preferences window. Everything else I've tried seems to work, though.
KDE doesn't actually suffer from this problem.
Shortly after Windows 10 came out I was joking that Microsoft finally made a Linux distribution (by replicating all the jankiness we usually associate with it).
Now I guess it's Apple's turn.
Wait, they implemented Alt-Drag/Right drag?
I believe the parent is referring to how GNOME 3.0 had some really bad resizing grabs. Single-pixel widths at the edges, and almost impossible to hit corners.
Latter versions significantly improved it.
Has been a major issue for me with Xfce and Gnome over the years, mostly just switched window managers.
Xfce is just ridiculous, it has 1px thin area to grab, and last time I checked they just mentioned you should use alt right click instead.
Sort of! Cmd + Ctrl + drag moves windows now.
Also the resize cursor is completely unreliable, the cursor often doesn't change to the resize one when the mouse is over the correct resize areg. So it's even harder to tell if your cursor is in the right place before clicking. If you click in the wrong place it can have frustrating consequences, like activating another window or even clicking something inside it.
I have had issues with resizing Quick Look windows with their rounded corners on macOS for the last several major versions, well before Tahoe. The resize cursor indicator there also doesn't seem to appear at the correct location for the actual resize handles.
I have been using Rectangle and Spectacle before it. Wanting to resize windows like in this article isn't natural to me anymore.
Just this week it also dawned on me the impracticality of the large corners after twice in a row failing to grab the corner of a window. Tahoe is absolute amateur hour.
This controversy could have been avoided if the GUI changes in Tahoe had been opt-in only. In other words, the Sequoia GUI should have remained the default, with the option of choosing to switch to Liquid Glass.
I thought this was going to talk about the struggle of sizing windows to arbitrary widths. I often try to keep slack and my email windows side by side and Mac OS seems to go out of its way these days to frustrate my efforts and maximize the one window or the other.
The resize corners grab area is also very frustrating though.
I've used Rectangle for years so I can arrange windows more quickly. Not good for arbitrary sizes, more for set positions.
https://rectangleapp.com/
I install Rectangle App on any mac I use. The keybinds are convenient and the auto-sizing/tiling is pleasant as can be.
That's funny. I perceive resizing windows as easier now, because the cursor change is more dramatic when it gets in the resizing area. Pre-Tahoe, the diagonal one in particular looked almost the same, except with an arrow end in the bottom. Now it splits into two triangles.
I still operate off muscle memory, so it's not actually easier or harder, of course.
Yeah the really misleading part of the screenshots in this article is that it doesn't show the "resize cursor", which basically makes this a non issue.
Also, for anyone reading this who hates the general aesthetic, go into Accessibility and hit "reduce transparency". This has been a desirable setting for last few OSX versions.
Seems very clear now that we are going to see touch screen MacBooks. Which is a very silly idea. But explains why the UI "snaps" like an iPad, and everything is designed for touch.
I'm hoping something like this takes off on FreeBSD: https://github.com/gershwin-desktop/gershwin-desktop
I've only owned macbook laptops but have run Linux at work since 2002. The lack of cohesion and non-stop changes in Linux is just as tiring and this MacOS Tahoe stuff. Gnome 3 cared just as little for users. FreeBSD + KDE Plasma is pretty good now, but lacks feeling and design.
that looks like xfce?
I'm on macOS 15.4 on a 2021 M1 Max. I haven't rebooted for months.
Is it possible for me to update to whatever was released just before "Tahoe", or will it just put me on that now?
The era of Apple design with great care to little details is long gone.
I haven’t had to move the mouse near a window corner to resize it in years — I just hold down the Shift and Fn keys and the window under my mouse resizes as I move it. Strongly recommend getting BetterTouchTool for this - changed my life.
I game on windows because of anti cheat software requirements. Windows is garbage. The windows + tab order is never consistent. Not having a good built in shell and don't get me started if you ever have to edit the registry for anything. Super poor experience.
I fully agree, but the winkey + tab order is simply in order of last used, with the most recent being at the upper left and oldest at the lower right.
Unrelated but iOS 26 is so bad and janky that I've finally decided to switch to an android phone. I hate it so much. Thank god I haven't upgraded to Tahoe.
It's obvious, the new Apple UI (and Liquid Glass) is optimized for visionOS, not macOS or iOS.
tribunals
the cherry on top is the delay between the drag start and the window begining to resize
I have been using Moom for a long time for especially two things:
- moving windows without holding from any particular position
- resizing windows without grabbing a particular corner
Life changing small things.
I didn't realize it was moom giving me my "move app to other monitor" hotkey, and moom didn't launch on startup after upgrading to tahoe. I've been using that hotkey for years.
That's when I realized there's no default hotkey for moving an app to an external monitor. That is absolutely wild. (Happy to be wrong)
I think there is an option in Keyboard Shortcuts to set a keybinding for moving to other displays, but it‘s not by default like in Windows.
For this kind of stuff Raycast is more than enough though. I use its window management features extensively.
All that 'glass' eye candy is a sheer sign that looks is more important to Apple than usability. And I don't even care for how it looks.
The iOS compass redesign is particularly egregious
I think you meant the Measure app, but yes. I hate it so much.
Who asked for those rounded windows anyway? They create so many problems; every app has its own border-radius, and it wastes precious screen space...
Those big radius borders are a waste of space just for the sake of fashion. Form follows function not the other way around.
> Since upgrading to macOS Tahoe, I’ve noticed that quite often my attempts to resize a window are failing.
That should nudge users away from this rather primitive method of window resizing using tiny 19px corners and instead set up a productivity app where your can use the full 33% of the window size (so conveniently huge! and of course customizable) to resize via an extra trigger (for example, using a modifier key)
(nice plate picture joke!)
I set up Raycast (https://www.raycast.com/) with the same keybinds as Magnet (https://magnet.crowdcafe.com/) because I learned those first and haven't looked back.
"I need to resize my window."
"You shouldn't need this."
Its not a great update and hopefully with Dye out they will make some changes, but personally I don't have this issue.
Do you mean you don't observe the same thing? Or that it doesn't cause you difficulty?
I observe the same thing but it doesn't cause me difficulty. I think I more or less aim for the edge, vs the inside or outside.
Also, the cursor changes
Most of the Tahoe and Liquid Glass related gripes are overstated or sometimes just against the idea of changing anything well-established
I disagree. I generally don't get too upset by UI changes - having been programming since before Windows I've seen many of them - but LG is a loser.
I upgraded my mac to Tahoe and I don't like any change to the UI that I have noticed.
I upgraded my phone the other day, thinking it was just an update to whatever it already had, and ended up with LG on there and it is a disaster. I enabled the 'more opaque' feature and it did almost nothing.
LG is an awful experiment IMO. I'd put it at worse than Vista (which I skipped) and Gnome 3 which didn't bother me because I don't expect anything from linux desktops. I also skipped Windows 8 so not sure about the ranking there. But I'd say it's that level of disaster.
That's genuine 2000s Linux experience there. Ironic that these days Linux provides a more refined and consistent UX than both MacOS and Windows.
I’ve been more and more confused by Apple’s product positioning for MacOS. They still have a sizeable “pro” market that spans across a very aspirational set of careers: Film, YouTubers, developers, photographers, artists, musicians, etc.
Considering how many people only buy a MacBook PRO no matter what they plan on doing with it, they really need to keep the actual salary-earning pros happy with it or else it’ll lose all credibility. A Mac in a recording booth has a look to it that sells well, but that aesthetic won’t last if you stop seeing them. Being an effective tool for the pro minority should honestly be the priority for MacOS, even at the cost of making it incongruous from iPadOS/iOS. *
* disclaimer: what do I know honestly haha, I’m sure they’ll print money anyway.
Question for people who have installed Tahoe. Of the regions in the article, which bring window focus / key window? Is it area clipped to the round rect? Or is it similarly weird?
If there was a background window in that area outside the corner, would it receive the click event?
> Of the regions in the article, which bring window focus
Just did a quick test in a VM, and it seems all of them. I.e. if you could resize the window, clicking that space (even if empty) brings it into focus. But then I also tested on Sequoia and the same happens.
It seems then that basically everything remained the same except for the visual presentation of the corner.
Thanks for going to the effort!
> everything remained the same except for the visual presentation of the corner
This either seems very well-researched change, or very shallow one.
>It seems then that basically everything remained the same except for the visual presentation of the corner.
Which just goes to show how holistic design is utterly lacking. They seem to think just swapping bitmaps is "UI redesign".
Aerospace is the answer :)
I wish I found out about it earlier. Aerospace is a tiling window manager for MacOS. As someone who prefers keyboard navigation over mouse navigation, I can't recommend it enough.
yabai too! I have fn + right-click set to resize window under cursor
Yep, came here to say this. It's the only thing that makes macos useable.
Apple's window management has always sucked, with the absurdly crippled resizing being a longstanding embarrassment.
Into the 2000s, the only way you could resize a window on the Mac was to drag its lower-right corner. That is it. NO other corner, and no edge. So if the lower-right corner happened to be off-screen because the window was bigger than the screen, you were kind of screwed. You had to fiddle with the maximize & restore gumdrops to trick the OS into resizing the window to make that ONE corner accessible. Then you had to move the corner, then roll all the way up to the title bar and move the window, then roll back down to the corner... until you had the window sized and positioned as you wanted.
When Apple grudgingly added proper window-resizing, it made it as obscure as possible. Since Apple remains ignorant of the value of window FRAMES, there is no obvious zone within which the resizing cursor should take effect. There is no visual target for the user. This has always made an important and fundamental part of a windowed GUI a ridiculous pain in the ass on Macs.
And as the author here notes, it has gotten even worse. Not only will the window often refuse to resize, but you'll wind up activating whatever app lies behind the window you're trying to resize... hiding the one you were dealing with.
This 100%
Please please please make this better Apple. Or just give us an option for square windows.
Windows is following the same path. In both it’s getting harder and harder to tell the window boundary and where to drag it resize.
Idk. I don’t resize windows with the mouse at all. I use the key bindings to move to a tile position or fill screen.
I almost always never use a mouse for more than maybe moving a tab to another window.
So I am wondering, are people fighting using a Mac in the most effective way simply because of old patterns and habits?
Maybe you don't use the mouse because it just doesn't work as expected? ;)
> So I am wondering, are people fighting using a Mac in the most effective way simply because of old patterns and habit
"Most effective" doesn't mean "most intuitive". I don't want to learn keyboard shortcuts just to move or resize a window. That's the entire premise of graphical user interfaces.
What if your needs aren't as simple and you want to increase the size just a bit to fit more text than the tile permits and you don't want to waste the whole screen for that?
That omelette does look delicious though.
Let's be honest, everything windows on macOS is and always has been an utter cluster fuck.
Steve Jobs would never have let this ship.
>Living on this planet for quite a few decades, I have learned that it rarely works to grab things if you don’t actually touch them:
Yes, but that is skeuomorphic design, which is old and ugly. We live in the era of anti-skeuomorphic design, where nothing makes any sense but it looks sleek.
Tahoe is a nightmare. I’m Literally not buying a new Mac because of it.
Dye destroyed macOS. I don’t know what they do, but they have to backtrack.
I started with an Apple Lisa. I’ve never enjoyed Apple products less than I do right now. And there were some rough days in the 90s! I switched from a AW Ultra 3 to a Garmin. Considering an S26 because of the semi-matte screen. The Mac, though, I probably can’t replace, but man Tahoe/Liquid Glass sucks.
I would highly recommend Magnets to anyone users who prefer shortcuts anyway: https://magnet.crowdcafe.com/
I don’t have this issue at all. I have a very generous amount of space to grab the corner with and it changes mouse pointer to the diagonal arrow.
Edit: despite all the negative feedback, I’m quite happy with Tahoe and I enjoy the visual changes. I think some of the subtler changes is more intuitive and Spotlight’s improvement is quite nice.
I agree it makes using my computer worse, but I'd like to see how far Apple is willing to go here.
They won't do perfectly circular windows, that would be crazy— but I think we all know they can go further than this.
From "Safari 15 on Mac OS, a user interface mess" https://morrick.me/archives/9368 from 5 years ago:
--- start quote ---
The utter user-interface butchery happening to Safari on the Mac is once again the work of people who put iOS first. People who by now think in iOS terms. People who view the venerable Mac OS user interface as an older person whose traits must be experimented upon, plastic surgery after plastic surgery, until this person looks younger. Unfortunately the effect is more like this person ends up looking… weird.
These people look at the Mac’s UI and (that’s the impression, at least) don’t really understand it. Its foundations come from a past that almost seems inscrutable to them. Usability cues and features are all wrinkles to them. iOS and iPadOS don’t have these strange wrinkles, they muse. We must hide them. We’ll make this spectacular facelift and we’ll hide them, one by one. Mac OS will look as young (and foolish, cough) as iOS!
--- end quote ---
At the time it was only Safari that they wanted to "modernize". Now it's the full OS.
I will never update to tahoe. if it becomes forced I'll switch to linux idgaf
Darkest before the dawn
Dawn of the year of the Linux desktop!
Another thing to add to the list of reasons why I'm not upgrading.
Imagine Steve Jobs allowing this to happen.
This is so simple.
This makes me angry.
i haven't resized a window with a mouse in almost a decade
Curious, how do you resize windows instead?
On windows at least, I almost always use 'alt+space; x' to maximise windows, as well as winkey+left/right/up/down, which is really the only resizing I do. Having to use the mouse is a pain.
....with a keyboard? on macos I use Rectangle, on linux I just use the built-in resizing keyboard shortcuts
"I downloaded a separate application to make resizing windows easier" is not a point in favor of MacOS's window resizing decisions.
I use rectangle on my mac for window resizing and generally keep most windows in the sizes that come by default with that.