If you're a designer at a top 10 S&P 500 company making 6 figures, you owe it to yourself to have some love for your craft. If a PM tells you to shove a UI style meant for an unsuccessful VR device onto desktop and mobile platforms, say no. Get your colleagues to say no. Make that PM read everything the Nielsen Norman group has ever written. Read it too.
More than likely designers are making up work to justify their jobs. Not good for your career if you admit the desktop interface was perfected in ~1995.
Many top bars have become a group of bubbles over the content, which we’ve been conditioned to see as floating notifications for years. Things shine and move when they don’t require attention, just because.
The end result is that my OS feels like a browser without ad blocker. As much as people hated flat design, at least it didn’t grab your attention with tacky casino tricks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSzjcVZXolc
https://tjkelly.com/blog/ios-7-sucks/
And he also takes credit for the dynamic island. It is an assault on my senses to see everything constantly moving around on my screen.
I have been working with Macs since 1995, but this year is my first using Pixel with GrapheneOS, that is how done I am with Apple. Unfortunately I know the UI will not change for years and I just could not take it.
There are some things that are nice. The dock looks nice. The transparent menu bar is nice enough too and there is a toggle off switch if it doesn't work for you. Spotlight looks fine. But the rest is so bad that I just cannot fathom how someone at Apple did not stop it before release. I would be throwing a fit to stop it from being released if I was in Apple and had any sway at all. I assume the executive team was all looking at it and using it before release. So how did this happen? The new side bar and the new tool bars are abominations. I cringe every time I have to use the finder; it is just a blob of various shades of white or, if you prefer, dark mode, grey.
My hope is that if nothing else they roll back the sidebar and the tool bar changes or do a complete rethink on how they are implemented. If they rolled back the extra rounded corners I wouldn't complain either.
The only UI change that I've found useful since Yosemite was Mojave's introduction of a dark mode. They made the fonts look worse on non-Retina displays, threw out the Preference pane in favor of a weird list that can only be resized vertically, added transparent everything, and banned any icon that's not in a squircle. Such UI, many differentiation, much insanely great, wow!
Anyway, I bought a ThinkPad.
If you run your own design agency, you've got your own company's reputation and yours on the line, so be as opinionated as you find necessary, but otherwise if you're just an employee without an inordinate amount of clear authority within the scope of your discipline at the large company (you know if you do or don't) then don't try and create a mutiny, it will more than likely be a childish assumption of personal risk on your part, much more so than it costs the company, much more so than anyone else needs to care, because someone on a forum told you to be passionate about round rects or small icons or whatever. If you need to tell your boss "google NN group", you probably don't have the trust or experience to be successful with such a play.
It's okay to have a personal hatred of it and do what you can to steer the work appropriately, but when you're tasked with a dumbass plan, let it be the decision-makers' dumbass plan, unless it's your decision to make. Let it be the project we tried and it didn't and couldn't have worked out, which sometimes happens, but you learn and then leave if it's pervasive and you have other options.
It would be remarkably stupid to single yourself out as the person who thinks of themselves as the reincarnation of Steve Jobs and risk your livelihood to save Apple's reputation. The unlikely upside is that you get your way and that can boost your confidence, but the downside is that you fumble your best shot at financial security for the rest of your life because you thought you'd be received well.
That's not to say you shouldn't say no to nothing, or have love for your craft, just don't pretend it's your job to, unless it is, which it's probably not. Disagree and let it be a failure if it's going to be, feel vindicated if it is, but the money is there for you if not. The people who worked on the Vision Pro aren't responsible for it being a dud product, and they can be proud of what they did design-wise and technologically despite that.
Also absurd is that tabs and menus are not attached to their elements.
Few days ago I booted a very old device running High Sierra and the UI and old Dock look so clean.
That desktop was peak for me, and the age starts showing a bit in Finder, but it's still more usable than today's versions.
I bet they’ve sold approx as many as they thought they would.
This product is a placeholder for a cheaper and lighter one in the future.
- UI/UX pros who understand this stuff: “I hate it” - everyone else: “I didn’t notice until you pointed it out”
... your career requires constantly chasing after what amounts to fashion trends every few years, otherwise it's a solved problem and probably does not provide much of a career
I think you've unintentionally illustrated the root of the problem here.
People motivated by profit are not incentivized to produce high-quality results. Rather, people motivated by profit are only incentivized to do the least effort that they can get away with.
People motivated by pride are those who are incentivized to produce good results, because the result reflects on them personally.
Which is all to say, pride motives produce a race to the top, whereas profit motives produce a race to the bottom. It's no wonder our modern economy can only produce slop.
Apple has been rudderless on the interaction design front for over a decade now. The windowing mess is evidence of it. We now have the cmd+tab (app switcher), Spaces, Mission Control, (full screen) split screen, Stage Manager, and now tiled window control. None of those interaction metaphors have been expanded upon since their initial launch.
I'm a "mac guy". I understood why Apple initially eschewed windows style alt-tab, given the emphasis on app-centricism. But now, they've created a thousand different ways to switch windows without giving us a proper window switcher. There are apps that bring alt-tab to Mac, but they are all bad because Apple doesn't give developers access to the low-level APIs to create performant and fully featured window management.
Before, Apple had an endless well of great ideas to tap. That's how we got the term "Sherlocked". However, now that they've locked down macOS so much, they've suffocated themselves of new ideas.
Here's an example: panes, tabs, windows, apps, spaces. These things all fight against each other, have their own little silos, get treated differently by every single app, etc, etc.
Another wrong rules I've seen blindly followed is making everything an edge-to-edge canvas, so that the sidebar floats on top. Having a full-window canvas with floating sidebars can make sense for applications where content is expansive and inherently spatial (like say, Figma) or applications where the sidebar is an actual floating element that can be moved around (like Photoshop once was).
It doesn't make sense in Finder, or Reminders, where the content is ultimately just a list. Forcing the sidebar "to float on top of the content" yields no benefit because the content wont ever scroll under it, and because it can't be moved anyway, but it does lead to wasted space, that ugly "double border", etc.
And the ones doing it have no say in how it's done.
Being involved and in the loop is how great software is made. Otherwise you can just outsource and have tickets completed.
Logitech’s software is also stuck in a loop denying it has Bluetooth access (Which it has). And with the added graphical glitches (Apple likes to call them liquid glass) and weird window artifacts (For some reason, all my windows had a black, rectangular border one day), it’s honestly less reliable than my macOS-style Linux rice from 2015. But I'm still stuck with MacOS since I NEED Adobe Lightroom for my work and there is still now way to run that with GPU acceleration on Linux. But if there was, there would be no device running Windows/MacOS left in my household
I've also recently come upon this talk by an ex-apple UI/UX engineer: https://youtu.be/1fZTOjd_bOQ I think what he's talking about is precisely what got lost at apple.
Edit: In case someone stumbles upon this after experiencing the same problem with ableton, here is the command I executed:
sqlite3 ~/Library/Application\ Support/com.apple.TCC/TCC.db "INSERT OR REPLACE INTO access VALUES('kTCCServiceMicrophone','com.ableton.live',0,2,4,1,NULL,NULL,0,'UNUSED',NULL,0,1725000000,NULL,NULL,'default',0);"
Disclaimer: I have absolutely no Idea what it does, as it was generated by Gemini. I do not have anything super important on this computer so I just executed it, but please don't touch obscure system files if you have data to lose.
What usually works is fully resetting permissions for an app:
tccutil reset All <APP BUNDLE ID HERE>
mdls -raw -name kMDItemCFBundleIdentifier <APP PATH HERE>I remember being really excited for Liquid Glass, because it felt like a return to the good old days of Skeuomorphism, at least in some spirit. In reality, it was a botched delivery, I suspect for two reasons:
1. Trying to unify all of their design (in one year no less) against one style -- developed primarily on Apple Watch & the now defunct Vision Pro -- was a colossal undertaking.
2. There's so much goddamn software packed into each OS that you're going to inevitably be stuck with bloated menus. Imagine Apple releasing OS 27 this year and saying "we're stripping you down to the bare bones. It's going to feel like Snow Leopard, but we're going to give you customization menus to alter that experience." I would lose my mind with joy. I'd be so excited to be able to operate my fucking phone again.
You shouldn't have to do any of that. Even if Live couldn't trigger the permission prompt, you should be able to give it a microphone permission in Settings.
And back to your point, a large reason people buy Apple in the first place is so they never have to read this sentence/try this solution!
It's painful to see the decay, update after update, into a more confusing, cluttered, and tacky experience.
And rightfully so. Tahoe is not just a step back, but it throws away so many good design elements that have been there for ages - and for no good reason.
I really hope they revert most of the design changes in macOS 27. I don't mind the Liquid Glass - the other changes they made to expose/highlight Liquid Glass are the real issue.
IMO we reached peak design in 2013 with Mavericks.
Jobs liked to talk this side of the business up because creatives were the substantial part of the business. Now they sell to everybody it doesn't matter so much. The average person won't even notice the complaints in the original article. They aren't sensitive to it in the way that creative people are.
The experience right now is bad. It’s frustrating and there is no overarching vision or clear focus on the user.
To use a famous movie quote: "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, that they didn't stop to think if they should"
Just because you have HDPI and opacity, doesn't mean that you have to use it by default, everywhere.
Steve Jobs had good taste in many areas, but he also approved the puck mouse.
Thank goodness for Firefox reader mode. That animation is so incredibly distracting.
That explains my other comment, which speculated the snow as the cause for my iPhone instantly overheating, followed by screen-dimming throttling.
Also: this is not a plea to stop putting snow/etc on pages. I miss the days of such things in earlier internet. I'd trade back janky plugins and Flash player crashes for the humanizing & personalized touch many sites had back then.
That snowflakes were the author’s preference? That’s too much madness for one day.
Do you not realize that the stakes are different between that and a whole OS?
It's not Microsoft-add-all-the-bloatware-and-adverts-we-can worse, but it's 20-year-old-operating-systems-were-better-designed worse.
We're getting to a point where I think Linux windowing systems like KDE are better designed. And it seems that all they had to do was not change much over the span of a few decades.
Or am I out of touch? It feels like I could use a computer better back when XP was the mainstay.
This is because incentives have changed such that being good at your job in your average mega-corp has very little to do with the outcome: To climb their ladder, you optimise for impact and move before you have to deal with the consequences.
I think a lot of key lessons that were studied and learned back in the day weren't adequately transferred to the new generation.
People used to build hackintoshes to get Mac OS X without paying Apple's RAM tax or suffer having mid-range laptop GPUs in the top-of-the-line desktops.
Apple's outstanding success with their ARM chips is more of an exception than the rule.
Software however especially from UX point of view, is more likely to be more or less ready at some point. Any improvements are marginal and subjective. What are the large UX teams at Apple going to do if not redesigns for the sake of redesigning? I wish it would happen, but it’s hard to imagine Apple shipping an annual OS release without noticeable visual changes.
It's not so different from the rationale for many consumer electronics products: novelty for marketing's sake rather than functionality. Similarly, notice the ridiculous trend of removing most physical buttons from car dashboards, started by Tesla and mindlessly aped by the other carmakers.
Maybe someday they'll completely remove the text to just keep the icons like the Office ribbon did, and I'm still confused with it.
To be fair, the bar is really really low in terms of mobile hardware. It’s just really hard (and expensive) for new players to design, build and manufacture hardware with competitive processing power.
Going to continue to get worse as time goes on.
Even the hardware will go at some point I'm betting.
It makes it seem like they’re designing for you until they’re not.
There's a lot more consistency in the Apple ecosystem.
Don't get me started on the other crap with Linux distros: power management doesn't work, audio barely works, heck even though both Linux and MacOS use CUPS for printing, in MacOS it works way better.
ive had the most success with fedora x11 / xwayland but lately wayland has been pretty solid
They did desperately need a distraction from the complete bedshitting mess they've made of AI though. Regardless of whether you think AI is good or wildly overpromised, getting on stage and lying through your teeth about what your AI does is what C-tier companies do, not Apple. Except they do now.
I think the key issue with macOS is that they don't seem to have someone who is looking at the whole ecosystem holistically to make sure that there's consistency and integration across experiences. You probably have development silos for different applications and they don't really integrate with each other. There should really be a role like Integration Emperor that exists outside of the traditional corporate hierarchy who can go to different teams to push for increased consistency.
That person died in 2011.
Exhibit A: In Safari I had to "share" this page to use the "Find on Page" feature to search whether anyone had mentioned the share button yet. Bonkers.
But lately, over the past 5 or 10 years, it seems to me that perfection in UI is just as arbitrary and mutable as people's tastes and preferences.
It's hard to admit it to myself, but I think my love for the early Mac OS and Windows 9x UIs was mere puppy love at first sight, and now is simply nostalgia.
To me, it seems very related to the idea of how to fall in love with a person. There seems to be nothing you can measure it against. You simply either do or do not feel a connection with the person, an inexplicable infatuation. And if you do, then that love cools and settles into something more subtle but just as real over decades, until you're holding hands on your deathbeds. Yet I can't for the life of me figure out how it begins, or what its metrics are, or where its catylists come from. I suppose this is what Randall Monroe wondered all those years ago when he came up with his blog's subtitle. If only I could ask him, perhaps I would have the answers to everything.
The Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines, especially the old ones, were seriously well thought out. Apple just doesn't follow them anymore, and that leads to demonstrably poor design choices. "Consistency" is still one of the three banner concepts (see https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...), and Apple just fails wildly at paying attention to itself.
Windows 2000 and Mac OS 9.x.x were contemporary with each other, are both considered to be strong examples of principled interface execution, and they were very different from each other in both behavior and appearance. They were also notably both the last generations of iterative executions of principled designs before both companies started veering off into the wilderness.
By that logic, you shouldn't have any particular preference for newer UIs (apart from how similar they are to your "primed" UIs) and you shouldn't ever able to discover new UI patterns you particularly like. You should also be unable to articulate why certain UIs are good or bad, or your reasons should be wildly inconsistent.
I don't think this is generally the case. There lots of articles like this one, and usually the takeaways are similar: UIs should be predictable and consistent and allow the user to reliably find actions and elements. Ideally they should also have markers and "fast paths" to allow more experienced users to find and do an action quickly. They should not overwhelm the user with too much irrelevant things.
That's the very high-level gist of it. There is actually lots of research in the details of it, which you can get a glimpse of in books like "The Design of Everyday Things".
They just don't seem to have a very high priority in current tech development for some reason.
That a good part of the industry seems to have essentially given up on GUIs, left them to the fashionistas and engagement maximizers and retreated to the command line and TUIs instead also doesn't bode well.
Also there are certainly better UIs than others, otherwise people wouldn't complain about software having bad UIs (see GIMP, older versions of Blender, etc).
Consistency is always better. App A and App B should use the same save icon, without any caveats, regardless of what it actually is. If you offer me a consistent experience, I'll take it whether it's Windows 95 or Tahoe.
Based on the measurement of these outcomes you can absolutely say whether an interface is better or worse than another.
Anyone in software design in the 90s/early 00s was quite familiar with this subfield of human factors. Very few people making software today are. As vibe coded UIs become more and more widespread, it's only going to get worse.
No. Perfection exists, but it's not how something works or looks. Perfection is stability. A bad solution that you know inside and out is preferable to a "better" solution that you have to spend time to think about every time you use it.
More specifically, to the user it means they’ll still have the opportunity to back out of the operation; that it won’t take effect immediately upon clicking the menu item. It allows the user to “explore” the command without committing to its execution yet. For that reason, IMO the ellipses in “Attach Files…” and “Add Link…” are appropriate.
What I’m seeing more often in practice is that menu items that should have an ellipsis don’t. They make you wonder what the immediate effect of the command would possibly be.
It's just a small nitpick though. The article generally seems to do a good job of highlighting some frankly shocking (and worrying amateurish) problems in these menus.
Tools' success metric is how much they make your task easier/faster. Ad delivery machines' success metric is how much of your time they waste.
Shitty UI making you spend more time in front of the screen is considered a good thing according to those "designers"' performance metrics.
For the last ~20 years: designing software for mobile devices
It's chock full of old screenshots from a variety of old desktops.
Microsoft’s desktop dominance was challenged by Google Docs and Facebook apps in parallel, Microsoft had to jump to web tech late, and the last few decades have been them reconciling their stack to the fact they missed the web and mobile despite pioneering key user-facing tech for both. Then they entered catchup-mode for client and search tech, only to later realize maybe they don’t care because the cloud catchup efforts blossoming into MS-consultant orthodoxy for every-darned-thing made their cloud offerings the most profitable bit… Ads and desktop stagnation pulled Windows into a weird OSX-at-home territory everyone kinda hates. And then LLMania took off, entrenching MS cloud and AI strategies into all of it, all the time. Pushing so hard that they’re gonna spend billions distancing their semi-Enterprise office brand from the term‘Microslop’.
TLDR: the rush to the web/mobile moved the focus off thick clients and desktop affordances, the money is elsewhere, a universal GUI toolkit isn’t obvious for anyone, and SaaS feels better online
On iOS it's totally fine, but on macOS it's a disaster. I've only updated one machine so far and will keep all others on Sequoia until this mess is resolved.
Instead they were all on stage praising it.
But bring that to desktop, where your UI is windowed and appears alongside (or overlapping) other windows, and you end up with chaos.
The floating sidebars are a prime example of this. Why should I have to expend mental energy to differentiate what's an actual window -vs- what's just a novelty round-rect with a shadow (oh, and and window controls for the parent round-rect, which is a window)?
Yeah, but I doubt that would change much; the amount of damage done would be difficult to roll back. What do you think Apple is going to do for the next macOS: "Look we told you to design all these extra icons last year. Guess what, this year we want you to remove them."
I just can't imagine that happening. This is the fundamental thing that is wrong with this. They had the OSes in beta for a few months, barely listened to feedback, and now we're stuck with the damage. For how many more OS iterations?
I really wish they had at least macOS in a different cycle than iOS (and with the idiotic year version names, they've brazenly signed themselves up for the yearly schedules.) I really couldn't care less about what damage they do to iOS after iOS 7, but I still haven't upgraded to Tahoe and I won't do so until they roll this design back entirely...which I don't see happening.
Maybe I'm just pessimistic about Apple at this point but I feel like no amount of criticism is going to change their design trajectory now, unless it affects their bottom-line.
Good for you, unless Apple changes its mind my MBPro from 2019 will be stuck on Tahoe forever.
Maybe it's because I use iOS more, while in macOS I "just" work, which is in reality opening a few Electron apps, a Chrome browser and a Terminal.
Apple's effort to maintain some semblance of consistency across this incredible array is laudable. (Which is not the same as letting the grievances highlighted in this article slide; I agree with the author 100%.) We all want consistency (probably to a degree greater than Apple is capable of delivering) simply so that we can use the metaphors we're familiar with.
I imagine Apple has dozens of design teams, each of which cannot talk to more than a sliver of the others, with probably not a single person aware of exactly how many design teams exist at once. There was probably a period in Apple's history – and probably not that long ago – when a single employee could assess the iconography across the entire suite. Those days are over.
My question: beyond preventing the obvious and severe transgressions (Liquid Glass), what systemic solutions are available on a scale like Apple's to maintain high-quality and strong consistency?
(I appreciate that Apple does generally one design refresh per year, in contrast to the continuous zero-utility tinkering observable in Google's products, for example.)
Not to even mention hardware support, as I had a lot of issues with Realtek external USB network devices randomly disconnecting (and they are in many USB-C hubs, including inside USB-C monitors), with no such issues under Ubuntu.
I imagine there is some history around MacOS being similarly much better in the past, but I've never seen anything great about MacOS UI/UX in comparison to GNOME.
I do like their performance and battery life, but the "shells" it's stuck in also sucks (until recently, only glossy screens; shallow keyboards with sharp palmrest edges; either heavy or passively cooled; no touchpad buttons...). Putting some of this hardware into a new Thinkpad X1 Carbon case would be amazing, though I'd want to run Linux on it.
Perhaps my biggest gripe is that many of these terrible UI/UX patterns are built in at such a low level, it is near impossible for developers to override them in the software they build. For example, I really dislike flat UI and particularly flat scrollbars. But it is near impossible to add scrollbars that look like these in any Windows or Mac app I build: https://flowingdata.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/evolution...
Usability has become theatre across Apple products. The sad part is that since Microsoft just seems to copy Apple, over time Windows usability has also degraded severely. I am so frustrated by what Apple, Microsoft and Google have done.
A key problem is that big US corps have always had a product design mentality that can produce monstrosities like your average cable TV remote and think it is in any way a good solution. That was clearly already an influence on things like XP.
I’d actually forgotten about the menu icons in Tahoe (I tried Tahoe during the beta period and lasted less than a day) and at first thought this would just be a pretty short piece on Tahoe’s new application icons.
Going back to the article though: another amusing detail is that the one menu where having icons is actually helpful (the Move & Resize menu) actually had those icons before Tahoe.
The reason for all this change is simple.
The first reason is planned obsolescence. The GUI has to change enough such that it looks like there’s constant progress so users think the company is moving forward when in reality GUI design plateaued decades ago.
The second reason is designers need to stay employed. So they change inconsequential things and make up reasoning to justify it. Liquid Glass is one of these things.
I also want to note that the most useable GUI is not the prettiest GUI. The current MAC GUI looks more modern and better then he one in the OPs guideline example. So gui design isn’t just about usability, it’s about manipulating consumer psychology.
As consumers ourselves There’s two traps here that people fall for. The first is aforementioned it’s that it looks better and feels flashier (like Liquid Glass) but isn’t rationally or logically better (in fact it can be worse). Most HNers don’t fall for this trap.
The second trap is to think these changes actually matter. Liquid Glass barely changed anything. More icons barely changed anything. This entire blog post is making it out to be a bigger deal than it is when in actual reality the difference is so minor it’s negligible. Every HNer falls for this trap.
I consider myself quite tolerant of UX quirks, iPhones are still pleasant to use, particularly if you select 'reduce motion' from the accessibility settings.
Tahoe though, bugs aside, is just genuinely unpleasant to use and interact with. By far the most offensive thing to me is the pointless rounded rectangle thing. It delivers absolutely no value at all to the user and defies any form of justification. How in any form is this a decision designed to improve things for the user?
The other multiple weirdnesses commented on elsewhere while unpleasant are more liveable with, but I honestly never found a single change that improved my interactions with the computer. How on earth can you have spent a whole year on this and why didn't anyone have the authority to pull the plug?
I would no longer recommend a new mac to my anyone. A second hand model running a previous operating system makes far more sense.
The past wasn't as rosy: while the left column is purposefully confusing (the icons don't match the description), the lack of keyboard shortcuts is just bad design "for the sake of emptiness". It degrades, rather than enhances, the "usability of the interface"
And re. icons: while this is correct
> The main function of an icon is to help you find what you are looking for faster.
The following isn't as straight-forward
> Perhaps counter-intuitively, adding an icon to everything is exactly the wrong thing to do. To stand out, things need to be different. But if everything has an icon, nothing stands out.
Not really, there is plenty of difference - length, the presense of ... ellipsis ..., the presence of a keyboard shortcut, the icon itself. This combo gives visual cues without reading, so improves the ease of finding. Yes, it would be better to have colors here and there, but then you have the following fundamental issue:
> Look how much faster you can find Save or Share in the right variant:
But "Save" is something I do NOT want to find fast, I never use that menu item! So I'd prefer the slighly worse (but not bad) busy version rather than a highlight of useless menu items and no icons for the menus I'd actually use!
Of course, there is an easy way out - user customization to match user needs (maybe you never use shortcuts, fine, remove the "noise" then; maybe you don't care about "Save", fine, remove the icon there), but that was anathema even in 1992.
(but otherwise very good criticism of the basic design fails like tiny size, inconsistency, lack of vertical alignment, bad metaphors, etc.)
This is a bad sign for design at Apple. It suggests a fundamental lack of attention to detail that would have been harder to imagine a few years ago.
What's driving it?
That said, Apple's Liquid Glass is really poor UI. It works okay on my Macbook but feel like it's basically broken a couple features of my second gen iPhone SE, which is kind of untenable imo. Apple also clearly seems to design for larger devices now, which I get but... am I any less of a customer because I use an older device? why should I be de-prioritized?
Lastly, speaking of UI/UX - this blog's website was really bad! Ironic that a blog on UI/UX would have bubbles floating down the screen interfering with text readability and no way to turn them off!
This is the key point for me. I think I go further than the OP, though; I would almost force apps to use the stock menu items. Declare that your app has to save stuff, and the OS can take care of supplying a 'File -> Save' menu item, a Save toolbar icon, and a Save keyboard shortcut.
I guess the more 'liberal' way of doing this would be to make it so easy to do the above that you would really have to go very far out of your way to purposefully deliver a worse experience. But you're free to do that if you're so inclined.
Oh, but Google hasn't, so Chrome's icons are still all over the place. Apparently, that's not for the OS to sort out, but every single individual app.
Oh, while some of the menus in Preview are fixed (File, Edit), others aren't (View, Tools). So it's not just down to each app to manage its own icon alignment, but each menu!
I do prefer this approach because it makes the symbols generally more useful for everything else than menu/toolbar icons. However as the article makes very obvious, unless a consistent scheme is placed in place, program developers will choose whatever they want to represent common actions.
"It shouldn't look cluttered" --> "Apply ever increasing amounts of padding/margin everywhere"
"keep it simple" --> "monochrome is the happy place", etc
etc
This is a symptom of no strong leadership that's capable of enforcing standards, Apple downslide as a whole firm where departments and people are fighting each other for resources.
Soon, I'll get my hands on one of those fancy AMD AI Max's and go Linux everywhere.
.icon {
text-align: justify;
display: none;
}I agree that colors could help.
Don't hesitate to give KDE/Qt a try, it apparently happens to get all these things right according to this article from a quick glance: everything is correctly aligned, even when in the same menu some items both have an icon and a checkbox, and some don't have anything; icons are mostly meaningful, some icons are colored (most are monochrome though, there's a move to this), and not all items have icons.
I guess it's the kind of things that are hard to get right for a hobby OS like macOS that lacks professional UX designers. :-)
Between any of the big 3 companies putting out major OSes (Apple, Microsoft, Google), Apple is the best for sticking to tried and true designs. It's certainly gotten worse the past couple of years (like the Photos app redesign they immediately changed again in iOS 26) and I hope with their new design lead he can pull things back to somewhere sensible, but compared to Android or Windows it's not even close. I used Android for the better part of a decade and every year they'd completely redesign the notification shade, the settings app, they'd switch the SMS app out for Hangouts, then put you back on Messages, then rename it, then change the logo/branding, then redesign it again, etc. Everything was endless changes for no reason, felt like a constant beta.
If you look at the basic iPhone apps - Messages, Settings, Notes - prior to Liquid Glass it's been pretty much exactly as it was when Jobs showed it off at the iPhone reveal 19 years ago.
It's a bit like adding new emojis in an OS release. There's been reports that new emojis are one of the drivers for getting people to upgrade. No one cares about a zero day security flaw, but that new kiss emoji everyone wants.
Reading that as an animation of snow completely blocks my ability to read
I'd argue it's not comparable to the 1992 standards because there's not clutter on the right due to dimming for the hotkey labels. These guidelines were written only slightly through Mac OS's colour era, with an extensive install base of monochrome Macintoshes where you could only depict dimming with hard-to-read dithering. Now that colour is ubiquitous, this gives designers the option to fade or tint UI items to make them look less distracting or to deemphasise them.
New Design, New Features, New Programming Language, New Products or even New Sector. It is like Apple without Steve Jobs again the first time around. None of them were done because it is better for the customers, but do so because it is better for paid promotion, justify their existing department budget or increasing it, and simply for profits.
In many ways Apple is still best of the pack, but they are no longer the same.
Including the hotkeys in the menu is good for similar reasons. Does it help me find and click the menu item? No. But does it help me use that action next time without going through the menu? Yes. Icons are same.
Imho the best layout for menu-bars was Windows Phone 7. In WP7, a toolbar of action button icons were shown along the bottom of the screen along with a kebab-button. Clicking the kebab-button would just expand out the bottom-bar into a menu showing the icons in the same order as they were in the toolbar along with a text description. Below the toolbar icons would be all other non-toolbar commands.
It made it clear that the toolbar and the menu were the same thing, just the toolbar is an abbreviated form of the menu for the sake of economy of screen real-estate.
Putting icons throughout menus is kind of a cruder version of same. I like that.
Starting to use Mac ~3 years ago, I often encountered giant blocks of text in right-click menus and while pleasing aesthetically, those were a chore to actually parse. For someone who daily drives macOS for, I assume, multiple years more than me, it probably comes down to memorisation, and how it looks becomes more important (with Tahoe breaking habits), but I find the inconsistencies and icons something that actually helps me find my ground.
Granted, the execution leaves a lot to be improved, I won't argue against it. Tahoe in some places feels downright amateurish. Despite that, I'll still take what Tahoe added over no icons at all... I feel like color icons + using them more sparingly would certainly be better though.
I guess a justification for Tahoe icons on my end is - those help me navigate the UI despite all their shortcomings (and ugliness they bring in many places).
The classic Windows menu from the article is a good example: https://tonsky.me/blog/tahoe-icons/word@2x.webp?t=1767611340
He has a knack for putting words to the vague frustrations I feel but can't quite articulate. How does he find so many perfect examples that nail exactly what's wrong?
I wait and hope that some point apple will revert certain changes, or at least give more options for disabling some stuff.
Another example are customized extensions of MarkDown syntax. To my mind constructs like `[link title](like_address)` already stretch things and the only justification for having brackets plus parentheses to stand in for link syntax is their ubiquity. One of the downsides of this terse syntax is its resilience to extensibility. For example, when you start with an exclamation mark as in `` now all of a sudden your code is understood as an `<img>` tag, not an `<a>` tag. What if you need extra attributes? There have been multiple suggestions how to extend `` to include desired image dimensions, none have become standard. You probably should fall back to inserting HTML, which I am fine with.
Lastly, when designing a user interface, I have found that having to choose icons is a significant burden, and often one without satisfactory solution. One of my solutions in the past was to fall back to Apollo-era text-only buttons; sure, the texts would have to be localized, but then the entire application is subject to localization anyway. A plus is that each button with a short text instead of a picture already provided the mnemonic, the identifier for that action, something an icon does not do for you.
Apparently I'm qualified to be a designer for Apple.
This new system of icons is something I was entirely unaware of until now, since I haven't updated or had to use an updated MacOS device. I've in the past been a defender of MacOS, but it really does feel like the decision making is completely off the rails and has no consideration of the most basic principles of design. Baffling.
links for those interested in downgrading:
https://github.com/LukeZGD/Legacy-iOS-Kit/wiki/How-to-Use
https://github.com/LukeZGD/Legacy-iOS-Kit/wiki/Restore-32-bi...
In other words, I'm not using icons to find a single action. I'm using icons to quickly understand the available options to me. Meaning, they're only there to help me compare and contrast options within the same visual context. It's fine for the same action to have different icons in different places. When I'm looking at the "File" menu, I'm not really concerned what the action looks like on the toolbar (let alone a different app).
It might sound flippant but I'm asking in good faith: do you have a reading disability (like dyslexia)? I (and I think this is generally the case) don't consciously read words character by character or say them in my head, it feels more like my brain pattern-recognizes whole words and I understand them "at a glance".
And it was clear enough that you would trust the stand-alone save icon to perform the action you expected. Icons were also selectively chosen for common actions.
If icons are considered non-deterministic and non-canonical, then they can't [confidently] be used stand-alone.
Also, I'll meet your data point of 1 with mine. I have an iPhone and find it far easier to pick an app from the list of names than pick an icon. I frequently mix them up (and I only use a dozen routinely)
Same name, same menu location, same shortcut key.
Much easier to train yourself or your employees - learn one app and you'd be familiar with the other apps in the Microsoft Office product line.
Other companies that tried to create Office-like suites didn't/couldn't create the consistency amongst the apps since they had to acquire the missing apps from other software makers to complete their own Office-like suite.
But this consistency was tempered by common sense.
The goal of shortcut keys was to make common actions quickly accessible to users. But for consistency, the same shortcut key should be used across apps.
When Mail/Outlook was introduced, users found that CTRL-F was bound to the Find command. Makes sense on first thought. But what's the most common command in an email app - is it "Find" or is it "Forward email". Especially when the prevailing standard for CTRL-F in email apps was CTRL-F.
When Bill Gates angrily complains that he's always invoking the Find command by mistake, Program Managers are willing to make exceptions to dogma.
It'd be interesting to compare the menus in Apple's iWork suite (Pages / Numbers / Keynote) to see if their menu items /shortcut keys are consistent or unique.
Note that this Microsoft Office suite consistency didn't necessarily extend to other Microsoft apps. There's no one managing menu item consistency company-wide at Microsoft, just within Office.
Things have become very... Amateurish. Think of the way these apps got to where they are-who decided to put all those icons? Probably someone who hasn't a good understanding of usability but maybe - like someone with not enough domain knowledge - looked at other apps and thought that the icons look pretty, while having a small amount of understanding of their purpose.
Why is that happening? I have theories... Hypothesis. Maybe too many managerial types are calling the shots. Maybe we needed more workers than we where able to educate and the average skill dropped (a lot). Maybe companies realized that poor quality doesn't matter, because either customers don't have other choices or the choices that there are are as bad.
Explorer also "promotes" copy/paste commands to the top of the context menu as just icons with no text label, which can be confusing - your instinct is to just to look for a "Copy" or "Paste" item in the menu, but no - for some commands you must learn the icon and the fact that it doesn't appear in the menu proper.
Also the context menu populates slowly with dynamic items depending on the right-clicked file which causes items to dodge out of the way of your cursor, but I don't want to get too deep into a wider discussion of the awfulness of Windows 11 Explorer...
QGIS is free software, so it can be somewhat excused vs a billion dollar company. But they could really benefit from some UX expertise...
The exact reason/s for this to happen is hard to figure out. Leadership changes, trends, getting too comfortable, lack of competition, the list goes on...
There's always bad reactions to change, but eventually they fade away because the product turns out to be good and just needs some time to get used to it. But this time, this is not the case. Liquid glass sucks and so does the UX that came with it.
Apple will eventually fix this mess, they have all the resources in the world to do so.
The snow? Something else?
With the potential to set off the installation flow with the wrong click (when its being shown over-and-over again), it makes me anxious and feel like I'm not even in control of my own computer anymore.
For the time being, I've installed a management profile to defer updates, disabled the Settings options for automatic updates, and used "Quiet You!" to try and keep the notifications at bay.
But the maximum deferral time for profiles is 90 days, so if anyone knows of a better solution or work-around, please let me know
I wish that OS developers would provide the option to retain the bulk of the old UI when a new one comes out, implementing the UI like a swappable "theme." People who prefer consistency could keep most of their old UI, and those who prefer the newer UI can have it.
Apple software used to be that elevated experience for the average person.
Given the lack of basic consistency though, it’s evident that there are no leaders at Apple that care about UX enough to thoroughly design and test the whole software experience anymore. Just a bunch of random teams doing whatever.
I wonder why every large company seems to fall off in the same way?
Additional thought: It's always interesting to see a website linked from HN with a method for user input and a means to see what other users have posted. Just a funny juxtaposition between the buttoned-up ego (not in the pejorative sense) of the HN poster vs the screaming id of that same user on a different platform.
This thread feels like classic HN bikeshedding. The article itself is nearly 5,000 words about menu icons. Menu icons! Yes, the inconsistencies exist. Yes, they could be better. But the level of outrage here doesn’t match reality. People are acting like Apple has completely lost their way over… inconsistent icon styling in dropdown menus that most users don’t even notice.
It’s been inherent in The Macintosh Way from the beginning.
I would wear the t-shirt with Reeder screenshot to work if I worked at Apple, and would observe who notices it.
To all the people also whining about the snow, as if it invalidates the opinions written in the article, again, PLEASE click the buttons at the top of the page.
The author is clearly going for a fun, whimsical, playful vibe that works perfectly fine on a personal blog. Expecting something different from a workstation operating system made by one of the Fortune 10, especially one who heavily markets their design "prowess", is perfectly reasonable.
_edit_: I'd also like to point out that I know it can be disabled, the question(s) I then have are 1) why is it enabled by default 2) black text on yellow background is yet another obvious mistake
For example: "Look how much faster you can find Save or Share in the right variant..."
But each variant took me the same amount of time. Or so I think. But that demonstrates the issue: is any of this being measured and analyzed?
My opinion is that much of design is just "convincing opinion wins" (where convincing-ness is often not at all based on measurement of some kind), leading to crappy stuff like ultra flat design and Corporate Memphis.
That the icons exist is not necessarily a problem, since they can help teach users which buttons in the UI do which actions. (menu bar for discovery, app UI for less mouse travel + contextual options). But that requires consistency, which the current implementation lacks...
One small nitpick: the ellipsis reuse in item #8 - that’s actually valid and would have been back in the 1990s as well. A menu item that is followed by an ellipsis indicates that selecting that menu option will open a dialog box. Inconsistently applied, but that’s always been the meaning.
Tim Cook- if you do one thing before you retire- promote the right person to fix both MacOS and iOS. They're both in need of a lot of work to fix.
Admittedly it would be "easier" if Apple gave you the choice of which version to upgrade to in macOS, but that's generally not how software is provided.
Open the Mac App Store and search for Sequoia.
So not only did teams have to rush incroporating this new design, they also didn't get time to think things through and polish. It sounds like they didn't have time to push-back either, and so there was no feedback/iteration loop where they could work out with whomever is in charge of wider system design what works and what doesn't on what apps.
I really hope the recent changes at Apple mean this will get completely overhauled and they'll return to their roots as design leaders. It will be such a shame if this mess is allowed to continue
This is only an opinion, but it feels like UX in general is moving towards making things cute rather than usable. Liquid glass is a case in point.
This is useful to a point, in the same sense that one might beauty, but when this is all you care about, it becomes a problem.
I agree the icons look cluttered, but they are likely addressing the fact that most users may not comprehend the meaning of those actions.
However I guess the real pain is that there's still nowhere to go. Switching to Windows or Linux means giving up the efficiency of M-series chips, losing key apps, and losing the consistent menu-bar. It feels like an abyss.
But on the other hand, I think 95% of the icons in the first menu in this article are clear and probably help most people navigate faster.
Imagine wanting to save and accidentally click close....
> Or two-letter As that only slightly differ in the font size:
In that one case having a large A for bigger and smaller A for smaller makes sense.
The article starts with this: > Sequoia → Tahoe It’s bad
And I look at the image... And I like it? I agree with the author that it could be better, but most of the icons (new, open recent, close, save, duplicate, print, share etc), do make it easier, faster and more pleasant for my brain to parse the menu vs no icons.
Again, I don't disagree that you could do it better, I just disagree with the premise that the 1992 manual is "the authority". Display density has increased dramatically; people use their computers more and have been accustomed to those interfaces, which makes the relationship of the people with the interfaces different. Quoting a 1992 guideline on interfaces in 2026 feels like quoting the greeks on philosophy while ignoring our understandings of the world since then.
But a file menu is still a file menu, and save is still save. In fact it's remarkable how little that has changed since 1983.
Besides, that interface designers or even the average computer user understands more than in 1992 is highly implausible on its face.
A brand new Apple iPhone 17 Pro.
Constantly lagging and locking up in preparation for another transparent animation that absolutely no one asked for.
Feeling like Apple just mugged me and stole $1,000.
Edit: Oh there is an icon to disable it, but still.
But where are they? Because they’re not leaving their imprint on any of the big tech companies in recent years.
Apple (software) has lost its way and needs to return to whatever made them great and different.
It's the software equivalent of fast fashion.
Just avoid it and stay with true and tried staples instead.
"On the upside: it’s not that hard anymore to design better than Apple!"
That’s what happens when you put in charge arrogant industrial and print designers who think UX and UI are inferior forms of design.
But what's interesting is why such hypocrisy persists - in particular, why so bad now?
Yes, designers might need to make work for themselves; yes, a new OS has to seem new, to justify upgrades and convince younglings that this isn't the oldsters' ride; but haventt these always been true?
What's different is Apple's slide into disorganization, as it spreads work around the globe in exchange for market access, and internal leaders coast in their mutual non-aggression pacts.
What remains of the center can issue global orders (adopt the liquid glass aesthetic; put icons on every action) and the periphery can comply - nominally, imperfectly, and inconsistently. Quality issues come to be tolerated like chronic inflammation, and even deployed in passive-aggressive turf battles.
"Back in the day" everyone would be pulled into a rock-tumbler room and grind it out. That's neither possible nor wanted today (as game theory effaced the requisite obliviousness).
What to do? Many YC companies have bonding time, where scattered teams join up for intense periods to restore alignment. Otherwise, the Apple might be ripe for a round of organizational consolidation.
Personally, I think internal competition with some misses and inconsistencies are a good thing long term. Inflammation is not cancer, and there are better ways to tamp it down.
No one uses menus. So why so get so upset over the mac implementation of a dead paradigm? Because ironically the Macintosh bakes a "menu" into the screen space for you, and has since 1984. Giving up menus on a mac requires that you give up one of the things that make a mac a mac. And that's hard, for marketers even more so than designers. So it persists and festers.
But in the rest of the world, we walked away and never looked back. The icons aren't the problem here.
[1] "Big" apps for experts still get value out of putting their actions into tightly packed text. Photoshop too, etc... But these are increasingly the exception and not the rule, and even there the next generation of big tools (c.f. Cursor) don't have them.
[2] Even worse there, because the tab bar it does have actually looks like a menu but isn't.
Chrome’s unique buried menu breaks user expectations. Casual users have trouble finding it.
clearly apple are doing their best to destroy them.
Top menus are good because of infinite size (fitts law) Discoverability - i can look in a menu add see what options are available to me. You can tell people either verbally or textually what to do e.g. Choose File Export as PDF instead of something like 'See the small icon that looks like a document with a folded corner, no not that one' yadda Menu are direct I don't need to open another menu to get to my menus (hamburger menu)
I use menus all the time. I totally agree with the article. You say 'no one uses menus' Not true.
I much prefer text to inscrutable icons.
This entire UI refresh strikes me as completely unnecessary. I didn't even notice the menu icons. Thanks for that. Just another thing to be annoyed about.
But really, the glaringly obvious ones are already in your face.
1. There is no setting to get rid of the ridiculously over-rounded corners.
2. The dock, which I put on the left, now has about 10 extra pixels between it and the edge of the screen. 10 pixels that now will never, ever, be usable again.
3. All the icons have been forced into a rounded corner box. As it turns out, the human brain is really good at recognizing silhouettes. This just made that part of my brain useless. It retroactively restyled applications' icons that I've used for over a decade.
I'm sure I'll find others, but it's clear that Apple does not care about users. This all about power. They didn't even include settings to turn any of this off...just "take it like we wanna give it to you, plebes".
Infuriating.
And none of these things matter. Literally none of them are core to how an operating system works, just how it looks. I just don't understand UX people, and at this point I'm starting to hate them.
maybe apple or ex-apple people can comment ?
PS— Edward Tufte has some interesting perspectives on data visualization but the reason he’s so popular with the engineering crowd is because he was an engineer and he makes cut-and-dried rules about things that are easy to understand without any design education, and explains them in a way that appeals to engineers. Reading that book is better than nothing, but it’s gives laypeople about as much understanding of design as a “[language] cookbook” gives laypeople an understanding of programming.
Still, my primary OS is Linux, but for laptops I prefer macOS, and it's still in acceptable shape.
However, I'll agree that Tahoe has far more papercuts than its predecessors. It needs a "Snow Tahoe" version.
[edit] I just discovered the snow icon, which does turn off the snow but turns the background into bright yellow. Oh and the other icon which turns your cursor into a ...spotlight? On an otherwise black page? Do I have that right? Which one of those things was a design decision that enhanced usability, or readability, or... anything at all? These choices can best be described as sophomoric. You can disagree with menu icons, but they at least in theory serve a purpose. What purpose is served by any of the gizmos on this site?
It's a personal website, it's fun. Comparing someones personal website - where the 'fun' things can be turned off - to a $tn company with hundreds of millions of users who rely on the usability their products is not a great basis for disagreeing with a pretty great write-up with many salient points.
I wonder if JWZ still has the red carpet for HN users. Let’s test: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2026/01/dali-clock-in-the-wild/
EDIT: Yep, still works!
Then something changed.
Touch bar was a miss. LaunchPad was a miss. I don't see a use of "Stage manager". iPad has gone to shit. Widgets came back, on mac... for no reason.
In Tahoe, the new spotlight search is one of the better features of Tahoe but i am fine with Alfred. But by and large, there are more annoyances in Tahoe than improvements.
For the iPhone and liquid glass, I am convinced that it was done to force people to upgrade to a new device. There *has* to be a reason to upgrade, and when hardware and software feature plateau, then we even the planned obsolescence era.
EDIT: the snow stops _but after a few seconds_. I toggled it to find out if it would turn off the snow, and the immediate feedback was that it doesn't. That's really _really_ bad UX.
Even without a designer's detail-aware eyes, I couldn't stop facepalming with what I saw. I'd be embarrassed to ship that and call it an improvement! Apple icons may look cool and consistent when browsing them all together as part of SF Symbols, but all that disappears when used incorrectly.
Citation needed. The open icon is general a file containing an arrow or a file as a metaphor of taking a file out of a folder. I just tested with MS Windows XP, MS Windows 7, MS Windows 10 and Mate/Gnome 2.
Are there some perverse incentives to having the OS upgrades be free? Is that what is causing this? Do they simply have no taste?
But yeah, maybe it helps that I have the scripting turned off.
The first thing I did with Tahoe was go into the System Preferences to try and turn off as much as possible of the new UI because it's the biggest regression in Mac OS history (at least since I've been using Macs).
I used to mock Windows for the Explorer UI and general GUI experience, now I think I prefer using my Windows 10 PC over my Mac. It's just such a fucking mess, so inconsistent, shitty performance (even on brand new macs and phones), is actively harder to grok, much harder to use for my elderly parents, and doesn't even look "cooler" or "better" in any way. It's just worse on every possible metric, and made me start wondering about an Android phone, which has never happened since I bought an original iPhone.
I am and have been the ultimate Apple fanboy since 1992, but this release fucking sucks balls. I hope you're listening Apple.
In my view, the three major systems Apple launched last year—iOS 26, iPadOS 26, and macOS Tahoe—all feel like they’ve placed a sheet of liquid glass over what is essentially a system-level interaction and design hell.
My most immediate impression of iOS 26 is that its initial version felt exceptionally crude. While iOS 7 and iOS 11 also felt unpolished due to their extensive redesigns, in actual use, iOS 26’s roughness feels unprecedented (I have an iPod running iOS 7.0.4 and an iPhone X on iOS 11). Beyond the endless bugs, the system’s UI and rounded corners are chaotic and inconsistent. That said, the stability improved considerably by version 26.2, which is commendable.
Back in 2013, Jony Ive’s bold push for flat design defined the iOS 7–9 era. The ultra-thin fonts created a light, visually pleasing aesthetic, but poor readability became a major point of criticism. Apple gradually increased font weight in response, which somewhat compromised the elegance but genuinely improved legibility. Now, with iOS 26, the combination of ultra-bold SF fonts and the liquid glass effect, along with the weakening or outright removal of separators between options, has successfully made readability an unreliable puzzle once again.
iPadOS 26 claims to unlock productivity with freely adjustable windows—on the surface, at least. Now the iPad gives you three choices: either use Stage Manager and multi-window mode to boost productivity, or stick to simple mode without split-screen. But once you remove the keyboard and mouse, the split-screen and Slide Over interactions designed specifically for touch suddenly disappear. What used to be straightforward dragging and switching now requires additional adjustments due to the “free” window sizing (Slide Over has returned, but it’s more cumbersome than before). In split-screen mode, the increased rounded corners between windows sacrifice a significant amount of full-screen display area. Also, while adding macOS-style traffic-light buttons and the menu bar seems nice, the interface elements—smaller than a pinky finger—seem to whisper: “Touch experience isn’t important here; keyboard and mouse are.” If productivity plus portability is the goal, why not just buy a MacBook Air? As an ordinary user, in everyday scenarios, what affects us most isn’t window size, but how intuitive and convenient the operations are. To this day, I still don’t understand why Apple didn’t keep the simple and elegant old split-screen logic as an optional mode.
macOS Tahoe takes the principle of “neglecting what should be refined, over-polishing what shouldn’t” to a whole new level. As the symbol of productivity, the Mac’s system has been made shockingly chaotic—a messy UI battlefield, not to mention the still inconsistent rounded corners across windows…
At the 1983 International Design Conference in Aspen, Steve Jobs once said, “Our design goal is to make products intuitively obvious.” For years, Apple indeed set precedents and profoundly influenced design language across the industry. But this latest iteration of the “Apple style”? I can’t bring myself to agree. I don’t hope to see a future dominated by this kind of visual-first design language. If anything, I’m inclined to think that this time, Apple has simply walked onto its own narrow bridge.
