I've been running it since the RC and am currently in the process of uninstalling it. The new UI is so incredibly ugly I honestly cannot understand how they thought it was acceptable to even released as a beta let alone an RC and now release.

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.

Basically the vibe I get from it is that they think their users are dumb - they won't care about things like this and that they want everything to look like a preschoolers tablet.

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.

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 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.

The whole "Liquid Glass" UI is by far their worst ever take on a design language. It feels like stepping backwards to web 2.0 but with even bigger accessibility issues.

It doesn't look or feel modern, its ugly, inconsistent and just all around crap. God knows what they were thinking with this.

Also who on earth green lit these low resolution looking blurry icons everywhere?!

> The new UI is so incredibly ugly I honestly cannot understand how they thought it was acceptable to even released as a beta let alone an RC and now release.

I feel like if you replaced all of the paper in a company's printers with transparency sheets you'd be fired because that's obviously a stupid idea that would never work. But then I guess that's why I'm not a software UI designer.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This is quite a departure from the company the pioneered UX obsession and attention to the smallest detail. What's happening here?

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.

> 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.

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

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.

Either Tim Cook does not use a Mac computer or he does not notice/care. I am not saying he should helicopter-parent all the design process but the "finished" product?

So: that is Apple's CEO for you.

> 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.

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.

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

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.

I just installed it (had to; if I am using the Mac, I'd rather be on the latest OS for security and compatibility reasons), and it is just disgusting. It is more disgusting than the iOS 26 monstrosity.

I mean, how do you even provide constructive feedback to such a pathetic design choice? Not that this company ever deals in feedback (unless it's a strong feedback directly to its wallet).

I do believe they are just exhibiting sheer incompetence and intellectual bankruptcy as a corporation. Is it beginning of an end? I don't know. Do giga corps even die 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.

How hard is it to downgrade?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmWOtf4Ziso

Look how far we've fallen.

> 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?

Did you notice any impact on battery life?

Honestly, Windows 7's Aero effects are better looking. Best thing after that is KDE (with light customizations). Everything else has regressed.

Training/preparing users for upcoming AR glasses interfaces?

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.

So the Gnome 3 gang were ahead of their time?

Steve Jobs would never have allowed this to be released.

I tried 3 betas of ios and then sold my iPhone and bought a Pixel, that's how disappointed I was from what I saw.

> 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.

> The new UI is so incredibly ugly I honestly cannot understand how they thought it was acceptable to even released as a beta let alone an RC and now release.

I just tried it and maybe I've just been primed by the internet, but by god, I did not like it.

The side-bar design is terrible and lots of application (Maps, Music, etc) always look like they have a window overlapping the current application. So even with a single window open, my desktop already looks messy.

For people like me, with a slight OCD about certain details (don't talk to me about notification-bubbles), this is absolutely infuriating.

I'll disable auto-updates on all iDevices and Macs, and just keep on security-updates for previous gen OS as long as I can.

Eww.

Eh. I like it. Seems more modern. Who cares as long as it’s not windows.

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.