OS Tahoe

[loby]

I have hit Apple´s Character Limit so i Post it here again:

Dear Apple Design Team,

After 40 years as a Mac user, macOS Tahoe is the first update I refuse to install. I'm staying on Sequoia.

The design decisions in Tahoe are baffling. The excessively large corner radii on app windows make the title bars unnecessarily tall and bulky. Combined with the new bordered outlines around icon buttons, the interface looks bloated and childish.

These thick borders around what were perfectly recognizable icons add nothing but visual clutter and wasted space. On my 13-inch MacBook Air M2, this padding is particularly egregious. Even on my 34-inch display, I resent losing screen real estate to these oversized UI elements.

Every line of display matters when you're working. The bulky window frames and padded toolbars in Tahoe sacrifice functionality for a design aesthetic that feels more appropriate for a children's learning app than a professional operating system.

All my Macs will remain on Sequoia (15.7) indefinitely until Apple either:

• Offers a compact/professional UI mode
• Reduces the excessive corner radii and padding
• Removes the unnecessary borders around icon buttons

Please give users the option to choose efficient, professional interface density over this wasteful design.

A disappointed 40-year Mac veteran

I heard Tim is now in-charge of design..

I can just see the conversation in the Apple Office:

Tim: What's happening? Why all of the complains. I thought you said this is the greatest and users are going to like it? (Tim never saw anything before they put it out. He was too busy hugging stuff animals)

Marketing: Well, I thought we would go after the next generation kids with the economy Mac to get into schools again.

Tim: Ok, I'll take over design....


Yeah, that will fix it Tim...

 

[Dave410]

I trusted Apple and installed Tahoe without doing my homework. Big mistake. Tahoe is really ugly. My bad.

 

[basslik]

I really think they made the worst decision with this move. (WHY)

 

[Piplodocus]

I'm generally fine with Liquid glass. And I'm generally fine with the latest updates on my phone. But it's weird stuff in MacOS like if I'm running windows full size (a very regular occurrence as I often don't want full fullscreen so I keep menus handy, etc), then the top bar being clear just gives me a weird thin strip of desktop image with the menu on harder to read. It's just odd. So I turned that non-transparent immediately. But then you have these great big ugly rounded corners then show chunks of desktop through, and they're just weird wastes of space.

What is this, MacOS Fisher-Price, my first OS?

It's pretty clear that these were inspired by Vision Pro OS, fine, but then they were not actually optimised for their final use-case. It's quite apparent that the design language for a phone/touch OS was FORCED into MacOS regardless of how well it actually worked, with no tweaks to make it really fit nicely.

So no, I don't have much of a problem with liquid glass itself, but I do with space-wasting florishes and rounded stuff that may make some sense on a finger-operated OS where it's generally not windowed apps, but makes no sense and crosses the line from what I'd say is arguably devisive, to what I deem just straight up ugly and ill-concieved.

Poor show Apple. Make the best UI you can for the Mac, not a second rate one because you insist on forcing a round peg into a square hole. Consistency is great, but not when it's at the expensive of usefulness and just makes it ugly (just like system settings - where I still can't find some stuff very easily a few years after the change).

I've seen various stuff these days where designers float their buttons in nearer the middle of the screen, away from the edge. There's zero point me being able to see a tiny strip of my document/picture/map/whatever outside the buttons if it's at the expense of the amount of that thing I want to see in the main central screen area. If your fat fingers will hit the screen edge more than the button on a touch OS, fine, move them in a bit, but any more than necessary and it's just a waste of screen real estate.