Luckily for Apple, Windows 11 is not exactly in a position to attract switchers.

Let’s see if Apple can turn things around. iOS 8+ did improve on iOS 7’s worst bits.

I'm sure people noticed this issue internally and brought it up but some thing by some designer was seen as biblically sacred and overruled all reason.

I've been at companies were you get severely punished... sometimes fired for subordination for fixing an obviously broken spec by a designer emperor.

It's normal to be "I guess 2+2=5 here, whatever" as if the designer went in a tiny room, had a seance with the divine...

Yo, newsflash, everyone makes mistakes. Failure is when you force them to stay uncorrected.

https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/system/managers/filema...

https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/system/managers/filema...

I remember a few years ago, people complained when Apple merely made the entire operating system uglier. (Something about a gradient on the battery?) A lot of people would talk hyperbolically ("apple KILLED macos!"), and that's indistinguishable to an outsider when an update like this brings other people out of the woodwork to say, "Hey, these changes are genuinely bizarre and absurd, what happened?"

Verily, the last UI redesign that was based on honest research and watching real users act was WinXP.

MacOS Tahoe has been heavily criticized for its UI decisions, especially Liquid Glass, which many people feel actively hurts usability rather than improving it. On the other side, Windows keeps piling on user-hostile features, dark patterns, and friction that increasingly frustrate power users and regular users alike.

Distributions like Ubuntu, Fedora, Mint, and others have mature desktops, solid performance, and fewer design decisions that get in the user’s way.

I honestly cannot remember another moment where both major desktop platforms were being questioned this openly at the same time. If Linux is ever going to take advantage of dissatisfaction at scale, this feels like it.

Tahoe is tragically bad by almost every UX measure, and following various Apple subreddits i wonder if they just don't care anymore - since the majority of people are shocked by the amateurishness of both bugs and design choices in the latest update - this comes on top of literally every major bug being ignored from the alpha to releasing anyway then continuing to ignore feedback.

When trying to reproduce the problem as shown in the article by resizing the Safari window currently displaying the article, the drag cursor changes shape at the visible border of the window, not the shadow and consequently, dragging works as expected.

https://youtu.be/kNovjjvYP8g

This might be an application- or driver specific issue, not necessarily a common Tahoe issue.

These are problems humanity solved over 35 years ago (see NeXTSTEP). Why are these designers breaking basic features that worked for over 35 years?

Additionally, it is hard on all developers (Apple included) to release updates for all of its many platforms on the same day, which IMO reduces software quality across the ecosystem.

(Apple also has the luxury of only supporting the latest OS versions with its software. Customers often expect third-party developers to support a wider range of OS versions and devices than Apple does.)

If cars were like computers, the steering wheel would be in a different place after every maintenance check.

Anyway, I'm on Linux, using Gnome Classic as my WM, and I don't have these stupid "everything is suddenly different now" issues.

Eg on my iPhone filling in a password sometime is kinda blanks the screen while I’m trying to fill the password in.

My keyboard is absolutely terrible.

Lots of other little annoyances I can’t remember right now.

This window thing is another good example of just not enough thought being put into things.

It seems like a clear regression in usability. By moving from a high-density, full-screen experience to a constrained, scrolling window, they’ve increased the interaction cost for launching apps via the mouse. It feels like a 'unification tax. Sacrificing desktop utility to align with non-Desktop modalilties. Does anyone see a functional upside here, or is this purely aesthetic consistency?

In all my years using computers I have never been so disappointed so profoundly by a 36 gigabyte operating system upgrade.

Simply put: the pointer doesn't always switch context properly. So, you'll have it hovered over a resize control and it will refuse to change from the default pointer. Or you'll be working, and suddenly notice the pointer is a 'drag' one, even though nothing's being dragged and nothing draggable is active.

I would love anyone with any knowledge, especially an (ex-)insider, to shed light on this issue.

For practical reasons I am stuck inside Apple’s macOS garden, but I wanted to share a few things that at least make me feel content using macOS:

First, I have at least two VPS systems so via mosh/ssh/tmux I always have Linux dev environments, the ability to use throwaway VPS for sandboxing, etc.

Second, when actually working on macOS I stick with tools that make me happy: Emacs and terminal windows, a uv-based Python enviroment and tuned-up Common Lisp, Haskel, and Clojure dev environments.

Anyway, I am just sharing my ‘macOS therapy’ - hope it helps someone here.

Steve Jobs would have had a fit over this product line. As '97 era Jobs put it, "The products suck! There's no sex in them anymore!"

My modest proposal for Apple diehards (especially employees) is to feed all the data that exists on Jobs into a multi-modal model so that Apple can hear just how much their shit sucks from Jobs' digital ghost.

A good starting point would be the https://stevejobsarchive.com/

This is standard in Gnome and a must for me back when I switch to MacOS for work.

[1] https://github.com/dmarcotte/easy-move-resize

I have no idea what Apple were thinking, this OS is basically unusable, and extremely ugly.

I hope I won't somehow be forced to upgrade at some point.

Apple needs to start thinking about their users again instead of shareholders.

And it's not just Tahoe. The various iOS/WatchOS updates from the fall are all broken in one way or another.

For example, WatchOS's music app can't play more than 2-3 songs from a downloaded playlist without crashing.

The WatchOS Outlook app won't launch (which also means the watch face complication is broken).

iOS Safari's search bar/address bar periodically freezes after you enter a search term. If you click the bar, the search term disappears, so you have re-type it.

So here I am, random hacker news links verifier.

Scrolling to the image below "So, for example, grabbing it here does not work:" text and reproducing the issue with a small caveat: just moving cursor 1 (ONE) pixel right turns the cursor into the "diagonal resizing mode" cursor. Overall, the resizing area of the window corner is comfortably bigger than the author draws. Dragging empty space outside the rounded corner is weird but what isn't in today's user interface designs?

All in all have never experienced difficulties resizing windows in macos.

Miss the times of windows 95/98 and macos 9 (as some other commenters here) when OS UI was designed by humans and for humans and everything was explicitly clear including the area for window resizing.

All that said, I REALLY would love to have a hotkey combo I can beep pressed down to resize anywhere over the window. Just like in many Unix/Linux window managers.

Double click any side or corner to move it to the edge of the screen, and hold down option to make the effect symmetric.

I put a Teams meeting on my second monitor. I put Teams on my first monitor. I minimize Teams to look at something in a browser on the first monitor. The Teams meeting on the second monitor minimizes, too.

Mac window management UX is dogshit in a lot of different ways. There are a lot of problems that I either have to just deal with, or try to find some third party app to solve in lieu of Apple actually caring about UX again.

Let's face it, new glass UI is stunning - not for everyone's taste, like everything in art - but it has the Wow effect. Fresh look, transparency, new colors, wow! Same goes to many, not all, web sites, apps, etc.

On the UX side, with some exceptions, it is a disaster, though. Why on Earth would I want an ill-readable text behind a semi-transparent panel? Windows that only use 90% of my OLED screen I paid for? Do I want every web app invent its own navigation? Not in my worst dreams.

I like the new UIs, designers do an excellent job. Now, we must also bring back the UX people! Real user-oriented UX, not dark patterns UX that trick users to sign up for services they don't need. Its a pity, the latter actually killed the UX domain I think.

I still operate off muscle memory, so it's not actually easier or harder, of course.

Out of all the things, the UX I cannot forgive is:

1. Hold Siri button

2. say "Create appointment at 3PM tomorrow."

The result is that no alert/notification/warning of this appointment occurs, unless I open the appointment and create the alert manually, at least at time of event. I cannot imagine any use case where one would create an appointment that required no reminder.

If I had created this appointment via Gmail or even Outlook, and synced... then there are notifications.

My point here is that the UX rot at Apple is not new. I am curious as to how this rot begins at BigOrg, and how it can be cured, if it can be addressed. I have never worked at BigOrg, so I really don't get it. Is there some missing UX role in the c-suite? How does my gripe, or Tahoe... ever happen? I understand how it happens at MSFT, but is this just what happens at all BigOrgs, eventually?

Edit: despite all the negative feedback, I’m quite happy with Tahoe and I enjoy the visual changes. I think some of the subtler changes is more intuitive and Spotlight’s improvement is quite nice.

`NSWindowShouldDragOnGesture` setting allows you to drag windows at any point if you hold ⌃⌘

`defaults write -g NSWindowShouldDragOnGesture -bool YES`

For the first time in 15 years I am considering to not buy apple as my next phone/laptop regardless of the specs.

Has text selection also changed? When I drag a block and copy it, I often find I've missed the first character. It's happening almost every time and I swear this wasn't happening to me before.

--- start quote ---

The utter user-interface butchery happening to Safari on the Mac is once again the work of people who put iOS first. People who by now think in iOS terms. People who view the venerable Mac OS user interface as an older person whose traits must be experimented upon, plastic surgery after plastic surgery, until this person looks younger. Unfortunately the effect is more like this person ends up looking… weird.

These people look at the Mac’s UI and (that’s the impression, at least) don’t really understand it. Its foundations come from a past that almost seems inscrutable to them. Usability cues and features are all wrinkles to them. iOS and iPadOS don’t have these strange wrinkles, they muse. We must hide them. We’ll make this spectacular facelift and we’ll hide them, one by one. Mac OS will look as young (and foolish, cough) as iOS!

--- end quote ---

At the time it was only Safari that they wanted to "modernize". Now it's the full OS.

Absolutely stupid design

This time the article is so good -- clear, funny, succinct, accurate -- that it's a better read than the comments.

https://rectangleapp.com/

We've spent billions. Are UIs a lot better off than Windows 3.1?

My biggest beef is there seems to be a lot of bugs in Safari. If I open Discord and switch tabs a few minutes later the tab is dead and a refresh doesn't work you need to retype the discord address again on the tab window.

On a full screen safari If I click on the share button by accident and don't pick any of the options the address bar for that tab becomes uneditable.

In IOS long pressing a video would show options such as opening on a new tab or downloading the file. Now for certain websites the options show for a split second before it switches to the full screen player.

There are many other annoying bugs but those are the most annoying ones.

BTW it's also amusing how not only iCloud doesn't flag a false Apple billing phishing message as junk but Apple """Inteligence""" will highlight it as priority. https://imgur.com/a/HaHxsUR

I'm taken aback. Change the look, that's fair enough. But it should have some usability testing for this kind of thing before it goes out the door.

In my head, I can hear GPT laugh hysterically, while it explains to me that I can just continue to use alt-SPACE to bring up the MOVE system menu, if I am overwhelmed, while it gleefully assures me that MSFT has 'no current plans to get rid of that feature' (which we know is Kremlin-speak for 'the system menu is NEXT brother'.

I'm glad I saw this blog post. I'm not going to upgrade until stuff like this gets addressed.

- moving windows without holding from any particular position

- resizing windows without grabbing a particular corner

Life changing small things.

For a long time, I've found that either full screen or tiling (driven by keyboard shortcuts) is a far less frustrating a way to interact with windows, so I almost never use window-resizing. Window resizing is also horrendous when you try to do it with a touchpad.

https://rectangleapp.com/

I think it all boils down to this one question. It’s not complicated.

I miss Windows 7 and OS X.

In the next generation or two iPads and MacBooks are going to essentially merge as a product line.

I wouldn't be surprised if Apple abandons classic macOS (w/ Terminal and a filesystem) all together. To continue to support developers all they need is a tweaked Xcode for Apple dev and their version of WSL for everything else. All the parts are already in macOS/iPadOS (native virtualization and containerization).

iMac and Mac Pro are all but dead now too. Mac Mini and Mac Studio will be the only desktop options and will be bought by people who are Millenials and older or ML/AI praciticioners. We may even see a special AI/Local LLM Mac Studio that would be the equivalent of mac pro of the ai era.

Your fingers will need these big round edges to grab. They may let you use a bluetooth mouse but they aren't going to cater their UX to you.

They year of the Linux desktop has come as commercial desktop OS's die.

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

Third-party apps have to use the Accessibility API, which was designed for screen readers, not window manipulation. Some windows simply refuse to be resized below certain thresholds, and there's no way to query the minimum size in advance. You request 500px width, get 800px back, no error.

The real question is: will Apple ever provide a proper public API, or will this remain a cat-and-mouse game with Accessibility permissions?

And I do not get why people so upset with Tahoe. I really really love it.

The resize corners grab area is also very frustrating though.

Edit: Oh, and the "beauty" is in the eye of the managers.

the cherry on top is the delay between the drag start and the window begining to resize

I think that kind of behaviour ought to be controlled by the green dot at the top-left of windows, not by some particular mouse movements.

There was a time when the changes to the mac UI were quite good, or at least not annoying. Sometimes it seems as though they are changing stuff just to change stuff.

He’ll show boring things like resizing windows because those things matter to you trying and if he cares about resizing windows to this degree then imagine what else this product has.

Apple today hides behind slick motion graphics introductions that promise ideal software. That’s setting them up to fail because no one can live up to a fantasy. Steve showed working software that was good enough to demo and then got his team to ship it.

Could it be that I just need to drag the window outside of the pane..?

I’m glad other people are pointing this out. At first I thought my eyes were going. It’s especially bad with the magic mouse for some reason.

Into the 2000s, the only way you could resize a window on the Mac was to drag its lower-right corner. That is it. NO other corner, and no edge. So if the lower-right corner happened to be off-screen because the window was bigger than the screen, you were kind of screwed. You had to fiddle with the maximize & restore gumdrops to trick the OS into resizing the window to make that ONE corner accessible. Then you had to move the corner, then roll all the way up to the title bar and move the window, then roll back down to the corner... until you had the window sized and positioned as you wanted.

When Apple grudgingly added proper window-resizing, it made it as obscure as possible. Since Apple remains ignorant of the value of window FRAMES, there is no obvious zone within which the resizing cursor should take effect. There is no visual target for the user. This has always made an important and fundamental part of a windowed GUI a ridiculous pain in the ass on Macs.

And as the author here notes, it has gotten even worse. Not only will the window often refuse to resize, but you'll wind up activating whatever app lies behind the window you're trying to resize... hiding the one you were dealing with.

They won't do perfectly circular windows, that would be crazy— but I think we all know they can go further than this.

I've only owned macbook laptops but have run Linux at work since 2002. The lack of cohesion and non-stop changes in Linux is just as tiring and this MacOS Tahoe stuff. Gnome 3 cared just as little for users. FreeBSD + KDE Plasma is pretty good now, but lacks feeling and design.

In fact I am not on Mac anymore because with every release there were more features I didn't use (because they only work within the Apple ecosystem) and more and more things that ticked me off. Eventually I decided it wasn't for me anymore, after being on the platform for more than 15 years. Oh well. I am very happy on KDE now.

Even worse: because the min/max/close buttons are all shunted into the top right corner, if you're trying to resize from the top right and you miss, you close the window.

Seems like most the attention this is getting is people wanting to grave dance Apple at any chance given.

I personally don't see this behavour on Tahoe 26.2 and an M2 MBP.

This seems like a very strange thing to release for a company that's supposed to care about the details.

Dye destroyed macOS. I don’t know what they do, but they have to backtrack.

I know that macbook has been crushing laptop market with their M chip. Macbook is amazing for sure. I very much enjoy using it at work. But for personal computing, I need Linux setup.

Apple keeps being a hardware company unfortunately.

Their software is not nearly as good as it could and should be if they had real competition.

Windows/linux is not a competition since they dropped bootcamp. Because that implies switching to a subpar hardware.

Not to say this isn't the case anymore but

https://dwm.suckless.org/

They keep on asking me to upgrade to some new OS, I consistently keep on telling it to sodd off!

If there was a background window in that area outside the corner, would it receive the click event?

Funny enough, I never suffered this because my mouse pointer has always been configured to be comically large. So I had adapt with inaccurate click area for many many years due to my own cause.

Also, years after reporting, you still need to pause typing for one second after switching keyboard language via keyboard shortcut, otherwise the original language stays selected.

Please please please make this better Apple. Or just give us an option for square windows.

my password is always incorrect unless i count to about 20 or 30 seconds. once i have 'redocked' for the day, unlocking it subsequently doesnt have the requirement. but every dock insertion, it comes back.

Is it possible for me to update to whatever was released just before "Tahoe", or will it just put me on that now?

Considering how many people only buy a MacBook PRO no matter what they plan on doing with it, they really need to keep the actual salary-earning pros happy with it or else it’ll lose all credibility. A Mac in a recording booth has a look to it that sells well, but that aesthetic won’t last if you stop seeing them. Being an effective tool for the pro minority should honestly be the priority for MacOS, even at the cost of making it incongruous from iPadOS/iOS. *

* disclaimer: what do I know honestly haha, I’m sure they’ll print money anyway.

It used to be in the middle of the screen and worked just fine. But then someone thoughts of putting it exactly where browser tabs usually are and I _constantly_ find myself in a situation where I change the volume and try to click on a tab that this UI is on top of. Then I need to move my mouse outside the UI otherwise it stays there, and wait for it to disappear before I can change tabs. It's infuriating.

Still running Sonoma on my MBP and iOS17 on my phone.

That should nudge users away from this rather primitive method of window resizing using tiny 19px corners and instead set up a productivity app where your can use the full 33% of the window size (so conveniently huge! and of course customizable) to resize via an extra trigger (for example, using a modifier key)

(nice plate picture joke!)

priceless

I almost always never use a mouse for more than maybe moving a tab to another window.

So I am wondering, are people fighting using a Mac in the most effective way simply because of old patterns and habits?

The location of the drag region is either the 10px-or-so just outside the window (GTK apps), or just inside the window (I see this in Electron apps). On GNOME, anyway.

On Windows this is caused by the removal of the thick window border with Win10. It wasn't really removed, it was just made transparent instead, thus the drag region moved outside the visible window to avoid the content size changing (for backwards compatibility). Apps often end up in a broken state too, because if you eschew system decoration, you lose the invisible border (which you don't even know you have), and it's easy to end up with a 1px drag region.

It's infuriating, because of the issue the author highlights -- you try and grab the window corner and fail.

It's a sad state of affairs, and a great example of how the basics are going backwards on desktop.

Yes, but that is skeuomorphic design, which is old and ugly. We live in the era of anti-skeuomorphic design, where nothing makes any sense but it looks sleek.

Hilarious. Is Apple attempting to defy the laws of physics?

New Desktop is FreeBSD+MATE. Config is a pain initially but idc.

I don't really see/care where my mouse exactly is. If it is outside or inside the window. Once my cursor turns to resize cursor, I just start dragging.

but its size still makes me use scientific notation to write it in kilobyte unit.

i am calling everyone(apple google..) here to switch their mindset to: "how can we reduce code size?", "what can we get rid of?", "how small can my product be?"...

set rules to measure everything in kilobytes and make your employees realize how big the number you are typing.

if every company thinks like that and stop the madness for a year or two, we might be able to solve the main issue: obesity.

They were praised for their human interface guidelines, and yet they now break almost every rule. I appreciate things change but those guidelines haven’t even evolved they have just been ignored.

Have they truly innovated in the last 10 years? What capitalist reason is for them to actually invest the manpower in the enshittification of the product experience? It feels counterintuitive. Maybe they are just too big to communicate internally?

This makes me angry.

lmao mac.