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.
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.
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.
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!
Not to mention that the actual controls in a car (from gearshift to button to change the brightness on the on-board display to 'open garage door' button of a built in radio wave thing) are never called chrome for fairly obvious reasons.
However, jargon words are just jargon words. There really are only two options:
1. Police them ruthlessly. Even if the word would only cause confusion in the amateur / casual observer, they must be eliminated anyway. I venture that this means almost all jargon words must be turned into words totally devoid of meaning. Jargon is useful - nobody wants to spend the same 3 paragraphs to convey a complex but very common concept - they invent a word for it. So, are we ready for the 'floobargle' and the 'glorpnitz'?
2. Just let them be, and instead police the idea that words that are jargon imply anything at all. Police the idea that their plain english dictionary definition holds any relevance beyond being a memento for what the jargon word is truly meant to convey.
In other words: The problem lies with those who realise 'chrome' is a jargon term and then kneejerk into '... it is frippery' anyway. That's stupid. Those who do that should be ridiculed.
I think that's the only way partly because that feels right and because I think it would lead to eliminated of jargon (bad endresult) or always ending up with jargon that is just a random word that has no meaning at all and wasn't in any dictionary.
No, it's the only feasible way, because of pragmatic reasons: Changing existing jargon? Hoo boy. That is extremely difficult.
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 from the touch control to see what I managed to select. It is 10 times worse than an old school rotary dial that I could operate instantly by touch alone. My workaround now is to prod the control, wait for 5 seconds to see if I feel air start flowing, and if not, prod the control and wait again.
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, and right clicking on objects in the UI opened context-sensitive popup hierarchical menus.
For cars it was in the 2000s before touch screens.
My 2018 RAV4 has physical buttons, and the touchscreen is only used for the backup camera, and the audio system and phone (their own UI for contacts, calls, etc. and not something like CarPlay).
I'm hoping whatever model I replace it with will have physical controls too.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
It worked so incredibly well on the Windows Phone 7, but translated horribly to the Windows 8 desktop. Especially the weird mouse gesture to get to the neutered Settings panel, the redundancy of that panel to begin with, and the entire UWP app experience. Windows 10 was a great marriage of these two concepts, even if the Settings menu was still redundant, it was functional. Then comes along Windows 11 even it's most recent feature updates feels like a half-finished UI.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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 does have some good points, but it feels like someone turned in C- level work.
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.
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.
I'd rather Linux developed an identity of its own. I feel like keyboard driven tiled windows are the closest it has to that.
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.
What's a good calendar app on Linux?
What's a good e-mail client?
What's a good photo and image editor?
I think Liquid Glass looks good.
Deleted Comment
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.
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.
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.
However, jargon words are just jargon words. There really are only two options:
1. Police them ruthlessly. Even if the word would only cause confusion in the amateur / casual observer, they must be eliminated anyway. I venture that this means almost all jargon words must be turned into words totally devoid of meaning. Jargon is useful - nobody wants to spend the same 3 paragraphs to convey a complex but very common concept - they invent a word for it. So, are we ready for the 'floobargle' and the 'glorpnitz'?
2. Just let them be, and instead police the idea that words that are jargon imply anything at all. Police the idea that their plain english dictionary definition holds any relevance beyond being a memento for what the jargon word is truly meant to convey.
In other words: The problem lies with those who realise 'chrome' is a jargon term and then kneejerk into '... it is frippery' anyway. That's stupid. Those who do that should be ridiculed.
I think that's the only way partly because that feels right and because I think it would lead to eliminated of jargon (bad endresult) or always ending up with jargon that is just a random word that has no meaning at all and wasn't in any dictionary.
No, it's the only feasible way, because of pragmatic reasons: Changing existing jargon? Hoo boy. That is extremely difficult.
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 from the touch control to see what I managed to select. It is 10 times worse than an old school rotary dial that I could operate instantly by touch alone. My workaround now is to prod the control, wait for 5 seconds to see if I feel air start flowing, and if not, prod the control and wait again.
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, and right clicking on objects in the UI opened context-sensitive popup hierarchical menus.
For cars it was in the 2000s before touch screens.
I'm hoping whatever model I replace it with will have physical controls too.
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?
But we're making the UI gEt OuT oF tHe WaY .
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.
NNGroup has written about this trend: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/content-chrome-ratio/
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.)
[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/08/apple-planning-macbook-...
Apple copying Microsoft is a mistake. It used to be the other way around.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.