For those that haven’t seen this very well done write up about Tahoe’s use of icons, I would definitely recommend it: <a href="https://tonsky.me/blog/tahoe-icons/" rel="nofollow">https://tonsky.me/blog/tahoe-icons/</a>
Also linked in the second sentence of the blog post.
or this one<p><a href="https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2025/icons-in-menus/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2025/icons-in-menus/</a>
Glad for the change, but a lot of the criticism overlooks that at some point we won't be the target audience of UI/UX anymore.<p>Flyouts, dropdowns, and other text menus make sense to me, but I could see how they might be alien and uncomfortable to someone that has only ever experienced mobile interfaces.<p>The reverse is true for sure, nowhere do I feel more frustrated and old-brained then trying to make sense of a new mobile app that everyone else seems to think is great.
> but I could see how they might be alien and uncomfortable to someone that has only ever experienced mobile interfaces<p>They are different devices. Just because you can drive a sedan does not means you can drive a bulldozer. Or playing piano qualifies you to play the organ. So going from touch and a small screen to keyboard/mouse and a bigger screen, you should expect that the interactions will change.
Exactly this. The “one UI to rule them all” paradigm has been a persistent, recurring flaw for decades. It probably hit its lowest (to date) with the exhortations to “mobile first design”. The motivation for that was reasonable: conventional desktop UIs of the time didn’t render on mobile. However the ensuing “mobile first” instead became “mobile only” - and consequently wide screen displays with buttons the size of elephants.<p>Phones and desktops are so radically different that your sedan/bulldozer analogy seems like shades of grey. It’s more like taking a Saturn V rocket to the local shop for a pint of milk.
This is great news. Apple never reverses course this quickly, so this is a clear signal that Stephen Lemay is making his presence felt.
Sometimes who can't be bothered to make the text on their website not extremely tiny when viewing on mobile shouldn't be writing multi-page rants on the other people's UI.
Isn’t he just serving up the desktop website? This goes along with the original intent of the benefits of the browser on the iPhone. It was able to run the normal Internet, not a separate “mobile” version of it. I found a simple double tap on the text sized it perfectly fine to read the text.<p>What I find to be a UI problem are sites that force me into a mobile view, which often loses features, and which removes my ability to zoom and pan as I wish. Apple had to add an option to “Request Desktop Website”, which I assume spoofs the user agent, to try and get around this issue. But for site that use other means, this still doesn’t work and the user is locked into a crippled mobile page… the exact problem modern smartphones were supposed to solve.<p>I’ll take Gruber’s model every time over the crippled mobile sandbox with no way out.
Even on desktop the site is quite difficult to read. White on gray isn't a great reading experience regardless of font size.<p>Accessibility technology like reader mode is once again proving its worth.
Thank god for Reader Mode.
I've been using firefox's viewport zoom to improve website visibility a lot these days. Traditional zoom reflows the page, but the viewport zoom keeps the page the same, just makes it bigger. You might know this from pinching out on the touchpad on a laptop, but you can do this on a keyboard by setting `mousewheel.with_$KEY.action` to 5 to perform viewport zoom by having a keyboard key pressed. I use it with alt, and use AHK to bind XB2+scroll to emit alts instead (I make it emit ctrl regularly but alt when a firefox window is focused). It has been one of my best usability improvements recently. It's one of those things that, if you make ergonomic enough, you end up using on every single website, since you can make the column width the optimal size for your readability.
This website is perfectly readable.
TIL about the proliferation of menu item icons in Tahoe. Perhaps I missed the outcry when Tahoe came out, but I got around to upgrading to it only a couple months ago, and this was not a change that stood out.
Is this a case of "removing the duck"?<p><a href="https://bwiggs.com/notebook/queens-duck/" rel="nofollow">https://bwiggs.com/notebook/queens-duck/</a>
I'm happy to see the HIG (Human Interface Guidelines) referenced in the post.<p>I was unaware Apple still maintained such a document? There was a time when TOG's HIG [1] was the Bible for the Mac interface. UI nerds at Apple (and likely elsewhere) would enjoy debating/interpreting them for some project or another. (I don't recall anyone being burned at the stake but there were definitely discussions that could reach a heretical pitch.)<p>The HIG preached a kind of nuance and balance—when it allowed for somewhat less "staid" UI elements it would advise moderation.<p>This came about in an era when the graphical user interface was a fairly new thing to the public and inconsistency (<i>Do What Thou Wilt</i>) would only have destabilized the gentle adoption Apple was treading.<p>It was a marketable advantage for Apple as well. Consistency on the DOS side, as far as I know, came about only as companies tried to adopt familiar patterns from popular apps of the day. (Related: I talked to an engineer at Adobe about the hideous UI (my opinion) of Adobe Acrobat on the Mac and was told they wanted it to look like it belonged alongside the suite of Microsoft Office apps. le sigh.)<p>From 1992, see Page 72 for menu widgets: [1] <a href="https://vintageapple.org/inside_r/pdf/Human_Interface_Guidelines_1992.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://vintageapple.org/inside_r/pdf/Human_Interface_Guidel...</a>
Got a vote just for the wonderful title, which captured my feelings exactly and was SFW.
I'm just sad that Intel MacBooks will be stuck with Tahoe, which is essentialy a botched beta for Golden Gate.<p>Bad customer experience for a company like Apple.
A good correction. But think about the months of work that has been wasted on creating those icon iterations. What a waste!
that's just sunk cost fallacy. The icons are also publicly available and can be used on projects conforming to the Apple branding, so it's not truly a waste.<p><a href="https://developer.apple.com/sf-symbols/" rel="nofollow">https://developer.apple.com/sf-symbols/</a>
"it’s proof that the rot has been rooted out of Apple’s software design team"<p>I know little about Apple, but have quite a bit of experience with how software products get "designed". Goofy and offensive things happen when corporations decide not to pay attention to customers.<p>The decision to ignore customer and focus on market wow is not the software design team. It is a systemic and structural thing.
The icons in menu items is one of the reasons I'm still on Sequoia. This settles it; I'll just stay on Sequoia until Golden Gate is released.<p>I can't say the following for sure, but there's evidence of it: One of Apple's real strengths and differentiators is that it listens to customer feedback to the point that it will say: "Hey, this was dumb. Customer feedback proves it. Let's just get rid of it like it never happened."<p>Other examples include getting rid of the earlier getting rid of Magsafe.<p>I don't know whether it's something taught in Apple School, but in the absence of not doing dumb things in the first place, which seems to be unavoidable in the real world with real people, it's probably the next best thing. And it may be enough better than the norm from tech companies that it's a real cultural differentiator.
The butterfly keys were around five years before they changed them. Which may have been related to the lawsuit about them?<p>I also vaguely recall issues with their magsafe connectors and lawyers.
People tend to ascribe to Apple only the Jobs years. That Apple might have reset after he came back. The truth is far from that. The people in the company were great, they just needed a massive amount of refocus. Apple has people who have been there decades and have had to reverse incredibly stupid decisions.
Aw. I may have been the only one, but I kind of liked those.
Same, my brain is pretty visually oriented so I kind of like the icons. To be clear I don't really use the icons to pick out a particular item, but they just look nice. It's kind of like pleasant background music in a hotel lobby.
Random icons for the days of the week don’t even make much sense. If they at least iconified the moon, Tyr, Woden, etc., it would at least have a leg to stand on, but here it’s like the randomized avatars so many services assign user accounts.
You'd think they'd go the other direction and remove the text.<p>I installed VLC on my phone, and I couldn't figure anything out, because it was covered in vague post-skeuomorphic icons without text.
Probably no one caused more damage than John Ive to Apple (post-Jobs period).<p>Removal of skeuomorphism, removal of essential ports, making MacBooks so thin that they wouldn’t work without overheating to name a few.<p>I am so glad he is gone now, it’s not all bells and whistles for Apple now, but at least it’s way more pleasing to own Apple devices any more.
good - I have resorted to a config setting to suppress these bad icons on Tahoe
"But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars"
This is also what's annoying with most model generated artifacts. They want every bullet point with an emoji. Even worse is an HTML artifact will be littered with chips/pill style "informative" boxes. So much useless distraction. I need something fine tuned by Tufte
Meh - these icons were bad, but I don't see the disaster
It was death by a thousand cuts. I am not a designer and Tahoe bothered me enough that, after trying it at work, I've been actively stopping my personal Mac to update, and it was a factor in moving to android.
Liquid Glass motivated me to sell my Mac. But also, Linux becoming genuinely amazing and being able to play all my PC games played a role there as well.<p>I don’t find Android nearly as compelling, and Liquid Glass seems at least a bit less of a disaster on the iOS platform.<p>My suggestion to you is follow the Panther Lake laptops that are coming out as your potential future Mac off-ramp. I have a Framework 13 Pro on preorder [1] but some other laptops are also showing impressive results on battery life and GPU performance. If I had more money to blow I would totally grab a Zephyrus G14 2026 with the panther lake CPU and RTX 5070Ti. Although as a programmer’s laptop, the Framework is excellent and the 13 Pro looks like it’s shaping up to be a dream system.<p>[1] Unfortunately you can’t get the kind of RAM deal that I got for my 13 Pro anymore. As soon as the 13 Pro was announced I pounced on some new old stock of Crucial LPCAMM2 memory, which isn’t available anymore. I paid about $250 for 32GB, which is a “deal,” apparently. As of now you pretty much have to buy it from Framework as nobody else has it at a more reasonable price.
Dead canary
You have to make accommodation for designers, that's simply their language. If something is misaligned by 1 pixel, it's not an annoyance, it's a catastrophe.<p>The icons were bad, but the real issue with the new theme is the waste of space and wasting time computing transparencies.
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I’m still on Sequoia because of all the Tahoe complaints. Not so much the rounded corners, but I heard performance was poor. Have updates to Tahoe improved things?
I've always used reduced transparency and reduced animations and haven't noticed any performance issues.
Performance was so-so, some minor degradations on my Studio. No change comparing today to half a year ago.<p>But my Apple TV 4K 2nd Generation turned into a 15 fps mess until I turned off the worst parts of transparency effects.
For me Tahoe's performance was alright, but cmd-space spotlight search disappeared after second keystroke wayy too often. Reverted to Sequoia.
I’m on an M1 Max device and the GPU performance drops have not gotten back to Sequoia levels on Tahoe patches. Golden Gate hasn’t changed anything either.
Does it get better if you disable transparency in the accessibility settings, or is there no workaround?
They toned down the effects in Golden Gate but the backend is doing the same amount of work to blend all that pointless stuff in.<p>You'd get the performance back if they gave up on the translucently to the point of removing the code.
I'm so upset that Liquid Glass is visibly pixelated now. Like, it's barely even blurred at the least transparent setting -- it just looks like a very obviously downsampled background. Like distractingly/annoyingly downsampled. Ugh!!<p>Screenshots:<p><a href="https://logandark.net/files/3SQ5P9OP-PP373NQ7-RS6RP2QR-P772S289/least.png" rel="nofollow">https://logandark.net/files/3SQ5P9OP-PP373NQ7-RS6RP2QR-P772S...</a><p><a href="https://logandark.net/files/3SQ5P9OP-PP373NQ7-RS6RP2QR-P772S289/middle.png" rel="nofollow">https://logandark.net/files/3SQ5P9OP-PP373NQ7-RS6RP2QR-P772S...</a><p><a href="https://logandark.net/files/3SQ5P9OP-PP373NQ7-RS6RP2QR-P772S289/most.png" rel="nofollow">https://logandark.net/files/3SQ5P9OP-PP373NQ7-RS6RP2QR-P772S...</a>
Huh, and I thought it's just my crappy old external monitor.
I'm upset that Apple is wasting my shader transistors on it.
Nope. Genuinely made my new Mac Mini feel broken. The only fix was going back to Sequoia.
No good reason to be excited about the old garbage UI returning after the new garbage had been trashed.<p>> This updated advice in the HIG is perfect.<p>> Use an icon to highlight the most common actions and key features of your app<p>Saving a document is the one of the most common actions in your average app, but I * never* need an icon there in the menu, there is no benefit in focusing my attention on an action I always do with a shortcut!<p>The perfect advice would be easy and powerful user customization, so that, for example, I could right click on the app's File>Save menu and select an option to hide the icon, reformat the rich text field and have this change propagate in all the other apps.
Or click on a web link from someone who has already done it better and add the theme.
Then I wouldn't even care about the back and forth design changes between major OS releases.<p>And that could also fix another sin in the screenshot - the text is not vertically aligned! "visual consistency" misunderstood