Unacceptable for the premium you pay for Apple software. Unacceptable for any software one is paying for. I hope they get their shit together and start fixing before they continue adding new stuff. 26.2 doesn't inspire me that they're on that trajectory.

The thing that amazes me most is that everyone on the teams responsible is probably using their Apple devices and running into these same bugs!

You used to be able to count on the basics working smoothly, but stuff like the camera and messaging are frequently broken for me

https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job

Thankfully he has now left. Things could hopefully pick up again usability-wise within 2-3 years.

At the same time I make Mac apps and I've got to adopt liquid glass to keep my apps looking alive/updated. How to do this without making my apps UI worse?

I would love to see some "how to fix Liquid Glass" type articles. List out the problems, list out potential solutions.

Anyone run across articles like this? Please share relevant links.

i really missed snow leopard for about 10 years all the way up to when i moved on from my macbook circa 5 years ago.

I want to turn the clock back. It’s not a reflexive opposition to anything new. I thought OS X clearly got better from 10.0 to 10.4. But in the last vie versions it’s been a regression.

There are so many parts of the os that flagrantly ignore well-established accessibility standards, some of which Apple themselves advocated for

So for Apple to start with a level of disrespect for the existing product where the question of whether each change is actually an improvement is effectively off-topic, it's no wonder they made a dog's dinner of Tahoe.

However, the execution is horrible. Massively inconsistent border radii, a Finder window that reminds me of the Engineers’ ship from Prometheus, laggy performance, illegible fonts due to overlays, and the list goes on. Tahoe is so badly designed that using Windows 11 feels like a breath of fresh air.

Curious if any Apple folk are on HN that could add some insight as to how it happened.

In 2025, the design failed upward to 4000 x 500K users, https://archive.is/gxaYw

> [Apple] is working to simplify the way users navigate and control their devices.. The design is loosely based on the Vision Pro’s software.. will mark the most significant upgrade to the Mac since the Big Sur operating system in 2020.. For the iPhone, it will be the biggest revamp since iOS 7 in 2013... 2 billion devices in use around the world.. when Apple revamped its Photos app last year, legions of users complained. With the entire operating systems changing, the stakes are much higher.

Since 2023 launch, Meta Ray-Ban sold ~4M camera glasses priced below $500.

They managed to break so many things, they even managed to mess up the volume slider. Instead of showing up across the screen now it’s tucked away to the top right. What the hell.

Oh one can dream...

The battery life first: I lost 6 to 8h of battery life EVERY DAY because of iOS 26. The battery life of my macbook is worst too, even after all the updates and a fresh install of macOS 26.2. The interface is very ugly, and not easy to use at all. I am oftenly loston both systems (iOS 26 and macOS 26) because of all those glass interfaces on top of each other. The performance did not improved either, and the gaming ecosystem that I was very optimistic is becoming a mess. Again. To finish, an exceptional high number of annoying bugs that are not solved yet, despite my feedbacks since the first Beta versions. It seems nobody care.

It’s infuriating that I can’t downgrade the OS on both devices. Especially on my mac.

This pushed me to re-try a Linux distro on my old laptop, and re-try Android on an old Google Pixel phone. Both are great for my needs, and the phone has way more battery life than the iPhone (despite the phone has already 5yo).

I did not expected at all that 2025 would be the year of Apple pushing me out of it ecosystem... Very nice job guys.

Fuck you, Apple.

It’s sad to be in a time where enshitifcation is the word of the day and things are getting worse as time goes on. There’s nothing on the horizon of tech that excites me anymore. I used to feel joy and excitement for the future of tech. Now I feel profound sadness at this reality.

If this kind of software trend continues in 2026, it might be the first time I take a serious look at Linux distros on Mac.

I shouldn’t be surprised given that the mac save as dialog box has a name field that is still hard coded to 32 characters visible. Whenever I bitch about it I get pushback that filenames shouldn’t be longer than that! Um hello - tell me you have never worked in the real world outside your iphone bubble without telling me.

I don't own a computer for the OS, I own it to run the Applications that I find useful.

> two windows in the same app, both created using SwiftUI, can’t even share a common radius, as shown below

this actually looks correct to me, the smaller 'subordinate' dialog has smaller radius, like nesting dolls

Best hardware around, but at this point I might even take W11 over this locked down mess. At least Asahi support is decent these days.

And I'm tired of paying for things that should be stock, such as proper window and mouse management, or reasonable fan control so that the keyboard doesn't burn my fingers under moderate workloads.

Now it was a while ago I left the Apple ecosystem as it became clear they didn't actually care about UX anymore, but did "strong feedback during beta-testing" ever actually result in any results? I remember doing something similar back in 2012-2013 sometime, and friends having similar feelings across the years, that it makes me think that Apple never really did any changes based on feedback receiving during the beta testing.

Has anyone here ever written something in via the traditional feedback forms/venues and actually had something changed before the final release? I even asked around my circle of acquaintances and even the ones 110% into the Apple ecosystem seem to never have noticed anything changed based on their feedback.

This was never true, for example, taking this simple criterion of readability:

> would be really helpful if I could read clearly what’s on my display

Look at the device's names at the left-most screenshot - you can't clearly read them even though there is plenty of space wasted on the margins and the "…"

I mean, sure, liquid glass made everything worse, but it doesn't mean all the other decades-old UI sins disappear in the exceptionally fuzzy rearview window

on top of the bug people mention a lot where types are miss-pressed, there's a problem i get where if iOS considers a word misspelled it'll refuse to let me use the space key or otherwise move away from the word or close the keyboard. it's almost like a UI thread lockout. it's extremely frustrating.

There is no true passion in MacOS, and the marketing has come face to face with reality in 2025. It's the neglected step-child of a company distracted by other things.

There's been some impressive engineering done by lower-level folks under the hood of it all, though.

What recommendations do people have for good metal-body linux-friendly "ultra books" (or whatever they're called these days)?

Looks too much like vista to me.

Perhaps Apple is willing to accept that most macOS users will enable "reduce transparency" so long as devs implement support for transparency.

But there is another explanation making the rounds, possibly a conspiracy theory. Some people claim that Apple is doing this to make cross-platform technologies look obsolete and hard to implement.

If there's any truth to this, it's a terrible idea that could easily backfire. People could get used to there not being a consistent platform look and feel. Like on Windows, "native" could lose its meaning.

Whatever Apple promotes as "native" could become just another style among many.

just format and install Sequoia, that's what I did

Step 1: company caters to a niche

Step 2: niche loves product, recommends to wider audience

Step 3: wider audience adopts product

Step 4: company switches to targeting the wider audience

Step 5: niche doesn't like product anymore, switches to a competitor

Windows is in step 5 - previously undisputed king of desktop, now an ad-infested boomer legacy system. MacOS is in step 4 - previously pricy but good solution for devs and creatives, now PITA for devs and "I would switch if it weren't for Adobe suite" for creatives, but normies think it looks pretty. Linux is in step 1 - Valve has been consistently investing in making it a viable gaming system. If you told me 10 years ago that Linux actually runs games other than TuxCart, I'd have laughed, but nowadays "does it run on Linux" is a serious question for every new release. It just needs some time to mature, and once gamers switch, other desktop users will slowly follow.

All these recent proclamations of disappointment in Tahoe seem insanely overblown to me. The problem that this post leads with is that thumbnails' corners are too rounded, which "misrepresents" the original? Seriously?

Maybe it's worse now compared to the golden years, I don't know, never owned a Mac. And it's fair to criticize it from that perspective. But I am completely at a loss for how any of these issues could be bad enough to make you switch platforms. Windows and Linux are not exactly usability all-stars! I had to write my own app for decent speech-to-text on Linux which is built in at a system level on Macs.

This feels to me like just the age-old tale of people wanting to (love | hate) brands, when really, things are nuanced. I switched from Android to iOS recently and the experience did not change much. iOS is absolutely not "borderline unusable" like I've seen many claim. If anything it's maybe a 10% nicer experience overall.

Lack of nuance in people's takes makes for less signal in the noise and makes it annoying to figure out the actual pros and cons of different platforms.

What I do know for a fact, is that for each error I have on my MacBook, I’ll have ~10 ungoogable errors on any other OS. I rage-sold my last Windows due to losing my Java installation (or just confusing which terminal I installed it in).

Please, crop all thumbnails in the corners, as long as you come pre-installed with just one working terminal.