Make macOS consistently bad unironically

post-it

I can't say I've had any issues with the corners, or noticed any difference after upgrading to macOS 26. But this is neat.

rafram

This isn’t a part of macOS 26 that bothers me, honestly. I don’t spend a lot of time stacking windows and measuring their corners.

pram

I'm not a fan of the look in Tahoe (especially Apple Music wtf happened there) but most of it I can totally ignore, and don't even notice anymore. Except for the tabs. I have Sequoia and Tahoe machines, and the tabs in Tahoe are so unbelievably bad in comparison. Like this ugly pill shape. I rarely hear this get brought up but they're astonishingly ugly, worse than the previous design in every way.

skrrtww

I'm not sure if these selectors are hit in SwiftUI or not.

gnarlouse

One of my claude code projects was going to be "theghostofsteve", a social media platform where people post things they love and hate about appleOS things. Likes/Dislikes would be "genius/it's shit". And in all likelihood, the platform would surface that most users think "it's shit." The platform would aggregate by major/minor version, and you could see in totality whether the current version of macOS/iOS would make Steve proud of miserable. Ultimately I decided against it, for defamation/cease-and-desist reasons, and not wanting to find out. But it needs to exist.

dcrazy

FYI, the article incorrectly claims that SIP just controls write access to /. It does way more than that.

_jab

Between the rounded corners that don't reach the edges of the viewport, and the behavior when opening a new app for the first time, it feels like Mac's UI is optimized around the assumption most users won't expand windows to fill the whole screen, but rather leave them half-sized somewhere in the middle. Does anyone actually do this? Especially for heavy-duty applications like my web browser and IDE, this has always felt like a bizarre assumption to me.

lucasay

The pill tabs are what get me too. I can ignore most visual changes after a while, but those somehow manage to feel both more distracting and less informative at the same time.

amarant

I must say that all this fuzz about the corners actually reflects rather well on macos. If the biggest flaw of a OS is the border radius of its windows, you've got yourself a pretty decent OS! It's not gonna make me leave my darling Linux, ofc, but i think this whole debacle can only be interpreted as praise. On second thought, it might also be considered a mediation on people's tendency to bike-shed.

nostromo

Clearing notifications on macOS Tahoe is ridiculously tedious. The "Liquid Glass" button is slow to respond, the notifications hang for a bit before being cleared, and then sometimes you have to jiggle the cursor to clear the next one. It's absurdly frustrating. And the updates to Music (formerly iTunes) are so bad the entire team should be dressed down, Steve Jobs style.

jasonhemann

I love that there are people who are observant enough to notice these kinds of things, a vanguard for those of us who are blithely unaware and protected due to their vigilance.

hmokiguess

I use this https://github.com/FelixKratz/JankyBorders to try and have a consistent feel to it, but I wish I could make it less rounded

streetfighter64

> disabling MacOS system integrity [protection], which results in making them possibly vulnerable Not really, if you have malware that has root access on your system I think you're already pretty screwed, especially considering that you don't even need root to read all your saved passwords and personal files https://xkcd.com/1200/

dmix

I've been using Tahoe since the beta and the borders haven't bothered me once. I get the UI consistency thing but it's okay to transition to new UI things gradually than making radical changes all at once. If this is still an issue 2yrs from now it will be more of a concern about their commitment.

Octoth0rpe

With only a little sense of self aware irony, one thing I hate about so much dialog these days is how vehement opinions are. I don't particularly like the rounded corners, and think it's a regression. It's also... fine. It's not the difference between usable and entirely unusable. And I see this kind of attitude all over the place now. A slight change, some slightly non-ideal behavior and all of a sudden a product is THE WORST THING EVER. We will be ok with inconsistently rounded windows. I think people need to be a bit more tolerant of design decisions that are opinionated, and likely worse but also not breaking. Ads in a start menu can die in a fire though.

haunter

I usually use Linux and Windows (pretty much split 50/50) and tbh this is why I never could switch to Mac full time even though I've have had and still have several Macs at home. The full screen beahavior is weird. Is the dock should overlay every single window all the time? If not then why is the dock not hidden by default? If yes then full screen is actually "maximum size app window without overlaying the dock"? What's even the point of the dock actually? The other one is the open window =/= running app behavior. Wait 2 hours later this app is still running in the background even though I've closed all windows?

htx80nerd

Half the people in IT have no business being here.

zackmorris

Not to mention that WindowServer seems to take 100+% cpu since the upgrade. Also I can't paste filenames in the save file dialog in some apps. And the URL field in Safari is just weird. My computer was running so slowly that I had to minimize transparency in system preferences somewhere. I think I also turned off opening every app in its own space. And I hid the icons on the Desktop in Finder settings somehow, which helped a lot. There are countless other little tweaks that are worth investigating. I also highly recommend App Tamer (no affiliation). It lets you jail background apps at 10% cpu or whatever. It won't help with WindowServer or kernel_task (which also often runs at 100+% cpu), but it's something. I can't help but feel that there's nobody at the wheel at Apple anymore. When I have to wait multiple seconds to open a window, to switch between apps, to go to my Applications folder, then something is terribly wrong. Computers have been running thousands of times slower than they should be for decades, but now it's reaching the point where daily work is becoming difficult. I'm cautiously optimistic that AI will let us build full operating systems using other OSs as working examples. Then we can finally boot up with better alternatives that force Apple/Microsoft/Google to try again. I could see Finder or File Explorer alternatives replacing the native ones.

diego_moita

Windows gets a lot of (deserved) bad rap for bloatware but MacOS is just a little less bad. "Features" that we can't uninstall (e.g.: Siri, Apple Music), arbitrary changes in the UI, ... True, the "blessing" of forced online accounts, telemetry and advertisement didn't arrive to MacOS, yet. But, I wonder how long it will take us to get there.

gib444

In window management, anything other than i3 is an unequivocal downgrade. Rounded corners are just...bizarre. Just because the laptop casing is physically rounded !? (Yet the menubar squares it off off at the top, and the bezel squares it off on the bottom...)