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by tensor 56 days ago
The UX used to be better by a country mile. The liquid glass update was a genuinely serious regression. Is Windows or Android now better? At least those operating systems don't have constant contrast issues and flickering. At this point they probably have more consistency.

MacOS reliability has slowly gotten worse and worse, but the UX drop with liquid glass was profound.
2 comments
Schiendelman 56 days ago
I don't agree with the whining about liquid glass. Sure, it isn't the design you like. But usability really isn't that different.
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tensor 56 days ago
No, it's objectively bad in terms of usability. There is also the matter of taste, but I'm not even talking about that. I'm talking about UX, not style. UX is about functionality and usability.

Contrast is an objective measure. There are well studied and known levels where you can have trouble reading, or an easy time reading. Similarly, things like drag regions not even aligning with visual elements are literally indefensible. This stuff is so basic you'd fail a UX 101 course with it.

Things like spotlight defaulting to the newest item so that when you hit enter and it changes your selected item the millisecond before you hit enter. I'm not even sure how you'd try to defend UI elements literally flickering as either style or not affecting usability.

It's objectively bad by a great many widely agreed upon and studied standards.

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rafram 56 days ago
Contrast was bad in the first couple bets, but now it’s very similar to iOS 18.
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Schiendelman 55 days ago
You're still reacting to the early beta, I think.
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tensor 52 days ago
No, I don’t generally use betas. In fact the Liquid Glass release was the first time I DID sign up for betas, but only after the actual release because I wanted to get the fixes faster.

While they’ve improved some of the contrast issues, all the other issues I mentioned are there to this day.

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reddalo 56 days ago
I agree. MacOS became completely unusable with Liquid Glass, it totally feels like one of those amateur custom themes for Linux.

I hope the new leadership will bring back better software. As of now, macOS 26 is disgusting.

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