Usually I like Apple’s OS updates but Tahoe is absolutely awful from the glass to the noddy sizing of everything. MacOS does not have to harmonise with VisionOS at all and it’s been a disaster for macOS to try.
Maybe it looks better on a nicer monitor or something. To me there's nothing terribly broken about the Tahoe UI, but it's clearly rushed because there are a ton of weird little things that just look off.
The dock is suppose to look like the icons float in a class panel, but the reflections in the glass look pixilated and the effect isn't there. The dock icons are centred in the dock, but the activity indicator on the "glass" pane make it look like they're not.
In the control panel, and other windows with a left panel, it's clear that the window curve and the panel curve aren't the same and the transparency of the panel makes it even more clear. I don't understand why some panels can be transparent, but other parts of the window isn't. There's no reason for the transparency.
The Tahoe looks like Gnome theme from 2005, it's interesting, sort of pretty, but the details makes it clear that the authors doesn't quite have the skills to perfect it.
Apple have been slacking in the UI quality control department in the past few years. I have similar issues on my iPhone SE, Apple (and app authors) clearly doesn't test on this phone, because UI elements frequently overlap.
Also I'm still annoyed about the control panel being ported over from iOS. You can't find anything and the window can't even be made wider.
> looking at older versions of MacOS just looks old fashioned
It’s an operating system, not a dress to parade around on a catwalk. I don’t want it to be fashionable and change with the seasons, I want it to be usable and intuitive. And yes, it should look good (which Tahoe doesn’t) but to the extent that it makes usability better, never in detriment of it.
I've always been "pro-change" for UIs, as opposed to the bunch of people in the "bring the old UI back" camp, but Tahoe looked like fecal matter from the moment it was introduced.
On iOS it's manageable with reduced transparency, but on macOS it's just so awful I won't upgrade.
So I’ve enabled reduced transparency and all the other accessibility settings I can find to remove the terribleness.
The UI is now mono-coloured gray and looks like MacOS back in the days before OS X was a thing - but it’s still better than what Apple “envisioned” with Tahoe.
I'm sure this is true, and that there will always be a (likely disproportionately) loud group of complainers, many of whom will forget about their complaints. I haven't really publicly complained about Tahoe before, and I don't intend on whining about it again. But...
It's fine. I'm not going to rail about how it's unusable, or say that it makes me want to gouge out my eyes, or whatever. But it's enough to dissuade me from ever wanting to buy another Mac, if I have the option of using a desktop Linux system.
That's a pretty big caveat. But those curved window borders and the rounded widgets in e.g. the settings menu are kind of awful. Not unusable. But every time I open a terminal and I deal with the choice of either having obscene padding around my content or seeing a few pixels of my prompt's corners shaved off, I get just a little more irritated, and a little less likely to pick up my Macbook the next time I'm deciding which device to use.
Good UI for tools, physical or digitial, should reduce the friction between picking it up and using it for something, that's the problem at the core of design. With the small caveat that sometimes technically good but perhaps unethical design solves stupid business problems well, like deliberately making chairs uncomfortable to keep traffic moving through a busy cafe, or making anti-homeless benches, design should not dissuade you from using something you purchased to solve other problems; it's unprincipled.
That's actually a problem with Tahoe, it is not something new and bold, it's old-fashioned. Transparency already has come and gone as a UI fad, and it doesn't really make any big difference if you throw computationally expensive effects at it.
I got a Mac mini and was very positively surprised that it still ran the older version. I can use the size setting I'm comfortable with in the display menu. When I use Tahoe, I need to make the setting smaller to have a reasonable amount of apps open, but then it's uncomfortable to read.
They'll do what they always do, it'll be the greatest thing ever just getting minor tweaks for 3-4 releases and then will be superseded by the greatest thing ever.
I’d even say pipe dream of just Apple commentators and pundits. I’ve yet to hear from a normal, real-life Mac user who legitimately wishes for a touchscreen MacBook.
Sorry to break your streak but I'm a "real-life Mac user who legitimately wishes for a touchscreen MacBook", but maybe you may argue that I'm holding it wrong and my wish is illegitimate :)
Nope, no bad faith here, I’d genuinely like to hear your use cases for the touchscreen.
I just hope you could exclude speculative new interfaces and gestures in future macOS that straight-up cannot be done with a mouse. In which case, yeah, the TouchBook would be degrading the experience for me and a huge portion of Mac users, thus making me sad.
I just don't want to switch to an ipad when I want to sketch something. Also some tagging interfaces for photo review work exceptionally well with a touch screen. So I don't want to carry a macbook pro and and ipad, long story short.
> I just hope you could exclude speculative new interfaces and gestures in future macOS that straight-up cannot be done with a mouse
I agree 100%. I'm already annoyed about how some stuff that's easy to do with a touchpad are straight-up broken with a normal mouse.
A kid raised on an animal sounds toy keyboard might also expect the computer to go “moo” when pressing the “M” key, but that doesn’t mean Apple should build that in. Expectations from previous platforms sometimes don’t fit others, and can be unlearned.
A lot of the controls are unreadable depending on the background behind it, for example. Which is crazy. Sometimes it's also hard to figure out if something is a control, part of a site/application, a visual bug, or something else.
They've even doubled down on it, I don't see this going away in the next 2 major OS versions. I expect them to have a lot of WWDC sessions about it again this year.
That said, Apple's own apps are a crazy mixed up mess of different design systems and technologies, so maybe it will all fall apart and something new comes along in ±3 years time.
Just swap to Linux if you don’t have a true reason to stay on Mac. I flipped last April and man, it is wonderful. Bazzite boot, no windows partition or anything. It just works.
Plus I have a 2016 MBpro I keep around in case I absolutely need a Mac (rare). Usually it’s an old drive formatted for Mac and I don’t feel like futzing around with software that allows it to read on my main computer.
I kinda want a new mac because the hardware looks so ... performant. But I can't bear this tahoe glass bullshit, every screenshot I see of it looks terrible. I just don't get what Apple's play is here.
My Tahoe issue was that when I shared screen with zoom I used to have some weird bug where the screenshare had issues. It was fixed in the last 2 updates. Either a tahoe issue or a zoom issue but you'd think that they'd have a beta program to fix such issues in the testing phase.
I use Linux at home and MacOS at work; I am quite fond of every visual change in Tahoe with sole the exception of the obscenely large radius rounded window corners which make no sense on a rectangular screen and make resizing windows a relatively slow and arduous task. I really wish they could be disabled.
I've used Linux at home for 20+ years, and sometimes mac at work.
To be honest I struggle to notice many changes, my machine was already configured the way I liked it and at work I basically live in only four applications:
Firefox for personal-browsing, chrome for work-browsing, terminal for running terraform, git, etc, and emacs for all development work.
Sure resizing is less good, but I do that once a day, in the morning, when I login. The rest of the changes I just don't notice or care about.
I was really happy when they added the pictures! Dyslexia, the icons are 100% faster for me, I don't use those menus often enough to know what is in there word wise, but I can read the icons super fast.
The problem isn't just the icons but the inconsistency. This link mentioned in the source article illustrates it well: https://tonsky.me/blog/tahoe-icons/
For a company that used to pride itself on its clean and consistent UI, this is really shoddy work. It feels like Microsoft now, every app designed by a different team and nobody coordinating together.
And this would have been a really minor job to coordinate properly. It probably would have saved time in fact having predefined icons for common functions. Now theres been 8 designers working on a different icon for the same function. It seems just complete disinterest in consistency. "Just do whatever" is not the apple way.
A lot of the examples in here, I can't find? Like, I looked around for the new smart folder with the cog icon, where is it on my mac? Same with save as check, where is that? Also I'm pretty sure (although I can't find it) the save as with the up arrow is save as out to something? The ones I do find, all make perfect sense and work pretty well for me, they're not totally perfect but I'd never thought about them much before this post and I use them almost exclusively. Look at all his new for example, see new finder window? Look at the box around it, then open your window menu at the top of your screen, see how minimize has the same box around it? If you go though those icons set, most of them have: primary, secondary and sometimes tertiary visual clues. I dunno, I read that blog post and it doesn't really jive with me. I'm sure they could stand to clean it up a bit, I don't know I'm not a designer, but I'm certainly glad they are there!!! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
New Smart Folder with a cogwheel icon is in the File menu of Notes.app, while New Smart Folder with a folder+cogwheel icon is in the File menu of Finder.app.
Thanks! I don't use the notes app, cog is not the best icon for that but I suppose it's differentiated from the file system version, if I read them both the same I might be confused, but not sure why they selected cog!!!
A lot of those icon examples are being rather disingenuous. Some of the icon symbol changes amongst the various apps are justified because the actions being represented are different despite using the same English word. Take the "New" icon example. Adding a new reminder is not the same thing conceptually as creating a new note.
Yeah I agree, this would be ideal, I actually thought this post was pretty funny because I couldn't imagine anyone wanting them off, and I suppose some people think it's funny I like them. :)
I would argue this is only true when the image is apt. In Tahoe I don't think this is always true. The lack of consistency in layout and presence of icons is also visually difficult to process. The signal to noise ratio of the icon gutter is very poor.
I like it in theory but the execution seems more harmful than helpful so far. If I'm wrong and it's helping some people, that's great.
It depends on the images. Processing a dozen of very similar-looking small gray blobs isn’t fast. Recognizing the text labels is faster for many people. The text labels also have visual structure within a menu by their different lengths that the icons don’t.
I use my Mac for film scoring and music production, so I have a long-standing practice of keeping my operating system one major version behind for stability reasons. If you want to do the same and at the same time avoid those annoying Tahoe update notifications then simply enable beta updates for OS 15 in settings. I don’t imagine I’ll ever update to Tahoe because I dislike the UI so much but honestly OS 15 is rock solid and it looks great, I’d be very happy sticking with it until EOL for this machine.
With all these commandline and registry hacks to make macOS and Windows bearable, why not use Linux? You will also have to use the commandline if you want total customizability, but at least the OS doesn't actively fight you.
That was not my experience with Linux in the slightest. I used various distros for many years, and it eventually became just a waste of time. I got fed up with trying to play whack-a-mole with fixing driver issues.
It has been some years though, so maybe things have improved in this regard. However, I felt like using Linux as my daily driver served as an outlet for procrastination when my time would have been better solved working on the tasks I needed the OS for in the first place.
Yeah, I was wondering (I haven't updated, patiently waiting for the next major). But here's a great piece about them: https://tonsky.me/blog/tahoe-icons/
Does anybody know a good solution of bringing "file labels" (color coding files) back to being more than just adjacent circular dabs — i.e. the previous behavior where the selected-color would illuminate behind the entirety of filename.text?
Not sure I'd call myself a fan, but I was an engineer on the Xcode team for a decade. The answer to your question about coupling is "ease of testing and coherence".
Prior to Apple, I was a senior engineer on the dev tools team at Microsoft. We did the same exact thing wrt full-release testing and vendor hardware.
I'm not saying I agree with the way either company handles coupling, lock-in, etc. but if you don't think that the Windows UI is coupled to ring-0 you don't understand how it works.
Spectacular! I haven't played minesweeper in many many years.... learned that the Mac trackpad has very inconsistent right-click detection. Frustrating!
I’d like to know what rules you use to prevent Tahoe updates while allowing Sequoia updates. It would be quite useful to me, and I guess, to others here who use Little Snitch.
I don't even have any special handling set and haven't had any Tahoe prompts beyond maybe the first one. I often forget that I'm not on the latest anymore.
I still miss launchpad.
Which is made worse by the fact the spotlight has become terrible.
Safari is unusable due to some weird sync that happens whenever I open a new window ( i dont use tabs) and adding bookmarks takes about 10-15 seconds.
Please Apple, help? Apple seem to have lost their cultish drive to satisfy UI obsessive like me who often didn't even know what we wanted until they gave it to us. Now, we know what we want, but Apple can't give it to us.
Now that Dye is gone, I still hold out hope that Apple will change direction and start fixing their UI. But that fact that it got this bad in the first place implies things are seriously broken at a senior leadership level.
I blame apple for making me run an old macOS version because I don't want to look at this ugly mess they've created.
I've been running macOS since 2008, and unless they manage to turn things around, my next laptop won't be an apple.
> unless they manage to turn things around, my next laptop won't be an apple.
Meh. I ran Linux on a PowerBook back in the day, because Apple made the best hardware and behind-the-times software, before deciding that Mac OS X was "Unix with decent office software" and wholesale switching. I'm fine going back to FVWM on a MacBook if macOS 27 is as bad as 26.
> I really dislike Apple’s choice to clutter macOS Tahoe’s menus with icons.
> It makes menus hard to scan
I disagree, I like them, and I'm glad there's an option
With billions of users, it doesn't make sense to offer just one style for everything for everyone, like all the OSes are these days. Hell the Switch and Switch 2 still doesn't have much options beyond Bright/Dark mode.
The only actual solution is customizability; let users fuck themselves up however they want, but always leave a quick "Reset to Defaults" panic button within reach :)
Usually I like Apple’s OS updates but Tahoe is absolutely awful from the glass to the noddy sizing of everything. MacOS does not have to harmonise with VisionOS at all and it’s been a disaster for macOS to try.
Maybe it looks better on a nicer monitor or something. To me there's nothing terribly broken about the Tahoe UI, but it's clearly rushed because there are a ton of weird little things that just look off.
The dock is suppose to look like the icons float in a class panel, but the reflections in the glass look pixilated and the effect isn't there. The dock icons are centred in the dock, but the activity indicator on the "glass" pane make it look like they're not.
In the control panel, and other windows with a left panel, it's clear that the window curve and the panel curve aren't the same and the transparency of the panel makes it even more clear. I don't understand why some panels can be transparent, but other parts of the window isn't. There's no reason for the transparency.
The Tahoe looks like Gnome theme from 2005, it's interesting, sort of pretty, but the details makes it clear that the authors doesn't quite have the skills to perfect it.
Apple have been slacking in the UI quality control department in the past few years. I have similar issues on my iPhone SE, Apple (and app authors) clearly doesn't test on this phone, because UI elements frequently overlap.
Also I'm still annoyed about the control panel being ported over from iOS. You can't find anything and the window can't even be made wider.
Tahoe's UI looks like a generic, "futuristic-like", user-created theme for KDE circa 2009.
The only missing thing are wobbly windows and a cube desktop switcher.
(Yes, I know, don’t give them ideas.)
Like the cube user switcher in MacOS?
Oh, yeah, I completely forgot about that. No multi-user Macs in the house anymore.
I don't know, I always see this pattern with iOS or MacOS releases. Everyone piles on at the time.
I've actually quite enjoyed some design changes in Tahoe, and looking at older versions of MacOS just looks old fashioned once you're used to them.
Almost every update I'm skeptical at first and then after a while I see a screenshot of the old UI and think "how did I ever use that?"
Tahoe I've been using since it came out and every time I see a screenshot of prior versions I think "wow it used to look so much better"
Yeah, there was a post recently about how window chrome changed over the years and the Tahoe era does not make me recognize Apple anymore:
https://pxlnv.com/blog/window-chrome-of-our-discontent/
The usability of older versions was so much better. Tahoe is a huge regression, making everything look like one big drab.
(Though Big Sur already entered the path of monochromatic toolbar icons, etc.)
It’s a shame, because their hardware has improved significantly since Jony Ive left.
> Everyone piles on at the time.
Not this much, they don’t.
> looking at older versions of MacOS just looks old fashioned
It’s an operating system, not a dress to parade around on a catwalk. I don’t want it to be fashionable and change with the seasons, I want it to be usable and intuitive. And yes, it should look good (which Tahoe doesn’t) but to the extent that it makes usability better, never in detriment of it.
I've always been "pro-change" for UIs, as opposed to the bunch of people in the "bring the old UI back" camp, but Tahoe looked like fecal matter from the moment it was introduced.
On iOS it's manageable with reduced transparency, but on macOS it's just so awful I won't upgrade.
I was forced to upgrade at work.
So I’ve enabled reduced transparency and all the other accessibility settings I can find to remove the terribleness.
The UI is now mono-coloured gray and looks like MacOS back in the days before OS X was a thing - but it’s still better than what Apple “envisioned” with Tahoe.
I'm sure this is true, and that there will always be a (likely disproportionately) loud group of complainers, many of whom will forget about their complaints. I haven't really publicly complained about Tahoe before, and I don't intend on whining about it again. But...
It's fine. I'm not going to rail about how it's unusable, or say that it makes me want to gouge out my eyes, or whatever. But it's enough to dissuade me from ever wanting to buy another Mac, if I have the option of using a desktop Linux system.
That's a pretty big caveat. But those curved window borders and the rounded widgets in e.g. the settings menu are kind of awful. Not unusable. But every time I open a terminal and I deal with the choice of either having obscene padding around my content or seeing a few pixels of my prompt's corners shaved off, I get just a little more irritated, and a little less likely to pick up my Macbook the next time I'm deciding which device to use.
Good UI for tools, physical or digitial, should reduce the friction between picking it up and using it for something, that's the problem at the core of design. With the small caveat that sometimes technically good but perhaps unethical design solves stupid business problems well, like deliberately making chairs uncomfortable to keep traffic moving through a busy cafe, or making anti-homeless benches, design should not dissuade you from using something you purchased to solve other problems; it's unprincipled.
That's actually a problem with Tahoe, it is not something new and bold, it's old-fashioned. Transparency already has come and gone as a UI fad, and it doesn't really make any big difference if you throw computationally expensive effects at it.
I got a Mac mini and was very positively surprised that it still ran the older version. I can use the size setting I'm comfortable with in the display menu. When I use Tahoe, I need to make the setting smaller to have a reasonable amount of apps open, but then it's uncomfortable to read.
I agree. Tahoe is disgustingly unusable; I'm happy that Alan Dye left Apple.
I hope Apple will backtrack on Liquid Glass after Tahoe. Otherwise, I'll just switch to Linux.
Steve Lemay, who now replaced Alan Dye as the design lead, allegedly was a driving force behind Liquid Glass and deeply involved in its development, so I wouldn’t expect any reversal. (https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/15/ios-27-macos-27-no-majo...)
They will likely tweak it but very unlikely that they’ll remove it altogether, especially with the upcoming touch screen MacBook Pro.
Companies like Apple typically don’t make reversals quickly (the butterfly keyboard took years to remedy).
They'll do what they always do, it'll be the greatest thing ever just getting minor tweaks for 3-4 releases and then will be superseded by the greatest thing ever.
Your "upcoming" touch MacBook Pro has been a pipe dream of apple consumers for 2 decades now
I’d even say pipe dream of just Apple commentators and pundits. I’ve yet to hear from a normal, real-life Mac user who legitimately wishes for a touchscreen MacBook.
Sorry to break your streak but I'm a "real-life Mac user who legitimately wishes for a touchscreen MacBook", but maybe you may argue that I'm holding it wrong and my wish is illegitimate :)
Nope, no bad faith here, I’d genuinely like to hear your use cases for the touchscreen.
I just hope you could exclude speculative new interfaces and gestures in future macOS that straight-up cannot be done with a mouse. In which case, yeah, the TouchBook would be degrading the experience for me and a huge portion of Mac users, thus making me sad.
I just don't want to switch to an ipad when I want to sketch something. Also some tagging interfaces for photo review work exceptionally well with a touch screen. So I don't want to carry a macbook pro and and ipad, long story short.
> I just hope you could exclude speculative new interfaces and gestures in future macOS that straight-up cannot be done with a mouse
I agree 100%. I'm already annoyed about how some stuff that's easy to do with a touchpad are straight-up broken with a normal mouse.
Kids raised on iPads totally try and touch three laptop screen, ah it's not all Internet pundits who want one.
A kid raised on an animal sounds toy keyboard might also expect the computer to go “moo” when pressing the “M” key, but that doesn’t mean Apple should build that in. Expectations from previous platforms sometimes don’t fit others, and can be unlearned.
> disgustingly unusable
Any specifics in mind? I, personally, haven't noticed much, beyond the initial difficulty in resizing windows.
A lot of the controls are unreadable depending on the background behind it, for example. Which is crazy. Sometimes it's also hard to figure out if something is a control, part of a site/application, a visual bug, or something else.
They've even doubled down on it, I don't see this going away in the next 2 major OS versions. I expect them to have a lot of WWDC sessions about it again this year.
That said, Apple's own apps are a crazy mixed up mess of different design systems and technologies, so maybe it will all fall apart and something new comes along in ±3 years time.
Why would they backtrack? Alan Dye wasn't the only person at Apple pushing this with God-like powers overriding everyone's decisions. [1]
New head of design, surprise surprise: Apple's new software design chief, Steve Lemay, was "a driving force" behind Liquid Glass and was "deeply involved in its development." https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/15/ios-27-macos-27-no-majo...
[1] I have small rant about this pervasive view here: https://dmitriid.com/the-curious-case-of-alan-dye
Will you really switch?
There are so many other wonderful reasons to switch beyond “my current OS has a few issues”.
And it’s not as if Linux is without issues either.
I mean if Linux was “SO GREAT” why are you bothering with an inferior OS now. Just switch already.
Just swap to Linux if you don’t have a true reason to stay on Mac. I flipped last April and man, it is wonderful. Bazzite boot, no windows partition or anything. It just works.
Plus I have a 2016 MBpro I keep around in case I absolutely need a Mac (rare). Usually it’s an old drive formatted for Mac and I don’t feel like futzing around with software that allows it to read on my main computer.
> Tahoe is disgustingly unusable
I think Tahoe looks pretty good all things considered. Maybe fix just a few little minor UI issues and it'd be perfect to me.
I kinda want a new mac because the hardware looks so ... performant. But I can't bear this tahoe glass bullshit, every screenshot I see of it looks terrible. I just don't get what Apple's play is here.
Apple fired the head of UX after Tahoe. Apple didn’t know what Apple’s play was.
The new guy is very well respected and hopefully back off of glass.
'The new guy' is one of the driving forces behind Apple Glass....
My Tahoe issue was that when I shared screen with zoom I used to have some weird bug where the screenshare had issues. It was fixed in the last 2 updates. Either a tahoe issue or a zoom issue but you'd think that they'd have a beta program to fix such issues in the testing phase.
I use Linux at home and MacOS at work; I am quite fond of every visual change in Tahoe with sole the exception of the obscenely large radius rounded window corners which make no sense on a rectangular screen and make resizing windows a relatively slow and arduous task. I really wish they could be disabled.
I've used Linux at home for 20+ years, and sometimes mac at work.
To be honest I struggle to notice many changes, my machine was already configured the way I liked it and at work I basically live in only four applications:
Firefox for personal-browsing, chrome for work-browsing, terminal for running terraform, git, etc, and emacs for all development work.
Sure resizing is less good, but I do that once a day, in the morning, when I login. The rest of the changes I just don't notice or care about.
arguably rounded corners have been an apple brand-image thing for a long time, like the icons on ios.
I kind of wonder if this is like overdoing your watch logo stuff like in this article: https://paulgraham.com/brandage.html
I was really happy when they added the pictures! Dyslexia, the icons are 100% faster for me, I don't use those menus often enough to know what is in there word wise, but I can read the icons super fast.
The problem isn't just the icons but the inconsistency. This link mentioned in the source article illustrates it well: https://tonsky.me/blog/tahoe-icons/
For a company that used to pride itself on its clean and consistent UI, this is really shoddy work. It feels like Microsoft now, every app designed by a different team and nobody coordinating together.
And this would have been a really minor job to coordinate properly. It probably would have saved time in fact having predefined icons for common functions. Now theres been 8 designers working on a different icon for the same function. It seems just complete disinterest in consistency. "Just do whatever" is not the apple way.
How can you read the icons if they mean different things in different apps?
Can you provide some examples of this? In my experience, they're quite consistent.
Here's an in-depth analysis (also linked in the OP): https://tonsky.me/blog/tahoe-icons/
A lot of the examples in here, I can't find? Like, I looked around for the new smart folder with the cog icon, where is it on my mac? Same with save as check, where is that? Also I'm pretty sure (although I can't find it) the save as with the up arrow is save as out to something? The ones I do find, all make perfect sense and work pretty well for me, they're not totally perfect but I'd never thought about them much before this post and I use them almost exclusively. Look at all his new for example, see new finder window? Look at the box around it, then open your window menu at the top of your screen, see how minimize has the same box around it? If you go though those icons set, most of them have: primary, secondary and sometimes tertiary visual clues. I dunno, I read that blog post and it doesn't really jive with me. I'm sure they could stand to clean it up a bit, I don't know I'm not a designer, but I'm certainly glad they are there!!! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
New Smart Folder with a cogwheel icon is in the File menu of Notes.app, while New Smart Folder with a folder+cogwheel icon is in the File menu of Finder.app.
Thanks! I don't use the notes app, cog is not the best icon for that but I suppose it's differentiated from the file system version, if I read them both the same I might be confused, but not sure why they selected cog!!!
Yeah should be an accessibility setting for the few users who need it
https://tonsky.me/blog/tahoe-icons/ (second section on consistency)
The later examples are pretty wild, 3 different ‘minimize’ icons? Why? Different teams?
This guy is doing free design work/critique for Apple
A lot of those icon examples are being rather disingenuous. Some of the icon symbol changes amongst the various apps are justified because the actions being represented are different despite using the same English word. Take the "New" icon example. Adding a new reminder is not the same thing conceptually as creating a new note.
So it should be an accessibility setting. I don't mind if the default is on or off.
Yeah I agree, this would be ideal, I actually thought this post was pretty funny because I couldn't imagine anyone wanting them off, and I suppose some people think it's funny I like them. :)
In article we discuss has a link to this article: https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2025/icons-in-menus/ Which has a good paragraph with an example:
--- start quote ---
Get a bunch of people in a room, show them menus where the textual labels are gone, and see who can get the most right.
--- end quote ---
Icons won't help you when they are inconsistent, or don't mean anything.
It's impossible to find a suitable visual metaphor for every possible action of every possible app and cram it into a tiny monochrome icon.
It shouldn’t even be just you and others with dyslexia either.
Processing images is always faster than processing text for everyone.
I would argue this is only true when the image is apt. In Tahoe I don't think this is always true. The lack of consistency in layout and presence of icons is also visually difficult to process. The signal to noise ratio of the icon gutter is very poor.
I like it in theory but the execution seems more harmful than helpful so far. If I'm wrong and it's helping some people, that's great.
It depends on the images. Processing a dozen of very similar-looking small gray blobs isn’t fast. Recognizing the text labels is faster for many people. The text labels also have visual structure within a menu by their different lengths that the icons don’t.
I use my Mac for film scoring and music production, so I have a long-standing practice of keeping my operating system one major version behind for stability reasons. If you want to do the same and at the same time avoid those annoying Tahoe update notifications then simply enable beta updates for OS 15 in settings. I don’t imagine I’ll ever update to Tahoe because I dislike the UI so much but honestly OS 15 is rock solid and it looks great, I’d be very happy sticking with it until EOL for this machine.
With all these commandline and registry hacks to make macOS and Windows bearable, why not use Linux? You will also have to use the commandline if you want total customizability, but at least the OS doesn't actively fight you.
> at least the OS doesn't actively fight you.
That was not my experience with Linux in the slightest. I used various distros for many years, and it eventually became just a waste of time. I got fed up with trying to play whack-a-mole with fixing driver issues.
It has been some years though, so maybe things have improved in this regard. However, I felt like using Linux as my daily driver served as an outlet for procrastination when my time would have been better solved working on the tasks I needed the OS for in the first place.
No screenshot? Dunno what’s all about. What menu?
Yeah, I was wondering (I haven't updated, patiently waiting for the next major). But here's a great piece about them: https://tonsky.me/blog/tahoe-icons/
If you read beyond just the headline, you can see a description of the problem with a bunch of links in literally the first paragraph of the article.
And if you run the command you can see that there's still lots of icons in menus
Oh, thank you for posting this. Just ran the Terminal command and it’s a vast improvement.
I just want brushed metal Aqua with Lucida Grande back. Seems to be too much to ask for.
Does anybody know a good solution of bringing "file labels" (color coding files) back to being more than just adjacent circular dabs — i.e. the previous behavior where the selected-color would illuminate behind the entirety of filename.text?
Something to think about for Apple fans:
Why should OS presentation be tightly coupled to kernel version?
Or why should it even be coupled to the vendor of the hardware?
And you can ask the same question about content filters, app stores, ...
Not sure I'd call myself a fan, but I was an engineer on the Xcode team for a decade. The answer to your question about coupling is "ease of testing and coherence".
Prior to Apple, I was a senior engineer on the dev tools team at Microsoft. We did the same exact thing wrt full-release testing and vendor hardware.
I'm not saying I agree with the way either company handles coupling, lock-in, etc. but if you don't think that the Windows UI is coupled to ring-0 you don't understand how it works.
nobody actually likes it, it's just macos is still the least terrible to use option
Spectacular! I haven't played minesweeper in many many years.... learned that the Mac trackpad has very inconsistent right-click detection. Frustrating!
What option do I use if I want to disable the icons only in some cases?
"apps will respect this change after relaunching" ...? I'm not seeing that happen. restart required?
I guess, this means logging out as the current user and logging in again, so that the various services are relaunched with changed settings.
Currently I’m blocking the Tahoe updates with Little Snitch. If that becomes untenable I’ll just run Sequoia in a VM.
I’d like to know what rules you use to prevent Tahoe updates while allowing Sequoia updates. It would be quite useful to me, and I guess, to others here who use Little Snitch.
Just enable the Sequoia developer/beta channel. You won’t see other updates then.
I setup a do not disturb to run all day everyday. I have not had a notification to update to Tahoe in over a month.
I don't even have any special handling set and haven't had any Tahoe prompts beyond maybe the first one. I often forget that I'm not on the latest anymore.
With all “auto updates” off I was getting a notification at least once a day.
After a good decade of Mac Tahoe made me go back to Linux + tiling WM for my main machine. I just could not stand the awful mess anymore.
Result? inner peace. It is so calm here, and everything is so familiar and fast.
And the MBP hardware seems to be getting shittier too :/ have trackpad issues on both my latest personal and work M4 MBPs.
I strongly disagree. Tahoe is horrible but Mac hardware is terrific. Have you seen a Neo?
I think Apple is hitting it out of the park (falling behind in many other areas)
They're referring to reliability btw
Window management on OSX/macOS cost me so much time of my life, still the hardware and overall experience is pretty nice.
Great. Thank you for sharing this tip!
Source: https://mastodon.social/@stroughtonsmith/116262411548746327 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47468034)
I haven’t upgraded yet but seeing this is a surprise, Apple seems to go hard on Accessibility yet there’s really no toggle for this??
I still miss launchpad. Which is made worse by the fact the spotlight has become terrible.
Safari is unusable due to some weird sync that happens whenever I open a new window ( i dont use tabs) and adding bookmarks takes about 10-15 seconds.
Please Apple, help? Apple seem to have lost their cultish drive to satisfy UI obsessive like me who often didn't even know what we wanted until they gave it to us. Now, we know what we want, but Apple can't give it to us.
As much as I resisted it, I switched to Alfred years ago and I don't see myself switching back anytime soon.
Related:
It's hard to justify Tahoe icons
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46497712
it's as if the icons get added by a lazy LLM prompt during CI
Which is probably exactly what happened. Reportedly Apple is all-in on Claude across the board.
Nah, blaming AI is too easy. It's more likely that Apple's design culture got rotted out under Alan Dye https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job
Now that Dye is gone, I still hold out hope that Apple will change direction and start fixing their UI. But that fact that it got this bad in the first place implies things are seriously broken at a senior leadership level.
What makes you think that things aren't bad under him?
Great now just need the same for the window corners and ridiculous Finder overlays.
Exactly.
I blame apple for making me run an old macOS version because I don't want to look at this ugly mess they've created. I've been running macOS since 2008, and unless they manage to turn things around, my next laptop won't be an apple.
I agree. I also tried Tahoe, and reverted back to Sequoia right away.
Either Apple is going to turn things around, or I'm done with Apple for good.
> unless they manage to turn things around, my next laptop won't be an apple.
Meh. I ran Linux on a PowerBook back in the day, because Apple made the best hardware and behind-the-times software, before deciding that Mac OS X was "Unix with decent office software" and wholesale switching. I'm fine going back to FVWM on a MacBook if macOS 27 is as bad as 26.
I just stopped using Finder all together.
Bloom is a fairly cheap one-time purchase and infinitely more capable.
https://bloomapp.club/
Nice, except it doesn't work in Safari. Some are hidden in the Edit menu but most are still there.
I never noticed the icons were even there until I read this.
> I really dislike Apple’s choice to clutter macOS Tahoe’s menus with icons.
> It makes menus hard to scan
I disagree, I like them, and I'm glad there's an option
With billions of users, it doesn't make sense to offer just one style for everything for everyone, like all the OSes are these days. Hell the Switch and Switch 2 still doesn't have much options beyond Bright/Dark mode.
The only actual solution is customizability; let users fuck themselves up however they want, but always leave a quick "Reset to Defaults" panic button within reach :)
There's actually a built in way to remove them in settings. System Settings -> Menu Bar.
You can uncheck or drag items around in the menu bar and group some inside of the menu bar control (and even create new menu bar controls).
I wish you could add third party apps to them, maybe that'll be next. But it's nice you can hide any apps icon right there.
This is for the icons in the drop-down menus, not the icons in the menu bar.
This is not what the article is about though?
It could have used a screen shot.
Read Tonsky for that. https://tonsky.me/blog/tahoe-icons/ a disgrace. https://tonsky.me/blog/tahoe-icons/writing_direction@2x.webp...
This is disgusting. Like, I'm using macOS but just seeing this standalone makes me cringe.