The whole thing of calling controls "chrome" is basically a metaphor gone horribly awry. The term was coined in the 1990s because (at least on Windows) the "content" usually had a white background, and the controls usually had a gray background. But of course the use of the word "chrome" inevitably implies that this stuff (the controls) are like the chrome on a car: nonfunctional, inessential visual frippery. And so UI chrome must be bad, and something to eliminate. But of course this is nutty: The UI controls are what you use to manipulate the content! It's like calling the steering wheel and the pedals in a car "chrome" and deciding you need to deemphasize them so that the driver can 'focus on the road' or something. The controls are important! They are how you drive the car!
For some reason UI taste influencers have outsized influence within companies. IMO it's because they have the ear of execs who react viscerally to eye candy - as we all do - but lack understanding of basic usability principles. As an exec sitting there frustrated by the slow pace of software development, at least you can always yell at the UI guy and demand changes that your gut tells you "look cool", and you can be an active, though uninformed particpant in sessions with design mockups.
Car UIs are a great case in point. People have been yelling for years at the poor usability of touchscreens in cars as opposed to discrete buttons/controls. Yet the enshittification of car UIs continues unchecked. My ioniq 5 has multiple touch panels and buttons, yet something as simple as directing air flow to the dash vents requires me to prod at a tiny touch area and look at a separate tiny display area well away form that control to see what I managed to select. It is 10 times worse than an old school rotary dial that I could operate purely by touch.
Peak usability of most computer UIs was back in the 90s when simple (to use) but deep and powerful hierarchical menus were uniformly placed at the top of the page. For cars it was in the 2000s before touch screens.
Liquid Glass on macOS is such a joke. Most of the redesign was just turning buttons into Fisher Price-looking circles and ovals. I'm typing this from Safari which looks so stupid in Tahoe. The tab bar is a giant oblong oval with a bunch of tab titles and icons floating on a solid background, only separated by a short, faint vertical bar that doesn't go to the top/bottom to truly separate them. The current active tab is a small oblong oval within the giant oval. The perfect visual metaphor for tabs which Safari set the trend for in macOS is gone.
And then just above is a bunch more ovals and circles. The sidebar button is an oval, the back/forward buttons are in an oval, the Wipr extension icon is in an oval, the URL bar is an oblong over, etc. And (at least in light mode) this is all white ovals on a white background. It all looks so amateurish.
I'm so glad that Hack Alan Dye is gone and I pray to God that Stephen Lamay can get us back to reason. I doubt they'll do an overnight Cmd+Z update in macOS 28 or whatever, but perhaps he can direct Liquid Glass in a direction that isn't just rounding things for the sake of it.
Liquid Glass is Apple’s Windows Vista. They had a ton of fun with Vista in their “switch” ads, if the Windows team were in better shape they could have a field day just screenshotting Tahoe on Social Media. Lucky they’re distracted with their own challenges.
Liquid Glass does have some good points, but it feels like someone turned in C- level work.
I see the Vista comparison a lot but I'm not sure I agree with it. I never thought Vista was that ugly, I thought it was more most of the computer hardware people were buying at the time just wasn't capable of running those visual effects (and I recall it was pretty buggy too)
It had a glassy aesthetic but the similarity doesn't go much further than that description. They didn't make all the buttons into glass blobs floating on top of the content with distracting warping effects; the window chrome was still generally separated from the content.
It's the year of the Linux desktop. Break free of the walled gardens, there's no good excuse to throw your money away anymore. ElementaryOS and a few other projects have superb Apple flavored UI and UX. Apple just wants your money; they don't give a flying rat's ass about you or your needs.
Let liquid glass be your red pill - come join us in the real.
The cross platform scene is much different these days. Electron apps suck, but at least they suck equally across all platforms. And there are many Electron apps.
But a lot of people rely on Adobe, Microsoft or Windows-only, Mac-only apps. I don’t see that changing anytime soon, unfortunately.
Breaking free is easier than ever. You don't need walled gardens.
AI is making handling the edge cases that kept people locked in almost trivial. Any workflow, custom spreadsheet, specific OS-only app can be worked around, easily. Staying stuck on Apple or Microsoft is a choice - they're no longer returning value concurrent with the money they charge.
You're free to continue giving them money, but the reasons to do so make less and less sense each day that goes by.
I use Adobe Illustrator daily at a very high level and have about 25y of source files in its private format, as well as a bunch of plugins I rely on. How well can Linux deal with running a version of it written in this decade?
Inkscape is not an option, nor is anything involving importing PDF/SVG, those have to expand a huge ton of stuff that's represented much more compactly in an .AI file. It's about as large a difference as that between an executable file and its source code.
I don't think there is an answer. The best you can do is probably running Windows in a VM and limiting its use to applications that you really cannot replace. It's been a while since I used a VM on Linux, but VMware had a thing called Unity Mode where you can have application windows from the VM on your Linux desktop:
"Adobe Creative Suite not running on Linux can be worked around easily" is something that people have been getting wrong for decades, but injecting AI into the premise is a new frontier of funny.
What's the AI workaround for Illustrator/After Effects/etc.? You're not suggesting generating vector art or video assets via LLM replaces these, surely?
We aren't given an option at my work, but if we were I'd still choose the Mac anyway. I love the Mac and that's why I care so much about this design regression. I like that it unlocks with my watch or fingerprint from a wireless keyboard, I like that I can push files and browser tabs between my Mac and phone just by sharing, I like that if I can push my mouse off the side of the screen and control my iPad with my keyboard and mouse with zero setup, or if I want one more monitor I can turn my iPad into that with 2 clicks. I could go on.
They just need to get back into the mindset that design is how it works. Not forcing some aesthetic into everything with the superficial idea of "focusing on content" as a backwards justification for making everything transparent cause someone thought it was prettier.
Linux is for people who want to get rid of "they". If "they" start screwing things up, you switch to a different "they". Alternatively, you become "they" by forking the project.
> Alternatively, you become "they" by forking the project.
This doesn't make sense for the vast majority of people.
Linux desktop doesn't have the vast majority of the niceties that living in the Apple ecosystem gives you. If I was going to rebuild any one of them for Linux, it would easily become a major project that would suck up all my free time.
About the UI I become "they" but installing the GNOME extensions that I need to make my desktop look like 99% of what I would it to look and behave. It takes a few minutes to get to 80%, a few hours to get to 95% and days (a few minutes here and there) to 99%. Those huge menus and tabs on GNOME terminal eventually became skinny with a good deal of CSS and AI.
Do most people want to get through that research? Absolutely no, I don't expect many people to follow me into that rabbit hole. They can get the default or Windows or a Mac, no problem with that.
I really want something between Sequoia and Tahoe. (Probably mostly Sequoia, but with targeted applications of Liquid Glass.) I don't like how Tahoe treats everything as floating on top, as if properly dividing windows into sidebars and panels is wrong... There's so much extra padding and rounding now, I hate it. Everything's lost the depth, detail and cleanliness it used to have, replaced by this bubbly mess. Like, sheets don't even slide out anymore, they overlay like on iOS. The charm, expressivity, and, well, Mac-ness is gone.
I love Liquid Glass - the blur and refractive effects are so pretty and technically impressive - but it should be used tastefully instead of this nonsense. I feel like Tahoe in general is straying way, way too far from the battle-tested Cocoa foundation and into this total top-down crap. Liquid Glass feels like some sort of shareholder-enforced enshittification.
macOS is supposed to be defined from the bottom up; it always has been. There has always been importance in having a solid base; a robust foundation for developers to build on. HIG, Cocoa, CoreGraphics, all of that is in service of this. The user experience and vertical integration is a result of this and couldn't exist without it.
There's so much wrong with Tahoe that goes against everything Mac has ever been. We don't want to dumb down the interface; that has never been the goal. The goal has always been to make the interface intuitive enough that anyone can learn it. macOS and iOS are fundamentally different platforms with fundamentally different design constraints and considerations.
Icons being able to escape the squircle was supposed to be a reflection of the fact that apps on Mac are less contained than apps on iOS. They have more expressive power and more advanced capabilities. You're working closer to the metal and in a less controlled environment. Because of that, you can do more and you're not constrained to the flows of the system.
iOS always hasn't been this. The constraints of touch are different than the constraints of the desktop. Steve Jobs spoke about this a lot back in his day, about why iOS is so much more locked-down than Mac.
But Mac has always been a platform for freedom and control. And Tahoe strips the soul of that.
> But Mac has always been a platform for freedom and control.
My impress has always been the opposite: MacOS is "opinionated", and the user can either accept the Apple way of doing UI or can take a hike.
MacOS has offered token customization, such as allowing the user to change the color of menu bar highlights, but any substantive change required 3rd party intervention, which would inevitably cease to function at the next upgrade.
These days the OS is even more locked down, making it all but impossible to modify OS files.
Catalyst was already sort of a death knell, since it's an admission that it's ok to port over iPhone/iPad HIG to mac. Maybe swiftUI too, since it's replacing appkit and all its various affordances.
Can't speak for GP but I got the feeling that after Apple embarrassed itself shipping almost none of the Apple Intelligence features announced at WWDC 2024, they scrambled to get something drastic out the door to show they're still "innovating" and "doing big things"
I assume the subtext is something like: "Customers are being abused to create the short-term illusion of improvement, to satisfy myopic investors in the financial markets and the personal compensation incentives of executives."
Shareholders want to maximize stock price, therefore they choose psychopathic CEOs willing to do literally anything to achieve that. People who view reputation and goodwill as just capital to be spent. Giving out free service to get people hooked then turning the screws on them is a proven strategy.
None of the siblings got it right. By 'shareholder-enforced enshittification' I meant when shareholders (or, generally, anyone from the top) enforce a direction that doesn't align with what's natural of the foundation. So the system ends up being stretched to afford it, corners get cut / shortcuts get taken, and then that becomes the final shipping version.
The biggest problem of all this crappy development in Windows and macOS is that they just threw customization out of the window.
Remember Windows 98, when you could actually just right click on the Desktop and select your own colors for basically everything in the UI.
With each Windows it got less, until in Vista and 7 only like 10% remained. This continues to get less.
This is pushing AI down my throat (+ privacy, but IMO Apple is at least okay-ish in this regard) is my main reason why my next laptop will not run macOS. Maybe Asahi Linux will finally support Thunderbolt, but maybe I'll just switch to a Framework. I'm just happy that I stayed on 15.7.5 until now. As soon as this gets no updates anymore, I'm gone.
The curious thing about 'bringing users’ content front and centre' or 'greater focus on your content' is that in the Tahoe redesign, the document and the window merge so much that the content (the document) is less visible.
They blur together. I can't see which is document and which is chrome. This is the article's point, but... how can Apple be saying what they have, when I feel that since Big Sur at least it's not only perceptively but arguably objectively not true?
My favorite rendition of this phenomenon is video player controls that only appear if you mouse over the content. So, if I want to pause a video to focus on something, god help me if that something is in the lower third of the frame and centered (for Quicktime Player on macOS) or in the lower 100 pixels (YouTube), because odds are the fucking play/pause button is going to block it and it won't fade away if the video is paused.
Yeah. They just plaster the UI elements all over the video, VHS style, and they remain on screen for several seconds. Browsers are particularly obnoxious: they display a giant icon right in the middle of the video. Depending on screen size and orientation, it can straight up block the entire content for several seconds, or indefinitely if the video is paused.
One of so many reasons why I love mpv so much. Fine control via keyboard, allows turning off all the UI elements. Always a pleasure to use. I hate having to use any other media player.
Unbelievable how bad the latest version of Pages looks against the oldest in the example. The "chrome" part - the buttons without labels, I have no idea what most of them would do and just glancing at them gives me a headache.
It's still impressing how the entire chrome can be collapsed into a single background bit of information, indicating a presence that may be attended to for interaction. In contrast, the newer interfaces seem to be made to reduce the attention span anyone may apply to the content. (It's really stress inducing.)
It can be good to reduce chrome and focus on content, and have minimal UI's but there's a limit. Your UI still has to be discoverable, and intuitive. With everything hidden away it's unfriendly, particularly for new users.
Sure, but why can't we have both? Sensible, usable defaults for new users, configurable views for everyone else. I'd like a version of Pages where I can turn off the toolbar, turn off the title bar, fullscreen the remaining window and focus purely on the document. That really shouldn't be difficult.
It would be extremely easy to have both. Tab to hide/show chrome and controls. The Affinity software does this, and it's intuitive and works flawlessly.
I presume the difficult question there, would be what you would expect users to do to engage with that mechanism on iOS (since many Apple first-party apps, e.g. Notes, are now designed once to run on macOS + iPadOS + iOS as essentially a single [responsive] UI.)
I don't understand how decreasing the contrast between content and chrome helps you "focus" on content. The older design screenshot has better content clarity than the current design.
The "content over chrome" trend was started by Microsoft's Metro design language. Windows 8 and Metro are one of the biggest UI/UX disasters since the dawn of computing. Why would Apple keep copying the worst ideas from Microsoft?
Metro worked perfectly well on tablets. And every OS since W8 has actually kept some version of Metro (in the form of e.g. larger touch-targets), because having a single version of Windows UI for both touchscreen and mouse-and-keyboard computers, is what enabled the creation of the "2-in-1" or "convertible" touchscreen notebook, a design that basically every modern Windows notebook instantiates.
Liquid Glass also makes more sense on tablets. I think Apple is copying Microsoft because Apple is also moving toward full UI-level unification between their desktop mouse-and-keyboard UI and their mobile/tablet touchscreen UI. They've already done it for some apps (e.g. Notes.)
MacBook Neo is getting a lot of attention for good reason. It is a great laptop. The fact that it isn't "convertible touchscreen" notebook doesn't seem to bother anyone.
Apple copying Microsoft is a mistake. It used to be the other way around.
The Windows 8 equivalent server edition also included the upgrade to Metro UI. I don't know, I guess MS figured IT wanted to provision Windows services using a surface tablet?
I actually really did like Windows Phones though. I can imagine a world with a third competitor in that space today... But MS didn't seem to have any understanding or ability to develop an ecosystem that works. Even when they were literally paying people to write apps for their app store, it was just terrible.
That article was written in 2014, just a few years after the trend started, and still today, over a decade later, Apple, once famous for its UX, is still failing to follow it.
What puzzles me is that information like this is out there. How did Apple get it so wrong?
I am hopeful for the new UX VP. He has his work cut out for him.
> Why would Apple keep copying the worst ideas from Microsoft?
Remember also the "Get a Mac" ads that parodied Windows Vista permission dialogs, but now macOS is a permission dialog hell.
Tim Cook was an IBMer. I'm sure that Cook was a fine hire as an operations manager, but I doubt that Steve Jobs intended for someone like Cook to be in charge of everything at Apple, including UI design. (Jobs never put Jony Ive in charge of software, by the way, whereas Cook did.) Indeed, I doubt that Jobs groomed anyone to be his successor. By the time Jobs learned he had a fatal illness, it was too late, and he had to turn over the company to someone the board of directors would accept, which was Cook. Jobs was CEO but didn't own the company; infamously, the Apple board of directors chose John Sculley over Jobs in an earlier power struggle.
You are rewriting history. Any time Jobs had to step aside from the CEO position, Cook took over immediately. He was Jobs' designated successor for a decade when he learned he was sick. They merely implemented the succession plan they already had.
When Cook took over, he was unequivocally the only choice. He steered the company in his own direction, with a focus on operational health to the detriment of other things. He kind of lost the plot somewhere in there and has been spinning his wheels for a while. That's not what I'm contesting. It's your idea that Jobs didn't want Cook. Jobs loved Cook.
> Any time Jobs had to step aside from the CEO position, Cook took over immediately.
Any time Jobs had to step aside from the CEO position temporarily, Cook took over immediately. Metaphorically speaking, Cook kept the trains running on time. Cook did not set or change the direction of the company at the time, and Jobs was still available for consultation.
Sick is not the same as dying. Jobs initially didn't think he was dying, and tried to treat his illness with some hippie-dippie "alternative" medicine, when aggressive treatment might have saved his life.
> He was Jobs' designated successor for a decade when he learned he was sick.
Citation needed.
> Jobs loved Cook.
In what way? According to biographer Walter Isaacson, Jobs lamented that Cook was "not a product person".
Maybe I just don't get it, but the first example the controls are out of the way, leaving most the space for the content.
In subsequent examples the controls have made less space for content and obscured it. And takes up space with less-often used things like line spacing and and drop caps. Feels like I'm being told that up is down.
And the smudgy liquid glass effect just makes everything look grubby. Not classy.
To me it definitely looks like the area for the document grew. The sidebar is a solution to not tacking a million things into the toolbar, it's not like it's open 100% of the time.
Since Big Sur redesign, light mode on macOS is borderline unusable.
I need contrast in order to differentiate content. I need contrast on buttons to know where to click and what is clickable. I don’t need to depend on muscle memory. On Catalina it was automatic. Chrome in moderation is not bad.
None of the reason for the redesign in 2014, 2020 and 2025 had anything to do with solving any problem users had with the interface. The goals were just to blend controls and content visually and make the interface feel fresh, which I doubt that any users were asking for in the first place.
Why do they do this? I just don't understand the regression in user interfaces in the major operating systems over the years. Is there some academic discourse about this? Is there some trend in UX or designer education that's produced this? It can't be just change for change's sake as there's a trend to minimize the OS chrome to the point that it's unusable.
Its partly driven by wanting to match mobile design, but I think more putting more value on aesthetics and usability.
From a commercial point of view branding and how it looks is more important. People buy what looks simple - they are not going to spend time trying something out to asses what is simple.
The trend is "less is more". For the past decade, UX designers have fetishized flat, monochrome, low-contrast designs with zero visual cues or opportunities for feature discovery. From what I'm to gather, their idea of a perfect computer is an empty white (or black) screen on which you can do absolutely nothing except yell out, "um, hey Siri? Are you there?"
I do wonder if we'll see the pendulum swing the other direction. We used to have UX designers that actually studied users and how best to mold the interface to them. I think now is the best time ever to get into UX design and make your mark by showing the world that software doesn't _have_ to be flat, lifeless, and radiused to hell and back in order to be great.
While I feel so too, I do actually think that objectively Catalina is a UX-side step up. Current displays have 16:9 or even 3:2. Putting less things in the top bar and more stuff in the sidebar, especially in something like Pages where your content does not even fill half of your display horizontally, I think it makes sense.
I'll play slight devil's advocate. The buttons in the toolbar are duplicative of the options in the menubar, and I don't want to learn 2 locations for every feature. You can't turn off the menubar items, so I end up turning off the toolbar. So I don't care what that part of the UI looks like, and the sidebar for formatting they added, as pointed out in the article, uses the horizontal space on screens better than options stretched out over the full width of the menu.
Now the visibility of the liquid glass stuff, that is definitely a problem. Can't recognize a UI element if it's constantly rendered differently and with very little contrast with the background elements.
Well, I guess someone is going to vibecode a decent Linux GUI or fix the driver pains there or something and we'll be free of this. Because Microsoft/Apple and to a lesser extent Google have jumped the shark with their UI these days.
When I used to use Pages frequently I just memorized all the relevant keyboard shortcuts and turned off the entire toolbar. It’s easy: for each button in the toolbar find the equivalent in the menu, and the shortcut is written on the menu item itself. That’s, however, entirely unacceptable for most users.
The sidebar for formatting they added is strictly worse than the inspector UI in old Pages ’09. The sidebar is constrained not to overlap with content, but the user can choose to overlap the inspector. It’s strictly better flexibility for users. If you are doing a lot of fine adjustments to a single text box, then of course it’s fewer mouse movement if the inspector is located right next to the text box, despite that it has obscured other irrelevant text boxes. I dearly miss Pages ’09.
The Lion screenshot is just perfect. Everything you need to do is right there. And with every version from then on the usability goes downhill and stuff you need to do is more and more hidden and requires several clicks to access.
Pretty sad state of affairs. Software isn’t build for usability but purely for whatever designers find fashionable at the time.
I think the idea of the Window Chrome "getting out of the way" of the user is a good concept, but we fail to consider what the user expects at arms length. We also have to consider the chicken-or-egg problem
In the example, we have a sidebar for the formatting in the newer example vs havign that in the toolbar in Lion. Was it that back then, people were more likely to configure fonts & formatting settings, and we've gradually as a society de-emphasized our formatting in word processing? Or did UI changes such as this, hiding formatting options push us towards a world where we care less about formatting? I'd like to think it's a bit of both; as the user-based broadened, you had less percentage-based people that cared so heavily about formatting, so UI changes were made to optimize for that, further pushing people in that direction.
On a different note, I want to call out just how badly the sidebar is laid out compared to the toolbar. In the Lion toolbar, there were unlabeled sections but it was pretty clear what the purpose of each group was. Then you have the sidebar, where labels are added in some places, excessive space given where uneccesary, tabs that are sectioned off from the settings they'll show/hide, collapsible sections that can also be shown/hidden, some dropdowns using up/down caret while others just use the down caret, most dropdown carets being right-aligned but not the gear one, and in the liquid glass versions, the overlay of toolbar buttons over the sidebar creating confusion.
Side-by-side, it's incredibly clear that the newest version is total UX garbage. Monochrome icons were a complete mistake, in basically all cases everywhere. A mix of the Lion color, shape/texture, and spacing, plus the Catalina sidebar, would be the best.
I really REALLY love the Lion icons. Colorful but subdued with only mild saturation, distinctive shapes, strong line borders with very slight halo, and mild gradients to make them pop.
Few software companies consider this: users appreciate it when the interface remains constant over time, and especially if we can continue using previous versions without being forced to change, since learning new things again takes time.
It's laughable how often companies redesign the UI, when it's counter to what their users want. Nobody wants to re-learn how to interact with their software. Gradual changes, sure, but a total redesign and then releasing it as a "feature" is such a turn-off to so many people.
“Perhaps Apple has some user studies that suggest otherwise“
I can guarantee you they have done no such research. This redesign is a clear top-down imposition to make the visual language uniform and match some lead designer’s specs, not to actually make anything more useful or usable.
Of these all, I prefer the Big Sur design language, which this article calls an “atrocious regression”.
Arguing aesthetics is pretty pointless (it’s a decided question to me: my taste is great; most others have very poor taste).
What bothers me about Tahoe are all the sloppy bits, like things you can no longer click or scroll to. We’re on 26.3.1 now and it looks/works like 1.0.
I think it's arrogant to call this merely "arguing aesthetics" unless you can point to real usability studies that say removing color from icons does not impair their legibility and recognizability, or that reducing contrast does not similarly have detrimental effects.
What really matters is not how the screenshots look, but how easy it is to use the software in action, with low error rate and without having to spend more than a fraction of a second finding the controls you need.
The whole thing of calling controls "chrome" is basically a metaphor gone horribly awry. The term was coined in the 1990s because (at least on Windows) the "content" usually had a white background, and the controls usually had a gray background. But of course the use of the word "chrome" inevitably implies that this stuff (the controls) are like the chrome on a car: nonfunctional, inessential visual frippery. And so UI chrome must be bad, and something to eliminate. But of course this is nutty: The UI controls are what you use to manipulate the content! It's like calling the steering wheel and the pedals in a car "chrome" and deciding you need to deemphasize them so that the driver can 'focus on the road' or something. The controls are important! They are how you drive the car!
For some reason UI taste influencers have outsized influence within companies. IMO it's because they have the ear of execs who react viscerally to eye candy - as we all do - but lack understanding of basic usability principles. As an exec sitting there frustrated by the slow pace of software development, at least you can always yell at the UI guy and demand changes that your gut tells you "look cool", and you can be an active, though uninformed particpant in sessions with design mockups.
Car UIs are a great case in point. People have been yelling for years at the poor usability of touchscreens in cars as opposed to discrete buttons/controls. Yet the enshittification of car UIs continues unchecked. My ioniq 5 has multiple touch panels and buttons, yet something as simple as directing air flow to the dash vents requires me to prod at a tiny touch area and look at a separate tiny display area well away form that control to see what I managed to select. It is 10 times worse than an old school rotary dial that I could operate purely by touch.
Peak usability of most computer UIs was back in the 90s when simple (to use) but deep and powerful hierarchical menus were uniformly placed at the top of the page. For cars it was in the 2000s before touch screens.
Liquid Glass on macOS is such a joke. Most of the redesign was just turning buttons into Fisher Price-looking circles and ovals. I'm typing this from Safari which looks so stupid in Tahoe. The tab bar is a giant oblong oval with a bunch of tab titles and icons floating on a solid background, only separated by a short, faint vertical bar that doesn't go to the top/bottom to truly separate them. The current active tab is a small oblong oval within the giant oval. The perfect visual metaphor for tabs which Safari set the trend for in macOS is gone.
And then just above is a bunch more ovals and circles. The sidebar button is an oval, the back/forward buttons are in an oval, the Wipr extension icon is in an oval, the URL bar is an oblong over, etc. And (at least in light mode) this is all white ovals on a white background. It all looks so amateurish.
I'm so glad that Hack Alan Dye is gone and I pray to God that Stephen Lamay can get us back to reason. I doubt they'll do an overnight Cmd+Z update in macOS 28 or whatever, but perhaps he can direct Liquid Glass in a direction that isn't just rounding things for the sake of it.
Liquid Glass is Apple’s Windows Vista. They had a ton of fun with Vista in their “switch” ads, if the Windows team were in better shape they could have a field day just screenshotting Tahoe on Social Media. Lucky they’re distracted with their own challenges.
Liquid Glass does have some good points, but it feels like someone turned in C- level work.
I see the Vista comparison a lot but I'm not sure I agree with it. I never thought Vista was that ugly, I thought it was more most of the computer hardware people were buying at the time just wasn't capable of running those visual effects (and I recall it was pretty buggy too)
It had a glassy aesthetic but the similarity doesn't go much further than that description. They didn't make all the buttons into glass blobs floating on top of the content with distracting warping effects; the window chrome was still generally separated from the content.
It's the year of the Linux desktop. Break free of the walled gardens, there's no good excuse to throw your money away anymore. ElementaryOS and a few other projects have superb Apple flavored UI and UX. Apple just wants your money; they don't give a flying rat's ass about you or your needs.
Let liquid glass be your red pill - come join us in the real.
Not everyone uses Electron apps exclusively.
The cross platform scene is much different these days. Electron apps suck, but at least they suck equally across all platforms. And there are many Electron apps.
But a lot of people rely on Adobe, Microsoft or Windows-only, Mac-only apps. I don’t see that changing anytime soon, unfortunately.
Breaking free is easier than ever. You don't need walled gardens.
AI is making handling the edge cases that kept people locked in almost trivial. Any workflow, custom spreadsheet, specific OS-only app can be worked around, easily. Staying stuck on Apple or Microsoft is a choice - they're no longer returning value concurrent with the money they charge.
You're free to continue giving them money, but the reasons to do so make less and less sense each day that goes by.
I use Adobe Illustrator daily at a very high level and have about 25y of source files in its private format, as well as a bunch of plugins I rely on. How well can Linux deal with running a version of it written in this decade?
Inkscape is not an option, nor is anything involving importing PDF/SVG, those have to expand a huge ton of stuff that's represented much more compactly in an .AI file. It's about as large a difference as that between an executable file and its source code.
I don't think there is an answer. The best you can do is probably running Windows in a VM and limiting its use to applications that you really cannot replace. It's been a while since I used a VM on Linux, but VMware had a thing called Unity Mode where you can have application windows from the VM on your Linux desktop:
https://techdocs.broadcom.com/us/en/vmware-cis/desktop-hyper...
It seems like they removed it from VMware 17.6, but maybe another VMM still has this functionality?
I haven't tried it but I've seen this project promoted in some tweets and maybe even here: https://github.com/winapps-org/winapps
> Breaking free is easier than ever. You don't need walled gardens.
There’s nothing that comes even close to Photoshop. Same for a lot of similar professional tools.
> AI is making handling the edge cases that kept people locked in almost trivial
Not for anything remotely complex. Let’s see how that looks in 5 years, but I’m skeptical.
"Adobe Creative Suite not running on Linux can be worked around easily" is something that people have been getting wrong for decades, but injecting AI into the premise is a new frontier of funny.
What's the AI workaround for Illustrator/After Effects/etc.? You're not suggesting generating vector art or video assets via LLM replaces these, surely?
I'm very curious what their workaround plan for something like U&I MetaSynth would be.
We aren't given an option at my work, but if we were I'd still choose the Mac anyway. I love the Mac and that's why I care so much about this design regression. I like that it unlocks with my watch or fingerprint from a wireless keyboard, I like that I can push files and browser tabs between my Mac and phone just by sharing, I like that if I can push my mouse off the side of the screen and control my iPad with my keyboard and mouse with zero setup, or if I want one more monitor I can turn my iPad into that with 2 clicks. I could go on.
They just need to get back into the mindset that design is how it works. Not forcing some aesthetic into everything with the superficial idea of "focusing on content" as a backwards justification for making everything transparent cause someone thought it was prettier.
> They just need to
Linux is for people who want to get rid of "they". If "they" start screwing things up, you switch to a different "they". Alternatively, you become "they" by forking the project.
> Alternatively, you become "they" by forking the project.
This doesn't make sense for the vast majority of people.
Linux desktop doesn't have the vast majority of the niceties that living in the Apple ecosystem gives you. If I was going to rebuild any one of them for Linux, it would easily become a major project that would suck up all my free time.
About the UI I become "they" but installing the GNOME extensions that I need to make my desktop look like 99% of what I would it to look and behave. It takes a few minutes to get to 80%, a few hours to get to 95% and days (a few minutes here and there) to 99%. Those huge menus and tabs on GNOME terminal eventually became skinny with a good deal of CSS and AI.
Do most people want to get through that research? Absolutely no, I don't expect many people to follow me into that rabbit hole. They can get the default or Windows or a Mac, no problem with that.
You're kinda skipping over the 75% of my comment where I said I like everything else, including things Linux can't replicate.
I think people should stop replicating "Apple-flavored" user interfaces on Linux. That just leads to constant disappointment.
I'd rather Linux developed an identity of its own. I feel like keyboard driven tiled windows are the closest it has to that.
This year I switched from the Linux desktop to MacOS. I finally got tired of how unprofessional Linux operating systems were being run.
I think Liquid Glass looks good.
I really want something between Sequoia and Tahoe. (Probably mostly Sequoia, but with targeted applications of Liquid Glass.) I don't like how Tahoe treats everything as floating on top, as if properly dividing windows into sidebars and panels is wrong... There's so much extra padding and rounding now, I hate it. Everything's lost the depth, detail and cleanliness it used to have, replaced by this bubbly mess. Like, sheets don't even slide out anymore, they overlay like on iOS. The charm, expressivity, and, well, Mac-ness is gone.
I love Liquid Glass - the blur and refractive effects are so pretty and technically impressive - but it should be used tastefully instead of this nonsense. I feel like Tahoe in general is straying way, way too far from the battle-tested Cocoa foundation and into this total top-down crap. Liquid Glass feels like some sort of shareholder-enforced enshittification.
macOS is supposed to be defined from the bottom up; it always has been. There has always been importance in having a solid base; a robust foundation for developers to build on. HIG, Cocoa, CoreGraphics, all of that is in service of this. The user experience and vertical integration is a result of this and couldn't exist without it.
There's so much wrong with Tahoe that goes against everything Mac has ever been. We don't want to dumb down the interface; that has never been the goal. The goal has always been to make the interface intuitive enough that anyone can learn it. macOS and iOS are fundamentally different platforms with fundamentally different design constraints and considerations.
Icons being able to escape the squircle was supposed to be a reflection of the fact that apps on Mac are less contained than apps on iOS. They have more expressive power and more advanced capabilities. You're working closer to the metal and in a less controlled environment. Because of that, you can do more and you're not constrained to the flows of the system.
iOS always hasn't been this. The constraints of touch are different than the constraints of the desktop. Steve Jobs spoke about this a lot back in his day, about why iOS is so much more locked-down than Mac.
But Mac has always been a platform for freedom and control. And Tahoe strips the soul of that.
> But Mac has always been a platform for freedom and control.
My impress has always been the opposite: MacOS is "opinionated", and the user can either accept the Apple way of doing UI or can take a hike.
MacOS has offered token customization, such as allowing the user to change the color of menu bar highlights, but any substantive change required 3rd party intervention, which would inevitably cease to function at the next upgrade.
These days the OS is even more locked down, making it all but impossible to modify OS files.
> There's so much extra padding and rounding now
I don’t like it either, but I wonder if that’s to support the touch-enabled Macs that the rumor mill is reporting about right now.
In any case, Tahoe has many other issues beyond padding.
There are definitely other ways to do it than making everything look like this.
Catalyst was already sort of a death knell, since it's an admission that it's ok to port over iPhone/iPad HIG to mac. Maybe swiftUI too, since it's replacing appkit and all its various affordances.
"shareholder-enforced enshittification" what on earth could this possibly mean?
Can't speak for GP but I got the feeling that after Apple embarrassed itself shipping almost none of the Apple Intelligence features announced at WWDC 2024, they scrambled to get something drastic out the door to show they're still "innovating" and "doing big things"
I assume the subtext is something like: "Customers are being abused to create the short-term illusion of improvement, to satisfy myopic investors in the financial markets and the personal compensation incentives of executives."
Shareholders want to maximize stock price, therefore they choose psychopathic CEOs willing to do literally anything to achieve that. People who view reputation and goodwill as just capital to be spent. Giving out free service to get people hooked then turning the screws on them is a proven strategy.
None of the siblings got it right. By 'shareholder-enforced enshittification' I meant when shareholders (or, generally, anyone from the top) enforce a direction that doesn't align with what's natural of the foundation. So the system ends up being stretched to afford it, corners get cut / shortcuts get taken, and then that becomes the final shipping version.
The biggest problem of all this crappy development in Windows and macOS is that they just threw customization out of the window. Remember Windows 98, when you could actually just right click on the Desktop and select your own colors for basically everything in the UI. With each Windows it got less, until in Vista and 7 only like 10% remained. This continues to get less.
This is pushing AI down my throat (+ privacy, but IMO Apple is at least okay-ish in this regard) is my main reason why my next laptop will not run macOS. Maybe Asahi Linux will finally support Thunderbolt, but maybe I'll just switch to a Framework. I'm just happy that I stayed on 15.7.5 until now. As soon as this gets no updates anymore, I'm gone.
The curious thing about 'bringing users’ content front and centre' or 'greater focus on your content' is that in the Tahoe redesign, the document and the window merge so much that the content (the document) is less visible.
They blur together. I can't see which is document and which is chrome. This is the article's point, but... how can Apple be saying what they have, when I feel that since Big Sur at least it's not only perceptively but arguably objectively not true?
My favorite rendition of this phenomenon is video player controls that only appear if you mouse over the content. So, if I want to pause a video to focus on something, god help me if that something is in the lower third of the frame and centered (for Quicktime Player on macOS) or in the lower 100 pixels (YouTube), because odds are the fucking play/pause button is going to block it and it won't fade away if the video is paused.
But we're making the UI gEt OuT oF tHe WaY .
Yeah. They just plaster the UI elements all over the video, VHS style, and they remain on screen for several seconds. Browsers are particularly obnoxious: they display a giant icon right in the middle of the video. Depending on screen size and orientation, it can straight up block the entire content for several seconds, or indefinitely if the video is paused.
One of so many reasons why I love mpv so much. Fine control via keyboard, allows turning off all the UI elements. Always a pleasure to use. I hate having to use any other media player.
Unbelievable how bad the latest version of Pages looks against the oldest in the example. The "chrome" part - the buttons without labels, I have no idea what most of them would do and just glancing at them gives me a headache.
It's still impressing how the entire chrome can be collapsed into a single background bit of information, indicating a presence that may be attended to for interaction. In contrast, the newer interfaces seem to be made to reduce the attention span anyone may apply to the content. (It's really stress inducing.)
I'll say. It really shows what we have lost. I deeply miss old OS X.
It can be good to reduce chrome and focus on content, and have minimal UI's but there's a limit. Your UI still has to be discoverable, and intuitive. With everything hidden away it's unfriendly, particularly for new users.
Sure, but why can't we have both? Sensible, usable defaults for new users, configurable views for everyone else. I'd like a version of Pages where I can turn off the toolbar, turn off the title bar, fullscreen the remaining window and focus purely on the document. That really shouldn't be difficult.
Absolutely. It's totally doable. But Apple is swinging a bit too far into the minimal aesthetic right now.
It would be extremely easy to have both. Tab to hide/show chrome and controls. The Affinity software does this, and it's intuitive and works flawlessly.
I presume the difficult question there, would be what you would expect users to do to engage with that mechanism on iOS (since many Apple first-party apps, e.g. Notes, are now designed once to run on macOS + iPadOS + iOS as essentially a single [responsive] UI.)
I don't understand how decreasing the contrast between content and chrome helps you "focus" on content. The older design screenshot has better content clarity than the current design.
The "content over chrome" trend was started by Microsoft's Metro design language. Windows 8 and Metro are one of the biggest UI/UX disasters since the dawn of computing. Why would Apple keep copying the worst ideas from Microsoft?
NNGroup has written about this trend: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/content-chrome-ratio/
Metro worked perfectly well on tablets. And every OS since W8 has actually kept some version of Metro (in the form of e.g. larger touch-targets), because having a single version of Windows UI for both touchscreen and mouse-and-keyboard computers, is what enabled the creation of the "2-in-1" or "convertible" touchscreen notebook, a design that basically every modern Windows notebook instantiates.
Liquid Glass also makes more sense on tablets. I think Apple is copying Microsoft because Apple is also moving toward full UI-level unification between their desktop mouse-and-keyboard UI and their mobile/tablet touchscreen UI. They've already done it for some apps (e.g. Notes.)
If you believe the rumor mill, Touch-enabled Macs may launch this year[1].
[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/08/apple-planning-macbook-...
MacBook Neo is getting a lot of attention for good reason. It is a great laptop. The fact that it isn't "convertible touchscreen" notebook doesn't seem to bother anyone.
Apple copying Microsoft is a mistake. It used to be the other way around.
The Windows 8 equivalent server edition also included the upgrade to Metro UI. I don't know, I guess MS figured IT wanted to provision Windows services using a surface tablet?
I actually really did like Windows Phones though. I can imagine a world with a third competitor in that space today... But MS didn't seem to have any understanding or ability to develop an ecosystem that works. Even when they were literally paying people to write apps for their app store, it was just terrible.
That article was written in 2014, just a few years after the trend started, and still today, over a decade later, Apple, once famous for its UX, is still failing to follow it.
What puzzles me is that information like this is out there. How did Apple get it so wrong?
I am hopeful for the new UX VP. He has his work cut out for him.
> Why would Apple keep copying the worst ideas from Microsoft?
Remember also the "Get a Mac" ads that parodied Windows Vista permission dialogs, but now macOS is a permission dialog hell.
Tim Cook was an IBMer. I'm sure that Cook was a fine hire as an operations manager, but I doubt that Steve Jobs intended for someone like Cook to be in charge of everything at Apple, including UI design. (Jobs never put Jony Ive in charge of software, by the way, whereas Cook did.) Indeed, I doubt that Jobs groomed anyone to be his successor. By the time Jobs learned he had a fatal illness, it was too late, and he had to turn over the company to someone the board of directors would accept, which was Cook. Jobs was CEO but didn't own the company; infamously, the Apple board of directors chose John Sculley over Jobs in an earlier power struggle.
You are rewriting history. Any time Jobs had to step aside from the CEO position, Cook took over immediately. He was Jobs' designated successor for a decade when he learned he was sick. They merely implemented the succession plan they already had.
When Cook took over, he was unequivocally the only choice. He steered the company in his own direction, with a focus on operational health to the detriment of other things. He kind of lost the plot somewhere in there and has been spinning his wheels for a while. That's not what I'm contesting. It's your idea that Jobs didn't want Cook. Jobs loved Cook.
> Any time Jobs had to step aside from the CEO position, Cook took over immediately.
Any time Jobs had to step aside from the CEO position temporarily, Cook took over immediately. Metaphorically speaking, Cook kept the trains running on time. Cook did not set or change the direction of the company at the time, and Jobs was still available for consultation.
Sick is not the same as dying. Jobs initially didn't think he was dying, and tried to treat his illness with some hippie-dippie "alternative" medicine, when aggressive treatment might have saved his life.
> He was Jobs' designated successor for a decade when he learned he was sick.
Citation needed.
> Jobs loved Cook.
In what way? According to biographer Walter Isaacson, Jobs lamented that Cook was "not a product person".
Maybe I just don't get it, but the first example the controls are out of the way, leaving most the space for the content.
In subsequent examples the controls have made less space for content and obscured it. And takes up space with less-often used things like line spacing and and drop caps. Feels like I'm being told that up is down.
And the smudgy liquid glass effect just makes everything look grubby. Not classy.
To me it definitely looks like the area for the document grew. The sidebar is a solution to not tacking a million things into the toolbar, it's not like it's open 100% of the time.
Since Big Sur redesign, light mode on macOS is borderline unusable.
I need contrast in order to differentiate content. I need contrast on buttons to know where to click and what is clickable. I don’t need to depend on muscle memory. On Catalina it was automatic. Chrome in moderation is not bad.
None of the reason for the redesign in 2014, 2020 and 2025 had anything to do with solving any problem users had with the interface. The goals were just to blend controls and content visually and make the interface feel fresh, which I doubt that any users were asking for in the first place.
Why do they do this? I just don't understand the regression in user interfaces in the major operating systems over the years. Is there some academic discourse about this? Is there some trend in UX or designer education that's produced this? It can't be just change for change's sake as there's a trend to minimize the OS chrome to the point that it's unusable.
Its partly driven by wanting to match mobile design, but I think more putting more value on aesthetics and usability.
From a commercial point of view branding and how it looks is more important. People buy what looks simple - they are not going to spend time trying something out to asses what is simple.
The trend is "less is more". For the past decade, UX designers have fetishized flat, monochrome, low-contrast designs with zero visual cues or opportunities for feature discovery. From what I'm to gather, their idea of a perfect computer is an empty white (or black) screen on which you can do absolutely nothing except yell out, "um, hey Siri? Are you there?"
I do wonder if we'll see the pendulum swing the other direction. We used to have UX designers that actually studied users and how best to mold the interface to them. I think now is the best time ever to get into UX design and make your mark by showing the world that software doesn't _have_ to be flat, lifeless, and radiused to hell and back in order to be great.
Oh, man... What I wouldn't give to have Pages (and other apps) appear like they did in OS X Lion. This is just depressing.
While I feel so too, I do actually think that objectively Catalina is a UX-side step up. Current displays have 16:9 or even 3:2. Putting less things in the top bar and more stuff in the sidebar, especially in something like Pages where your content does not even fill half of your display horizontally, I think it makes sense.
The formatting bar in iWork '08 was optional, with everything in it replicated in the (vertical) inspector panel.
(Screenshot: http://www.macosxtips.co.uk/index_files/120609-inspector-win... )
With iWork 2016, they essentially took the existing inspector panel setup and docked it into each window.
I'll play slight devil's advocate. The buttons in the toolbar are duplicative of the options in the menubar, and I don't want to learn 2 locations for every feature. You can't turn off the menubar items, so I end up turning off the toolbar. So I don't care what that part of the UI looks like, and the sidebar for formatting they added, as pointed out in the article, uses the horizontal space on screens better than options stretched out over the full width of the menu.
Now the visibility of the liquid glass stuff, that is definitely a problem. Can't recognize a UI element if it's constantly rendered differently and with very little contrast with the background elements.
Well, I guess someone is going to vibecode a decent Linux GUI or fix the driver pains there or something and we'll be free of this. Because Microsoft/Apple and to a lesser extent Google have jumped the shark with their UI these days.
When I used to use Pages frequently I just memorized all the relevant keyboard shortcuts and turned off the entire toolbar. It’s easy: for each button in the toolbar find the equivalent in the menu, and the shortcut is written on the menu item itself. That’s, however, entirely unacceptable for most users.
The sidebar for formatting they added is strictly worse than the inspector UI in old Pages ’09. The sidebar is constrained not to overlap with content, but the user can choose to overlap the inspector. It’s strictly better flexibility for users. If you are doing a lot of fine adjustments to a single text box, then of course it’s fewer mouse movement if the inspector is located right next to the text box, despite that it has obscured other irrelevant text boxes. I dearly miss Pages ’09.
The Lion screenshot is just perfect. Everything you need to do is right there. And with every version from then on the usability goes downhill and stuff you need to do is more and more hidden and requires several clicks to access.
Pretty sad state of affairs. Software isn’t build for usability but purely for whatever designers find fashionable at the time.
I think the idea of the Window Chrome "getting out of the way" of the user is a good concept, but we fail to consider what the user expects at arms length. We also have to consider the chicken-or-egg problem
In the example, we have a sidebar for the formatting in the newer example vs havign that in the toolbar in Lion. Was it that back then, people were more likely to configure fonts & formatting settings, and we've gradually as a society de-emphasized our formatting in word processing? Or did UI changes such as this, hiding formatting options push us towards a world where we care less about formatting? I'd like to think it's a bit of both; as the user-based broadened, you had less percentage-based people that cared so heavily about formatting, so UI changes were made to optimize for that, further pushing people in that direction.
On a different note, I want to call out just how badly the sidebar is laid out compared to the toolbar. In the Lion toolbar, there were unlabeled sections but it was pretty clear what the purpose of each group was. Then you have the sidebar, where labels are added in some places, excessive space given where uneccesary, tabs that are sectioned off from the settings they'll show/hide, collapsible sections that can also be shown/hidden, some dropdowns using up/down caret while others just use the down caret, most dropdown carets being right-aligned but not the gear one, and in the liquid glass versions, the overlay of toolbar buttons over the sidebar creating confusion.
Side-by-side, it's incredibly clear that the newest version is total UX garbage. Monochrome icons were a complete mistake, in basically all cases everywhere. A mix of the Lion color, shape/texture, and spacing, plus the Catalina sidebar, would be the best.
I really REALLY love the Lion icons. Colorful but subdued with only mild saturation, distinctive shapes, strong line borders with very slight halo, and mild gradients to make them pop.
Few software companies consider this: users appreciate it when the interface remains constant over time, and especially if we can continue using previous versions without being forced to change, since learning new things again takes time.
It's laughable how often companies redesign the UI, when it's counter to what their users want. Nobody wants to re-learn how to interact with their software. Gradual changes, sure, but a total redesign and then releasing it as a "feature" is such a turn-off to so many people.
“Perhaps Apple has some user studies that suggest otherwise“
I can guarantee you they have done no such research. This redesign is a clear top-down imposition to make the visual language uniform and match some lead designer’s specs, not to actually make anything more useful or usable.
Of these all, I prefer the Big Sur design language, which this article calls an “atrocious regression”.
Arguing aesthetics is pretty pointless (it’s a decided question to me: my taste is great; most others have very poor taste).
What bothers me about Tahoe are all the sloppy bits, like things you can no longer click or scroll to. We’re on 26.3.1 now and it looks/works like 1.0.
I think it's arrogant to call this merely "arguing aesthetics" unless you can point to real usability studies that say removing color from icons does not impair their legibility and recognizability, or that reducing contrast does not similarly have detrimental effects.
What really matters is not how the screenshots look, but how easy it is to use the software in action, with low error rate and without having to spend more than a fraction of a second finding the controls you need.
> We’re on 26.3.1
I'm still on macOS Sonoma 14 and iOS 18
Nothing enrages like change.