Maybe it looks better on a nicer monitor or something. To me there's nothing terribly broken about the Tahoe UI, but it's clearly rushed because there are a ton of weird little things that just look off.

The dock is suppose to look like the icons float in a class panel, but the reflections in the glass look pixilated and the effect isn't there. The dock icons are centred in the dock, but the activity indicator on the "glass" pane make it look like they're not.

In the control panel, and other windows with a left panel, it's clear that the window curve and the panel curve aren't the same and the transparency of the panel makes it even more clear. I don't understand why some panels can be transparent, but other parts of the window isn't. There's no reason for the transparency.

The Tahoe looks like Gnome theme from 2005, it's interesting, sort of pretty, but the details makes it clear that the authors doesn't quite have the skills to perfect it.

Apple have been slacking in the UI quality control department in the past few years. I have similar issues on my iPhone SE, Apple (and app authors) clearly doesn't test on this phone, because UI elements frequently overlap.

Also I'm still annoyed about the control panel being ported over from iOS. You can't find anything and the window can't even be made wider.

Tahoe's UI looks like a generic, "futuristic-like", user-created theme for KDE circa 2009.

I agree. Tahoe is disgustingly unusable; I'm happy that Alan Dye left Apple.

I hope Apple will backtrack on Liquid Glass after Tahoe. Otherwise, I'll just switch to Linux.

I don't know, I always see this pattern with iOS or MacOS releases. Everyone piles on at the time.

I've actually quite enjoyed some design changes in Tahoe, and looking at older versions of MacOS just looks old fashioned once you're used to them.

My Tahoe issue was that when I shared screen with zoom I used to have some weird bug where the screenshare had issues. It was fixed in the last 2 updates. Either a tahoe issue or a zoom issue but you'd think that they'd have a beta program to fix such issues in the testing phase.

I've used Linux at home for 20+ years, and sometimes mac at work.

To be honest I struggle to notice many changes, my machine was already configured the way I liked it and at work I basically live in only four applications:

Firefox for personal-browsing, chrome for work-browsing, terminal for running terraform, git, etc, and emacs for all development work.

Sure resizing is less good, but I do that once a day, in the morning, when I login. The rest of the changes I just don't notice or care about.

arguably rounded corners have been an apple brand-image thing for a long time, like the icons on ios.

I kind of wonder if this is like overdoing your watch logo stuff like in this article: https://paulgraham.com/brandage.html

How can you read the icons if they mean different things in different apps?

So it should be an accessibility setting. I don't mind if the default is on or off.

In article we discuss has a link to this article: https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2025/icons-in-menus/ Which has a good paragraph with an example:

--- start quote ---

Get a bunch of people in a room, show them menus where the textual labels are gone, and see who can get the most right.

--- end quote ---

Icons won't help you when they are inconsistent, or don't mean anything.

It's impossible to find a suitable visual metaphor for every possible action of every possible app and cram it into a tiny monochrome icon.

It shouldn’t even be just you and others with dyslexia either.

Processing images is always faster than processing text for everyone.

Yeah, I was wondering (I haven't updated, patiently waiting for the next major). But here's a great piece about them: https://tonsky.me/blog/tahoe-icons/

If you read beyond just the headline, you can see a description of the problem with a bunch of links in literally the first paragraph of the article.

I guess, this means logging out as the current user and logging in again, so that the various services are relaunched with changed settings.

I’d like to know what rules you use to prevent Tahoe updates while allowing Sequoia updates. It would be quite useful to me, and I guess, to others here who use Little Snitch.

I setup a do not disturb to run all day everyday. I have not had a notification to update to Tahoe in over a month.

As much as I resisted it, I switched to Alfred years ago and I don't see myself switching back anytime soon.

it's as if the icons get added by a lazy LLM prompt during CI

I just stopped using Finder all together.

Bloom is a fairly cheap one-time purchase and infinitely more capable.

https://bloomapp.club/

Exactly.

I blame apple for making me run an old macOS version because I don't want to look at this ugly mess they've created. I've been running macOS since 2008, and unless they manage to turn things around, my next laptop won't be an apple.

I strongly disagree. Tahoe is horrible but Mac hardware is terrific. Have you seen a Neo?

I think Apple is hitting it out of the park (falling behind in many other areas)

Window management on OSX/macOS cost me so much time of my life, still the hardware and overall experience is pretty nice.

This is for the icons in the drop-down menus, not the icons in the menu bar.

This is not what the article is about though?