Comment by smcleod

There's SO much padding and wasted screen real estate

That seems to be a growing trend ever since "UX designers" started taking over (early 2010s?), to the point that I wonder if they're trying to see how far they can take it.

I count four different corner radius sizes currently on my screen, which is maddening.

Apple has a thing against people with OCD. Or taste.

The thing is horribly wasteful of screen real estate, and as someone who’s been writing a Mac blog for over two decades, I am so happy I started using Fedora two years ago—GNOME has its flaws, but it looks nicer than Tahoe.

I have been running the beta from the beginning and they have improved quite a bit, but I am actually shocked they didn't delay Mac OS 26, because the design is so rough around the edges. Some of the larger aesthetic changes, such as the menu bar and the dock look good, but there is so much more that looks objectively awful.

1. the way window UI elements float in bubbles on the top over a white background is horrible. It looks amateurish.

2. Icons look low detail and blurry. At first I thought they were using low resolution placeholder icons, but no, the layered diffused glass effect just kind of translates to blurriness on many app icons.

3. The side bar, such as on Finder, just kind of floats there. That is fine and looks kind of neat on the Maps app as you can see some of the maps behind it, but on the Finder it is just a white bubble over top of a white background, which... is a choice.

4. The app launcher is gone, and replaced by Spotlight, which is worse.

I could go on. The point is it is bad and Apple should be embarrassed. I say that as someone who likes Apple products alot.

It was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me. After trying out the preview for a month, the writing was on the wall, and I began the process of switching to a Thinkpad with Linux. I am now fully off macOS for the first time in 20 years of being an Apple die hard. I could use a lot of emotionally loaded words to describe how I feel about this release, but the long and short of it is that I am no longer the target audience for Apple.

I try not to indulge in negativity and scorn, but I agree with these sentiments. This is resoundly a regression. Text overlapping on text, searchboxes that are broken and now just function as text boxes, increased latency throughout the operating system.

It's so bad that it's kind of fascinating. Unfortunately, even "Reduce Transparency" doesn't fix the LG update.

There are also under-the-hood changes that I found truly upsetting: among other things, all the Emacs versions I've tried (stock GNU Emacs or Mac Port, downloaded binary blobs and compiled on my machine) are either immediately unusable or become so slow after a day that they are almost unusable. Tracing things on Instruments suggests a culprit (the culprit?) is NSAutofillHeuristicController. This is not a new feature, but I'm guessing with them pushing Apple Intelligence it was rewritten. AFAIK no obvious way to disable this "feature". (Turning off Apple Intelligence doesn't seem to do it.)

I'm contemplating rolling back to Sequoia.

Yeah similar situation here. I've been running it since basically the day after WWDC, and I've just had this sinking feeling that its so bad, they wouldn't be able to fix it before release. Or, they don't even view it as something that needs fixing.

I'll begrudgingly get a couple more years out of this personal M2 Air, but my engineering team is prepping to do upgrades on some older M1 Pros we've had since launch, and after seeing Tahoe, the CTO and I formed a plan to give devs the option of getting either an M4 Pro or a Framework. We haven't launched yet, but I think a solid number of our engineers are going to opt for the Framework, hopefully as high as half.

It’s ugly as hell and plain stupid.

I couldn’t watch the WWDC and when I saw the screenshots I thought it was a joke. Giant buttons with weird padding and extreme transparency effects.

This is going to sound harsh but it looks like when “working” from home, Apple engineers outsourced their work to amateurs online.

I simply cannot believe that Apple is shipping an OS this out of touch with elegance.

Steve Jobs said in his inauguration speech that he slept on the floor to take typography classes and later obsessed over having great typefaces on Macs. Steve would’ve burn the place down instead of shipping a crap like this.

I was on RC too, for a few days, and also uninstalled. I'm glad I did, the fresh Sequoia install feels much nicher. Even with reduce transparency on, the design was too ugly and the drab gray icon jails for non-squircle icons were downright offensive. First macOS version I'm gonna skip and I've been a day one updater since mountain lion, very sad.

Ugh I upgraded excitedly and can't stand the UI - there is no upside to any of it. Also for some reason things are also beachballing and VSCode keeps crashing - new M4 MBP. All the system log errors are present exactly as they were and my USB-C dock with Ethernet port still doesn't work.

> they think their users are dumb

Aren’t they/we? :-)

*majority of

Well, hasn’t this been the single biggest reason for their sustained stellar returns year after year where often (or maybe most of the time) the biggest change their devices (like iPhones) used to see was the version number change e.g. iPhone 13 -> 14.

For the rest of their users — they make a noise (which is not even feeble in comparison), bicker around, lament the fact that the other alternative is Google (Windows and the Wild Linux West), and they stay. Rinse, repeat.

> SO much padding

No idea on macOS, but turn on Reduce Transparency on iOS and there’s tons of padding most of the time, but then sometimes zero padding. And I mean zero. The edges of buttons and text are at the edge of the underlying background. It’s…embarrassing.

I made the mistake of updating my phone, and immediately regretted it. We tried Liquid Glass already, it was called mid-aughts Windows. It sucked then, and it sucks now.

Everything I've seen of it looks a disaster. I'll wait for macOS 27.

It would be one thing if they excessively rounded and padded the windows, but they shipped with a bunch of different padding and border radii. So far I’ve counted 4 different borders, and I’m sure there’s more.

That was my experience with liquid glass on mobile. I’d heard it was bad, thought it couldn’t possible be that bad then tried it and was flabbergasted. Really unfortunate.

The Finder looks like shit. The sidebar is like badly retrofited from another program, perhaps from some crappy Gnome theme.

The Control Center (or however they call the drop down window with quick controls for volume, wifi, brigthness, etc) has floating isolated icons like crap.

Bring back Scott Forstall. Give him a big bonus. Let him fix this shit.

Otherwise, the code changes and actual features are probably fine.

It's very unstable, indexing doesn't work anymore

Can you post screenshots of what you mean?

I see grossly rounded corners in some apps, but I don't see the other stuff like gaps in window corners for full screen apps. I may have some config bit flipped that has disabled those.

Yeah, the new corner radius is ugly but by and large, it's not much different than before, from what I see so far.

Steve Jobs would never have allowed this to be released.

> There's SO much padding and wasted screen real estate, disjointed looking floating inner panels, window corners that are so rounded you see gaps in full screen apps, inconsistencies everywhere and - well, I could go on.

Remember in the beforetimes when we decoupled themes from OS updates? Wouldn't it be nice if once again we discovered this lost technology that let different users have different UIs?

How hard is it to downgrade?

My progression:

1. Apple photos redesign from last year sucks and I’m already frustrated with iCloud abstraction and lack of cross platform friendliness

2. Switch to an alternate cloud photos provider

3. Find out about Liquid Glass, looks like shit, impulse sell my MacBook Pro in favor of a Framework

4. Surprise surprise, it’s actually the year of the Linux desktop. My gaming situation is way better on Linux and it does everything my Mac did. The only compromise is my need to carry a big extra battery around.

Did you notice any impact on battery life?

Training/preparing users for upcoming AR glasses interfaces?

> Basically the vibe I get from it is that they think their users are dumb

Your point would have been much more convincing had you refrained from this sort of pejorative assigning of motives. It wasn't necessary.

I've been running the betas to the final release and there are a number of basic affordances and system improvements that are definitely worthwhile. I will not be going back.

Having said that, while I know they had good intentions with this whole design, and probably really thought they were pursing a winner, what a massive, massive miss. This is such an aesthetic disaster that I'm just in awe. I feel like they had a huge push to do some seemingly substantial change, particularly on the mobile side, given the stumbles in the AI space, so they changed a lot of things maybe without quite enough thought.

Ugly as hell. More dead space. On the mobile side they released an update to iOS just today from the RC a few days ago that removes some of the particularly stupid animations (the app tray did some dumb thing where it expanded and shrank, and that and a few similar things are gone).

I've been running the RC and I have had no issues. Some of the design choices (sidebars particularly) are strange, but it's generally fine.

I recommend not overcomplicating your life and just staying on the latest macOS.

So the Gnome 3 gang were ahead of their time?

I float around the VC world in SF. Several of the women that work for VCs in decent positions don't know how to maximize a window on the MacBooks.