I don't mind how Liquid Glass looks at all. It's just insane how buggy the system has become. Even Messages will bug out, like deleting my first word if I type too fast after opening a conversation or auto scrolling and not letting me scroll down until I exit and re-enter.
Unacceptable for the premium you pay for Apple software. Unacceptable for any software one is paying for. I hope they get their shit together and start fixing before they continue adding new stuff. 26.2 doesn't inspire me that they're on that trajectory.
The thing that amazes me most is that everyone on the teams responsible is probably using their Apple devices and running into these same bugs!
>I don't mind how Liquid Glass looks at all.
I do, and the fact that it isn't even optional is crazy.
Windows Vista vibes where they first looked at what the could technically pull off on todays' hardware. And mind you: Liquid Glass is very impressive!.
It's just not necessary.
Although outright opt-out isn't possible, it seems like heading to Accessibility -> Motion -> Reduce Motion (on) and Prefer Cross-Fade Transitions (On) reduces the effect.
I'm not sure if this reduces the buggy artifacts though.
Who decided things that slide in place need to jiggle like jello?!
I've been describing it as if the ui has been covered in corn syrup; like it has been drizzled in a slow and sticky and slightly blurry layer of transparent obfuscation.
I don’t mind Liquid Glass either to be honest. I kind of like it even. I also completely agree regarding software quality, which is abysmal (I am sufficiently aware of the internals of a lot of things on macOS to know most of the time why it’s like this, but it’s still unacceptable).
I'll bite. Why is it like this (in your opinion of course)?
Indeed - the system as a whole is starting to feel bloated. Today’s macOS design is akin to the cosmetic mufflers/exhaust pipes in cars, which serve only to justify the “Sport” badge. I long for the days past.
It's felt bloated for a while. Everytime I setup a new Mac I have to remove all of the icons from the doc. A new Dell isn't that bloated.
This is my shining moment! I just happened to setup a new Dell. It was far more cumbersome than dealing with a new Mac.
Here's some of the stuff I had to do on my new Dell, from memory:
- Uninstall all the bloatware apps that come installed with Windows 11. They nag and beg you not to uninstall them, but after several prompts, they mostly seem uninstalled?
- Remove the trial offers from the Start menu.
- Remove the third-party stub apps from the Start menu (eg. TikTok).
- Remove the O365 stub apps.
- Remove the McAfee antivirus payware.
- Remove Dell SupportAssist from the laptop.
- Then, just reinstall Windows 11 from scratch, because of all the remaining detritus left after performing the above steps. And uninstalling SupportAssist caused some instability and weird errors upon login.
- Uninstall all the bloatware apps the come installed with Windows 11 again.
- Remove the trial offers from the Start menu.
- Remove the third-party stub apps from the Start menu (eg. TikTok).
- Remove the O365 stub apps.
Compared to on my Mac:
- Remove apps from the Dock
- Go into /Applications and uninstall about 6 Apple apps I don't use.
> a new Dell isn’t that bloated.
At least a new Mac doesn’t try to serve you ads in the app launcher.
A new ${computer_brand} with Linux doesn't show you any ads, doesn't add more bloat than you let it, doesn't insist on you creating any iCloudy or Microsofty accounts, doesn't try to police what software you run on the thing, doesn't try to upsell you to some ${precious_metal} plan, doesn't insist your 5 year new computer is obsolete, doesn't spy on you, etcetera.
What are you waiting for?
Oh I 100% agree, but what consumer-grade Dell comes with Linux out of the box?
Proper sleep.
what about iCloud and News?
I was specifically referring to ads for third party applications in the start menu, so you’re technically correct and I should have been more specific. I’d argue that those are upsells for the OS to enhance existing apps and systems. Not my favorite, but preferable to windows telling me to install candy crush in the start menu.
It is akin to some military operations doomed to fail, and everyone ends up dying because of the chain of command no one is willing to speak against.
That is how the current chaos feels like.
Apple employees should have kidnapped Alan Dye from his office and deposited him on Facebook's doorstep wrapped up in a straightjacket with ribbons and a bow years ago before he finally left voluntarily.
Like the Hong-Kong guy in The Dark Knight!
Using Dye as a scapegoat feels like cope. The rest of the executives were fully content with this effort, and in the end he wasn't even forced out. There's no evidence that Apple will correct its course without him.
> The rest of the executives were fully content with this effort, and in the end he wasn't even forced out
Tim Cook, by all accounts, can be very micromanaging and demanding when it comes to logistics underlings, but has been extremely hands-off with all his other underlings, doesn't insert himself into their loops or require his approval, doesn't decide by decree like Jobs which forces underlings to fight the bureaucracy on their own, leaves them to resolve conflicts among themselves on their own. He treats Apple like a machine or system where his role is to keep things running smoothly.
It's not "the rest of the executives", that's how Cook's Apple is run. Reportedly.
I agree that it’s a mark of shame that he left voluntarily, but I do think a lot of this traces back to Apple being more of a hardware company at heart. Jony Ive pulled off some industrial design which looked really nice and I think his history there meant that when he promoted the packaging designer to be in charge of UI people gave it too much credence, forgetting that Jony Ive also wasn’t experienced in that area and, as the history of UX botches shows, was about as good at it as a software developer would be at winging hardware design. People who’ve been successful at one thing just aren’t guaranteed to be successful somewhere else and loyalty to the company shouldn’t overshadow that.
Sort of in agreement here.
In-between not paying attention to general software quality and not voicing concern, Craig Federigi should not get a free pass.
In-between kissing the boots of Kings, and dining with Murderers, and posting AI slop on Twitter, Tim Cook ought to have been more involved.
There is enough blame to pass around at Apple today among the leadership, but the specific shitty UI buck stops with Dye. Dye is putting his signature on it and is the face of the Liquid Glass demo, if he wants the primary fame, he can have the primary blame.
Yes, there is: Lemay, who replaced him, is a career UI guy.
Regardless of whether the C-suite recognized the problem or made a conscious decision to replace Dye with Lemay, it is likely that this outcome will, indeed, result in improved UI.
I've had similar observations with different behaviors in Safari and Finder. One would think the quality of Apple's software would be increasing with the usage of Swift over Objective-C, but the opposite seems to be true.
Spotlight is also slow and buggy now, on an M3 Pro no less. I loathe the feeling of being faster than my computer and having to wait for it to catch up, something that I haven't felt since the M1 came out.
This was my last straw that caused me to disable Spotlight:
Typing something into Spotlight, having it pull up the right result and highlight it, and me hitting the Enter key, and the search results suddenly updating after and highlighting some new result and then opening that instead.
It’s not just Liquid Glass. It’s bugs like these where I realized Apple software was truly rotten to the core. Whomever is running the show (Craig) can’t do their job.
I’m now noticing the same bug in the latest versions of Windows 11 when I hit the start button and run a search.
This was a solved computer science problem.
Apple software used to exhibit reasonable UX for “edge cases” just like the one you described. This was one of my main reasons for going Mac — they cared about the details. Sad to see that seems to be going away.
It seems to be that these things never last, as company culture inevitably changes.
The updating input locations under your cursor in particular is so f*ing frustrating.
To be fair, it's not just macOS, but many webpages which load dynamic content as well.
That laggy behavior plus indexing not appearing to find some obvious files made me switch to Raycast.
Raycast looks really cool, thanks
Swift was the worst thing that happened to Mac OS, because we’re now suffering second system syndrome.
I completely agree. I saw the writing on the wall the moment they started boosting swiftUI as a UI library of the future where it was only half done and not even compatible with existing frameworks.
There are like a half-dozen blatant bugs I encounter between daily and weekly in Safari. Text input and textarea editing is buggy in a couple ways, Apple Pay has a positioning bug where sometimes its bottom button is about 1/3 off the screen, certain elements on a couple pages smear when I scroll (but only sometimes). Not even counting ways the keyboard itself is worse now.
I haven’t seen browsing this buggy outside weird niche Linux browsers in… 15+ years?
I’ve highly preferred Safari on Mac OS for a very long time- the bugs and memory leaks are forcing me to Firefox at this point, it’s completely unusable on the betas I’ve been driving lately in the hope they fix the previous bugs.
My issues with Safari have mostly been iCloud-related. The latest one being the iCloud tabs SQLlite database getting corrupted constantly and keeping stale tabs around that I have long closed. 26.2 seems to have fixed it, but it was around at least since Sonoma. I've had similar issues with Reading List, where again, the database gets corrupted and changes that I've made to Reading List get reverted. It is just little stuff like this that adds up and creates poor UX.
What's also telling is how long the bugs stayed around, too. They were reported on Reddit and Apple's forums for awhile with various workarounds, like deleting the phantom entries from the SQLlite database manually and doing some other gymnastics like removing the other devices from iCloud in hopes that everything would sync up nicely. No one at Apple had the time or took the time to chase down the bugs. In a world of Claude Code or Codex you would think they would have at least tried a cursory "fix this".
On a related note, maybe one of these days iCloud will have a force sync option that tells the other devices to trash their copies vs having to remove all devices and re-add to get everything coherently synced.
I gave up on the normal iCloud tabs for over a decade now. But the Safari Tab Groups implementation is by far the best I've used. If I need to share a window, I just open it in a tab group and those have synced flawlessly for me so far.
If you switch Safari’s tab bar mode to bottom (i.e. restoring the sort-of-one-touch controls that existed before iOS 26), textareas become utterly and completely broken. It’s almost impossible to reply to an HN message, for example.
This bug is so blatant that I assumed my would have been fixed by now, but no.
Maybe the sharper edges of objective-C lead to a programming practice that was more careful, which has been abandoned under the impression of Swift's increase default safety.
I think parts of Liquid Glass on macOS looks pretty bad. But I don't care that much about how things look, so it doesn't offend me.
What does offend me are all the bugs, as you say. It's still utterly broken all these months after the public release. Spotlight is a mess; I've seen it take DAYS before it has made an app in '/Applications' findable through search (even as the app shows up in Spotlight's long scrollable list of apps), and the animation where it comes in as a result of the four finger gesture has so many bugs I won't go through them all here. The most annoying is that it can end up in a state where Spotlight is not on screen, but you need to do the "make Spotlight go away" gesture before the "make Spotlight appear" gesture works again. It also often loads icons slowly; sometimes loading them in one by one over time, sometimes all at once after thinking for a second. It's arguably better from a UX design perspective than Launchpad was, but Launchpad was so much more polished and better performing.
There's also just constant minor graphical glitches. Things which pop in, things which load in with the wrong background color, that sort of stuff. The Settings app sometimes loads in stuff gradually and parts of the app jump around for a second before it settles, like a bad web app. It feels janky.
Mac OS X used to feel like a solid operating system. It has been going downhill for a while, but macOS 26 is the biggest leap in a long time.
> It also often loads icons slowly; sometimes loading them in one by one over time, sometimes all at once after thinking for a second.
This is frequent, if not constant, on iOS for me. I never witnessed it before the 26 update.
How can it take an entire second or more to display an icon in list in the settings application? It was literally a solved problem for every iOS version I've ever used.
> I think parts of Liquid Glass on macOS looks pretty bad. But I don't care that much about how things look, so it doesn't offend me.
I don't care overmuch about the purely cosmetic side of it, but Liquid Glass looks absolutely terrible from an ergonomics point of view. It's just plainly, objectively bad UX.
Tip: in accessibility , enable High Contrast and disable transparency. Optionally disable animations. Decent experience imo. I can now see what areas are clickable.
Nb I see tons of rendering bugs across a bunch of apps and I suspect it’s because I disabled as much animation and transparency as I could. Things like the keyboard opening slightly off the screen to the right then jumping into place, some apps going black when certain overlays are open, stuff like that.
I did basically that on my iPhone. My laptop was needing a cleanup, so I just wiped it and re-installed Sequoia. the Mac Studio never got the upgrade at all. If at some point I find there's something in Tahoe that I particularly need, I'll revisit upgrading.
Doing a fresh install of Sequoia was the best move for me, too. I had an unnecessary amount of third party apps installed for no reason. I don't even use Ice for the menu bar anymore, I realized the icons that I had hidden I didn't need in the first place so I completely disabled them, in whichever apps it's possible.
> But I don't care that much about how things look, so it doesn't offend me.
So I'm guessing you use some default Mac editor (Xcode?)? You don't change your color scheme, you don't change your font, etc?
Aside: Software devs are very weird, they spend all this time crafting their dev setup and but when it comes to their OS they just give up and whatever Tim Cook feeds them their in. Makes no sense. Anyway, off to Linux land. See ya'll!
My IDE provides 98% of the pixels on my screen and provides 90% of the overall experience. That’s why it gets all the attention. If the OS is able to show my IDE on one screen and a web browser and UNIXy terminal on the other, it’s working.
So you don't use the built-in Terminal? What about Finder, Safari, Mail, Spotlight, System Settings, etc? If someone doesn't care about how they look, they should use all the built-in stuff right?
This year I've had to perform many hard resets on my MacBook, iPhone and even Apple Watch because they've locked up. And they're all relatively new devices. Apple needs to get its shit together. I already expect to move away from their mobile ecosystem when it comes time to upgrade.
I recently upgraded (downgraded?) from an iPhone 15PM to a smaller iPhone 17P, and I have found myself wondering if I got a glitchy piece of hardware or if it's just iOS 26 bugs. I hardly had any problems with the previous phone, but on the 17 it's pretty routine that I have to close apps (including native Apple ones) which have become non-responsive. Frustrating, for sure.
Nope, that's iOS (I'm on a 16 Pro). I routinely have apps I can switch into but are entirely dead. They're not chewing CPU cycles, the phone is "cold". But very much so.
So very frustrated.
the one I've noticed being the worst for lock ups is the camera / photos app, which is frankly very surprising given how central the photography usecase appears to be to iPhone sales and therefore Apple's bottom line.
I'm talking, I pull up the camera and try to take literally 4-5 shots quickly and by the 6th there's what feels like seconds of lag between the button press and the photo being taken.
It feels like I'm using an ancient camera phone, or a more modern phone but in extreme heat when the CPU is just throttling everything. But instead, this is a 2 year old iPhone at room temperature.
Interesting, likewise, the Camera app. And other camera apps, I use Halide too.
And Photos. Will it sync? Yes. When? Who the fuck knows? Doesn't matter whether you're on Ethernet or Wifi, gigabit internet. You can quit Photos on both devices, you can then keep Photos open foreground... so what? Photos will sync when it wants to, not what when you want it to.
you're right! The photo syncing is comically bad, again given the alleged importance of photos in the Apple marketing material. That said I've rarely used it in the past and so wasn't sure if it was a newly degraded experience or had always been that poor.
It's Apple itself that needs a hard reset. Maybe if we all at the same time collectively hold our power buttons down for sixty seconds, Apple Park will reboot.
> The thing that amazes me most is that everyone on the teams responsible is probably using their Apple devices and running into these same bugs!
This is what surprises me the most to be honest. CarPlay seemingly still suffers from a (sometimes deadly) issue of covering the entire map on your dashboard with the avatar/number of the person calling, so if you're actively using it for navigation (since, you know, there is a map there and all) someone calling you is a highly stressful moment and more than not you need to hang up because otherwise the call is in the way.
I've had my iPhone 12 Mini for so many years now, and this is still an issue, the only conclusion I can take from this is that people at Apple actually all have Android phones.
The Apple release schedule is unremitting. We know that bugs are reported to Apple by developers, and we know that reported bugs get ignored for years, or forever. I suspect that every Apple engineer has a mountain of bugs in their queue.
If Apple leadership doesn't care about software quality, then Apple engineers can't care about software quality. They use the same buggy crap that we do, because they have no choice.
Often it is that people who use the devices learn how to work around bugs and then they forget they exist.
There is also subconscious resistance to create an action that will uncover a bug and then remind of personal failure.
Then once whole teams get used to this, it's not possible to get it fixed as it gets deprioritised always.
I agree with bugs, you can't even scroll through settings with touchpad without permanently enabling scroll bars.
> Unacceptable for the premium you pay for Apple software. Unacceptable for any software one is paying for.
You don't pay anything for the software, so the quality matches
Funny, last time I used macos there were so many annoyances and every suggestion was to use some paid third party app. I finally caved and used hammerspoon to write everything I needed myself.
You pay for it in lots of ways, including an obscene premium on minor hardware upgrades, not to mention you have to buy their hardware to even use the software itself.
This is not an argument that works for the company proudly pairing hardware and software as their core business.
I have these insane bugs where my apple tv will connect to my mbp even tho my mbp has blutooth disabled. I'll be listening to a podcast on my mbp with airpods while my wife is watching some show on the apple tv. It will still randomly connect to my airpods when my wife never tries to connect them.
Apple is quickly becoming a trash company and we're seeing the effects of an industry writ large when you only hire leetcode monkeys.
I think for the first time I’ve been considering moving off iOS because of liquid glass. The bugs on apple products have hit a breaking point for me. Mac is still unequivocally the best laptop around imho, but it’s less clear cut for phones. My iPhone 15 pro is borderline unusable. Every day is a new issue. I’m very much over it.
You used to be able to count on the basics working smoothly, but stuff like the camera and messaging are frequently broken for me
I recently switched from a 13 Mini to a Motorola Razr and wow Android is so much nicer than iOS. Notifications don't randomly disappear on Android, I have a Back button, and I can use real Firefox!
As an Android user since the T-Mobile G1, I tried switching to an iPhone 15 Pro as my primary phone from a carrier deal as the hardware looked nice plus Android/iOS has converged so much over the years with all the same apps available on either. I was pretty used to iOS from iPads and as a backup phone so the switching costs were minimal and the better MacOS integration seemed cool.
But man, the notifications are a constant thorn in my side. I have missed so many work notifications due to the lack of persistent notification indicator (other than on the lock screen), and the overall weirdness of iOS lockscreen notification panel (segmentation between "old" notifications that can be mass dismissed and "new" notifications that pile up individually-ish). I use an Apple Watch and somehow still miss Teams notifications as they come in, I'm not even sure how that happens...
I'm so close to abandoning the iPhone as my main phone and going back to my S23 Ultra pretty much entirely because of notifications, it's been a disappointment...
I've recently been using an Android phone a family member gave me after they upgraded and to my shock it's...fantastic? It's not at all like I remember Android from back in the early Android days.
Android has frequently been ahead of Apple in terms of features for years at this point. But Apple's overall "ecosystem" is (or was) much more cohesive, so everything felt very Apple, while Android's has (for better or worse) been something of a wild west situation; and iPhone's have excellent cameras. If you go with a flagship Android phone, though, you're now getting an equally good camera (if not better in some cases) and the benefit of Android's more freedom, in relative terms of course.
NA seems to really fixate on the luxury and social significer aspect of having an iphone though. But I think this update is finally ending that for some people. I have many friends who were diehard iPhone users that are now thinking of moving to Android. There's also a growing sense that new gens of most phones are making only marginal advances. Keeping a phone for 3 or more years is much more common and some mid-tier phones are now getting long security and update commitments.
> NA seems to really fixate on the luxury and social significer aspect of having an iPhone though
I have yet to experience that. The biggest reason I have mostly stayed with iPhones over the years was because the tight integration with my MBP was useful, and iMessage is way better than SMS.
RCS helps even out the playing field a bunch, but just about the time that went mainstream I hear that it's a regular source of trouble for everyone (Android an iPhone both) because the carriers suck. And Apple did at least finally add some equivalence for one of the Android features I had wanted (call screening).
Teenagers supposedly care. But I've never seen adults who care in the least what kind of phone someone has.
> I think this update is finally ending that for some people.
For some people in the HN social sphere, maybe. My sisters have had iPhones since they were first released in the naughties. They used to make fun of me for using Android and then Windows Phones (I'm on iOS now). The notion that my sisters would ever switch over to Android is risible; they don't care about phones "making advances" or having "security commitments." They care about iMessage, TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat.
There are no other phones that are not iPhones for them. The blue/green gap is real.
Dunno man, I’ve used Android recently and it’s still as bafflingly confusing and crappy as I remember it being.
Definitely an “to each their own” kind of situation.
If you want to see daily bugs on top of it: disable animations in accessibility. Constant, 10x-daily-or-more issues in system UI (apps are surprisingly much better normally). E.g. it has partly or completely broken the recent app switching for the past 4 major versions so far, especially if you use a non-stock launcher.
I still prefer it over iOS due to being able to install stuff outside of the Play Store. If/when Google kills that, I'll be switching to a Linux mobile something. (I'm aware of the verification nonsense, but that isn't in place yet, and it has been shifting a bit)
I think that is what you get used to. I've been using Android for over a decade and my wife's iPhone is super confusing to me.
I had (the same) Samsung android phone from 2017-2025. I bought an iPhone, mainly because of privacy concerns (for which I consider apple to be the least bad mainstream option, not good).
But I couldn’t get over how bad the ux is compared to my 7 year old phone. Things like highlighting, autocorrect, placing the cursor where you want “just don’t work”, the setup is unintuitive, the hotspot doesn’t work half the time, there are bugs (like email not connecting) that based on my searches are prevalent and have no solution “did you try updating and restarting”. I really couldn’t believe how bad it is.
But evidently people really like them, and I imagine they could find things not to like about my old Samsung, so to each his own I guess.
> Things like highlighting, autocorrect, placing the cursor where you want “just don’t work”
Hilariously, those things actually did work back in 2017, and Apple has since broken all of them in various OS updates
Yeah that's the joke. 10 years ago all of this basic stuff was working well. Now, autocorrect and cursor placement regularly make me want to chuck the phone into a chipper shredder.
I've had an iPhone since 2009 and feel they have gotten much more confusing over time.
It seems to be there has been some sort of internal conflict between the need to add basic functionality to be remotely comparable with Android, and the desire to keep everything "simple". The end result being a kind of a worst case of neither being especially featureful nor all that simple. There's a cottage industry of apps that exploit users' lack of understanding of their own device's capabilities (e.g. flashlight apps with ads + in-app purchases).
That’s a good observation, I think you’re right.
Yep, my parents are both Android users and have to ask "where is the home button" when someone passes them an iPhone.
> ask "where is the home button" when someone passes them an iPhone.
This is actually hilarious because Android had all-screen phones with only virtual buttons long before iPhones did :)
iOS UX-affordance has done an incredible reversal from "one of the best" to "unambiguously the worst" over the years :| it's stunningly unapproachable nowadays, and Android seems excited to follow them
Followed by “where is the back button.”
Answer: sometimes apps let you swipe right from the left margin, sometimes there may be a left arrow in the upper left, but it may not be visible unless you enable tinted Liquid Glass, but also look in the bottom left, there may be a less-than sign, and some times you have to force-quit the app and restart (like with Libby books borrowed via Kindle…)
You mean the “roulette-wheel do-something-vaguely-backish” button?
I can't remember the last time I've encountered an app that didn't let you swipe to go back. That's practically built into iOS at this point.
Does apply still sometimes put the back button in the top left?
That used to drive me nuts especially as they grew the phone to size 5+ inches
Things like media playback via a web browser (and really browsing in general) are so superior to iOS it's not even a fair comparison.
Fair if you haven't looking at it in a while but they have largely been on par for a decade.
The Apple hardware is more consistently premium of course but if you compare the Samsung Galaxy whatever with the iphone they have been pretty close for a while. The entire industry has been in incremental innovation for a long time.
I'm not the biggest fan of Liquid Glass, but I regularly use Android via single-use tablets and dev test devices and I think I dislike Material 3 Expressive even more. M3E feels weirdly awkward and unrefined and it's a struggle to come up with a color scheme that looks right. It would be a constant irritation if Android were my daily driver.
I’m actually glad because it seems like we are finally leaving behind the flat design that started in iOS 7, if I remember correctly. I’m not sure it would be good to go full skeuomorphic but at least a button looks more like a button again
Liquid Glass appears to be the culmination of the Alan Dye era at Apple, where UI terms like "radio buttons" were derided as "programmer talk".
https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job
Thankfully he has now left. Things could hopefully pick up again usability-wise within 2-3 years.
The worrying thing is that his departure seems in no way like a consequence of his terrible job. He wasn't squeezed out by upper management, he left because Meta made him a better offer. I'm sure Apple's software quality will go up now that he's gone and his replacement is allegedly liked by Apple's competent UX people who disliked Dye; but Cook clearly doesn't recognise the problems, lest he'd have planned to get rid of Dye by now.
It’s honestly hard to tell from outside - execs at that level are very rarely fired. They tend to be asked politely to find something new to do with their time
They also tend to not be featured very prominently on a huge product launch event while in the process of "finding something new to do with their time". If he's actually being squeezed out, that process must've started after the public launch of iOS 26.
EDIT: though I guess you could also read it as, iOS 26 had come too far to stop it, so they let Dye be the visible face of it so that he'd be the fall guy and the next guy would get the credits for fixing it... I don't know, I guess we don't really have enough info to speculate one way or the other
I’d also believe that he was able to ride his past reputation and his sponsor’s memory enough to get the commitment to ship Liquid Glass, but that gamble blew up once most reviews revolve around how they’ll probably make it less bad in an update. Apple values keeping users on current releases and this is the first one where so many experienced users and fans have been advising people to hold back. I think Dye knows he had enough capital to bull the release through but not to recover from making the story about the release about his shortcomings.
I'm hopefully optimistic that he can destroy Meta in less time than that!
I just hope that my current Mac keeps being usable long enough that Liquid Glass has been fixed or replaced entirely by the time I'm forced to upgrade to whatever's shipping on my next computer.
My kid dumped a glass of water all over my MBP M1 a few days ago. Deciding between an inferior M4 with Sequoia or a fancy new M5 with Tahoe has been rough :/
If it helps, I've been using XFCE since 2007 and it's remained functionally identical for all of those almost 20 years. It just works, it improves a tiny bit with each major upgrade, and they don't rearrange everything every couple years for the sake of justifying a salary.
Maybe it's a good opportunity to consider whether you actually have to keep running on Apple's treadmill.
I’d love an XFCE (or even gnome tbh) environment on a properly built laptop, unfortunately only Apple is able to build something that works in all areas that matter: sleeps when lid closed, wakes when lid opens, touchpad and display don’t suck.
> unfortunately only Apple is able to build something that works in all areas that matter: sleeps when lid closed, wakes when lid opens, touchpad and display don’t suck
In my case I'd add:
- Chassis that doesn't flex like crazy
- Battery life good enough that I typically don't need to think about AC outlet accessibility
- Can sit in standby for upwards of a week without battery drain forcing it to shut down
- Is inaudible except when maxing out CPU or GPU for several minutes
- Has a screen panel with a resolution that's either 1x or 2x UI scaling native
The number of laptops in the market that check these boxes is disappointingly tiny.
FWIW that all worked out of the box for me on my Intel Framework. But yes, it's fair to say there are tradeoffs for each solution. Maybe Apple's cons are getting big enough these days. Worth considering.
I have an oled thinkpad running fedora that has never had a sleep issue. Excellent touchpad as well. Thinkpad X1 Carbon.
For me the touchpad experience is not just about the hardware. I got a Magic Trackpad for my Linux desktop hoping that it would at least be somewhat comparable to my MacBook. But scrolling and gestures are nowhere near as consistent and fluid as in macOS since the software support just isn't there.
As a fairly typical example, getting Firefox on Linux to actually scroll smoothly takes googling and fiddling with settings. Gesture support is hit or miss. On macOS, Firefox behaves just like any other native app in this regard.
Firefox on Fedora on X1 Carbon and scrolling just works. Maybe it was different in the past.
If you “fling” the page, lift your fingers off, and then tap with two fingers, does the page come to a stop?
This was a few weeks ago. IIRC, the issue with Firefox was not that it didn't scroll but that the scrolling wasn't inertial unless you changed some settings.
My Magic Trackpad feels more consistent on Linux, Force Touch notwithstanding.
I have a thinkpad p1 with popos, but it doesn’t sleep properly. Closing the lid causes it to be super active. I have to lay it down up side down so the ventilation gaps are not blocked, otherwise it overheats. Burned one SSD this way.
Which version? I have a X1 Carbon from, uhh, 2017? It supports S3 sleep. I'd think about an upgrade, if only I wasn't worried about sleep issues. I run Debian if that makes any difference.
Actually now that I think about it, my visceral reaction is one of dread: a feeling the trouble will be more than the benefit of a new computer.
> all areas that matter: sleeps when lid closed, wakes when lid opens, touchpad and display don’t suck.
All of these seem to be fine on my thinkpad (true, I probably have somewhat lower standards for passable display). Battery life sucks a bit, what I can usually fine outlet somewhat to plug into.
I’ve combined my MacBook with a Linux desktop for about five years now. Linux has its pros as a developer, but IMHO daily driving it is like walking around with pebbles in my shoes.
Something as basic as scrolling feels slightly inconsistent in just about every app and keybindings are all over the place. There’s always the allure of getting the config ”just right” but after a while I swear I start seeing Sisyphus’ reflection in my screen.
What DE are you using? Some of the higher profile ones (Gnome, KDE) try to be all smooth and polished and feature-full and in my opinion just introduce more complications and bugs that get in the way of just being a good desktop. I like XFCE because it's just a really good, simple window manager, desktop, and set of basic utilities. Other than that it just gets out of your way and doesn't make you relearn how to do things every few years. It's like if the Win98 desktop got another 30 years of gentle refinement.
I’ve tried XFCE, i3, Pop Shell and plain Gnome.
But it doesn’t really matter, since the DE doesn’t determine how individual apps behave.
My baseline is OSX from decade ago OSX with native apps where everyone was following the Apple HIG so consistently that using a Java app felt like waking up in the twilight zone. macOS these days have fallen quite a bit from its UX glory days but there’s still quite a bit to go before it hits the level of Ubuntu or Windows.
On Linux it feels to me like every app exists in its own parallell dimension where you never know if even the basic laws of physics still apply.
Fair. I guess I haven't had that experience, but so much stuff is web-based these days that probably 90% of my computing time is just spent in a browser and the rest in just a handful of applications that I know well.
I'd guess that I am unusually picky about UX for being a techie. The story would probably have been very different 20 years ago when fiddling with my computer was more of a hobby than a chore.
Yeah, could be. You mentioned elsewhere in this thread having to tinker a bunch to get scrolling in Firefox to be smooth and I don't even know what that means :) I just put 2 fingers on the touchpad and move them up and Firefox scrolls the page down and I'm happy, haha.
Anyway sounds like you've already done what I suggested and it didn't out work you. I hope for your sake Apple comes to their senses soon!
I'm completely with you on this. Everything from scrolling to how windows behave makes a huge difference in the feeling of quality and responsiveness.
Once you're spoiled by a macOS machine's smoothness, it's hard to use anything else, where cursors feel like they're literally lagging behind your trackpad movements and land somewhere imprecise, and scrolling feels like opening a rusty car door as it catches on itself and you feel the friction.
macOS on an Apple Touchpad is like using a well-oiled machine by comparison. These things really matter!
There could be hope for it, but it might be too late now. I dumped tea on my M1 Macbook air earlier this year. I managed to save it - sort of. I had to replace the battery. The screen was working but also had liquid damage so I replaced it as well.
Immediately after spilling tea on it I shut it off, took off the bottom plate, rinsed it with water, and rinsed it again with isopropyl alcohol. I think I waved a heat gun over it for a bit and then left it in front of a fan. This was about 8 months ago and it still works!
The only lingering problem is that when caps lock is off, the light on the key is slightly illuminated. Weird, but I can tolerate that!
> dumped a glass of water all over my MBP
I believe that's how the designers at Apple came up with Liquid Glass
Liquid Glass is not that bad lol.
Neither is an M4 Pro.
I thought Liquid Glass was cool & interesting when I first saw it in the Developer releases, but I find myself yearning to go back to Sequoia. Hopefully, Apple decides to go back to "simple" soon.
Just keep giving Apple more money. That'll show them!
How is using an already paid for computer giving more money to Apple?
Eventually it will go away just like brushed metal, lickable, green felt, and woodgrain. Unfortunately for that to happen they will need to invent something so heinous you will wish for liquid glass.
Personally I would be down for a return to woodgrain or brushed metal.
It’s infuriating that you can’t downgrade.
Especially when Sequoia will be supported by security updates for at least another 1-2 years. There aren't any compelling "gotta have it" reasons to upgrade to Tahoe.
eh, the problems aren't prominent on macOS.
I dislike Liquid Glass.
At the same time I make Mac apps and I've got to adopt liquid glass to keep my apps looking alive/updated. How to do this without making my apps UI worse?
I would love to see some "how to fix Liquid Glass" type articles. List out the problems, list out potential solutions.
Anyone run across articles like this? Please share relevant links.
Funny to see the last screenshot of OS X from 2014 in the article. I would love to use a system with such a high contrast and information density. But I also remember very well how many users were upset with the most recent design changes at that time: The all caps section titles in the sidebar, and the gray icons that were previously colored.
It was worse than what came before, but we had no idea how bad it was going to get.
Yes, IMO Tiger was actually peak Mac UI.
As soon as Apple released iPhone, the Mac took a back seat.
Tiger with 10.5/10.6-style 2D grid virtual desktops and Mavericks traffic light buttons, or alternatively Mavericks with aqua scrollbars and 10.5/10.6-style 2D grid virtual desktops is very close to my ideal desktop environment.
Wow I completely forgot that Spaces were also vertically oriented. I miss that.
It was really nice. With the current linear design I organize desktops by theme (e.g. one for dev, one for research, etc) and with the 10.5/10.6 design I'd use vertical desktops for subcategories — so following the same example, on a single screen setup I might have desktops arranged something like:
│ Rails Docs/Search │ Backend Dev │ Music │
├───────────────────────┼────────────────┼────────────┤
│ UIKit Docs/Search │ iOS Dev │ Chat │
├───────────────────────┼────────────────┼────────────┤
│ MDN/Web Dev Search │ Web Dev │ Email/News │
liquid glass is a total disaster. what the hell is going on in the ux teams at apple? this is like their windows vista era. i hate it so much
I'm almost positive that it's because they want to make as many apps as possible VisionOS-friendly.
I suspect that they were rather shaken at how poorly AVP was received.
I don’t want to wear one of those things on my face. I want a high-quality computer and phone. Apple executives are out to lunch.
Alright grandad. You said the same thing about touchscreens, and look how well that went for blackberru.
People were right about touchscreens, actually, and mobile phones.
They never did replace the productivity usecases. They replaced a lot of casual usecases, and created a bunch more usecases, mostly around media consumption.
But if you go to an office anywhere in the world, and you look around, it's not people on their phones. It's a sea of desktop computers, like it's 1995. Even at Apple. Not because everyone is out of the times, but because we did truly find the perfect form factor, and have chosen to refine it.
Apple vision pro wont replace the productivity suite, like the iPhone didn't. And it won't replace the iPhone, because it's way bigger and more inconvenient. So, I'm not sure where that leaves it.
the market agrees for the most part. VR goggle interfaces just aren't taking the world by storm. When it came out I thought: I'll wait for the iteration that comes 2 years later (the AVP 3 or whatever) since by then they'll have worked out the kinks and it will be a solid computing platform. It's 2 months shy of 2 years since general availability of the AVP and it's essentially identical to the initial release with just a minor chip upgrade. It's a dead product line
AVP may be dead but VisionOS is not. I'm pretty sure Apple smart glasses are coming.
If someone cracks “smart glasses” that’s the next smartphone-size market and revolution, guaranteed, no question about it.
VR headsets ain’t it but I’m convinced the reason every company is working on them and developing AR stuff for their traditional devices (which are terrible to use for AR) is because they don’t want to still be at the starting line if someone figures out smart glasses.
This is the “answer” in plain sight and I agree. The iPhone is the beating heart of the modern Apple empire. Tim Cook has been a vocal proponent of AR since the summer of Pokemon Go. That combined with Meta getting traction with their Rayban line is almost certainly at the center of an overarching internal strategy at Apple to ensure they are positioned to maintain or even grow position as end user mobile computing form factors shift beyond the traditional smartphone. Getting the ux and app ecosystem ready visually is what ‘caused’ Liquid Glass.
Grandparents also said it about a lot of technologies that actually were worse and didn’t survive. Those are just not around anymore to be the subject of survivorship bias.
I’m not sure when we’re started dismissing the elderly’s advice as “just complaining because they’re old” but it seems we’re hell bent on reinventing the wheel of misfortune with every generation.
If old people complain about something, maybe they have a point?
If they're still complaining about something that's around, do they have a point? How do we know? What things have survived the fires of testing and should just be accepted, and what things can be groused about as bad?
ps. I am a grandparent, on the edge of elderly.
Counterexample: how did the metaverse go? Is there anyone using it? Facebook even rebranded to Meta on that bet.
Bring him inside, we're just about to start another round of Ultraman Quiz King on the family Pippin.
It sounds plausible, but only in the shallowest “yeah, make ‘em look the same” way. Just like when they started shipping the Catalyst-based Mac apps of Messages, Photos, etc so that they’d look the same as the iOS apps (and no doubt so they could reuse some code from there instead of wasting developers on the Mac platform they hate).
It’s not as though anything about Liquid Glass makes a meaningful difference in usability.
I think this goes deeper. Transparency is clearly not a good fit for desktop or mobile apps, but imagine smart glasses where every app completely blocks your view of the things behind it. It just wouldn't work.
To move around safely with smart glasses on your face, apps need to be semi transparent from day one. It's not about superficial stylistic similarities this time. And it's not primarily about design either.
This is absolutely about core usability, just not for macOS or iOS.
Remember when Windows 8 tried to make all desktop applications touch-friendly? The situation seems remarkably similar.
It would help if it wasn't 3500 dollars, they did not embrace games, and were expecting developers to buy such devices for so little return in development cost, released at a time most headsets were already on yet again going down on another VR headset cycle.
It was bound to fail since day one.
IMO one of the big misses for launch, and one of the most untapped markets for VR/AR, was business analytics & visualization. Any manager worth flying to a corporate retreat is worth getting a capex-treatable top-of-the-line device to see an extra dimension of data breakdowns. There would be a trendiness factor here, too, much like how every executive needed a Blackberry back in the day.
But one of my big takeaways from e.g. https://www.tableau.com/blog/exploring-spatial-computing-and... (2024) was that some of the most basic UX research around 3D visualization was left to the market to discover.
> During Tableau Conference 2024 in San Diego, we recruited 22 attendees to help us assess the usability, learnability, and potential utility of Tableau on the visionOS platform, along with broader perspectives on the potential for HMDs to create engaging experiences around data. Participants were tasked with a series of analytical exercises using one of three datasets. These tasks included specifying filter settings, changing data fields, and interpreting trends across various visualizations, such as bar charts, line charts, and a 3D globe. Examples of tasks included identifying the country with the highest CO2 emissions in Asia and determining when poultry production first exceeded beef production in South America.
If you want to launch a $3000 device properly, why are you making Tableau do this themselves?
Are there even enough active Vision Pro users to make the $3500 back selling an app for it, not even considering the cost to develop it, or Apple's 30% app store tax?
How about porting "I Am Rich" to the Vision Pro, and it could just show a glowing red orb floating in front of your face.
That would be like the countdown in Three Body Problem (the Netflix version).
I keep seeing this take lately and I don’t understand it at all because there is ~zero Liquid Glass in visionOS, including in visionOS 26.
I would be shocked if Apple was making any product decisions to benefit visionOS at the expense of anything else. It’s so abundantly clear that the vision pro was a failure, it would be a horrible mistake to sacrifice anything to try and save it at this point. I think Apple is done with that experiment.
VisionOS doesn't actually have the degree of transparency of Liquid Glass, though, which makes the whole thing particularly weird. It has a much more opaque frosted glass effect.
It actually runs on Metal so the “GL” wasn’t supposed to be in the name.
Liquid (Gl)ass
Perhaps the thing I hate most about Tahoe is the embedded rounded rectangle around the menu inside of the larger rounded rectangle window. They're trying to go for this look of a menu floating above the rest of the window it belongs to, but it just looks sloppy to me in dark mode.
Looks sloppy in any mode. The amount of wasted space has gone from “well a little bit of rounding/padding is alright to achieve a unified unique look” to “holy shit this is just Fischer price laugh and learn garbage”.
1/2 pixel strips everywhere, around tons of elements. Huge rounded corners. Slow showy animations.
This isn’t a UI for adults, this is a UI for a fake computer sequence in a cheap Netflix movie.
Even Jony Ive, who I thought was a bad UI designer when that job was unwisely given to him, thinks Alan Dye has no taste. That’s saying something.
Personally I couldn’t get past the horrible gray squircle jails for icons that don’t adhere to their boring new standard. They didn’t even update the pixelmator icon for quite a while, which they themselves acquired. Shows you how much effort went in to this.
> Maybe this is because I’m getting older, but that gives me the benefit of having experienced Apple’s older interfaces, with their exceptional quality and functionality.
i really missed snow leopard for about 10 years all the way up to when i moved on from my macbook circa 5 years ago.
I feel so old saying this, but back in the days both Apple and third party developers would follow the HIG closely enough that something felt off right away when an app wasn't behaving 100% native. Running something like a Java app was jarring to say the least even if they were supposedly using a "cross platform" UI library.
But then Gruber said that the HIG was dead and the decline gained more and more momentum...
> back in the days both Apple and third party developers would follow the HIG closely enough that something felt off right away when an app wasn't behaving 100% native.
That's only true for desktop productivity apps and widgets. Apple and 3rd party "creativity" apps never followed the HIG religiously, if at all.
Very much yes. When "affordance" was one of the primary goals, rather than "breathing room". Information density took a nose-dive and we lost all visual separation and gained... what? Less battery life?
Snow Leopard, Mountain Lion were so peak. The first step into minimalism was beautiful, too, I'll admit, but it's culminated in this Liquid Glass garbage, so it was ultimately a misstep.
This is a good time for trying Linux. If you are coming from Mac, then a distro with GNOME interface (Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu...) will feel like at home after a couple tweaks. I recommend "Dash to Dock" to get the MacOS dock experience and "Search Light" to get the spotlight search.
I installed CachyOS recently for my 8 year old kid.
Fantastic experience all around. KDE Plasma is an excellent window manager and everything just worked out of the box (gaming, wifi, etc).
I love GNOME Wayland; it has some of the best support for trackpad gestures of any Linux desktop experience I've ever tried. On the other paw though, client-side decorations are not the way to go on Linux, and I'm still incredibly frustrated that they insist on not even supporting server-side decorations at all.
Client-side decorations are for apps that are designed specifically for a certain desktop experience; server-side decorations are for compatibility with the many millions of apps that already exist!! (And for anything cross-platform / cross-DE.)
Apple gets away with it because macOS is largely monolithic, and doesn't really have swappable desktop experiences. GNOME does not get away with it because they're just one competitor in a large landscape of Linux and they should want to be compatible with Linux applications in general, not only GNOME applications.
My biggest beef with client-side decorations is that they're not optional. For those of us using tiling window managers those decorations are totally superfluous and only take up space, especially since the Gnome folks seem to have decided that every UI element needs to have lebensraum by adding huge areas of white space around them. I want my windows densely populated and I want lots of them on my screen because I'm using a COMPUTER - not a PHONE - with a LARGE SCREEN and a pointing device. I do not need to be able to fat-finger those buttons, I have an accurate pointing device with which I control a pointy cursor with which I can accurately hit single pixels if needed. Now I need to LD_PRELOAD some library to get rid of those stupid unneeded decorations, I need to find the current iteration of the compact Adwaita theme (for as long as that is still possible...) and I otherwise need to FIGHT the software as if I were running some proprietary blob of malware from the Fruit Factory or from Redmond. Blegh, so much wasted time and effort.
> That was little more than a decade ago, in 2014. Not that I want to turn the clock back, but it would be really helpful if I could read clearly what’s on my display once again.
I want to turn the clock back. It’s not a reflexive opposition to anything new. I thought OS X clearly got better from 10.0 to 10.4. But in the last vie versions it’s been a regression.
I booted a G4 Mac the other day, running 10.4.something. I was thrown back in time to a period where OS X was clearly their flagship software stack. Everything was coherent and cohesive - and shockingly - fast. I'd daily 10.4 again if it could operate on the modern internet comfortably!
Nevertheless, I also remember that in the 10.4 days, OS X had the reputation of being sluggish compared to Linux or even Windows (I guess it was Windows 7 at the time?). And it kinda was. Bouncing ball when launching an app.
How high the bar was back then.
What's obvious to me is that the PRIMARY motivation for Liquid-Glass-ifying MacOS was not to improve MacOS, but simply to make it look consistent with the new version of iOS/iPadOS.
So for Apple to start with a level of disrespect for the existing product where the question of whether each change is actually an improvement is effectively off-topic, it's no wonder they made a dog's dinner of Tahoe.
One of the most egregious issues with macOS 26 is the accessibility/usability regression. Apple prided itself on making their operating system accessible. Good ux is inherently accessible.
There are so many parts of the os that flagrantly ignore well-established accessibility standards, some of which Apple themselves advocated for
It’s what you get when you install a hack print designer who knows nothing about UI as the head of software design and leave him there for a decade. Even Jony Ive, who also had no business designing software, didn’t respect Dye.
Thank goodness Meta has done Apple the biggest favor of the century by poaching him.
I hope I'm wrong but I don't see quality control improving with Dye's leave.
The man had a bad taste for design but bug prevalence is endemic and changing head of design won't fix that.
How is it possible that the head of a divisions particular UX taste pervades the product?
Well once Tim started hanging out with Trump and licking his boots and awarding him participation trophies and illegal gilded emoluments, the MAGA attitudes that empathy is a weakness, transparency is performative cosmetics, accessibility is for crippled people who should be mocked, and usability is for DEI hires, all start trickling down into the culture and user interface design.
Liquid Glass looks like Trump hooked Alan Dye up with Don Jr's coke dealer.
2023 Vision Pro (iPad-on-Skull) sold less than 500K devices, with v2 cancelled.
In 2025, the design failed upward to 4000 x 500K users, https://archive.is/gxaYw
> [Apple] is working to simplify the way users navigate and control their devices.. The design is loosely based on the Vision Pro’s software.. will mark the most significant upgrade to the Mac since the Big Sur operating system in 2020.. For the iPhone, it will be the biggest revamp since iOS 7 in 2013... 2 billion devices in use around the world.. when Apple revamped its Photos app last year, legions of users complained. With the entire operating systems changing, the stakes are much higher.
Since 2023 launch, Meta Ray-Ban sold ~4M camera glasses priced below $500.
Using Liquid Glass on both a retina and non-retina display it looks like Apple is trying to depreciate non-retina displays just like they have done in the past with floppy disk, cd rom, and having useful ports. Tahoe on a non-retina display looks slightly but noticeably shittier than the previous version.
Since macOS went to a yearly cadence, I usually upgrade during Christmas break, this allows for a couple of point releases to work out the kinks. I won’t be upgrading this year. I hope macOS 27 fixes this abomination. Otherwise, this 30+ year Mac user will be moving on…
You would do well to avoid 26. I upgraded to be a Guinea Pig for a few colleagues and I regret it. Things like apps and scripts work in the technical sense, but it is worse because the myriad of graphical and interactive issues.
its very odd that apparently everyone working in Apple software dev either refuses to dogfood this stuff or just uses iPads for everything.
So many of the rough edges disappear when "Reduce Transparency" is enabled I've theorized that setting must be pretty popular around Apple's offices.
Using that option suddenly nerfed all my themes in Edge, forcing the window title bars to all be gray instead of the bold colors I use to differentiate the different profiles I use for work. I wish there was a “Reduce bullshit” toggle on MacOS and iOS, and also that it would skip all the increasingly stupid animations. No, reduce motion sucks because it just uses an equally-slow crossfade. Just STFU and let me move to the next task and stop animating everything. Good for you, you have a good GPU, I don’t care.
My browser has a half-inch white bar at the bottom constantly, presumably because of this setting.
Cannot reproduce on 26.2 with either Safari or Chrome with the setting on. That would infuriate me.
When first scrolling, the bottom page controls disappear. But they leave their container blocking the page content.
iPadOS 26 is an even bigger F-up than macOS 26, though
It's hugely embarrassing how they've had to perform a screeching U-turn in bringing back Slide Over and dock-launchable Split View with the .1 and .2 updates - lest graphic artists and others who depended upon these features left their platform in droves. This is essentially an admission that iPadOS 26's touch-based UX had precisely zero thought put into it. They do not have a clue what they're doing
There are still many, many more nonsensical UX degradations and bugs that need ironing out
For years I was begging to get better multitasking and more powerful apps, especially after they introduced the magic keyboard. They can take it all back now. I'd rather they stick with 0 multitasking, if this is the best they can do.
It would not matter if they dogfooded it, the decision makers higher up in the chain are getting paid more to make a visible change and/or increase revenue, not to make a better user experience.
I think this goes both ways.
Famously, Jobs' demands pushed engineers to think and work harder to achieve what they think was impossible, which resulted in many of the most iconic designs of personal electronic devices in history.
On the other hand, we have butterfly keyboard and this.
Jobs did not run on a fixed annual schedule like Tim Cook does.
Mac OS X 10.3, 10.4, 10.5, 10.6, and 10.7 all took over 12 months to develop, sometimes much more, and 10.5 was famously delayed out to 30 months.
Jobs may have pushed engineers, but he was more careful about what he pushed out the door to consumers.
Doesn't sound very agile..............
Ironically that would be a new kind of dogfooding.
The day that I need to update to macOS 26 for continued security patches is the last day I'll choose to run macOS. I'm pretty much all on Linux for non-work stuff anyway with an old Windows 'gaming' PC that only runs a 10 year old game.
Not gonna lie, this year has been exceptionnaly disappointing for every product and every OS (more generally: software) from Apple.
The battery life first: I lost 6 to 8h of battery life EVERY DAY because of iOS 26. The battery life of my macbook is worst too, even after all the updates and a fresh install of macOS 26.2. The interface is very ugly, and not easy to use at all. I am oftenly loston both systems (iOS 26 and macOS 26) because of all those glass interfaces on top of each other. The performance did not improved either, and the gaming ecosystem that I was very optimistic is becoming a mess. Again. To finish, an exceptional high number of annoying bugs that are not solved yet, despite my feedbacks since the first Beta versions. It seems nobody care.
It’s infuriating that I can’t downgrade the OS on both devices. Especially on my mac.
This pushed me to re-try a Linux distro on my old laptop, and re-try Android on an old Google Pixel phone. Both are great for my needs, and the phone has way more battery life than the iPhone (despite the phone has already 5yo).
I did not expected at all that 2025 would be the year of Apple pushing me out of it ecosystem... Very nice job guys.
There are claims that Liquid Glass was in development for three years. If that is accurate, the results are even more appalling.
All the non-technical people I know loved it. It's pretty. It's neat. It looks cool. Apple is a consumer products company.
My personal feeling on it is just "meh." My productivity with my laptop hasn't changed. I'm not a huge fan but it's not a deal breaker. I still find it better than Windows 11 for the most part, and Linux has other issues as a daily driver for me.
IMHO Apple needs a "tick" release where they only polish and fix bugs and usability issues with an almost total feature freeze. I've heard they may be doing that.
My wife is non-technical and hates it. She said it looks "ugly and childish".
And I made sure to not bias her with my or HN's opinion about liquid glass. I patiently waited for her initiative to comment on the update.
Yup. I didn't say anything. My partner's first question to me was "is there any way to get rid of this?"
> All the non-technical people I know loved it. It's pretty. It's neat. It looks cool. Apple is a consumer products company.
My partner doesn't like it, and outside of excel she is not a technical person.
Looking at popularity of similar design on iOS it would be surprising “non-technical” users like it. People HATE new iOS. Low contrast, not clear layering and focus, things being moved around for unknown reasons.
Also who uses MacOs beaides developers? Majority are creative prosumers in arts/design and they are even more annoyed by messed up designs. What you are left with are lawyers, writers, students? I guess they might like it.
> Also who uses MacOs beaides developers?
Students - all of them.
I said that in the next sentence. Than again this is really true only in US. In rest of the world (including europe) Macs are seen as luxury environment.
Macs are not seens as a luxury environment in Sweden at least.
Of the people I know only old folks, gamers and some techies own PCs. A lot of people will however just use whatever wintel laptop their employer provides them with.
Sweden is another rich country.
But worldwide Chromebooks are more numerous than macs in education.
I'm not arguing that macs are more common than non-macs, only that "In rest of the world (including europe) Macs are seen as luxury environment." is false.
Chromebooks dominate K12 here so it kinda depends on what you mean by "students". Once people start buying their own computers however my impression is that Macs are quite common of not dominating.
Very few uni and high school students have MacBooks in East and Southeast Europe and it’s seen as quite a flex there. They’re also impractical for those in engineering schools due to required software that only works on Windows.
For me, earlier versions of macOS/OS X and Windows Vista/7 were the right mix of eye candy and usability. Apple's just showing off with this liquid glass thing. Yeah, it's cool that they attempted it, but it should've remained entirely opt-in. Apple being Apple, there's no opt-in -- once they like it, it's the default.
For a major revamp, you should either do it or not do it. Making it opt-in or even opt-out means every app then has to try to support both different UIs, which is a longterm maintenance cost. Not only for Apple, but the entire ecosystem.
I personally sort of like the liquid glass, but it's also kind of a mess in a lot of edge cases. I feel like it was an interesting idea that didn't really pan out fully and should have been scrapped. It's just too controversial for pure eye-candy.
Adding insult to injury, my fans are constantly going now because I have to pay for this disastrous upgrade with tons more resources.
Well, the M1 is still good enough to last years longer under the sane demands of nearly any type of work. That’s bad for the stock price. How else are they going to keep people on the same upgrade cycle as the Intel days if they don’t tax those GPUs with all these pointless animations?
Couldn't agree more. I haven't and won't update to Tahoe, and am now using linux more frequently as I begin to move away from Mac OS, and eventually Apple products.
These articles always make me laugh. Everyone complains and then everyone lines up and buys Macs again. macOS has been on the decline for literally years now. If you really want things to change put your money where your mouth is and switch!
Switch to what? Windows is horrible and Linux is just as bad (but in different ways).
Linux has loads of problems, but at least to me, I register these problems in a very different way.
The problems with Windows and MacOS are almost all the result of bad incentives, user hostile arrogant design, or just neglect. As such, the presence of these problems feels malcious, and it always feels like I'm pitted against the very company that I'm paying quite a bit of money to. I'm left with very little hope of things actually improving, because these companies seem to have no incentive to actually make their operating systems more useful or aligned with my needs.
On Linux, the problems are almost always just a result of "hey man, I tried my best to make something good and useful, but I either don't have the resources or the skills to get it all the way there." Sometimes things break or are ugly or whatever, but it's not malicious. There's a strong sense that things are rapidly improving, and that I can play a small part in helping those improvements along (via the patches I submit, or with donations or other forms of support). Because of this, I find the problems on Linux so much less frustrating than analogous problems on MacOS or Windows.
I also think a lot of people might not realize just how rapidly things have been improving on Linux. The situation today is pretty different versus even just 3-5 years ago.
I think a lot of people on HN don't realize that some people require software outside of a terminal and a web browser. Can I run Ableton on linux? can I run all the audio plugins that only ship windows/mac versions? is there a decent graphics editor? (gimp is not it.) If all I did was play in the terminal and a web browser, I'd have switched to Linux by now.
Exactly. There’s nothing that comes close to the Adobe suite. Maybe someday an investment similar to what was made in Proton will happen to Wine in general.
> Can I run Ableton on linux
Yes? The .msi installer for Live has worked in Wine for more than a decade.
Until you need a specific plugin that doesn’t, or some hardware equipment with custom drivers (very common in the AV world).
Windows is horrible, yes. But Linux definitely isn't "just as bad" as MacOS, it's already better, and it keeps getting better every year while MacOS keeps getting worse.
Obviously not representative, but recently I installed the most recent release of the "user friendliest desktop Linux" and tried to get it to stop asking me for my password, or asking me to select the user, on startup.
Not only is the issue spread across more than one similar sounding system setting which interact in strange and mysterious ways, but nothing works as designed or described. It's a horrible mess.
Searching for an fix was great: forums were full of sanctimonious "you shouldn't be doing that, it's not secure" and no solution.
I gave up. The average user has no chance with desktop Linux is my experience is any guide.
> But Linux definitely isn't "just as bad" as MacOS, it's already better
Is this better Linux in the room with us [1]?
My main gaming computer used to be Windows until this year when Windows has gone completely to shit. So first I ran Omarchy for a few months, and now running CachyOS because it's better for gaming.
Yeah... Even with things going to shit MacOS is still a better proposition (at least I have a working sleep and restore, and the OS remembers which windows need to be open next time you restart/go out of sleep, and in which locations). Though I haven't upgraded to Liquid Ass yet.
[1] Let's count the number of "oh, you chose the wrong distribution" and count the number of different distirbutions people will come up with that are 100% guaranteed to not have issues.
Laughs in very stable Xfce for 15 years.
Although its not for everyone, I run a Hackintosh and stick to 10.15 or lower.
> Windows is horrible and Linux is just as bad
I will civilly contradict you about both MW11 and about Linux.
MW11 is rather good for usability. The failures at this point are the egregious telemetry, the spyware misfeatures (e.g. Recall), and the AI slop being squeezed into everything including Notepad for pity's sake.
Linux with Wayland is sweet. Gnome and KDE now use Wayland by default and they are celebrated for their usability. I personally have taken a leaner approach by opting for Sway (tiled) and labwc (floating) depending on the current task.
TL;dr _ Get with the times, Linux is great. Windows UX is actually rather good, but the leadership of MSFT continues to be ghoulish.
all else aside...
> two windows in the same app, both created using SwiftUI, can’t even share a common radius, as shown below
this actually looks correct to me, the smaller 'subordinate' dialog has smaller radius, like nesting dolls
My MacOS has this insane bug where the cursor sometimes won't change to a pointer/loading/any other state on my second monitor. This is really bad, but even worse for me who writes websites for a living, and need to check that my CSS cursor pointer class actually worked. I can't count how many minutes I've lost refreshing my browser and double-checking my code. Now I just keep my browser on my primary monitor. I've found many other people with this bug on the internet, and it has been happening for YEARS. I honestly can't understand how a premium product aimed at developers can have something like this for YEARS without a fix. I'm moving away from MacOS, and might ditch my iPhone too as I won't have all the nice integration with MacOS anymore.
Fuck you, Apple.
Do you have a trackpad? If you re-enter focus by right clicking (very easy to do with gestures), focus stops working until you leave and re enter by left clicking. Unfortunately not a new issue.
I don't use a trackpad. I leave my Macbook closed with 2 external monitors and an external mouse/keyboard.
I ran into this, and there was a bizarre fix—I think having Adobe apps open in the background caused it, or something.
I saw some responses like this. I have zero Adobe apps in my Mac.
The Bozo Explosion is in full force at Apple now. They should bring Forstall back. Engineers need to be be humiliated for making stupid decisions.
I get where you're coming from, but the word humiliation is not constructive in a professional setting. Reasonable decisions can easily look stupid without context and hindsight is always 20/20. Being responsible for your actions should be the norm, but ridicule is not the right way to get there.
honestly the issue i hate the most is how bad the keyboard has gotten over the past 3-5 years/major iOS releases.
on top of the bug people mention a lot where types are miss-pressed, there's a problem i get where if iOS considers a word misspelled it'll refuse to let me use the space key or otherwise move away from the word or close the keyboard. it's almost like a UI thread lockout. it's extremely frustrating.
Design got worse since Maverick for professional users.
It has been worsening since Snow Leopard. That is cliched but true.
Tahoe has to be the worst software Apple has released in three decades. It's unbelievable it got through. If Macs and macOS were not a tiny portion of their revenue I would short the stock.
>short the stock
The frustrating part is that even if you take the position that iOS 26 is just as awful, their incentives are so decoupled from what you’d hope they would be, that ruining your product isn’t really bad for the business! After all, Apple can just point to Windows 11’s embedded ads, three or four layers of different generations of overlapping settings panes, and inferior hardware and dare you to switch. Most of the customer base has only those two realistic options.
One thing that made Tahoe even worse is that Apple changed what they considered an update or upgrade, so for Tahoe it was suddenly considered as a update and not an upgrade, in all management solutions.
This force-upgraded a lot of Macs at work and we lost days of effective work across many engineers. The machines was practically useless for weeks.
They clearly don't care about power users anymore, and haven't for quite some time. It's so sad.
That's egregiously bad, and malicious.
iOS 26 is also very bad. Many Christmas conversations between boomers baffled by their phones, and as I younger (than boomer) person I am not as baffled but there are a number of things that take more button presses than they did in previous versions for no apparent reason. And it’s real ugly imo.
They’ve achieved sufficient lock-in that they can enshittify everything as much as they want with no consequences. Switching has too high an ecosystem cost, plus in the US it’s a special case that a lot of people think if you don’t use all Apple products you are probably poor.
Viewing all tabs in Safari is the thorn in my side.
Yes, that’s the main one I was thinking of, though there are spots in the photos app too iirc.
The really really frustrating thing is that even in this lesser state, all of the alternatives are still a worse experience than an Apple Silicon macbook.
It’s sad to be in a time where enshitifcation is the word of the day and things are getting worse as time goes on. There’s nothing on the horizon of tech that excites me anymore. I used to feel joy and excitement for the future of tech. Now I feel profound sadness at this reality.
Without arguing with the main point I do want to say that although I didn’t ask for increased control size from 18 to 26, my hands are really appreciating it.
I 100% agree with OPs take, though I don't really mind it as much as he does. I do hope the changes will be rolled back in 27, or at least controls given to us that allow us to roll back changes.
If you notice your OS/Window Manager, then they have failed in what they were designed to do.
I don't own a computer for the OS, I own it to run the Applications that I find useful.
While the UI designers are rearranging deck chairs, the UX is totally failing to love up to the promise of an ecosystem. Cross system cut n paste is a neat trick, but I just want timers and alarms to actually work as expected.
I shouldn’t be surprised given that the mac save as dialog box has a name field that is still hard coded to 32 characters visible. Whenever I bitch about it I get pushback that filenames shouldn’t be longer than that! Um hello - tell me you have never worked in the real world outside your iphone bubble without telling me.
I’ve deferred my next Mac upgrade to when my current M1 air on Sequoia stops being supported. If they mess it up further I may just move off the platform. Such a shame because the hardware is great.
+1 I only updated my MacBook Air and really don’t like it. Will keep all other macs on Sequoia until macOS 27 hopefully fixes most of the issues.
Tahoe is such a criminal worsening of UI quality, it really is worrisome that Apple is proudly releasing it.
If this kind of software trend continues in 2026, it might be the first time I take a serious look at Linux distros on Mac.
Installed Mint on my GAMING Windows system, uninstalled Steam on Windows. All is well.
While at it, nuked my old MacBook Pro and Air with Mint too - not like they are getting updates anyway.
It can be done, it should be done. These commercial operating systems have enshitified to a critical point and are beyond repair.
The thing that’s weird about this though is it isn’t enshitification. I don’t want to defend the worsening of software quality/ux/ui for monetary gain but at least it’s somewhat rational. This is not a change that emphasizes profit driven changes over user driven ones. Maybe I’m missing some profit motive but it just seems like an awful design choice.
Edit: Not to disagree though. I too have a Linux gaming pc and are helping friends do the same.
Maybe not enshittification in the sense that every other UIImageView has an ad in it, but definitely a huge regression from the UI it had before.
Sadly it's only a matter of time until everyone copies it because it's cool and it's what Apple does so they must be right!
I'm holding off upgrading my laptop (2013 MBP running Catalina) until they get their UI stuff together. I'd just gotten used to Sequoia on my desktop but this is unbearable.
Not a single update since 2019 has improved the UI more than it regressed it in my opinion. Too much whitespace, too little contrast, too big controls, and now too little readability.
It's almost like their entire UI department is under threat of being fired unless they invent a radical UI update every other year.
Even Vista was a readability zen compared to this and they aren't listening to feedback at all.
I'm a Linux and Windows user thinking of getting a Macbook, mostly for the hardware.
All these recent proclamations of disappointment in Tahoe seem insanely overblown to me. The problem that this post leads with is that thumbnails' corners are too rounded, which "misrepresents" the original? Seriously?
Maybe it's worse now compared to the golden years, I don't know, never owned a Mac. And it's fair to criticize it from that perspective. But I am completely at a loss for how any of these issues could be bad enough to make you switch platforms. Windows and Linux are not exactly usability all-stars! I had to write my own app for decent speech-to-text on Linux which is built in at a system level on Macs.
This feels to me like just the age-old tale of people wanting to (love | hate) brands, when really, things are nuanced. I switched from Android to iOS recently and the experience did not change much. iOS is absolutely not "borderline unusable" like I've seen many claim. If anything it's maybe a 10% nicer experience overall.
Lack of nuance in people's takes makes for less signal in the noise and makes it annoying to figure out the actual pros and cons of different platforms.
It is not only for the corners.
Do some searches and you will find a ton of bugs, bad performances and bad battery life for laptops, random crashes, ...
The issue is not only on the lack of good design ideas, but also on the quality of what Apple provides since a few years now.
Maybe the quality is reduced, sure. But if you "do some searches" you can find all of those things for any major software release.
Seems to me like people in Apple's walls are forgetting that the outside world is not some Garden of Eden. But yeah, I'd have to use it to say for sure.
> you can find all of those things for any major software release
Maybe it is because you were using Windows all the time and you can't judge outside (no judging), but the quality and the (legendary) reliability of macOS was true. Everything was well engineered, well designed, and had a purpose.
This is not the case anymore, and this is why people are so upset too. People are also upset because all those annoying things have been reported since betas and Apple did not really listened to them (except most absolute valid points).
Okay, now go use it and report back. The grass isn't always greener.
> All these recent proclamations of disappointment in Tahoe seem insanely overblown to me. The problem that this post leads with is that thumbnails' corners are too rounded, which "misrepresents" the original? Seriously?
The example in Photos is absolutely egregious, and as a user of Linux for the past 25 years and recent user of a Mac for work I can’t remember something that bad in a mainstream desktop environment on Linux.
In fact from a usability perspective a modern Gnome desktop seems for more usable and consistent than modern Mac OS and that’s saying something. Font scaling seems to work better in Linux, UI wisgers in Gtk seem to be more consistent. Dark themes have been around on Linux far longer and it shows.
I don’t use the latest Mac OS version; it’s _okay_ from a usability perspective. But this new version seems like a clear downgrade for something where the purpose of paying large sums of money is for higher productivity and comfort.
Not upgrading to Tahoe for as long as $DAYJOB allows. ‘Defer update‘ dialog can be conveniently moved away to the second display almost out of sight.
Just as a datapoint: Not only do I actually like Liquid Glass, I don't have any errors or bugs on my MBP or my iPhone EXCEPT for the audio scratching sometimes on macos. Which alone is flatly unacceptable.
I am trying hard to have strong feelings about it, but I just can’t bother. The only thing constant is change.
What I do know for a fact, is that for each error I have on my MacBook, I’ll have ~10 ungoogable errors on any other OS. I rage-sold my last Windows due to losing my Java installation (or just confusing which terminal I installed it in).
Please, crop all thumbnails in the corners, as long as you come pre-installed with just one working terminal.
> I’ll have ~10 ungoogable errors on any other OS.
If you ever attempt to compile software, the shoe instantly hits the other foot. WSL is a godsend, and Apple's "native" terminal environment becomes a confusing liability.
Catering to different audiences, I suppose.
M2 MBP here. Definitely skipping Tahoe. Sequoia is already just terrible, not only is the UX clunky and hostile, but Apple seems to have flat out broken its Bluetooth and networking stacks in multiple ways, and in general the system is extremely unstable.
Best hardware around, but at this point I might even take W11 over this locked down mess. At least Asahi support is decent these days.
And I'm tired of paying for things that should be stock, such as proper window and mouse management, or reasonable fan control so that the keyboard doesn't burn my fingers under moderate workloads.
> with their exceptional quality and functionality.
This was never true, for example, taking this simple criterion of readability:
> would be really helpful if I could read clearly what’s on my display
Look at the device's names at the left-most screenshot - you can't clearly read them even though there is plenty of space wasted on the margins and the "…"
I mean, sure, liquid glass made everything worse, but it doesn't mean all the other decades-old UI sins disappear in the exceptionally fuzzy rearview window
Can Apple get it over with and revert this overhaul? It's such a disaster. Sequoia's UI and icons were nearly perfect and still looked modern. There was no need for this change whatsoever.
> After three months of strong feedback during beta-testing, I was disappointed when Tahoe was released on 15 September to see how little had been addressed
Now it was a while ago I left the Apple ecosystem as it became clear they didn't actually care about UX anymore, but did "strong feedback during beta-testing" ever actually result in any results? I remember doing something similar back in 2012-2013 sometime, and friends having similar feelings across the years, that it makes me think that Apple never really did any changes based on feedback receiving during the beta testing.
Has anyone here ever written something in via the traditional feedback forms/venues and actually had something changed before the final release? I even asked around my circle of acquaintances and even the ones 110% into the Apple ecosystem seem to never have noticed anything changed based on their feedback.
I think if macOS is a tool it should change less.
Looks too much like vista to me.
I do enjoy the liquid glass controls in some places. The glass effect is really beautiful. What I hate about it is the way the overall UI constantly gets in the way of my content.
I expect and demand a level of, for want of a better term, UI crispness.
It is equally aggravating to err on either side: Windows 3.1 clunk to the left, Tahoe's operationally useless (indeed, operationally detrimental) visual fireworks to the right.
Apple needs to hit a sweet spot of crisp, but the priority must be fast, logical interaction that lets me operate at the speed of thought. With Tahoe, Apple tried to gild the lily.
MacOS aesthetically peaked with Leopard in '09, but speaking frankly the OS has felt abandoned to me since around 10.2, with so many basic interaction issues with window management and the dock just never getting fixed properly and a long list of half-assed bandaids and abandoned experiments over the years.
There is no true passion in MacOS, and the marketing has come face to face with reality in 2025. It's the neglected step-child of a company distracted by other things.
There's been some impressive engineering done by lower-level folks under the hood of it all, though.
I'll have to upgrade my M1 MBP some time and no way am I putting up with this nonsense - back to Linux laptop for me.
What recommendations do people have for good metal-body linux-friendly "ultra books" (or whatever they're called these days)?
It would be newsworthy if Linux laptops could compete with MacBooks on performance and quality. Maybe reconsider Windows if you feel the need to switch?
It seems obvious to me that liquid glass is no designer's idea of a good UI. It's a business move to force developers to support the upcoming iGlasses where transparency is actually necessary.
Perhaps Apple is willing to accept that most macOS users will enable "reduce transparency" so long as devs implement support for transparency.
But there is another explanation making the rounds, possibly a conspiracy theory. Some people claim that Apple is doing this to make cross-platform technologies look obsolete and hard to implement.
If there's any truth to this, it's a terrible idea that could easily backfire. People could get used to there not being a consistent platform look and feel. Like on Windows, "native" could lose its meaning.
Whatever Apple promotes as "native" could become just another style among many.
I think people are already used to inconsistency. Whatever Apple thinks, and honestly even in spite of what any users think, only the very largest companies have the appetite to mess around making bespoke SwiftUI things, so that they have to build their app twice. So, actual “native” stuff is mainly the realm of passionate indie developers and everyone else will always use cross-platform tools.
i switched this year from windows to mac because windows is unbearable.... but apple seems to want to get rid of desktop user also
It’s clear how much Apple now hates the MacOS as we have known it… I think the concept of a computer which can run code outside a sandbox and without tollbooths that extract rents for Apple is abhorrent to them.
I think the vague plan is to iOSify it more and more until there is no real difference, including the lockdown and mandatory App Store requirement.
windows vista called, it wants its Aero back...
just format and install Sequoia, that's what I did
Updated iOS overnight and what the fuck man. Also Settings search is so totally broken I can’t even
The cycle of most products:
Step 1: company caters to a niche
Step 2: niche loves product, recommends to wider audience
Step 3: wider audience adopts product
Step 4: company switches to targeting the wider audience
Step 5: niche doesn't like product anymore, switches to a competitor
Windows is in step 5 - previously undisputed king of desktop, now an ad-infested boomer legacy system. MacOS is in step 4 - previously pricy but good solution for devs and creatives, now PITA for devs and "I would switch if it weren't for Adobe suite" for creatives, but normies think it looks pretty. Linux is in step 1 - Valve has been consistently investing in making it a viable gaming system. If you told me 10 years ago that Linux actually runs games other than TuxCart, I'd have laughed, but nowadays "does it run on Linux" is a serious question for every new release. It just needs some time to mature, and once gamers switch, other desktop users will slowly follow.
The answer is KDE and GNOME, at least on the machines that support some form of Linux.
That is not the answer. Many of us run software that is not available on Linux.