One Size Does Not Fit All
If you’re someone who’s only using email, a web browser, and some messaging apps to get stuff done, changes to your desktop appearance aren’t going to be disruptive. It’s also likely that you’ll appreciate changes that make it look like your phone.
If you’re doing anything more complex than that, your response to change will be much different.
[…]
Professionals on the Mac are like truck drivers. Drivers have a cockpit filled with specialized dials, knobs, switches, microwave ovens, refrigerators, and pillows that are absolutely necessary for hauling goods across country. Those of us who are making movies, producing hit songs, building apps, or doing scientific research have our own highly specialized cockpits.
And along comes Alan Dye with his standard cockpit, that is beautiful to look at and fun to use on curvy roads. But also completely wrong for the jobs we’re doing. There’s no air ride seat, microwave oven, or air brake release. His response will be to hide these things that we use all the time behind a hidden menu.
John Gruber (2010):
It’s the heaviness of the Mac that allows iOS to remain light.
After mocking the Toaster-Fridge, it turns out that’s kind of where Apple’s taking us. I think they’ve done OK at keeping iOS and iPadOS light, but a lot of the Mac changes seem aimed at achieving a foolish consistency.
The iPhone has utterly changed Apple’s priorities as a company. It generates, directly or indirectly, most of Apple’s revenue and profit. But it’s also had knock-on effects: The popularity of the iPhone has driven more people to the Mac. The proportion of Mac users who are “using email, a web browser, and some messaging apps” has risen, probably markedly.
[…]
In many ways, it makes good financial sense for Apple to steer the Mac in a direction that feels familiar to iPhone users and pleases those casual Mac users. They’re probably the majority of Mac users! But what about the Mac as a platform for professional users, who use the Mac as a truck, not a car?
Dye’s “consistency” poorly attempts to solve a problem no Mac users had, by radically redesigning the Mac to be utterly unlike itself, carelessly discarding decades of thoughtful design, function, and delight without bothering to understand any of it, and lacking adequate resources to replace it with anywhere near the quality and consideration that it once had.
It’s the sad conclusion of macOS’ takeover, under Tim Cook, by people who seem to kinda hate the Mac.
I seriously dislike the experience of using a Mac with Liquid Glass. The UI has become the star, but the drunken star, blurry, illegible, and physically unstable. It makes making things way more of a struggle than it used to be.
We had pretty good Mac UI, but Apple took the bad parts of it — the translucency and blurriness already there — and dialed it way up and called it content-centric. But it seems to me the opposite. Liquid Glass is Liquid-Glass-centric.
Why menu icons are a terrible idea on macOS?
Here’s a photo showing them side by side on an iPhone and on a MacBook Pro screen.
On iOS, menu icons can work quite well to communicate the meaning of menu items. They’re reasonably sized, displayed on screens with very high pixel density (around 460 ppi), and typically viewed from a fairly close distance.
But this doesn’t translate to macOS at all. On macOS 26 Tahoe, the icons are ridiculously small (about one-quarter of the physical area), displayed on screens with much lower pixel density (e.g. 254 ppi on the latest MacBook Pro), and usually viewed from about twice as far away.
If you already think Liquid Glass looks bad on macOS, try running apps fullscreen and take a look at the botch job they’ve done to shoehorn it in and get it over the line. You get a mostly-opaque toolbar that intersects the sidebar that no app is designed for, bleed-through of shadows and other chunks of off-white areas, and a miserable bleached sidebar that removes any sense of Liquid Glass and just looks pale and awful.
With iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and watchOS 26, icons are now, for the first time, shared between platforms. Liquid Glass is attempting a unification of the design language across all of these platforms (but curiously not VisionOS).
This also means that the Macintosh now shares the constraints of these other platforms.
[…]
With Liquid Glass, iOS gains personality and macOS loses some of its soul.
While I mourn the loss of transparency and unique app icon shapes on the desktop, I also fear that applying a single visual effect consistently across a big system is problematic.
My two theses of the summer beta period remain:
- iPadOS 26 has crossed the rubicon on the way to becoming a ‘real’ desktop OS
- Classic/traditional Mac apps no longer feel fully native on macOS
It’s actually macOS itself that no longer feels fully native on the Mac.
I support all the Mac developers out there who are resisting this bulldozing of decades of carefully built software environments, by buying their products and software subscriptions. And I refuse to support “Mac” developers who drink Apple’s tasteless Kool-Aid and keep embracing this relentless destruction of real Mac software, version after version. Nothing makes up for it.
Into the squircle jail it goes.
The Tahoe squircle jail is in the crApp Store too!
Previously:
- macOS Tahoe 26 Developer Beta 9
- The Tim Cook Era
- macOS Tahoe 26 Developer Beta 8
- “No” Part 2
- Assorted Notes on Liquid Glass
- Gemmell Is Back to Mac
- Rediscovering the Mac
- iOS Apps on macOS 11
- Catalyst and Cohesion
7 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
The menu icons would be great - if they used color! Then you could actually get discernible iconography instead of tiny grey blotches.
Squircle jail is probably the standout dumbest decision about this whole thing.
There is not one single reason for them to do this and many, many against. OK I guess their one single reason is to force all icons to be the same so they can...tint them...and make them transparent. In other words, to further ruin them.
In a way this seems to be the monkey's paw wish we all had for more of Android's customization. Not like this...not like this...
After having used macOS and iOS for my entire adult life, I'm looking for the off ramps.
If I could use iMessage on Windows or Linux, I'd have switch away from macOS.
If I could use iMessage on Android, I would have tried to switch by now.
If I can convince my friend and family group to ditch iMessage, I'm gone.
I never understood why Americans love iMessage so much and are attached to it by the hip. It’s really a mediocre messaging app that isn’t even fit for SMS messaging, let alone modern. WhatsApp is far superior, but also Signal, Telegram, etc.
@Léo I guess it’s a network effect because iMessage really is terrible. All these years later, I’m still frequently having messages that never arrive, or arrive several days late, or that don’t sync between my devices.
@Léo: Partially momentum. You try to get 100+ people to switch platforms when you are the only person pushing it.
@Michael Tsai: 50% network effects and 50% parental controls options for my friend/family group. We have children in some of the group threads and it is literally impossible (at least as of a few months ago) for a parent to restrict who their children can be messaging on anything other than iMessage. At least on WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, and everything else I've looked at. Maybe you can do it with Facebook Messenger, but never looked into it as giving all the children Facebook accounts is a non-starter.
@Hammer: I'd love to, see the above comments. Difficult to impossible to get everyone to switch over for lots of reasons.
