It's still a bit jarring to me to see how far Apple embraced form over function with iOS and subsequently macOS. I remember reading the Human Interface Guidelines from the late Mac OS 9/early Mac OS X days and being taken aback by the level of detail and thought that went into those interfaces. Don't get me wrong, some things made no sense (brushed metal was... a choice) but there was a certain level of polish that I don't think exists anymore.
Yeah, for a decade now it's been a UX disaster. It "works", because so many people are used to it, but look at a new user trying to navigate iOS, it's bonkers. Swiping from random directions achieves different things (and how would you even know you can?). The home button has like 11 different functions depending on how you press it and when.
Something that I ended up loving about iOS was the relative simplicity it had compared to Android at the time I started using the iPhone in 2017. iOS 10 and 11 were great. People complained about things like all apps needing to be on the homescreen or not being able to place apps arbitrarily, but at the same time that "lack" of function is part of what made iOS easy to use and understand.<p>I find nowadays iOS is as complex as the Android I remember. I can navigate it just fine because I'm used to it but even my parents who've been using iPhones longer than me have found themselves getting lost in the OS with iOS 26 in particular.
1. Ive been using apple iphone since 2010 and i jave an iphone air right now. I still dont know how/why/when i seem to accidentally call the AI thing where the side of my acreen go all all funny. Ive never done it intentionally and i dont know how but every so often i trigger it.<p>2. Can apple ‘regress’ the camera app so the it is easy to use. The interface is a disaster of mixed inputs and over loaded widgets. Theres so many modes and sub modes. Swipe to zoom works mostly except when it changes modes. I spend about 10 seconds every tone inise the camera app just making it take a picture because accidentally touching it in the wrong place switches to some other mode.<p>3. The genrel consistency has went downhill. Its difficult sometimes now to know just how to interact with an app.<p>4. Search box. If i do another attempt at a web search when i am in mail search box i dunno. Either unify it or make it distinct. Also sometime its at the top sometimes the bottom
About (2), it reminds me of a video I saw once of someone trying to take a picture at a sport event, or how my parents try to do it. Hold the phone with an awkward grip to point it towards what you want, with one hand free. Accidentally touch the edge of the screen and click something with the gripping hand. Then try to zoom in with your free hand, but one finger hits the screen first due to the angle of the phone so you do a swipe instead and go to selfie mode. Swipe fervently to get back. Try again, click screen to focus. But just as you click a notification pops up and you press it.
Im an iPhone user. I want it to take as little space as possible physically and mentally, and try to use it as little as possible. My experience has been that it was easy learning to use it by just bumbling around.<p>That is, until two weeks ago when I got my new iPhone. I had to, the old one couldnt upgrade to the newest iOS.<p>I feel ashamed to admit, that I had one or two days of extreme frustration just learning to do basic stuff. It was not about the shape of icons, but more along the lines of what you write. Swiping patterns, button press sequences, and the time you should hold down a button. It is ridiculous.<p>Some of the blame is on me for not being mobile phone savvy, but it is indisputable that the UX has deterioted significantly. I suspect it will just get worse going forward.
> Swiping from random directions achieves different things (and how would you even know you can?)<p>Cultural context, the same way you'd know tapping on an icon opens an app.
Tapping something is discoverable and a basic human instinct. How the hell do you discover "swipe up from the bottom edge and then slightly right" to open the app switcher?
No, tapping something visible and seeing what happens is discoverable. And Apple used to have skeuomorphism to help with affordance. Swiping from various directions and other hidden shortcuts aren't discoverable, and my guess is most users can't find half of the features of their phone.
That's what made me switch to Android.<p>At least you can have 3-button navigation
I moved over from my old Android to an iPhone (needed to develop an iOS app for a freelance thing too) and that was the first thing that cause me off guard - it’s like controls that <i>should</i> be buttons of some kind were just omitted.
Its just as bad. Please define ‘back’
1. Hide virtual keyboard if shown<p>2. Go to previous app view. This is app-dependent though it will probably, successively with each press:<p>a. Close menus if open (context, sidebar, etc)<p>b. Go to previous (web)page if web/file browser
c. Go out of submenus (ex: settings/WiFi -> settings) if not in a browser or if the oldest page has been reached. Keeps walking the tree upwards.<p>3. Reach the main app view (usually the one you land on when opening the app)<p>4. One more press minimizes the app.<p>It is fairly consistent, but some apps decide otherwise:<p>* some will minimize as soon as you press it (I've seen games do it)<p>* some will open a new menu (again, games: pause menu)<p>* some will seemingly walk you the history of visited pages instead of the hierarchy -- which may make sense but can be confusing<p>* some old apps will display a toast "press back twice to exit". This used to be common back when physical buttons were the norm, but I haven't seen this message a lot.<p>So, mostly consistent with some weird-behaving apps. Same as on desktop I guess?
Even thats slowly being depreciated for gestures as the default option. A bunch of Google's own apps won't play nice with it anymore on the flagship Pixel, drawing buttons underneath
it's market changed<p>it started as a computer for professionals<p>now its for people who want to look cool. so form is much more important than function, it's literally what you buy
Haha yeah! Mac users just buy them to look cool while they write their whatever in the coffee shop! This is definitely not a preposterous and outdated observation/joke!
Wasn't there a trend where kids were just wearing dead apple watches as accessories? It's just a status symbol, like gold bracelets.
I just graduated college and I’ve never heard of this. Can’t find anything about it online either.<p>You can get a functional Apple Watch on Facebook for 50-100 bucks. So not much of a signal for status.<p>We have much sillier, trendier accessories to choose from :)
Might be just a certain demographic then, there was a viral tiktok with athletes wearing dead apple watches.
Not every kid has 50-100 bucks avaiable.
Yeah, and there are kids pooping in litterboxes in Texas schools! /s<p>I would never trust media covering youth trends. It's a bunch of 50yos whose teenager told them something as a joke and they took it seriously.<p>See also: latest millennial trend is avocado toast, and that's why they're all broke
Sounds like it hit a nerve to be honest
<i>> it started as a computer for professionals</i><p>I feel as if it was the opposite. It started as a true "home computer," and nowadays, it's used to do work.<p>The fact that MacOS is probably the worst gaming platform on Earth (and Apple doesn't seem to lose sleep over it -although I think they'd like iPad to be a better gaming platform), is an indicator that people use the computer to get work done; whether at home, or in the office.<p>But there's a lot of pretty visceral hatred for Apple -especially in tech circles- so I don't expect much reasoned discourse about it.
Is that why their laptops routinely beat the competition year after year in reviews and reliability surveys? Because they “look cool”? I’m going to need some more numbers on that one.
All my devices are Apple: laptop, Studio, display, phone, iPad, watch...<p>I will say that Apple has solidified on the design and reliability "recently". But let's not pretend that the MBP line, to pick on one, didn't go through some rough rough days. I've had laptops that had the delaminating screen, the 'single grain of sand can ruin it' butterfly keyboard, hell, I've had two models that had recalled logic boards. Early Magsafe connectors (fantastic invention) where the rubber would routinely fail even without tension (I had two that failed, exposing bare wire, even though they spent the entirety of their life on a desk, routed through a cable organizer, far away from any UV sunlight hitting them directly.<p>But now? Things are much, much more solid.
You missed the late Intel MBPs which I remember heating up hotter than the sun and exhausting it out the back which made the touch bar uncomfortable to touch!
Some of the other examples you could maybe say are just poor industrial design or bad execution of a potentially workable idea, but the Intel MBP thermal debacle was definitely the most egregious example of Apple blindly pursuing form-over-function. They set a goal for ultra-slim laptop forms that the components they were using simply could never achieve. It would have been obvious from prototyping that temperature was a major problem, but whatever decision making process they had in place at the time overrode it. The best you can say is they seemed to have learned from their mistake.
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Even the worst MBP is light years better than the plasticky crap on the Windows side.
MacBooks have the best value/money ratio at the moment. The combination of battery life, processing power and touch pad UX are unmatched
I challenge you to find a laptop that can do what my macbook air m1 with 8gb of ram does at the $899 it was through the education store. No fan, awesome battery life, good trackpad and keyboard, the ability to not get hot while using it.<p>I'm a senior platform engineer who at the time I bought it was a senior software developer, who can still use it for my daily tasks despite it having 8gb of ram. Until very recently the 32gb T14 I had ad work was frankly worse performant than the little air, while having a battery life of around 45 minutes a fan sounding like a jetengine and a keyboard so hot it made the sun jealous. My new model is way faster than my macbook air though, but the old model was technically newer than the air. Obviously the comparisson isn't completely fair since we run a lot of corporate enterprise stuff on our laptops, but still.<p>I'd really like a Linux laptop, but a Framework laptop is expensive (and it has loud fans and runs hot). A tuxedo is even more expensive and has fans where you'd place it on your legs for whatever reason, and runs hot. Looking at the laptop market now, I can't see what you'd buy. A week ago I would've said the Neo (if the 8gb of ram holds up as well on the mobile chip as it does on the m1), but today I'm guessing a refurbished air with 16gb would be the only real option for someone who want's a cool low noise machine with decent battery time.<p>Whether you run OS/X or Asahi, I really can't see what you'd buy other than these. At least if you actually use it on your lap and don't just have it sit in a dock on a table.<p>Then again, I'm the sort of person who would buy the pink neo because it would fuck with the perception people have of my mid 40 Scandinavian conservativeish dad look. So maybe it is just about the message?
Are there any laptops where the cooling is handled by the screen backside?
A Framework isn't loud at all. I regularly do simulations on mine and it works perfectly without noise.<p>I think if you just compare cost then yes the Mac is a good deal but there is more than cost that matters. I think flexibility, reparibility and so on matter.
Mine (11th gen framework 13) is.<p>I have to keep it in battery saver mode or the fans just spin up when it's idle. They come up anyway (and irregularly) when watching a movie, loud enough to be heard over the movie -- though that may also be partly the fault of the milquetoast speakers that also inexplicably point down (so if you're watching something in bed you'll need to find a hard surface to put it on so that the sound isn't completely muffled).<p>That said, i have a macbook pro for work and macOS infuriates me, i would not trade my framework for any apple device under any circumstances. I love my framework more than any laptop I've ever owned. I just wish the hardware was more polished.
> $899 it was through the education store<p>Comparing a subsidised computer for children to one that isn't isn't exactly a fair comparison, is it?<p>> No fan,<p>You know why Macbooks don't need a fan? It's because they aren't powerful enough to draw heat in the first place. A month ago, for the same price as a $1700 Macbook Pro (before the recent increase) I got a laptop with a CPU that is literally twice as fast on parellelisable workloads, has a 5070 Ti vs. nothing at all, and 32GB RAM. A superior screen, keyboard, and I can install my own choice of OS on it, too. Now that same dingy Macbook Pro costs $2000, or $2400 if you want 32GB RAM. Apple's greatest coup was convincing people that paying twice as much for half the hardware was a killer feature, and now everyone goes on and on about how Macbooks are the most premium hardware money can buy because they're so weak they don't need a fan to keep them cool. It's truly remarkable how susceptible people are to status-culture-based marketing.<p>Username related.
This comment is untethered from reality. Apple Silicon at present beats every single laptop on the market at CPU-bound workloads using a fraction of the power draw. Exceptions exist but usually those cases are break even or close calls.<p>It trails GPU workflows on the high end but wins on the low end. It still wins on efficiency.<p>It falls over on storage and RAM prices (well, for about 6 months it was competitive here).<p>I say this as someone who over the last year has done the majority of my competition on PC hardware running Linux.<p>You may be looking at this as a status game but it has clouded your vision. It is implausible that mass market products with mass adoption find their success solely on status. If believing that makes you feel superior, well, enjoy the rush.
Apple education store isn't subsidized or "for children."
It's such a shame because back then even Windows was motivated by actual human user research and had thorough guidelines. <a href="https://ics.uci.edu/~kobsa/courses/ICS104/course-notes/Microsoft_WindowsGuidelines.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://ics.uci.edu/~kobsa/courses/ICS104/course-notes/Micro...</a> (HN discussion from a few years ago: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22475521">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22475521</a> .)<p><a href="https://movq.de/blog/postings/2026-06-16/0/POSTING-en.html" rel="nofollow">https://movq.de/blog/postings/2026-06-16/0/POSTING-en.html</a> was an interesting look at Win2K's UI controls and how much clearer they are compared to modern UIs.
Seeing all those old icons makes me realize how much I miss them.<p>Superficial, perhaps, but they were one of the things I loved about OS X when I made the switch back in 2005 or 2006.
No they were <i>better</i>. Whether someone likes the style better or not (I do) they were FAR more visually distinct from each other which made it much easier to find the program you wanted to use.<p>Right now my dock is a soup of squircles. I have to scan multiple times to find icons even though I know roughly where they should be.<p>They aren’t distinct. They don’t stand out.<p>That was never a problem until last year. 40 years of Mac was fine. Then that.
I don't think it's superficial at all.<p>I genuinely find my apps harder to navigate now than I used to. Part of that is that I have far more apps installed today, but the uniform white borders also contribute. They make every icon look about 20% more similar, which adds just enough friction that scanning for the app I want takes a little longer.<p>Poorly executed icon shapes were distracting, but when they were done well they provided subtle visual cues that made the interface easier to navigate. I miss that more than I expected.
Yeah the article really drives the point home ending with those icons
While I wholeheartedly agree, I suspect the required backgrounds are to create a uniform format between system, where VisionOS requires round icons for more reliable eye tracking.<p>It seems like every OS got a little harder to use in order to better vibe with VisionOS, the least popular platform they have.<p>While I applaud the commitment to building a new platform, I don’t like that’s is coming at the expense of the others.
I understand this logic, but at some point it makes sense to design the system for the millions of people on macs rather than make compromises for the sake of dozens of Vision Pro users.
> <i>VisionOS requires round icons for more reliable eye tracking</i><p>I'm confused here. What do you think is the relationship between round icons and eye tracking?
They found having round icons made people look at the center, rather than the edges and corners. Since the UX relies entirely on where the user is looking, this made it more reliable.<p>I remember reading it in the HIG when VisionOS came out and everyone was complaining about the shape. I went looking to see if there was a reason, and there was.
That's interesting, but I think this is solvable in better ways. If the VisionOS icon grid doesn't have a voronoi hit map, then IMO they're doing a stupid. There's a _lot_ of space between icons in the grid. It should be plenty of distance to reliably determine that you're looking nearer to the center of a particular one.
Here is what they say:<p>> In general, give an interactive item a rounded shape. People’s eyes tend to be drawn toward the corners in a shape, making it difficult to keep looking at the shape’s center. The more rounded an item’s shape, the easier it is for people to use their eyes to target it.<p>The page also talks about leaving enough visual space between elements as well as many other considerations for this type of interface.<p><a href="https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/eyes/" rel="nofollow">https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...</a>
Are you sure visionOS requires it? Having an icon be a few px smaller so a microphone can stick out, doesn't seem like a big deal for tracking.
The thing sticking outside of the icon draws the eye to it, which means your focus is at the edge instead of the center, which makes for a more error prone experience.<p>Since the eyes are the cursor, this is a problem. Desktop and mobile don’t have this issue.
Obvious solution, two different icons, round one for Vision OS, more shapely one for everyone else.
> The thing sticking outside of the icon draws the eye to it, which means your focus is at the edge instead of the center, which makes for a more error prone experience.<p>And Apple decided this was a problem with icons, rather than a problem with the way they implemented their vision tracking? Believable, and laughable.
Where you are looking should not be the cursor, that is obviously dumb. Should be where your nose is pointing.
Regardless, you don't need to make the hitboxes one-to-one with the graphics. Indeed, doing so tends to make for unreliable hitboxes, so most picking systems have two different, idealized enter and exit hitboxes for each icon.
So what? Thats not MacOS.<p>I think things are fine on iOS. I don’t mind the rectangles, they fit the grid. That’s how it’s always been.<p>I don’t care about VisionOS. Circles are odd, whatever.<p>But the Mac shouldn’t be forced to lose great design because iOS was under different constraints almost 20 years ago. That’s just dumb.
They were trying to make a unified design language across all their operating systems. If iOS and VisionOS both have their icons sitting on uniformly shaped tiles, macOS would break the convention.<p>I don't like it, but I believe that's the reason why.
Oh I’m sure that’s why they did it. It’s not a good reason. It’s like saying all the food you eat should be beige.<p>Sure it’s more consistent, but at what cost? You lose all the benefits. It’s like Chesterton’s Fence, except it has a big sign on it saying “beware of bull” and there is a guy nearby saying “you don’t want to let that bull out dude, it’s vicious”.<p>But you want to take down the fence because it’s not the same style as the one on the pen for the chickens.
VisionOS, at least as it stands today, will be dead before you know it. If you don't understand what I mean, look up the rumor about the future of Vision Pro.<p>What a waste of resource to invent the whole Tahoe "design language" only for nothing.
One thing I tend to give Apple a lot of credit for is having a longer term vision (no pun intended). When they release something they tend to stick with it, where others (Microsoft in particular) will kill products pretty fast if it doesn’t look like they are instant hits.<p>When trying to create a new category, customers need to have some faith it’s going to stick around and they won’t be abandoned. So it’s important to have that long term vision and conviction that the decisions made were the right ones.<p>That said, I bought the M5 Vision Pro and returned it after a week. It doesn’t feel like a product yet. Vision Pro as a future product might be questionable, but will they abandon spacial computing all together or switch to more of a true AR setup? I think real AR would be much better.<p>I think now that Cook is stepping down, we could see more change. Cooked seemed a little desperate to make sure Apple looked like an innovative company, when he clearly wasn’t a product guy. I don’t think a a full computer is needed on the face, that was the first mistake, they need a more purpose built device for the few things that make sense in the context of a HUD.
Also imo touchscreen Mac tap targets. Sigh.
There's so little joy and happiness left in computing. Reverting to the older style of icons, plus perhaps a few UI tweaks, certainly help bring a bit of whimsical back into the macOS platform. That's something many of us would love.
> There's so little joy and happiness left in computing<p>Preach it! <a href="https://daveon.design/creating-joy-in-the-user-experience.html" rel="nofollow">https://daveon.design/creating-joy-in-the-user-experience.ht...</a>
Great article -but the image has issues with Safari (invisible drag corner), and iOS (a mess).<p>I have found that we need to be very, very careful, when making the UI more "fun."<p>Things like rounded affordances, short transition animations, easy-to-understand elements, etc., are good. They remove the "friction."<p>However, cute icons, unprompted animations, and overuse of whitespace for the sake of design aesthetics, can cause the UI to be too prominent.<p>UI needs to be approachable, useful, and unobtrusive. i.e. "forgettable." Many designers absolutely can't stand the idea of designing stuff that no one pays attention to; but that's actually exactly what most UI needs to be.<p>The metaphor that I use, is that most waitstaff at restaurants, wear black.<p>The reason is, is because people don't go to a restaurant to pay attention to the staff (with a couple of <i>ahem</i> exceptions <owl emoji/>). They go for the food, and the ease of having it provided without the need to cook and wash up.<p>I feel that UI needs to be the same.<p>I am currently working on a version 2 of a pretty popular app that has been out for a couple of years. The original was almost entirely designed by a professional graphic designer, and he did a great job -for the most part. It looks great, and people like it.<p>But I am constantly encountering people that have no idea about some of its most important features, mainly because the affordances were deprecated in service to visual aesthetic. The new version uses a distinct "accent color" for elements that can be manipulated, as well as simpler, clearer design. It's working well.<p>Another example is my "Spinner" UI element[0]. This was a UIKit element that I designed, to provide an interactive "prize wheel" spinner feature for iOS. It works nicely.<p>But I have never been able to justify actually using it for any of my projects. It's too "in your face."<p>[0] <a href="https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/RVS_Spinner" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/RVS_Spinner</a>
Thanks, very nice of you to note that, and I'll fix. The SSG behind it has some updates coming to improve mobile rendering for sidenotes etc already, will add more :)<p>Drag corner... hmm... seems a change in recent browsers - that has not changed in the website implementation since it worked in all three (FireFox, Chrome, Safari.) And I may have to break my no-Javascript ethos to get it working again!
> UI needs to be approachable, useful, and unobtrusive. i.e. "forgettable." Many designers absolutely can't stand the idea of designing stuff that no one pays attention to; but that's actually exactly what most UI needs to be.<p>You can be all those things without being forgettable. What matters to the user is the cohesiveness of the whole experience, not individual widgets. People use apps, they don’t just stand there looking at it like a video playing.
That's a lovely little article. Thank you.
Liquid Glass was a good step in the right direction imo. A choice to make visual entertainment and beauty a priority over pure function.<p>I feel like what computers really lost was sounds, we used to have so many joyful sounds and background music on computers while now they are all silent. I think it’s a tragedy the Nintendo switch broke the long history of music in the menus and apps.
> A choice to make visual entertainment and beauty a priority over pure function.<p>Except that (in my view, which is shared by many others though of course not universal) Liquid Glass is ugly as sin. Even if it worked properly I’d still rather not have it. But there’s also nothing entertaining or beautiful about unreadable overlapping text, flashing UI as you pan, visually cut off scrollbars, excessively rounded corners, or any from a plethora of bad decisions.<p>Liquid Glass is the worst of both worlds.<p>macOS used to be both functional <i>and</i> visually entertaining, and they’ve been removing that incompetently and for no apparent reason. One obvious case is removing an app from the Dock: It used to be that it went away in a quick puff of smoke with an appropriate sound; some versions back they removed the puff of smoke but kept the sound.
> the much-celebrated Liquid Glass opacity slider<p>The Liquid Glass slider is an embarrassing outright admission of failure. Apple built its brand as a tastemaker, so to put out this new, controversial design language, and after a year of tweaking, finally throw their hands up and say "we don't know what looks good, you decide" is so disappointing.<p>That said, all the changes in iOS 27 are such a massive improvement from 26. The first design turnout with Alan Dye gone is making me feel very optimistic of their direction.
It's prideful too since just undoing it would be an actual admission of failure. This is a hollow apology and compromise
You're totally right. :)<p>That's just big corporate politics. Ever been involved in a 'lessons learned' exercise? Everything gets politically massaged so as not to upset individuals or functions, so that by the end of it, there are very few meaningful lessons remaining, and those that are still present need background understanding to divine.<p>This approach just protects the people, the function, and ultimately the corporation.
> outright admission of failure<p>Right!? Who's out there going "oh no, translucent is too translucent; opaque is too opaque; but now that I can have 72.93% glass, my life is complete"?
I'll take an admission of failure over slavishly refusing to and trying to pretend it's fine.<p>There were plenty of people saying Liquid Glass was fundamentally an utterly flawed, bad design, that even if you subjectively liked the way it looked, that its design philosophy was <i>wrong</i>, and led to logically consistent but unusable and ugly interfaces, all to solve a problem no one had.<p>I'm cautiously optimistic now that the bozo cardboard box designer dope with the ugly glasses is gone we'll see a quiet but rapid change of direction. I'll take "mea culpa". I'll take "whelp, this shit does actually just suck, here's a slider while we work on something better".
Great design is more about consistency than uniformity.<p>Just imagine how hard it would be to read a text if all the words had a similar shape! You want them to look very distinct while the predictability of the layout helps you read (which is consistency).
I've got to disagree.<p>I really disliked previously, when icon prominence could be wildly different because one icon takes up the full area with a big square, while another is a circle that necessarily has a significantly smaller area within the same extent. Icons from Apple were all nicely balanced in size, but third-party apps could be anything.<p>Giving equal visual weight to each icon is an improvement. iOS was a step forward in this direction, and now they finally brought the same standard to Mac.<p>Squircles aren't ugly, they're functional. "Shape" hasn't disappeared as a distinct visual cue, as the area within the squircle is made of, well... <i>different shapes</i>.<p>And let's not forget the fact that Macs <i>still</i> effectively use icon masks. A smaller icon is harder to click, because clicking on a transparent area... doesn't click at all. I remember icons like a skinny letter "S" that you had to click <i>just right</i> or you couldn't at all.
> <i>Giving equal visual weight to each icon is an improvement.</i><p>Equal visual weight is another way of saying less differentiated.<p>> <i>"Shape" hasn't disappeared as a distinct visual cue, as the area within the squircle is made of, well... different shapes.</i><p>Shape refers to a boundary outline, not interior patterning. A square with polkadots is still shaped like a square.<p>> <i>A smaller icon is harder to click, because clicking on a transparent area... doesn't click at all.</i><p>That problem is only tangential to what shape they allow your icon to be within an enclosing NxN hitbox. Assume an implied framework where clicking on them isn't broken.
Some differentiation between elements must be sacrificed in order to build shared UX patterns between them. I think we can definitely go too far in either direction.<p>An example of a nice compromise would be the macOS menu bar. Most status icons are monotone, which allows the ones with meaningful color differentiation to shine through without being drowned in the noise or increasing user fatigue.
You seem to conflate different facts that have nothing to do with each other to arrive at a conclusion: There is nothing preventing Apple from not using said click masks while icons retain their distinct shapes. iOS is for mobile, its lessons don't transfer to desktop, and this was proven by Windows 8.
That "squircles aren't ugly because they are functional" - how on Earth can those be mutually exclusive even in recognition? Functional very often is at the cost of making things ugly, the history lesson is that Apple more often than others managed to be both functional and beautiful.
You also conflate convex pixel area with visual weight, but that is false too.
I’m not a designer but I disagree. I want to be able to easily distinguish apps without much focus or concentration or searching. Making them visually distinct with shape and color is superior. Uniformity is a problem not a target.
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Hard agree! Not only is it less fun and less visually appealing to me, I think forcing the uniform squircle everywhere makes it harder (than it used to be) to distinguish one app from another by icon alone.
> With color now so critical to tell icons apart, it should be no surprise that the new “Clear” and “Tinted” icon styles added in Tahoe are seeing so little uptake. As Adam Engst noted, “[I]t’s nearly impossible to identify a particular app when they’re all clear or tinted squircles, as you can see below. My brain just shuts down when it sees them.”<p>Also, that's true for a lot of normal application icons. Any Google application, including of course Chrome, but also Slack, Apple Photos, etc ... they all decided to use a "abstract red green yellow blue" logo on a white background. Of course, Google is the main culprit here. IntelliJ icons are another variant but still a pain to recognize and they add so much fun when they are mixed with Google ones.<p>And that's for the multicolor icons. Less problematic but still are "one color abstract on white background", like how am I supposed to distinguish Jira from Confluence ?<p>Also my personal bonus is that I have slimmed down high reflective glasses which creates chromatic aberrations so all those multicolor icons are dismantled when they are in my peripheral vision.
Tahoe was such a huge mess, but I'm hopeful that the new CEO will turn things around and bring things back to normal.<p>If they do, I'll consider upgrading both OS and laptop, but right now I'm holding on to Sequoia
Same. Apple and Adobe seem to constantly have updates that feel one step forward, two steps back in a lot of places.
It really was Mac OS X's Vista moment.<p>Edit: It'll always be Mac OS X to me, not macOS.
Yes! You are not alone. The name Mac OS X has always felt special to me.
Mac OS X 27.<p>10.27?<p>But that means there were two each of 10.11, 10.12, 10.13, 10.14, and 10.15 :-)
They have a new head designer too IIRC, but probably is going to take some time for him to slowly move away from the mess he inherited.
Alan Dye was brought in during the Jony Ive era when they were launching the first Apple Watch because he came from a fashion/print background. Before Apple really figured out what the Watch was going to be (a health/fitness accessory for your phone) they were going for the "luxury fashion" angle.<p>Somehow when Ive left, Dye got put in charge of design even though he had zero experience in software design that anyone seems to be aware of. He was criticized for the years following for a lot of bizarre design regressions that were happening across all of Apple's OSes. Then a few months after Dye himself announced Liquid Glass at WWDC last year, he blindsided Apple by accepting a poaching offer from Meta, seemingly because Zuck isn't aware of how untalented the guy is.<p>Now Stephen Lemay is in charge, who's been at Apple for many years and actually knows stuff about software design. It's said that within the walls of Apple, a lot of people were very happy about the change, and the first showing of design changes we got since then are looking very good for Apple.
> seemingly because Zuck isn't aware of how untalented the guy is.<p>Maybe Zuck just wanted his laptop to get better.
> Now Stephen Lemay is in charge, who's been at Apple for many years and actually knows stuff about software design<p>And who was Dye's second in command, and who was integral in coming up with Liquid Glass, designing it, and forcing it down everyone's throat.
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The bit about internal rumblings at Apple I definitely read from him but the rest is just things we saw play out publicly over the past decade.
Gruber does not have a monopoly on disliking Alan Dye’s work. On the contrary, I never met anyone who knew UI design was a thing that liked what he did.<p>When you’re using a tool for 40 years and someone who really has no clue gets in charge, starts breaking basic functionality for no good reason and affecting your day to day work, it’s not hard to get infuriated.
How do you think thay worked? Alan Dye alome came up with, designed and somehow forced Liquid Glass into every platform? Lemay, who was his second in command had nothing to do with it? It was Alan Dye single-handedly doing it?
I am very, very curious how he reached, stayed that long at the top of the org chart and convinced so many people that this was a good direction to take.<p>If I were at Apple's leadership I'd consider that a major blindspot and focus deeply on fixing it.
Perhaps (any of these can be true, or false):<p>- He wasn't the only one pushing it? Lemay was described in Bloomberg as one of the key people behind Liquid Glass<p>- The vision wasn't as bad as it turned out to be, but it was rushed because of yearly releases and Apple having nothing to present?<p>- None of the senior leadership use the devices beyond occasionally, so they couldn't care less what's happening to the UX?
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> slowly move away from the mess he inherited.<p>The mess he actively implemented and was an integral part of?<p>Why do people keep thinking that Alan Dye was the only person (apparently with God-like powers) who somehow forced and designed Liquid Glass alone, in isolation, and somehow sneaked it in to every Apple platform.
Apple CEOs always seem to want to make a splash via hardware (especially since the guy worked in hardware engineering) but it would be nice if an engineer brings more focus on the software as well.
Golden Gate is better but it hasn't fixed your icons unfortunately
The thing which kills me, is that with entirety of the State of California's Gazetteer to pull from, Apple didn't pull a page from Android and use an alphabetically ordered naming scheme so that folks could determine ordering of versions.
They've gone too far on enforcing uniformity of icons and abusing liquid glass, but I disagree that arbitrary shapes were better. All the random icon shapes looked cool in isolation, but were harder to scan at a glance. The uniform squircle is a useful constraint.<p>I wouldn't mind if they allowed something similar to that audio hijack icon, where you require the rounded rect as the guiding frame but are allowed to have some elements protruding out of it. But completely arbitrary shapes are too jarring imo.
Early on, when UI/UX was emerging as a discipline, user reaction times and accuracy were measured across a large number of participants. There are many stories during the development of the Lisa and Mac of unexpected user behavior and results.<p>We shouldn’t be guessing if uniformity helps distinguish between apps or not. We could very easily test it.<p>But UI/UX has long distanced itself from science, for whatever reason. Maybe because users are so proficient these days that almost anything works. We used to required training on how to use a mouse, menus and windows.<p>It’s been probably a decade since I’ve heard anyone mention Fitt’s law, for instance, and Liquid Glass atrocities are direct a consequence of disregarding all that was learned in this field.
I'm pretty sure Nielsen already tested it, if I had to guess they probably found that different icon shapes are broadly better but that gets ignored because "it's cheaper to use some shitty vector squiggle in a round rect", just like the research that found "icons are better when there is text" is widely ignored too because internationalization costs money.
I mostly lament the simplification of app icons as an artistic loss, not as a usability loss. Shameless plug, but I made a project based on the idea of icons as pure art with no utility <a href="https://www.benedelste.in/post/__001" rel="nofollow">https://www.benedelste.in/post/__001</a>
I can see both sides. Artistic constraints can suck, but on the other hand, for every app with a truly beautiful icon design, like the ones listed in the "It Doesn’t Have to Be Like This" section, how many apps have truly awful icon designs? The dock is prime visual real estate, and as a user, I'd like some kind of constraint that makes it less likely some crazy art style is going to be imposed on my desktop just because I need an app there.
As an aside, Rogue Amoeba are one of an ecosystem of great and greatly passionate indie software houses for the Mac.<p>All of them create excellent software with polished UIs, provide excellent support and never forget to have fun. This seems to be unique to the Mac, at least at this scale.
> Let’s return to a world of gorgeous app icons like these:<p>Seriously, they look like pictures you could find in a child's book, and it's a form of occupational deformation when you think of those icons as "gorgeous".
I find them gorgeous.<p>Admittedly, the term is unavoidably subjective. But what I like about them is that they are distinct, and that each one has character. Honestly, the fact that they looked like pictures I could find in a child's book is the main part of what I like about them: they have simple ideas ("a bird") and forms so distinctive a child could tell them apart.
Ok, but how would you feel if the dashboard of your car had images that made it look like a child's toy? Or your watch? You've maybe grown accustomed to it on your smartphone, but it has little to do with great taste (imho).
I'm on Tahoe and when i built an app using neutralino js the png icon was way bigger than the other icons, i needed to add padding to make the squircle look normal. So honestly i dont think this is a software thing, its more of designers designing it this way or only using their icon composer software which creates imaginary limitations.
Any linux kid with a slightest experience with desktop ricing would tell them that uniformly customized icons are a nightmare for visual recognition. Why didn't they run some internal tests, it's so obvious
My personal take is that icons should conform to the squircle, but have a permitted amount of break out from the core shape. For example, Audio Hijack’s icon as presented in the article should be allowed to have the microphone extend past the border slightly. The squircle should be mandated as the core shape, but with just tad bit of flexibility and shape definition.<p>This keeps grids feeling proper, organised, and aligned, without feeling like the icons of Android Honeycomb.
The great thing about the new multi-layer icon format in Golden Gate is that it finally separates an icon's foreground from the background.<p>So in theory, it opens the door to returning shape-differentiated icons to MacOS if a future display theme (a successor to the poorly-conceived Clear and Tinted themes) allows the background to be minimized while the foreground is emphasized.<p>What I would love to see, and should now be possible, is a revision of the Clear theme where the squircle is transparent/refractive and the foreground retains its native color.
Maybe it's just me, but I never really liked the detailed older mac icons, like the examples at the bottom of the page. I've always enjoyed more minimalist, simple user interfaces. And I can understand what Apple are trying to do by standardising their icons on the squircle (even if the execution is a bit iffy sometimes, the big grey border doesn't look great). Though, judging by everyone else's writings, I'm probably in the minority
> <i>This time, however, the changes are genuine improvements. Here’s the refined Automator icon, for example</i><p>Uh, maybe. Parts of it are certainly slightly sharper in an unimportant way when viewed at normal icon size and not zoomed way in. I'm not sure that it's any better. And if that Automator icon is the exemplar, then any improvement is extremely marginal. My god it's just such a bad icon. Whoever is managing icon design should be extremely ashamed of themselves.<p>Show anyone the pre-Tahoe Automator icon and ask them what it depicts and why that fits and they'll be able to tell you that it looks like a robot and robots are used in automation and therefore every time they see the little robot they'll think Automator. Ask them what the post-Tahoe icon depicts and why that fits and they'll be able to tell you fuck all because what the fuck even is that supposed to be if you don't already know.
I find the squircle jail just creates a lot of confusion for me, having distinct shapes helps a lot at a glance.
I never understood this sick decision. I used to use the shapes to identify apps.<p>Most cartoon characters have very distinctive silhouettes and I don't think it's a coincidence. Remember "Who's that Pokemon?"
Someone posted an old MacOS screenshot on Reddit and it was immediately obvious that the icons without a silhouette were the worst out of all of them.<p>Like iTunes / Books / App Store. And that's basically what they went with eventually...<p>Dashboard and Launcher are fine, but they have a reason to be a circle. (Well Launcher less so maybe)<p>Chrome is terrible, it represents nothing. But I guess it's just a brand.<p>I wish we could go back to this instead of squircles...<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/s/9MZsGioCG6" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/s/9MZsGioCG6</a>
It is always great to see more people be vocal about the poison of flat design
Tangential related, but i find Icons should have a animated tooltip- when hovered over prolonged, they should tell what the program should do in a cyclical svg-animation.
The only reason to run MacOS over Linux is the hardware. Arm MacBooks are unreasonably good but don’t support Linux (Asahi is still a bit WIP).<p>They sell hardware, not software, so the state of things makes sense. It is so disappointing though.
I was originally excited by the flat design revolution because it appealed to my affinity with uniformity and consistency. But I believe now that I was ignorant and lazy. Bad design still exists within flat style rules, and it has an even worse and cheap feel to it. Meanwhile we've lost whole dimensions of expression.
Same for Android. Hate adaptive icons...
I honestly forgot icons used to be a lot of different shapes. Used Panic Coda way back in the day and that leaf icon from this post is unmistakable.
Ever since the android debacle with icons having shadows going in different directions or length I've been thinking that icons should be 3D models (with restrictions to make them fast to render and/or fast to bake into flat images).<p>That would be a marvelous way to make icons unified and a differentiating move for Apple.
Oh yes, I hate this. OneUI has that as well. It makes searching for an app so much more conscious and bothersome. I don't want my app drawer to look as neat as possible, I want it to work with the least amount of attention that I can possibly get away with.
It might be better to make Linux have these gorgeous icons now that Apple locked them up.<p>Make the icons be Free on Free OSes like Linux.
Android started mandating all icons to have the same shape like 9 years ago. In 2026 there are still some apps on my phone that haven't updated their icons yet.
Apple will never care about what users want, they only do what Apple want. If you want to free anything, don't use Apple. It's an obvious lesson that should have been learned a long time ago.
I think this is a battle they won't win, though I applaud the effort.
I agree, but I'm surprised there was no mention of contrast or proposal to restrict colors.<p>Their first good example bumped up the color contrast. The orange examples in their set of "gorgeous app icons" are just as bad as the slack vs photos example.<p>I would love if the OS had an option to automatically convert every app icon to greyscale and required a minimum color contrast ratio for the original. Then, the user can pick their own overlay colors (similar to the color tags in finder).
Design is a cost center now at Apple. Must be reduced and minmaxed.
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I honestly disagree with the author when they say that the Golden Gate icons are better than Tahoes. There are more lines, which is literally removing the point of LIQUID glass. It is supposed to be BLURRY, like LIQUID. I get that it is more readable, but are icons meant to be read? There is no text in them, other than Apple TV which is very distinctive. It seems like they just boosted the sharpness of the icons and pushed to production (or I guess it is technically production-beta?) However I do agree with the point of the article. Icons having things outside of the squircle were unique, fun, and interesting.
If one is this passionate about icons, why not just install (or even make) a custom icon pack? The default icons for Google Apps on Android are awful, but I haven't seen them in years aside from setting up a new device.
>Apple didn’t just mess with their own icons. They also dictated the shape of every third-party app icon<p>We will never know if this was AI generated or not, but I have started to flinch at this sentence structure.