In case of emergency, break glass
morrick.me
morrick.me
I'm generally no fan of Steve Jobs, but what he did offer was a single point of (dictatorial) good taste, and a willingness to stamp on bad ideas. Unfortunately, it's exceptionally rare in modern business that you have someone (who is allowed to be) in such a position of power to act dictatorially when needed, and who also has the right set of taste/experience/knowledge such that their decisions are on balance more usually good ones. CEOs are far more usually MBA drones than product people, and it doesn't appear that we've figured out a way to 'scale' taste and good decision-making throughout an organisation in a reliable manner.
There is a saying among PMs: when you're not sure what to do, you do a UX refresh.
(It's a bit like the same one for CEOs: if you're not sure what to do, drive an acquisition.)
UX rework needs to be done with real care -- not primarily care for looks, but care for function.
I _love_ Snow Leopard's UI. It was clear. Watching the videos on Liquid Glass, I was really hopeful we'd see a return to a similar design. Old OS X gave me joy, and I am sure I heard the word 'joy' used in the Liquid Glass video... and I was so happy! But what I see when I installed last night, and from this article, is glass and shadows in the background of windows, very low contrast ratios, and confusion between window areas.
Backgrounds are the wrong place for fancy effects. You need to be able to see foreground content clearly.
Foregound elements, like buttons, are great for fancy effects. They are small and isolated.
That's why pinstripes were awful (difficult background) and Aqua as a whole was great (blue gel buttons were clear.) Look at the comparison screenshots in this article: a list view in Finder, which is sorted, has a blue header on the sorted column. That is a fancy gel effect, but it is isolated and readable. If liquid glass were used the same way in Tahoe, we'd really be on to something. It's what I hoped for, and what I don't see.
However: one good thing in Tahoe is how fast UI elements interact. There is no animation on mouseover transition. It snaps in and out. This is excellent.
Changing something like a checkbox is ok. Changing something like the side panel, or a set of toolbar buttons to resolve the background/floatiness/shadow issues in the article, is going to be hard (for me, with my level of AppKit and SwiftUI knowledge.) If I get far enough, I'll share with HN.
But I’m not thinking of the superficial design so much as the underlying ethos informing such decisions. Early OS X got a lot right by focussing on usability. Skeuomorphism might not be in vogue today, but the iPhone was much more usable, approachable and discoverable compared to most mobile phone OSs of the day. The Apple UI guidelines have mostly stood the test of time.
I hope that Jobs (or Ive, for that matter) would’ve taken Liquid Glass in a very different direction, as the current offering seems to make things worse for users.
All that while I can’t connect from macOS to iPhone's hotspot, because I split family account while MacBook wasn’t powered on. Bugs growing, but shiny stuff making big money from few FTEs won.
The same in the computer UIs has been going on for last ~15 years. Astonishingly it's the company that boasts usability/ergonomics that does it. And sadly, every desktop out there (KDE, MATE, Gnome) does its best to imitate Mac OS.
I wonder if anyone in this part of "tech" industry does any sort of measurements of what they produce.
I've recently been given a Mac laptop at job (they refuse to support Linux), and the Finder UI is terrible exactly as the author describes.
Seems quite normal for 2025, so it might have been an issue in 1935?
But then came the interface overhaul. That’s incredibly bad. Looking at the screenshots comparing Liquid Glass Finder vs, e.g. Snow Leopard Finder, it truly feels like Apple should be _ashamed_ to present this.
It’s so wrong that it truly feels like Apple is making fun of me, the user.
I tried the developer beta of iOS 26 out of curiosity and I swear it’s the first time I felt so wrong about a new iOS version. I know it will still be refined but in its current state ? It feels so wrong. There are bugs, ok that’s an early version, no issue. But the new UI ? The supposed next big thing ? It’s incredibly broken, inconsistent, chaotic, hard to read.
I hope they are on a miracle to fix this but they seem to be so proud about it …
I mean, sure, usages changed (even if not for everyone) but even for someone "just browsing downloads", the new design is not better.
Changing/modernizing the general theme of the OS ? Changing colors ? Textures ? Fonts ? I’m not against it and it’s an age old tradition at this point. But why mess with the general organisation / visual clues / layout to make it less functional especially when your users are already happy with the current design ?
It’s change for the sake of change, not to build a better tool for the user.
Spotlight has replaced app search.
In-app file browsers have replaced a lot of Finder functionality (project views, file views, browsing etc. in IDEs and power tools).
And given how anemic Finder still is, I wonder if its use among power users is very low.
Over time, various aspects were improved/refined, and people simply got used to it.
I expect the same thing to happen here.
Something IS indeed rotten in the State of Cupertino, but that rot is not new. To me, it feels like the Apple Intelligence fiasco is the accumulation of Apple’s software failures over the past 10–15 years finally coming to a head. They are just not very good at making software anymore.
Just not good at making software any more. There is ample evidence over the last several years that makes this conclusion inescapable.
I absolutely loathe and detest the hidden-scroll-bar convention that is now de rigour
Something that requires finesse in using the mouse to even access the least info ("About where in the document am I?"), and more for it's primary use.
It's like having to take a sobriety test just to change the radio station.
Actually, as an owner of both a washer/dryer and a dishwasher from the Bosch “Serie 6” range, this makes the opposite point intended. The interfaces are bafflingly, irritatingly different for no good reason, and would really have benefited from some central alignment on UX patterns.
Bloody ridiculous, but hey, some price to pay to the design gods for at least having a machine that works solidly and that I can repair should it ever be needed.
This is their redesigning for the Alpha generation, the brainrot generation.
Making it inconsistent and hard to read is exactly the point. That's the new aesthetic.
1. Double down on the aesthetic and gradually redesign apps to improve the hierarchy. That would mean adapting UX across countless apps to serve the new look.
2. Tone down the glass effects and shadows drastically. Preserve existing app layouts without compromising usability as much. We'll be left with shimmering buttons and panels, a bit more blurred transparency than in the 'current' design language.
My guess is they will end up choosing option 2, simply because it’s cheaper.
I fear the apple is starting to rot on the inside.
Yes. Interfaces where you have to be able to select, pan, rotate, and zoom in combination. Those are really tough.
- an ad-ridden, privacy invading hellhole that goes for "flat design" even worse than macOS's newest iteration (Windows 11), with machines mostly built out of cheap plastic, with the hardware being inadequately cooled and built on a CPU architecture that leads to guzzling power worse than an X-series BMW with its gas pedal floored on a German Autobahn. On top of that, AI slop everywhere.
- a visual hellhole that, gotta admit it, still has by far the upper hand performance-wise thanks to a best-in-class-by-far hardware and excellent integration with the OS (macOS)
- an "OS" that's more like 20 different ways of doing things, with not a single one achieving any sort of visual integration across at least the major applications because there's like a dozen UI frameworks and serious issues with hardware support across the board on top (Linux)
Brave new world lol
I'm tired of this myth. Just like with Mac and Windows, you choose the suitable hardware or, better, buy preinstalled. There are no compatibility issue with my Librem 14. Even suspend works 100% of the time.
Also, GNU/Linux is not an OS but there are many very different OSes for different use cases and visual preferences.
Can you walk into any big box store and buy that thing, or a Framework? No. I am talking about OS choices accessible to the general public, not to nerds with dedicated knowledge. The experience of installing Linux on anything available at a big box store is likely to result in a multitude of issues.
No actor in Linux at large makes any effort to cater to the general public, and that's the point I'm making.
> Also, GNU/Linux is not an OS but there are many very different OSes for different use cases and visual preferences.
... and the consequence of that multitude of How To Do Things is precisely what keeps Linux adoption so low. Steve Ballmer had a point in "developers developers developers" - it's no wonder that there aren't that many native software products viable for actual commercial use on Linux.
This is a real problem and I wonder if it might be connected with the lobbying of the Win-Mac duopoly.
That's why anti-trust legislation and enforcement is actually important... to prevent ossification of scale that effectively prohibits new actors from entering the market.
I am not sure about brick-and-mortar stores, because I have not used such stores for many decades, but with on-line shopping it is certainly easy to find a Dell or HP computer with preinstalled Linux that supports the hardware as well as Windows. Moreover, choosing Ubuntu over Windows frequently saves at least one hundred $.
I have such a Dell laptop (Dell Precision), which came with a preinstalled Ubuntu that worked perfectly (even if I have wiped it and installed another Linux by myself, because I do not like Ubuntu).
99.999%+ of people out there in the world don't start with a desire for a Linux setup; and so many of the small proportion who at some point want to consider it start with pre-existing hardware. And yes, having tried and largely burnt out trying to use Linux on several different computers on different occasions, it can be hugely frustrating, if not ultimately impossible.
I'd very much like to switch to Linux to lose some of the Windows awfulness, but (as you say) the reality of getting a particular computer working sufficiently well is somewhere between non-trivial and ulcer-inducingly complicated, and anyway the absence of native Microsoft Office makes it a non-starter.
The funny thing was that at least those older versions of MS Office ran much better on Linux than on the contemporaneous Windows (XP and Vista), i.e. faster and with no crashes, presumably due to the faster file system and due to the lack of interfering antiviruses or other corporate garbage.
Switch to Mac. Honestly. Office is decent enough for creatives to use (otherwise you'd get half the ad industry to close). Add Hyperswitch to get a decent alt-tab, Karabiner so you can remap ctrl+c/v to avoid twisting your hands, and a Windows keyboard layout to not lose your muscle memory for braces and other special characters (that Apple doesn't print on the keyboard FFS), SizeUp for having Windows shortcuts to move your windows around without a mouse - and that's it. A Mac that gets enough of the Windows muscle memory to make the transition pretty painlss.
Sadly, as this article discussed, Mac OS is not going in a direction that's strongly encouraging. Plus, RE: Microsoft Office, I always believed that it was handicapped on Mac versus Windows. Excel seemed to bog down more quickly when faced with large spreadsheets, and the whole suite seemed sluggish, as if it was running through a not very efficient compatibility layer.
I beg to differ. GTK and Qt cover 99% of applications. If you run Plasma, you get a pleasant GUI for theming which lets you set them both to a matching theme. Look and feel consistency is on par with Windows 95 (and far superior to modern Windows), and I can't even tell which UI framework is being used a lot of the time.
This design requires far too much visual processing of my own brain to separate the 'liquid glass' animations from the content of the button.
I find my eyes tracking content sliding under the controls and not looking at the objects in the controls.
I was thinking of moving from Google to Apple with the next generation, but this new feature for me is a hard pass.
Even watching the video about it from Apple is not a relaxing experience for my eyes.
"Boss, this idea is shit and I am not implementing it. Either you change or I go."
And before leaving, an email to the boss's boss or to the CEO.
And the boss's boss or the CEO wouldn't listen anyway, as they'd ask their reports what was what, and receive an appropriate 'message'.
Ooh grandpa quit because of the stupid idea instead of just yelling - yayyyyy! Wonder how he is going to earn money to survive, well not my problem - Now, let's implement this stupid idea!
on edit: this comes up every now and then and there are all sorts of reasons why people can't take the high road, especially not on stuff that is just "stupid ideas", and I guess this time it falls to me to respond.
Certainly people not quitting because your company is say, putting addictive chemicals in cigarettes or accepting a certain number of fatalities from cars instead of spending more money to make them safer or all sorts of moral issues is something that should be judged - but considering how often people don't do the right thing when even other people are going to die it seems a bit much to expect people will do the right thing when design sucks and is stupid, and it seems likely to expect that your claim that people should is issued from a position where you can completely afford to do so - most of the time people say "must be nice" at this point, but hey I spent a lot of my time at that position in life and I can confirm "yes, it is nice" and it really sucks to be in a position where one can't do that stuff anymore, but that's life I guess.