For those that haven’t seen this very well done write up about Tahoe’s use of icons, I would definitely recommend it: https://tonsky.me/blog/tahoe-icons/
Good grief, hopefully in v28 Lemay will also throw away the absolute crap that is Liquid glass. Aesthetically it looks horrible, it slows my iPhone 13 — which never before lagged in all its life since iOS 15 – to a maddening crawl.
Liquid glass should be taught in design school as an example of what not to do when you design UX. And also in business school as a case of how middle management can fudge up something that is working normally in the illusion of progress.
My iPhone 13 performs better since the Liquid Glass update. Animations seem to have been optimized and are much smoother. I also replaced the battery last year, so it might be worth checking if you are getting degraded performance due to a old battery.
It was still ugly, but it did kinda work because it only affected the window chrome, and it could be set to opaque with an easy-to-find setting.
On macOS the checkbox for "Reduce transparency" is hidden away in the Accessibility settings panel which is the last place I'd look for configuring the desktop theme.
Liquid Glass made my 13 mini consistently lock up and overheat. Multiple reboots every day. Ludicrously slow screen repaints. It only stopped with the latest version (26.5).
Anecdotal evidence is not proof, and as I’ve seen two people in this thread saying the performance of their iPhone 13s improved after iOS 26, I don’t see how you could concretely attribute any of your issues to Liquid Glass specifically (especially since you say it has been resolved with 26.5 despite Liquid Glass still being present in the os).
Steve Lemay was a driving supporter of liquid glass, just like at least 2 other remaining designers at Apple. It's not going anywhere. Hopefully it will get toned down several times over though.
It is being toned down, at least in that they seem to be lightening up on that stupid lie that it helps you "focus on the content" because there were no toolbars. As if you're reading any text behind the buttons that are warping it and displaying another layer of text or an icon on top of it. And they ended up having to do an ugly fade at the top and bottom anyway cause you couldn't see the buttons on certain backgrounds.
I think Liquid Glass is inherently bad. Universaly accepted truths about UIs that Liquid Glass violates:
* Consistent look across instances
* Consistent look as surrounding content changes
* Contrast is meaningful
* Interactsble elements are not stacked on the z axis
* Animation conveys meaning
You can see evidence that even Apple understands this by the presence of the options to disable many aspects of Liquid Glass living in the accessibility options.
Why the hell do people keep assuming that whats-his-face was the one singular person responsible for Liquid Glass? How do they imagine Liquid Glass happened? By magic? Unbeknownst to any person in the company? Including the people who spent two hours on stage last year praising it?
MacOS 27 Beta seems to actually fix a lot of my complaints with Tahoe. I had cynically been believing Apple was simply going to let macOS rot and not fix these major annoyances.
(Rather interestingly, menus still have icons if a menu option will simply launch another app, a specific folder that has an icon, or will perform a specific action like a window resize or category sort change that already has an icon you could click elsewhere.)
They also have cleaned up the mess of differently rounded borders (not complete yet but progress is being made). The OS also feels a lot less sluggish. I had gone back to Sequoia simply because performance was so bad.
The poor quality of macOS Tahoe is by design as it is a "transition" release - a transition OS release is often like a beta quality release (of some feature) and often features a "break" (like loss of hardware support or EOL etc.). It is meant to frustrate the user, so that the "next" OS release (which fixes all the bugs of the "beta" features is more "appealing" and hyped (just read all the comments praising the new release here and elsewhere :). Apparently Tahoe is going to be the last macOS that supports Intel macs - that means it will continue to frustrate Intel Mac users and force them to consider buying the Apple ARM models if they want to use the newer macOS. A similar thing happened with Catalina too after it dropped support for 32-bit apps - many people chose to remain in the previous version (Mojave) because it was less "buggy" / appealing than Catalina. Followed by the "hype" of how the next version (Big Sur) was "so much better". Microsoft also does this with Windows OS - e.g. Windows Vista and Windows 8 both can be considered "transition" releases that are infamous due to their "beta" quality features and / or frustrating UI features. (This tactic of boring and / or frustrating the viewers is more common in many popular TV series, where one or more episodes is often deliberately made that way - by focusing on something mundane and meaningless that doesn't really move the story forward, so that it makes the following and often climax episodes more exciting, fulfilling and enjoyable. E.g. Breaking Bad s03e10 - The Fly - the most boring episode of season 3).
This has been my favorite WWDC in years. Everything I've seen from the OS 27 releases has been such a breath of fresh air after years of bizarre design/usability decisions.
I hope Apple learned a lesson from what happened with Alan Dye and that Ternus doesn't let something like that happen again under his leadership.
Sometimes who can't be bothered to make the text on their website not extremely tiny when viewing on mobile shouldn't be writing multi-page rants on the other people's UI.
Isn’t he just serving up the desktop website? This goes along with the original intent of the benefits of the browser on the iPhone. It was able to run the normal Internet, not a separate “mobile” version of it. I found a simple double tap on the text sized it perfectly fine to read the text.
What I find to be a UI problem are sites that force me into a mobile view, which often loses features, and which removes my ability to zoom and pan as I wish. Apple had to add an option to “Request Desktop Website”, which I assume spoofs the user agent, to try and get around this issue. But for site that use other means, this still doesn’t work and the user is locked into a crippled mobile page… the exact problem modern smartphones were supposed to solve.
I’ll take Gruber’s model every time over the crippled mobile sandbox with no way out.
Nope, your snippet proves nothing. The only font rule in it is `font-size: inherit`, which means "don't change the size." So your proof that HN resizes text is a line that resizes nothing. Since your snippet was so useless I had to go read the actual news.css to find out what rules are actually there. The result: body text goes from 12px to 13.3px.
It's still small. The widely considered standard size of body copy is 16px or 1rem.
But the thing is, which was my point all along, it doesn't fucking matter.
On the sites I visit often I use uBlock Origin to make fonts large enough for me to read (damn you, presbyopia!). Otherwise I use Ctrl-+ to increase the font size (Daring Fireball, for example).
White on gray is the only dark mode that doesn't hurt my eyes. I use light mode for practically everything except IntelliJ which has a great built-in "Darcula" theme (which is now opt-in in favor of a more standard dark mode that I hate) which looks similar to DF's theme.
White on black or dark gray makes my eyes bug out. I have pretty good vision but that's the only thing that actually hurts my eyes.
I've been using firefox's viewport zoom to improve website visibility a lot these days. Traditional zoom reflows the page, but the viewport zoom keeps the page the same, just makes it bigger. You might know this from pinching out on the touchpad on a laptop, but you can do this on a keyboard by setting `mousewheel.with_$KEY.action` to 5 to perform viewport zoom by having a keyboard key pressed. I use it with alt, and use AHK to bind XB2+scroll to emit alts instead (I make it emit ctrl regularly but alt when a firefox window is focused). It has been one of my best usability improvements recently. It's one of those things that, if you make ergonomic enough, you end up using on every single website, since you can make the column width the optimal size for your readability.
I didn't know about this, I'm on my laptop right now running macos and just tapped the trackpad with two fingers and it zoomed in. Usually I'm using a mouse and keyboard, I'll have to figure out how to do this with a keyboard shortcut.
Glad for the change, but a lot of the criticism overlooks that at some point we won't be the target audience of UI/UX anymore.
Flyouts, dropdowns, and other text menus make sense to me, but I could see how they might be alien and uncomfortable to someone that has only ever experienced mobile interfaces.
The reverse is true for sure, nowhere do I feel more frustrated and old-brained then trying to make sense of a new mobile app that everyone else seems to think is great.
> but I could see how they might be alien and uncomfortable to someone that has only ever experienced mobile interfaces
They are different devices. Just because you can drive a sedan does not means you can drive a bulldozer. Or playing piano qualifies you to play the organ. So going from touch and a small screen to keyboard/mouse and a bigger screen, you should expect that the interactions will change.
Exactly this. The “one UI to rule them all” paradigm has been a persistent, recurring flaw for decades. It probably hit its lowest (to date) with the exhortations to “mobile first design”. The motivation for that was reasonable: conventional desktop UIs of the time didn’t render on mobile. However the ensuing “mobile first” instead became “mobile only” - and consequently wide screen displays with buttons the size of elephants.
Phones and desktops are so radically different that your sedan/bulldozer analogy seems like shades of grey. It’s more like taking a Saturn V rocket to the local shop for a pint of milk.
The solutions is then them building a mental model for the desktop. Using phone strategy on larger screens is a usability issue, because it doesn’t translate well or take advantage of a mouse and keyboard. We went through this with windows 8. It’s a nice idea, but in practice it makes the desktop much more cumbersome to use. It might have a benefit for very new users, but it’s temporary in nature.
The utter user-interface butchery happening to Safari on the Mac is once again the work of people who put iOS first. People who by now think in iOS terms. People who view the venerable Mac OS user interface as an older person whose traits must be experimented upon, plastic surgery after plastic surgery, until this person looks younger. Unfortunately the effect is more like this person ends up looking… weird.
These people look at the Mac’s UI and (that’s the impression, at least) don’t really understand it. Its foundations come from a past that almost seems inscrutable to them. Usability cues and features are all wrinkles to them. iOS and iPadOS don’t have these strange wrinkles, they muse. We must hide them. We’ll make this spectacular facelift and we’ll hide them, one by one. Mac OS will look as young (and foolish, cough) as iOS!
--- end quote ---
(power users don't use mobile devices for their work, and yet...)
TIL about the proliferation of menu item icons in Tahoe. Perhaps I missed the outcry when Tahoe came out, but I got around to upgrading to it only a couple months ago, and this was not a change that stood out.
"it’s proof that the rot has been rooted out of Apple’s software design team"
I know little about Apple, but have quite a bit of experience with how software products get "designed". Goofy and offensive things happen when corporations decide not to pay attention to customers.
The decision to ignore customer and focus on market wow is not the software design team. It is a systemic and structural thing.
"it’s proof that the rot has been rooted out of Apple’s software design team"
Weird sentence given that three staunch supporters of liquid glass are still in that team, including Lemay. I highly doubt it's going anywhere, hopefully it gets a few more improvements before it will be replaced for The New Thing in MacOS 29.
Liquid glass isn't inherently bad, it just needed someone to dial it back when the prettiness is hurting legibility/usability.
There are lots of things (well, in iOS) that I think are a big improvement, like menus spawning from the button you tapped instead of a bottom sheet popping up from the bottom of the screen. And the nested list menus are very nice.
But completely eradicating toolbars and replacing them with a fade that still doesn't allow buttons legible in all cases was clearly a mistake. And it's something they're backtracking on!
that's just sunk cost fallacy. The icons are also publicly available and can be used on projects conforming to the Apple branding, so it's not truly a waste.
If anything, the waste would have arguably been putting people to work on a feature that needed to get removed in the first place. If there's any post-mortem to be done, it's "why did this get released in the first place, and how do we make sure we don't spent time on something like it again?"
I'm happy to see the HIG (Human Interface Guidelines) referenced in the post.
I was unaware Apple still maintained such a document? There was a time when TOG's HIG [1] was the Bible for the Mac interface. UI nerds at Apple (and likely elsewhere) would enjoy debating/interpreting them for some project or another. (I don't recall anyone being burned at the stake but there were definitely discussions that could reach a heretical pitch.)
The HIG preached a kind of nuance and balance—when it allowed for somewhat less "staid" UI elements it would advise moderation.
This came about in an era when the graphical user interface was a fairly new thing to the public and inconsistency (Do What Thou Wilt) would only have destabilized the gentle adoption Apple was treading.
It was a marketable advantage for Apple as well. Consistency on the DOS side, as far as I know, came about only as companies tried to adopt familiar patterns from popular apps of the day. (Related: I talked to an engineer at Adobe about the hideous UI (my opinion) of Adobe Acrobat on the Mac and was told they wanted it to look like it belonged alongside the suite of Microsoft Office apps. le sigh.)
I'd think it's like, the whole Tahoe version had a lot to complain about, but enough people focused on the menu icons that they didn't focus on other things. Look how relieved they are the icons are gone!
Same, my brain is pretty visually oriented so I kind of like the icons. To be clear I don't really use the icons to pick out a particular item, but they just look nice. It's kind of like pleasant background music in a hotel lobby.
If you're visually oriented it's easier to quickly find what you're looking for when there's only occasional icons as visual anchor points rather than everything being a bunch of tiny icons you have to parse
I would be far more sad at the battery life of any Intel Mac anymore! Having been on Apple Silicon for some five years now, I can't imagine going back.
Considering that Intel Macs will still be more than functional and provide a great user experience for many years afterwards even with Tahoe, not something that can be said for Win/PC machines, strikes me as being rather good customer support even if the breakpoint does seem like a bit of a short EOL.
But I now plenty of people who bought Win machines and with the next update they basically turned into molasses, all while dealing with horrible trackpads and bad performance.
For the HIG: Use menu item icons sparingly and with purpose. Icons allow people to find menu items more quickly, and help clarify what selecting an item does.
I'm not sure that's even OK. I find icons disruptive to reading the menu, but at least Apple still has text to read. Microsoft Word doesn't even have "Save" as text for saving your file, never mind that the icon isn't even in the file menu these days.
It's one for one or two items to have icons. The vegetarian dishes on a restaurant can have the leaf icon for instance. But it would be stupid if every single dish did. The whole point is that icons pop out so putting them on EVERY item is just counterproductive.
Toolbars (pre office-ribbon design era) were understood to only have frequently used items which are the ones that also happen to have icons. Then the office-ribbon thing happened, and everyone complained about that because it meant everything had to have an icon and everyone had to memorize what every icon meant (I’m exaggerating slightly)
The main problem with icons is that they need to be universally understood, otherwise they are a usability issue. In the past, this was achieved through Skeuomorphism and consistency across software.
However, as time has gone on Skeuomorphism has lost value, because people don’t necessarily recognize the old things they’re trying to reference. So we’ve been seeing a movement away from that for the past 10 years. But, then we run into another issue: the icons are new, and therefore unknown if not obvious. In addition, every software company seems to go their own way and have their own “style”, which is actually a big problem because users have to keep an absurd amount of iconography in their minds to use all their day to day software.
Text solves this, because text can inherently be read.
The other issue is the few icons that existed before Tahoe generally highlighted import or more frequently used actions. And acted as a visual anchor point so if you frequently used another item you know, "it's 2 items below the save which has the save icon"
When everything has an icon it all just becomes clutter and no one is going to waste their time trying to parse tiny glyphs that are inconsistent between apps anyway. You could try to figure out which of the 4 icons with a plus button is the "New X" option you're looking for, but you'll probably just be reading the titles anyway so the icon does nothing.
> In addition, every software company seems to go their own way and have their own “style”
Hence Apple using the same set of SF Symbols across all their platforms. And I don't think icons are intended to be used to initially identify the purpose of a button, but instead to provide a quick visual anchor once you are already familiar. Sure, there are some buttons that everyone will use more (like Save or Open), but I don't think there's anything wrong with allowing every button to have this sort of quick visual lookup. Predicting user behavior is hard.
But they don’t actually, Apple will use different icons for the same function across their platforms (and even on the same platform across applications!) That was part of the problem with the menu icons.
Yes, I have been listening to Gruber complain about them for a year now. His critique is that "Apple's HIG used to say not to," not anything about what actually makes them bad.
Curiously, I haven't heard him talk about Apple Intelligence in Shortcuts, or any of the cool new features in Tahoe. Design is how it looks, I guess.
I’m still on Sequoia because of all the Tahoe complaints. Not so much the rounded corners, but I heard performance was poor. Have updates to Tahoe improved things?
I’m on an M1 Max device and the GPU performance drops have not gotten back to Sequoia levels on Tahoe patches. Golden Gate hasn’t changed anything either.
I'm so upset that Liquid Glass is visibly pixelated now. Like, it's barely even blurred at the least transparent setting -- it just looks like a very obviously downsampled background. Like distractingly/annoyingly downsampled. Ugh!!
They're trying to waste it less. For example, it's now very common for me to see it simply not update when I move a window that's behind another window. Which kinda ruins part of the magic for me.
I didn’t upgrade to Tahoe after reading a couple of bad reviews. This time around though I may just do the upgrade. Nagging for system upgrade every time I plug my iphone is getting my nerves.
The icons in menu items is one of the reasons I'm still on Sequoia. This settles it; I'll just stay on Sequoia until Golden Gate is released.
I can't say the following for sure, but there's evidence of it: One of Apple's real strengths and differentiators is that it listens to customer feedback to the point that it will say: "Hey, this was dumb. Customer feedback proves it. Let's just get rid of it like it never happened."
Other examples include getting rid of the earlier getting rid of Magsafe.
I don't know whether it's something taught in Apple School, but in the absence of not doing dumb things in the first place, which seems to be unavoidable in the real world with real people, it's probably the next best thing. And it may be enough better than the norm from tech companies that it's a real cultural differentiator.
People tend to ascribe to Apple only the Jobs years. That Apple might have reset after he came back. The truth is far from that. The people in the company were great, they just needed a massive amount of refocus. Apple has people who have been there decades and have had to reverse incredibly stupid decisions.
This is also what's annoying with most model generated artifacts. They want every bullet point with an emoji. Even worse is an HTML artifact will be littered with chips/pill style "informative" boxes. So much useless distraction. I need something fine tuned by Tufte
Random icons for the days of the week don’t even make much sense. If they at least iconified the moon, Tyr, Woden, etc., it would at least have a leg to stand on, but here it’s like the randomized avatars so many services assign user accounts.
It was death by a thousand cuts. I am not a designer and Tahoe bothered me enough that, after trying it at work, I've been actively stopping my personal Mac to update, and it was a factor in moving to android.
Liquid Glass motivated me to sell my Mac. But also, Linux becoming genuinely amazing and being able to play all my PC games played a role there as well.
I don’t find Android nearly as compelling, and Liquid Glass seems at least a bit less of a disaster on the iOS platform.
My suggestion to you is follow the Panther Lake laptops that are coming out as your potential future Mac off-ramp. I have a Framework 13 Pro on preorder [1] but some other laptops are also showing impressive results on battery life and GPU performance. If I had more money to blow I would totally grab a Zephyrus G14 2026 with the panther lake CPU and RTX 5070Ti. Although as a programmer’s laptop, the Framework is excellent and the 13 Pro looks like it’s shaping up to be a dream system.
[1] Unfortunately you can’t get the kind of RAM deal that I got for my 13 Pro anymore. As soon as the 13 Pro was announced I pounced on some new old stock of Crucial LPCAMM2 memory, which isn’t available anymore. I paid about $250 for 32GB, which is a “deal,” apparently. As of now you pretty much have to buy it from Framework as nobody else has it at a more reasonable price.
Thanks for the suggestion! For the moment I'm dual booting, since the m1 MacBook is still a decent piece of hardware for my needs and asahi Linux offers good support.
Given the current market I intend to hold on as long as possible, but I'll probably be eyeing the Frameworks when it's time to change. Apple's change of direction makes me hopeful that they'll recover, but the current trends in tech have moved me away from corporate platforms a bit.
I like the YouTube channel Just Josh Tech for laptop reviews. They also have a price tracking website.
Something that’s perhaps hard to get used to with switching to a non-Apple piece of hardware is that Apple sales are not the same as Windows laptop sales. If you watch retailers like a hawk there are sometimes pretty incredible discounts.
In other words, lots of Windows laptop MSRPs are just completely not real prices and it makes them look really bad against MacBook hardware.
That said, with Apple’s stable pricing, alternative laptops being the “cheap alternative” to a Mac is pretty much over. Your next upgrade might just be a newer but still used MacBook when the newer hardware gets better Asahi support.
You have to make accommodation for designers, that's simply their language. If something is misaligned by 1 pixel, it's not an annoyance, it's a catastrophe.
The icons were bad, but the real issue with the new theme is the waste of space and wasting time computing transparencies.
> I don’t know if all the untalented hacks are gone, but the untalented magazine-designer hacks with clout and influence all left with Alan Dye.
As usual for Gruber, this is fanboy cope. Dye may be a convenient scapegoat, but he was not a lone wolf, he was operating with the full assent of executive leadership, which is to say, the same leadership that appointed his successor.
It’s important not to forget the (work) politics while looking at the work produced. Unfortunately when you get a politically astute Mad Men (for real, from Ogilvy) in the organization, great damage can be done for a very long time without much recourse.
You’ll note Dye was an Ive decision. And you’ll see the successor was not in Dye’s camp. Because (work) politics.
> Gurman reported that Billy Sorrentino, a Dye deputy who has served as a senior director of design at Apple since 2016, is leaving for Meta with Dye.3 I don’t have any other names, but word on the street is that other members of Dye’s inner circle are leaving Apple for Meta with him. But those who remain — or who might remain, if they’d have been offered the promotion to replace Dye — simply can’t be trusted from the perspective of senior leadership, who were apparently blindsided by Dye’s departure for Meta.
> Putting Alan Dye in charge of user interface design was the one big mistake Jony Ive made as Apple’s Chief Design Officer.
> Dye had no background in user interface design... Before joining Apple, he was design director for the fashion brand Kate Spade, and before that worked on branding for the ad agency Ogilvy.
> Alan Dye is not untalented. But his talents at Apple were in politics. His political skill was so profound that it was his decision to leave, despite the fact that his tenure is considered a disaster by actual designers inside and outside the company. He obviously figured out how to please Apple’s senior leadership. His departure today landed as a total surprise because his stature within the company seemed so secure.
Whether or not the successor was a friend of Dye isn't relevant here. Let's say for a moment that Apple's design woes were a result of Dye. Dye was appointed by Apple's leadership. The conclusion would that Apple's leadership isn't capable of evaluating whether or not someone is fit for the job. And even if the guy who appointed Dye isn't around any more, the guy who appointed Dye was also appointed by Apple's leadership; despite whatever turnover there may be, there is an entire web of leadership continuity that resulted in Apple not being capable of selecting proper leaders, which means there is no reason to suspect that the current guy will fare any better. Politics is politics; the idea that the last guy was appointed because he was good at politics only goes to show that Apple fundamentally rewards politicking, not ability, so the assumption must be that the new guy is also a politicker first and foremost. Gruber is hoping that the new guy, in addition to politicking, is also good at design, but that's all it is: hope, and hope as a front for refusing to face harsh truths (to wit: the harsh truth that Apple has no magic touch left, especially difficult for a lifelong super-fanboy like Gruber to understand) is called cope.
I strongly dislike Ive's influence overall, but skeuomorphism made it incredibly difficult and cost-prohibitive for a single indie developer to make an app that felt like a polished first-party experience for iOS. I'm glad it's gone. You're still welcome to do it if you want and you have the whimsy and artistic talent (or design team) for it.
I agree with you on everything but Skeuomorphism - seeing that leather address book made me genuinely repulsed every time, it felt like I was using a child's computer.
I hated - hated - skeuomorphism. It’s not just the appearance, which I can take or leave, but also the idea of making software model the behavior of physical items. Frankly, the old Mac first party apps sucked for it. For example, for the longest time Calendar didn’t have an event list view, only a day or week or month view (IIRC; it’s been a while). Why? Because desk calendars don’t have an event list view, so neither should this. Or remember the old QuickTime Player where you had to adjust the volume by clicking the edge of a volume wheel and dragging it because that’s how an old portable TV worked.
Skeuomorphic icons can be pretty. Skeuomorphic UX sucks because it inherently brings physical world limitations to software where it’s unnecessary.
VLC has the best UX in the world. Yes It Will Play That Video!
It has a ton of cryptic options, but at least it lets you mess around with them and maybe get something usable, where other apps would just give up and shake their head.
But that’s all I want it to do… play the video. Now it adds those videos to a media library for some reason. I never want this and I never found a way to turn it off.
I moved to IINA to finally get back to a video Swiss Army knife that just plays video and doesn’t force me into an experience I don’t want… after tweaking a bunch of settings.
A miss Perian, the codec pack for QuickTime, which gave QuickTime and QuickLook that play-anything experience. It played the video and got out of my way.
Having recently switched to Tahoe with a new computer, I honestly wonder what kind of life these people lead that this is where there mental and expressive effort goes. It's just not a big deal.
No good reason to be excited about the old garbage UI returning after the new garbage had been trashed.
> This updated advice in the HIG is perfect.
> Use an icon to highlight the most common actions and key features of your app
Saving a document is the one of the most common actions in your average app, but I * never* need an icon there in the menu, there is no benefit in focusing my attention on an action I always do with a shortcut!
The perfect advice would be easy and powerful user customization, so that, for example, I could right click on the app's File>Save menu and select an option to hide the icon, reformat the rich text field and have this change propagate in all the other apps.
Or click on a web link from someone who has already done it better and add the theme.
Then I wouldn't even care about the back and forth design changes between major OS releases.
And that could also fix another sin in the screenshot - the text is not vertically aligned! "visual consistency" misunderstood
The garbage that threw itself out was "the untalented magazine-designer hacks with clout and influence [who] all left with Alan Dye" and that's worth celebrating. Especially because Meta collected the trash.
