The Fallen Apple

Old farts like me will rememeber the iBook G4, a marvel in repairability and sturdiness. I had that machine running well into the Intel era, replacing defective keyboards, worn out batteries and bugged drives all by myself. Today if look a Macbook wrong it may not boot anymore, even if you have an external drive, so... Yeah. I don't think the hardware is good enough anymore. It's pretty and fully featured, sure, but sturdy and reliable? I would want to use my expensive piece of hardware without having the fear of it breaking apart for no reason, specially with the outrageous repair prices that Apple bills. And Apple Care is just ransom, a "give us more money or else" type of business. Thanks, but no thanks.

Cargo cult is a good description and I think was one of the things that makes people have such a visceral reaction to Dye. Not only was he the one who proudly brought us this disaster, he kept quoting Steve Jobs while he was doing it. Almost literal insult to injury.

Also:

"Liquid Glass is the sort of folly that was once limited to portfolio pieces and fanciful blog posts, complete with clumsy attempts to replicate Apple’s style of marketing copy; pretty little animations that showed as much inexperience in UX as they did proficiency in Photoshop."

Ouch, this was brutal. The saddest thing to me is that I agree completely.

Tim Cook does not have an autographed copy of “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.“, does he.

The Apple dev community must reject Apple's asks instead of cooperating.

We know the issues and they're not getting fixed. There's no vision, no accountability, and no taste anymore. Apple's platforms and apps are about the level of quality if Comcast's IT team slopped them together.

- Stop mindlessly adopting WWDC announcements like summer assignments.
- Stop soying-out over all things Swift and new product colors.
- Stop wasting time trying to make Apple's stupidity like Liquid Ass or SwiftUI work.

Apple doesn't need to try when sheep devs race one another to the Slop Trough with every announcement for cheap good boy points.

"They're no longer our north star!" a corporation should have never been.

Going Indie means being independent of Apple.

"We are experiencing a period of great angst in the Apple community, and most of it is the result of Tim Cook’s leadership."

The community? The developer community maybe, and the developer community (and likely a very small segment of even that group) has always been WAY out of touch with what normal people, the ones mostly buying Apple products, think.

I've been a Mac developer for 30 plus years. I've shipped software through every major visual overhaul – Platinum, Aqua, the iOS 7 flat redesign, Yosemite vibrancy, and now Liquid Glass – and won MacEddys and Apple Design Awards while doing it. Every single one got the same apocalyptic reception from the commentariat, and every single one got ground into shape over subsequent releases. That's how this works. That's how it's always worked.

Liquid Glass has issues. Nobody's disputing that. But the hysterical tone of the current discourse is wildly disproportionate to what is ultimately a UI refinement cycle, and it's actively damaging the platform those of us who actually ship software depend on. Users who would otherwise be perfectly happy with Tahoe – which is the best Mac OS in a long time – are being told by people they trust that it's a catastrophe. That suppresses adoption and makes life harder for working developers.

What troubles me is the self-aggrandisement driving so much of this. There's genuine social capital in being seen to criticise Apple right now. It's the trendy position, and the Mastodon-to-podcast-to-Hacker-News pipeline lets a small group create the impression of universal consensus.

Gemmell writes well, but he's a novelist. He has never shipped a single piece of Mac or iOS software of note. Gruber carries on like he's some sort of doyen of design – have a look at his website, rooted firmly in the 1990s. Arment is a former Windows user who thinks his software is something special (see the episode of ATP where he genuinely believes he's going to win an Apple Design Award) but has really gotten where he is because of his mouth, and riding on the coat tails of Mr John Siracusa, not his craft. The florid prose comparing Liquid Glass to institutional rot and civilisational decline is absurd from people who have, at best, leeched off Apple's design chops rather than solving hard design problems in production code.

It's much easier to critique from the sidelines – and more profitable – than to ship something into the constraints of a real platform toolkit.

The Mac indie scene has always marketed itself as a warm community of craftspeople, but it functions as a clique. The criteria for being taken seriously have always been more about aesthetic signalling and social proximity to the right people than about the actual impact or technical depth of the software. Some of the most widely used Mac utilities in the history of the platform like BBEdit have never had the blog-circuit cachet of a pretty weather app.

Michael, as ever, is one of the few honest brokers in this space. But the chorus he's aggregating here is not the brave truth-telling it's being packaged as. It's narcissistic theatre.

@DD I sort of agree, but I don’t know why they always have to follow the same dumb pattern instead of refining more internally. I’ve been through all those visual overhauls, too, (installed Aaron to get Platinum sooner) and I just think Liquid Glass is on a different level. I’d love to hear what makes Tahoe so great.

It does feel like a dam has sort of broken in terms of criticizing Cook/Apple and even talking about switching platforms. I think this is more driven by politics (Trump as well as the antitrust stuff) than this year’s OS releases, specifically. Will there be consequences to the herd changing direction or is it just talk? With Mac OS X 10.0, it felt like the momentum was shifting (towards Apple) long before this was recognized outside the community; now it feels like the opposite may be starting to happen, or maybe it’s just a few loud voices.

I’ve never really understood the more delicious side of the Mac indie scene, instead gravitating towards workhorses like BBEdit (and, say, Omni’s apps) that are respected but don’t really get the buzz they deserve.

Funny, “narcissistic theatre” is what I called the most recent WWDC keynote.

Count me in on the side of the leeching peanut gallery, who see this for what it is.

@DD I think you're missing the point on the criticism of Liquid Glass, people have criticised the decorative style of macOS whenever it's changed - people like the familiar, and they have a right to have the familiar, because they paid for the software, but that's not the issue.

Most people will note that about the only UI style from Apple that had universal praise (at least I've never seen anyone say they didn't like it) was the ProKit style of Aperture / Final Cut / DVD Studio.

Tahoe isn't just a Rococo-vulgar decorative style that people can find distasteful; moreso than Yosemite with it's retina-searing whiteness, Tahoe is a decorative scheme that makes good *design* largely impossible, unless UI designers ignore every Apple guideline for it and go with custom everything via Qt or similar.

Worse still, following on from the changes introduced in Big Sur, Tahoe is an OS whose decorative scheme reaches its apotheosis in being designed for the paradigm of a VR headset and direct hand manipulation, with a large left-hand-grippable side bezel for the left column in windows that could be held in the hand, rather than a top-dominated full width toolbar that would cause a forearm to obscure the window's contents if grabbed.

It doesn't matter that there's never going to be a VR macOS, and the windows are never actually going to be grabbed by hand, Apple's "design" department (hardware as well) has long since become a cargo cult for other things they've seen (granted the entire Ive era was cargo-culting Dieter Rams, because Ive is a largely talentless cipher, who's done nothing of note without Jobs driving the editorial / curatorial process). Translucent VR style UIs are "cool" so Apple makes them.

I'd really like to see examples of what people think are Tahoe-style apps that are examples of good UI & UX design. I'm yet to see one, and working with complex "pro" apps every day for ~32 years now, I'm always looking for them.

I think people in US underestimate the dramatic break in Europe for trust in US. We are one small step away from universal grassroots boycott of anything having to do with your country. Unfortunately, the proverbial baby (decent people in US) will be thrown away along with the bath water.

"The community? The developer community maybe"

Read the Apple communities on Reddit. They're having daily meltdowns over Tahoe.

"But the hysterical tone of the current discourse is wildly disproportionate to what is ultimately a UI refinement cycle"

Why should anyone refine the UI if there is no criticism? Also, this clearly isn't like any of the previous cycles.

@DD - You've been at this longer than I have, but I do have a fairly decent collection of Mac hardware that I rescued and restored (some real gems - PMG4 Cube, Blueberry Studio Display, a Flower Power iMac G3!). I have 10.9 installed on a 2008 MacBook Pro, and have 10.4 and 10.6 installed on a 24" white iMac.

Every time I boot one of those systems up, it's just so obvious that we've regressed.

In the context of my eyes today:

10.4 looks and feels clean, but rudimentary - no QuickLook.
10.6 feels much more featured and shiny, full of affordances, very powerful and professional.
10.9 seems like it was the height of photorealism (and maybe UI in general) on Mac OS, slightly simplified from 10.6 - we came back down from space and reclaimed the wild terrains. The blue loading swoosh they did in this version of Safari's address bar is just exquisite!

In truth, Mac OS hasn't felt "right" to me since 10.10. I still use it and love it, but it just isn't "right."

Someone mentioned Apple's Pro Toolkit UI, but I am still SO SHOCKED at what I see in Server Admin, Workgroup Manager, even the older Airport Utility applications. They're PHENOMENAL - professional and beautiful, with legendary information architecture.

Open up Server Admin or Server Preferences, then go look at "System Settings" and ask yourself which you'd rather use. You know, and I know you know.

Even if only a relatively small minority complains, this is the canari in the coal mine, and the potential beginning of a reckoning for Apple. There is still time to turn the boat around (or: fly away, fly away, little canari!!), but some damage is done.

Jobs among other things was a marketing genius, trait d’union and ultimate decision maker. Cook publicly recognized that. Then tore down internal barriers to increase collaboration and foster collegial decisions. Steering a company the size of Apple was never easy. Let’s recognize it. Unfortunately decision by committee taken to the extreme leads to the outcome now plain for everyone to see.

Can we have Scott Forstall back now.

@Ben I was actually an Apple certified OSX Server admin back in the Tiger days, and when you compare the tools available then, or if I look at my VM'ed Snow Leopard Server install, what's very different is the old way of doing things was to provide the most sunlight possible, through UI, to the true nature of the way things worked. Tools exposed what they were adjusting, and why.

Your iPhoto library kept your files with their original names, in human readable year / month / day folders, etc. By looking at the UI, you could understand HOW things were being done behind the scenes.

Now the paradigm is black boxes, and you don't need to worry your head about it paternalism. Everything is abstracted to "intuitive" (to a group of multi-millionaires in a specific suburb of California) UIs that actively hide the true nature of what is happening, and for anything that can't be made "magical", tough luck, you have to use the command line.

Your photo library is now a locked directory, with files renamed into giant strings of random characters, as are half the directories in which your data is kept. You can't keep Podcasts on an external drive now, they're all on a secret internal folder in your system drive because Apple is putting DRM on them so they can offer paid subscriptions on their own Podcast service, etc.

For the most damning illustration of the "new way", look at pre-Big Sur macOS Finder window. Thin strip at the top with the window control widgets on the left, and then the whole width of the title bar for the window title. Below that, the whole width of the window for toolbar space. Below that, the space for Sidebar and Content area.

From Big Sur onwards your Sidebar goes to the full height of the window, but if you scroll it gets a top crease where it goes "behind" a little nub of titlebar (producing a stupid cross of the two halves of the title bar), then the right side the one titlebar space has to accommodate both the window title, and the space for toolbar items, so half the toolbar is empty in case the window title is long, and then your toolbar buttons are compacted into single drop menulet proxies, so instead of a singe click to change window mode from 4 icons, you have to click, then slalom a menulet, then click a selection.

"Move to non-US services and products wherever possible, such as those based in the EU."

Does Gemmel realize that there is a huge pression from the governments to break end to end encryption in Europe? That's probably the last thing you want to do.

At least some criticism I agree with, but a lot of the commentary and comments here lead me to ask -- do any of you use the primary alternative, Windows?

I split my time between Windows (75% of my work time) and Mac (25% of work, and 100% of my personal use) and that platform is a horror show. Office365 or whatever they want to call it this week gets pushed at every opportunity, to the point where they've apparently made a conscious UX decision that saving anything locally outside of OneDrive/SharePoint is going to be as irritating a flow as possible. Which might be less annoying if it was rock-solid reliable, but it's not, partly also because they obfuscate things a bit to hide the fact they're jamming your data into their cloud.

And Copilot? Yeah, that's getting crammed into every possible crevice too, whether it makes sense and is helpful or not. At least Siri isn't in my face non-stop, and if I do use Siri I'm not reminded on a regular basis that there's higher paid tiers of Siri that might be better, faster, etc.

Someone I think once referred to Microsoft as the great Xerox machine in Redmond and that's still true. Teams is a half-baked attempt to photo-copy Zoom and Slack but inferior to both -- and getting worse as more and more bloat gets added. (But hey, you can integrate Guul Gamespace, I'm sure that really pleased 2 or 3 people) Outlook is actively getting worse. SharePoint tries to pick up features from competitors but it's still painful to use. My employer (2nd largest private company in its field in the US) pays for all the Microsoft things -- and fights a constant battle of keeping whole teams from trying to quietly go do their own thing and subscribe to Dropbox, Slack, Smartsheet, etc., even though Microsoft products are "free" from the corporate mothership. It's all "free" and it's all so bad we've got mid-level managers willing to carve out chunks of their budget to pay for alternatives.

Also, people at the higher levels of management that have enough swing to dictate to IT what their personal device will be? The most common setup I've seen is an iPad Pro as their daily driver and a Windows laptop for that once-a-week or once-a-month thing that has to be on Windows.

And while that dumpsterfire is only intensifying, Apple... adjusts its UX and we're upset. Brothers, sisters, we got it good over here. It's not perfect, maybe Cook's successor will prioritize certain things differently, but we have to keep things in context. It could be worse. We could be running Windows 11.

@Wu Ming: I've never seen "trait d'union" before, and all that I can find when looking it up is that it means 'hyphen'. I'm curious what the metaphorical meaning is here? I'm always interested to add a new flourish to my vocabulary!

Thanks,
Ricky

> - Stop wasting time trying to make Apple's stupidity like Liquid Ass or SwiftUI work.

+1 .

>The Apple indie dev community is undergoing an identity crisis. For decades, whatever Apple said was good, was good. People mostly agreed with their ethics, design priorities, way of doing business.
>Now that all of that has, well, severely degraded, it leaves us in the dark. The north star is gone.

Right after the Codex app was released developers got a marketing email about doing "Agentic coding" inside Xcode. Feels like they are a bit nervous.. They want to keep everyone inside of Xcode and maintain control.

The endless "requirement" of rewriting stuff in Apple's new implementation of _insert_feature_here_ was wearing everyone out. Before WWDC felt like everyone was dreading it. What will I have to rewrite now? Combine that sourness with all these new tools (some of questionable value to be sure) and all this hype...and you got a population of devs ready to flock to cross-platform.

With AppKit and UIKit no longer being front and center, the notion that writing a native app produces higher quality software doesn't seem to be true anymore.

@Ricky: In a metaphorical sense it's a link or something that joins or connects. See sense 2 of the French definition at Wiktionary: https://fr-wiktionary-org.translate.goog/wiki/trait_d%E2%80%99union?_x_tr_sl=fr&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp

I've been an Apple user since my elementary school had IIe's and IIc's in every classroom. I've used a Mac since the day my parents brought home an SE/30 (still my favorite of any computer I've ever used, right above my TI 99/4A and the PowerMac G5 I bought when I started graduate school). I've also had to deal with myriad Windows versions, NeXTStep, Linux variants, and even OS/2 at once company I worked at for all of two weeks. I've been a UI/UX designer, web developer, video game artist, and now work as a librarian, a field not known for having great software products. All of that to point out that I've used a LOT of interfaces of many kinds over the last many decades, and I'll say this:

Tahoe and iOS 26 are just the absolute worst. Awful to use, worse to look at. I say this not as a developer or fanboy- I say this as a plain-old garden variety user. There's been a lot of moments in Apple history over the years that felt like maybe things weren't as smooth sailing as they could be- I still have a saved copy of the issue of Wired that proclaimed the death of Apple in 1997. But this is the first time where things really fell like they're going off the rails. I really take issue with dismissing the criticism of 26 as a trendy position being driven by some mythical minority of loud voices. Yes, previous UI overhauls have been criticized. Yes, they got better over time. But this smells different to an average user. There really is the feeling that something is deeply wrong, on more than just a surface level. Anecdotally, all of my friends and family who've made the "upgrades" to 26 are deeply regretting it, across the board.

The hardware is great. It's just too bad I'm seriously considering installing Linux on it to feel like I'm back in control of things.

Also, the point that Gemmell is making is that it's a shitty time to be an Apple CUSTOMER. As a longtime Apple customer™, I can't say I disagree with him, whether or not he's ever written a line of code. Between the half-baked OS to Cook palling around with the literal worst people on earth, it's making it really hard to justify why I continue using Apple stuff lately.

"Does Gemmel realize that there is a huge pression from the governments to break end to end encryption in Europe?"

Almost none of the services you already use are end-to-end encrypted. Do you think stuff like search engines, email providers, domain name registrars, maps, translation services, or most of the other services you use are in any way private or end-to-end encrypted?

@DD I’m not totally sold on the Overcast redesign, but I do think it’s a special app. I’ve tried Apple Podcasts and all the major indie ones and still think it’s the best. But, yes, it took more than writing code to get where he is.

@Fritz To be clear, Gemmell is a longtime developer—I remember him from the amazing GoLive CyberStudio as well as his personal Cocoa open source projects that I still see mentioned in various about boxes—who made a career change.

"Brothers, sisters, we got it good over here"

LOL, no.

Yes, Microsoft is giving Apple a run for its money when it comes to destroying its operating system. But that's a bit like getting punched in the face and being happy that you weren't also kicked in the balls.

Worse, Mac OS X is increasingly locked down, so while it's possible to take Windows 11 and turn it into a reasonably good OS, the same can't be said for Tahoe.

@DD, you have supposedly shipped “Apple design award” apps and say that Tahoe is the best macOS ever?

LOL.

I have been an Apple professional user for 35 years. The enshittification is real. You listed major visual overhauls. Every one of them since Aqua has brought regressions and made the experience worse. The only things that keep me with Apple are the mac mini and the know-how I have invested in the Mac (not even the MacBook does it for me anymore). As soon as Linux will have decent support for Apple hardware, I’m gone.

@Alexander: thank you!

“ At least some criticism I agree with, but a lot of the commentary and comments here lead me to ask -- do any of you use the primary alternative, Windows?”

I truly hate this tactic of mollifying criticism because it’s worse somewhere else. Yes, Windows is way worse. That’s part of the problem. As Apple’s software quality declines, there’s nowhere else to go unless you’re willing to take on Linux’s own headaches. Things being worse somewhere else does not mean we have it good over here. We *had* it good, and we’re losing our grip, and acting like we should be grateful that our daily computing lives are only a kitchen fire instead of a burned down house is just ludicrous.

@Ben and @Someone +1M! Classic AirPort Utility or ServerAdmin may have taken some getting used to, and I'm not saying there wasn't room for a "simplified" UI for those who needed it ("Server Preferences" was that UI for the server, of course, until it became the only UI), but there's no denying the beauty *and* the power of the full-featured UIs, which balanced both information density and convenience, and weren't (and didn't try to be) "black box" or "shoebox" interfaces where the entire model of the problem domain was encapsulated within the UI, and if simplification was deemed necessary, then it would be the model that would be simplified to match the UI, rather than making compromises to the UI and offering alternatives to those who really needed that power. That is the approach Windows has taken, and whatever you think of it it has largely worked, even for the largest enterprises. It is a real Shame that Apple's "consumerist" impulse has taken it to the bottom of the barrel, instead of the top. As I said in the recent DFU thread, Apple now holds power users in contempt.

@Fritz But I *liked* OS/2! Best design-by-committee OS ever.

@Plume and @Billyok +1 Better is not best and is not an endorsement. And, yes, Windows is simply more hackable. That is significant mitigation.

@ObjC4Life As Apple locks down their dev environment, MS opens it up further to CLI toolchains with WinAppCLI, so you don't need MSBuild to use all the current Windows API that require signing and app manifests. There is decent enough free competition to MSVC, which is now freely available for certain purposes even without Visual Studio. Not nirvana, to be sure, but striking, for all that.

@Someone,

“It doesn't matter that there's never going to be a VR macOS, and the windows are never actually going to be grabbed by hand”

Never say never. Imagine a pair of cheaper pair of VR glasses (w sensors) hooked up to your Mac or your iPhone. Remove the CPU from Apple Vision Pro and replace it with one of the many other CPUs that most of us have in our Phones, iPads, Macs. I think that starts to become quite interesting, and just as important, much cheaper.

@Ben,

“10.4 looks and feels clean, but rudimentary - no QuickLook.
10.6 feels much more featured and shiny, full of affordances, very powerful and professional.
10.9 seems like it was the height of photorealism (and maybe UI in general) on Mac OS, slightly simplified from 10.6 - we came back down from space and reclaimed the wild terrains. The blue loading swoosh they did in this version of Safari's address bar is just exquisite!”
[…]
“ In truth, Mac OS hasn't felt "right" to me since 10.10”

Just want to point out that even the Mac took several years after 10.0 to grow into itself… and Liquid Glass just came out. So perhaps we also need to give Liquid Glass a few years. I’m confident they’ll try to address the worst of the bugs, etc. but based on track record, will probably will stick with the new layouts for about 3-5 years (say, for Apple Music on Mac with play controls on the bottom now (please add a toggle to put it back on top)).

I think the question many of us are asking is: Why did they do this?

You know that saying: Skate to where the puck is headed? Well, we see where the direction of Apple’s puck… the next question we should ask is “why is it heading that direction?”. I’m not a betting person but speaking as a UI guy, there are some obvious possible things that Liquid Glass throughout all the platforms could be hinting at.

Re: access to original file names in photos libraries, etc.

Those were, for the most part, before iOS and Apple cloud sync that actually worked. I was on MobileMe and while revolutionary, it was also quite buggy. It’s probably a trade-off. Hide the complexity and make it work for more people, but lose being able to snoop around (and mess up) internal libraries and see original file names (exporting does re-create the original file name, so it’s not losing much). For the most part, I think Apple made the right decision.

Apple is un-afraid of putting us users (and developers) through some pain if there’s a long-term reason for it. People mock the ‘brave’ thing but they’re willing to take a hit (32-bit, Apple Maps) when they feel they need to. And at some level, that’s commendable. But Apple rarely does costly things on a whim.

At some level, we rely on hope and track record. Liquid Glass is… fine. It’s certainly a neat visual effect. I look forward to a few years from now once we’re used to it and it’s had time to mature.

Final thought: the best Windows UI was Windows 2000.

> Just want to point out that even the Mac took several years after 10.0 to grow into itself…

I think that if Lemay and de With and the rest of the new design team come up with something radically better within the next year or so, to breathe life back into interface design (that we've been void of since 10.10 - again imo), everyone will be more than willing to call Liquid Glass what it is. I'm just willing to call it now, because I've seen stronger work materialize on Dribbble.

> I think the question many of us are asking is: Why did they do this?

Partially borrowed from the AppleTV, but because Dye was apparently personally and heavily invested in VR.

@Michael
"I’m not totally sold on the Overcast redesign, but I do think it’s a special app. I’ve tried Apple Podcasts and all the major indie ones and still think it’s the best. But, yes, it took more than writing code to get where he is."

To me, it is Castro. I can't go back to Overcast now. The inbox system is far better than other podcast players sorting systems and unique.

> Almost none of the services you already use are end-to-end encrypted. Do you think stuff like search engines, email providers, domain name registrars, maps, translation services, or most of the other services you use are in any way private or end-to-end encrypted?

Fun call, then why is the EC pushing for laws spying at all communications if it's already doable today? In any case tell me what's better in Europe than in the US right now? In France, you can't even legally use encryption that the state can't break. France targeted GrapheneOS developers https://www.reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/1p5klu4/grapheneos_is_being_threatened_by_the_french/. And the list goes on...

But sure, let's all use European services so more private and safer.

"I think the question many of us are asking is: Why did they do this?"

I think we know. It's not 4D chess. They're incompetent.

"Fun call, then why is the EC pushing for laws spying at all communications if it's already doable today?"

Oh my god, why do people keep arguing against easily verifiable, obviously true facts? I realize we live in a post-truth world, but this is just getting stupid.

> Apple Music on Mac with play controls on the bottom

Wait WTF are you joking??

@Someone else Regarding the file layout, you’re presenting this as a tradeoff, that this is making it “work for more people,” but I don’t think that’s the case at all. It’s just lazy/sloppy design, with the potential benefit that maybe it took less time to code and test. (And from what I’ve seen, the Podcasts storage system is not actually more reliable, either.)

@Mr.Damien Castro is my second favorite. I’m jealous of the inbox system but didn’t prefer it in other respects.

@Michael, If the ‘potential benefit’ is that “it took less time to code and test”, then isn’t that a reasonable reason to change it? Again, I don’t think it was changed on a whim.

In particular, the old way iPhotos stored its library was arguably more fragile and prone to people messing around with it.

I don’t know what your experience was but I recall many days of finding missing files in iPhotos and haven’t had to do that in years. Maybe it’s because my photos are in the cloud. Maybe using hashes for filenames helps with storing files in the cloud (no namespace collisions).

Did I lose direct access to my photo files so I could… copy them out or Finder metadata-search them, I guess? Yes. Did I get more stability? Yes. If I were designing for the median user, I think I’d probably choose for more stability as well.

I think attributing changes like this to ‘lazy/sloppy design’ is unfair here, particularly the lazy part, since it clearly took a lot of work to change and I believe also killed off other apps like Aperture that relied on iPhotos’ library.

@Someone Else and @Michael I don't use Photos, though IIUC you can at least move the library to an external disk; that's not the case with either Books or Podcasts, incredibly. So yeah, ultimately I agree with Michael that this is just developer convenience over genuine regard for the user, their data, or their choices. Again, contempt for the power-user.

And what's the big deal with the inbox system adopted by Castro? Isn't this just deleting a podcast from a playlist view, so that when you play the playlist you get just the podcasts you want? In which case, Downcast can do that just fine.

@Someone else Less time to code is not the benefit that you originally claimed. In neither case were you supposed to mess with the files being managed by iPhoto/Photos, so this just sounds to me like arguing for security through obscurity. I think it’s UUIDs, not hashes. But just because the sync ID is a UUID doesn’t mean it has to be stored that way in the file system. Besides being inscrutable, it’s less robust and libraries can no longer really be reconstructed from on-disk metadata; it’s reliant on the cloud. You have the history backwards; they killed off Aperture and iPhoto and based the Photos library on the Aperture design. The Photos UUID storage system was a later rewrite. And I have not found it to be reliable.

> Liquid Glass has issues. Nobody's disputing that. But the hysterical tone of the current discourse is wildly disproportionate to what is ultimately a UI refinement cycle, and it's actively damaging the platform those of us who actually ship software depend on. Users who would otherwise be perfectly happy with Tahoe – which is the best Mac OS in a long time –

Man, I haven't laughed this hard in a while.

See, the trolling would have been more effective without that last blatantly ludicrous claim.

This is not 'another UI refinement cycle', because to have a UI refinement you need people who understand UIs in the first place and know how to refine them. From a UI perspective (but not exclusively limited to that), Mac OS 26 is the worst version of Mac OS in a very long time. And I've been using Macs since their screens were black & white.

@Sebby > you can at least move the library to an external disk

Yes and no. You can move the library to an external disk, but you can't set it as the system library which removes a lot of features.

@gildarts Ah, thanks, didn't realise that. Oh well, in that case the answer is clearly to buy more internal storage, at Apple's prices.

@Riccardo Mori TBF there *have* been new Tahoe additions well worth having, such as the new automation and Spotlight features. Not, as is usual now, with the requisite quality control, but still, if the last macOS to run on my Intel iMac had been Tahoe sans "Liquid Glass", I wouldn't be quite so sad.

@Michael, Timeline isn't the important part: Yes, Apple made changes that made iPhotos's private library less accessible to 'power users'… who weren't supposed to be messing with the library in the first place.

Is that really a loss worth complaining about? (for the record, I complained about it to myself, too, but in the big picture it's trivial)

Is it, as someone else said, 'contempt for power users'?

Is putting a stronger lock on an already locked door… contempt for the lock-picking-'power'-door-user?

You and I don't really know why Apple made those changes and if things actually made things more stable for everyone or what those changes enabled for Apple or for users — but I think we can make a few educated guesses why they did. In my mind, contempt isn't one of them.

Does Apple always make the right choice? No. Does it generally do so? I'd say they're pretty okay over the long term, with better results as we expand the time frame we're judging it by. Does it do things that don't make sense till later? Absolutely yes.

Does it typically make the right choice for 'power users'? I can't say — depends on the power user, I guess. Creative, programmer, scientist — but the Mac was supposed to be the computer for the rest of us.

Fun fact: Lots of kids nowadays don't understand file systems because they've never used them. It's likely fewer and fewer people will care about these things over the long term. I think John Gruber wrote something good recently about library-based vs document-based apps. Something to think about in the context of younger folks..

Finally for folks griping about 26 (and I count myself as one of them): Apple is doing way, way, way than it was doing 20 years ago. This 26 redesign probably makes things easier over the long term. Certainly a single design language across all platforms would help with that, even if it grates our sensibilities at first. It's refactoring, and things are inevitably lost during the initial refactor. Hopefully, though, this short-term pain makes for longer-term success, and this is but a single stop on a long train ride to a surprise but pre-planned destination. Crossed-fingers.

@Someone else I’m not the one who brought up “contempt,” and I’m certainly not going to argue about the emotional state of Apple engineers. I’m just saying that I think there were obvious losses (less ability to troubleshoot and recover data). Certainly Apple knew this. You, I guess, are assuming that it improved stability or had some other benefit that more than compensated, but with no specifics I don’t see anything further to discuss. Your reply, including wrt Liquid Glass, boils down to “trust Apple; they have a plan,” but I think recent history belies that.

@Michael,

“You, I guess, are assuming that it improved stability or had some other benefit that more than compensated, but with no specifics I don't see anything further to discuss.”

I mentioned it obliquely but I’ll call it out specifically now: pretty sure the new library switch had something to do with moving photos into the cloud. Prior to that, it was just recent-photo transfer. I think that was a VERY significant improvement for users.

Does that feature outweigh the loss of access to the original filenames on the Mac? Maybe not for some ‘power users’ but it absolutely did for this power user (points thumbs to self), and I bet also for millions of normal folks.

https://www.cnet.com/reviews/apple-photos-ios-preview/

I know you didn’t say ‘contempt’ but you did say ‘lazy/sloppy design’.

I can’t speak to the emotional state of Apple engineers either but building that was surely not easy. Definitely not lazy.

Yes, it comes back to trust. Trust seems like something I’ve been mentioning a lot lately, no? I think UI-wise, their recent history prior to 26 is ‘ok’. Better than okay, actually, though some Mac people may not agree. So I’m going to expect better-than-okay here as well.

Do they have a ‘PLAN’ in capital letters? I honestly don’t know. Did flat iOS have a plan? It was a style change and got them (and us) out of a design-style dead end. Maybe getting out of a dead end was the plan. So maybe the same thing is happening here.

I’m just willing to give it some time to play out.

Doing a visual overhaul like this is a significant undertaking and takes valuable hours from all software teams so the obvious question is why? And why now?

Apple often does well at solutions for large systems. This overhaul feels like a large-system thing to me.

Let’s maybe check-in again in about 4-5 years about how we all feel about Liquid Glass as users, designers, and programmers. By then MAYBE most of us will look at it like we now look at when iOS was flattened. A bump in the road. We’ll miss some old things but see our users are chugging along in the new style.

I do think that Apple is stretched too thin, though. So many services across so many platforms makes things difficult to build well, and easy for bugs and edge cases to multiply. It’s hard stuff.

@Someone else My point isn’t that they didn’t need to change the library format to support the cloud. It’s that they didn’t need to make the format opaque to support the cloud. So you can’t ascribe all the cloud benefits to that decision. I don’t see the user-visible benefit to making it opaque.

> Do they have a ‘PLAN’ in capital letters? I honestly don’t know. Did flat iOS have a plan? It was a style change and got them (and us) out of a design-style dead end. Maybe getting out of a dead end was the plan. So maybe the same thing is happening here.

See, the thing is, user interfaces of operating systems don't have to follow the logic of the fashion world. Consistency and predictability are more important than changing the look — and, worse, certain ways to interact with UI elements — every few years. Judging by the feedback I've received over the past years, regular users don't really complain about what certain pundits perceive as UI design stagnation. Instead, they complain when things change, and especially when they perceive the changes as arbitrary.

These complaints are often dismissed by tech enthusiasts with reactions like, "Oh, they'll get used to it", or "They should adapt. With this stuff, you either adapt or you're left behind". This *might* make a grain of sense when the UI visual refresh is accompanied by a series of objective improvements in how the system looks and works, otherwise forcing your customers and users to adapt to your yearly update cycle and your increasingly arbitrary changes is just stupid and needlessly hostile. People have to *work* with these machines. People have to interact with these UIs for hours every day. They need stability, predictability and (looking at you, Liquid Glass) *legibility*.

It's been a while that Apple hasn't focused on improving the quality of their software, or created new, useful Mac OS applications. In fact, they have removed a few utilities, made some existing ones worse, made their systems more like black boxes and harder to troubleshoot.

For the past few Mac OS iterations they've just sprinkled some new minor features here and there to justify the new Mac OS version number, and with Mac OS 26 they have toyed with the UI in childish ways, breaking what worked well just to give the environment a new coat of paint. Again, UI design for operating systems is not haute couture and should not be treated as such. But evidently Alan Dye thought he was the new Galliano.

> I’m just willing to give it some time to play out.

We should really, really stop cutting Apple some slack (well, all the slack).

> Doing a visual overhaul like this is a significant undertaking and takes valuable hours from all software teams so the obvious question is why? And why now?

I strongly suspect the answer to be disarmingly simple here: because they literally didn't know what else to do, and they felt they should do *something* to make their degrading software and OS look *fresh*. But, like many Hollywood plastic surgeries, this one too has turned out weird and wrong.

"Is putting a stronger lock on an already locked door… contempt for the lock-picking-'power'-door-user?"

I'm starting to think Someone else is parodying crazed Apple fanboys rather than actually being one.