I'm increasingly convinced that many of Apple's recent design choices are dictated by 20-somethings and without proper input from other age groups. I have nothing against 20-somethings, but what looks "cool" to them can be unusable for others.
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Do you like Liquid Glass on Mac?
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I'm 61 and I love Liquid Glass on macOS and iOS. And I've been using macs since the 80's.
Not a fan of the Liquid Glass UI on either iOS or macOS. I'm usually open to new and better ways, but LG is a regression for usability in exchange for eye candy. I use my devices to do actual work, where I prioritize efficiency and speed in workflows, and LG slows all of that down. UI elements now take up more screen real estate, certain features are absent or missing (such as history and tab workflows w/Safari in iOS), and all of the transparency and animations consume system resources which I'd like to go towards my workflows. I don't think that I can overstate the annoyance of unnecessarily bulbous UI elements everywhere, which reduce usable space for content and therefore make many workflows less efficient. I really love Apple's hardware and the inherent features and stability of the underlying OS, but man, if some of this stuff isn't toned down I may find myself preferring Windows 11 (or Linux) for actual work.
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These are my main issues with what I'm seeing on Tahoe.
I'm definitely staying on Sequoia for the foreseeable future.
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macrumors 65816
I really like Liquid Glass on my Mac; can't stand it on my 2020 iPad Pro - it's all a little too sluggish.
This is basically what I meant by Tahoe feeling a bit suffocating or giving a slight feeling of claustrophobia in my post earlier in this thread. It's hard to explain, but the overly rounded corners and other elements of the GUI give a feeling of cramped space, impeding the full use of the GUI's window or usable space (even if the exact differences between Tahoe and Sequoia are minimal on paper).
Fonts also look smaller by default systemwide, and making them larger in some apps makes them too large, leaving out a happy medium, but that may be my eyes playing tricks on me. Speaking of eyes playing tricks, the parallelogram effect on icons in Tahoe is something you cannot unsee once your brain sees it. Sounds like this is due to the Liquid Glass effect as well.
Tahoe, in some areas (not all) feels like a well done Stardock 'WindowBlinds Theme' of yore offering a 'Mac Futura' style theming option where it kind of looks cool at first, but feels like it's not fully baked, a bit misaligned and gets in the way at times (something an OS should never do).
And while this is a thread about 'Liquid Glass', for me, the issues with Tahoe aren't limited to Liquid Glass and wouldn't go away if it was turned off or if Apple gave an option to adjust it System Settings (over and beyond the limited Accessibility options). It would help a lot, but the overall UX would remain the same for me for the most part.
I am hopeful that Apple will improve things as dot releases come out, but they will be probably be very minor changes. So, I guess I'll eventually get used to it like everything else.
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I am slowly getting used to 26. I hadn’t paid any attention to the betas prior to the final release.
Some aspects are growing on me. Some aren’t. I think Apple needed to give their “final” version to a bunch of oldtime Mac users used to everything from System 6 onwards, and get their immediate reactions to it.
It looks pretty. It has at least one of my major bugbears fixed from prior macOS (showing output source right in the popup when you change the volume). But dear God Safari looks horrendously ugly half the time with the weird floating toolbar buttons. I’m sure I’ll find more as I use it more.
Some aspects are growing on me. Some aren’t. I think Apple needed to give their “final” version to a bunch of oldtime Mac users used to everything from System 6 onwards, and get their immediate reactions to it.
It looks pretty. It has at least one of my major bugbears fixed from prior macOS (showing output source right in the popup when you change the volume). But dear God Safari looks horrendously ugly half the time with the weird floating toolbar buttons. I’m sure I’ll find more as I use it more.
We have people here trying to tell us this is "good design" and everything is a-ok.
All in all it feels like a rush job. The thing I dislike a lot too is that for the first time in a very long time there’s a distinct difference between redesigned apps and non-redesigned apps. Apps like Pages have an interface that’s distinctly macOS Big Sur - Sequoia with different corner radiuses, toolbar style and smaller window control buttons. Before apps would largely automatically adapt to the new theme because these things were pushed by the OS.
Spooky! 👻🎃
"Halloween" sidebar, where things appear and disappear like a ghost
I like liquid glass, but not on Mac. For me the problem is that there isn't enough liquid glass on but also that the liquid glass there is is just ugly or badly implemented. For example, why does Safari keep a ribbon behind the buttons? If we're going all in on LG then Safari should be only the buttons and the search bar as LG elements floating on top of the window, like it works on iPhone. Why isn't the scrollbar made out of lg like material? it's the same flat old scrollbar. And what the hell is going on with the sidebars? The layering doesn't work because on mac very rarely does content flow behind it and even if it did more often it's so opaque that it looks exactly as the transparency we had before anyways.
On iPhone content interacts a lot more with the LG so you get to see the effect of the material, in MacOS most content is never anywhere near the LG elements and so they look like ugly flat gray pills instead of glass. It just might be that Liquid Glass is a bad system for a computer or perhaps more accurately, that they did not put a lot of effort into the Mac version of it and simply did the bare minimum so they could launch the entire visual revamp at once, quality be damned.
On iPhone content interacts a lot more with the LG so you get to see the effect of the material, in MacOS most content is never anywhere near the LG elements and so they look like ugly flat gray pills instead of glass. It just might be that Liquid Glass is a bad system for a computer or perhaps more accurately, that they did not put a lot of effort into the Mac version of it and simply did the bare minimum so they could launch the entire visual revamp at once, quality be damned.
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My experience now is like installing Ubuntu on a gaming PC with NVIDIA card and unsupported WIFI card. I try to tinker this and that to get somehow the feeling of Sequoia back. I started using Firefox, because Safari is unbearable. I switched off animations and I switched of transparency. What's left looks like some basic Windows 7 in its first days. This isn't Apple anymore. I could live with eye candy as long as it is nice to look at. But this looks like AI pictures. It FEELS so wrong. Like the glassy clock when I wake up the Mac. The reflections make outlines that don't fit the picture or anything else. Looking just strange. Those button animations... like swiping left to delete a mail in the Mail.app... is like... who do they want to impress with that? The big X delete button becoming bigger looks like some of the iPad games I tend to let my kids play while we are at a restaurant.
This isn't something that slipped by QA; it's deliberate. I'd love to hear the principled reason why they thought this was the correct behavior, because I assume only some galaxy brain idea about their new design prevented them from fixing what is an obvious bug to a dumb user.
This one is funny. You think the sidebar is just a fixed part of the window, but it's actually just a floating UI element and nothing prevents things from sliding under it.
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French has rather strict grammar rules compared to English. It also regularly breaks those rules for the sake of euphony. Sticking to your design language when it hurts usability or makes your UI look goofy / buggy doesn't seem like a good thing. Especially when you imported said design language from another system with a very different interface.
I don’t see how your example hurts usability. With the “fixed” and solid sidebar of the previous macOS version you wouldn’t see any more of those wallpaper previews. At least now you have an even clearer indication the pane scrolls horizontally. It also gives the interface more depth which is the goal. It doesn’t seem like a bug in the slightest. When scrolling it’s more than obvious it isn’t. And whether it looks “goofy” is just a personal matter of taste.
I really do notice a fair share of issues with Liquid Glass, this just isn’t one of them. To me at least.
I really do notice a fair share of issues with Liquid Glass, this just isn’t one of them. To me at least.
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