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Tell HN: Apple Broke Fitts' Law in Tahoe

38 points by dmd ↗ HN
In every MacOS version - all the way back to the Lisa, even - items on the menu bar could be reached by clicking on the very first row of pixels on the screen. ("Rule of the infinite edges". - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law )

In Tahoe, they broke that for 3rd party menu bar icons (and some Apple ones) See video: https://shot.3e.org/ss-20250918_074040.mp4

This worked fine until Tahoe.

It gets stranger, though - this is only broken if the menu bar is light-colored. That means it's broken if Reduce Transparency is turned on - OR if it's off, but you're using a very light (white or light gray) colored desktop background.

This isn't just the canary in a coal mine. The miners are dead. The mine has collapsed.

8 comments

[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 32.1 ms ] thread
PaulHoule
I switched my iPhone and iPad to iOS 26. Talk about amateur hour. They took something which was refined and industry leading and turned it into... meh.

Of course the competition is the folks who made the logo for their OS a trash can and are oblivious to what that means. That's how they can get away with it.

JustExAWS
Liquid Glass is butt ass ugly true enough. But the iPad finally having real windows after 15 years is a god send.

It is the first OS version that made my iPad Air 3 (released in 2019 with an A12 processor) feel slightly sluggish. But I could see using it with a Bluetooth key used and mouse without hating myself.

I’m waiting for my wife to get back to see how it feels on her current generation M3 13 inch iPad Air.

hu3
About infinite edges, on Windows I can mindlessly drag cursor to the top-right of the screen and click to close current window. Bottom-right edge means minimize all windows. Bottom-left click opens menu if you left the Windows button there).

This reduces cognitive load when operating the mouse. I miss that on macOS.

mcc1ane
> on Windows I can mindlessly drag cursor to the top-right of the screen and click to close current window. ...

Try that with GOG Galaxy (it's app-dependent).

hedora
Not sure what the name pf the law is, but OS X and later broke the UI for anyone with a working spatial memory.

I’m not surprised they’ve also broken the pointer for anyone using a trackpad or mouse.

wpm
I don't believe that a lot of the people designing Liquid Glass even know what Fitt's Law is, or why it matters, or why it should be respected.
dylan-m
Pedantry time: Fitts' Law is a law in the same sense as Newton's Law. Fitts' Law is an established model for understanding how humans interact with objects. If you're jumping on a trampoline, you aren't breaking the law of gravity, but you're certainly using it to some effect.

Similarly, if you decide that your button positioned at the edge of the screen actually shouldn't be an infinitely long click target, you aren't breaking Fitts' Law. You might be doing it with Fitts' Law in mind, or not, but Paul Fitts' ghost isn't waiting in the shadows to prosecute small buttons. Some actions should be difficult!

With that said, they definitely screwed up here, but I don't like when we're like "but Fitts' Law" and act like that proves our point on its own. If they wanted, they could "Fitts' Law" right back at you.

leakycap
I've been an Apple user since the 1990s – Tahoe broke my willingness to keep using their desktop OS.

There are too many aggressive regressions for power users over recent versions of Apple software, and now Tahoe is broken in every way.

I miss the days of System 7, but Apple didn't really lose it until sometime around iWork 13. Looking at what they had in iWork 09 and what came as a release 4 years later was shocking and it hasn't changed directions since.