It also immediately eats 5% of the raw compute on my RTX 4080 Super, which is more than a dozen tabs in chrome and 3 active youtube videos running, run in each of Chrome, Firefox, Edge-- all combined, which was 3% before loading this page (which is 5% on its own) up to 9% total.
That explains my other comment, which speculated the snow as the cause for my iPhone instantly overheating, followed by screen-dimming throttling.
Also: this is not a plea to stop putting snow/etc on pages. I miss the days of such things in earlier internet. I'd trade back janky plugins and Flash player crashes for the humanizing & personalized touch many sites had back then.
Hot take: The snowflakes are fun and when blogs integrate fun things they make me feel joy like when I was throwing marquee elements all over my geocities site in grade school. In an era where most of the content I read is written by AI, the more personal a blog feels to me, the better.
Is there a reason Apple can’t focus on system improvements instead of constantly tweaking with their UI so thoroughly every couple years? I don’t disagree the OS UI needs to be revamped periodically, but it seems they do it too often.
Sorry, even though I agree with your piece, the incredible irony of writing about bad design decisions while having fucking snow flying past the text I'm trying to read is just too much...
[edit] I just discovered the snow icon, which does turn off the snow but turns the background into bright yellow. Oh and the other icon which turns your cursor into a ...spotlight? On an otherwise black page? Do I have that right? Which one of those things was a design decision that enhanced usability, or readability, or... anything at all? These choices can best be described as sophomoric. You can disagree with menu icons, but they at least in theory serve a purpose. What purpose is served by any of the gizmos on this site?
I suppose I wouldn't mind much either way, apart from the misaligned text maybe now that you brought my attention to it.
I agree that colors could help.
Don't hesitate to give KDE/Qt a try, it apparently happens to get all these things right according to this article from a quick glance: everything is correctly aligned, even when in the same menu some items both have an icon and a checkbox, and some don't have anything; icons are mostly meaningful, some icons are colored (most are monochrome though, there's a move to this), and not all items have icons.
I guess it's the kind of things that are hard to get right for a hobby OS like macOS that lacks professional UX designers. :-)
It is incredible just how widely held the view is that Win2k (or XP in classic mode) was close to peak desktop UI. (Contenders also being Tiger to Snow Leopard and Windows 7).
A key problem is that big US corps have always had a product design mentality that can produce monstrosities like your average cable TV remote and think it is in any way a good solution. That was clearly already an influence on things like XP.
Classic Mac OS' Platinum is also a contender for pre-2000 peaks. I actually never grew up with a Mac, my first one ran Tiger when I was in high school. But over the years I have collected rare or interesting Macs of yore, from before my time and come to adore Platinum and the classic Finder.
I was somewhat buying the article until I got to the monstrosity that is the “Special mention”, at which point I flipped to completely agreeing. That really is atrocious.
I never disliked an OS as much as I dislike what Apple is doing with MacOS (and iOS by extension). I've been with MacOS for 20 years, but I've switched at home to Linux full time 2 years ago and I don't regret it. At work I'm forced to be on MacOS. It's concerning how Apple doesn't care anymore about user needs, usability, design and consistency. Where it was the best OS in the past for me, it's not anymore. Other OSes are better suited for where I'm at in my life.
Low quality, inconsistent software is a result of a lack of standards, QA, internal communication and rigged corporate processes that are serving the private interests of managers trying to satisfy the board, not the users.
This is a symptom of no strong leadership that's capable of enforcing standards, Apple downslide as a whole firm where departments and people are fighting each other for resources.
This isn't the only aspect of Tahoe that seems amateurishly designed by someone following "wrong rules", the wrong rule here being "for consistency, let's assign an icon to every action.
Another wrong rules I've seen blindly followed is making everything an edge-to-edge canvas, so that the sidebar floats on top. Having a full-window canvas with floating sidebars can make sense for applications where content is expansive and inherently spatial (like say, Figma) or applications where the sidebar is an actual floating element that can be moved around (like Photoshop once was).
It doesn't make sense in Finder, or Reminders, where the content is ultimately just a list. Forcing the sidebar "to float on top of the content" yields no benefit because the content wont ever scroll under it, and because it can't be moved anyway, but it does lead to wasted space, that ugly "double border", etc.
The article starts with this: > Sequoia → Tahoe It’s bad
And I look at the image... And I like it? I agree with the author that it could be better, but most of the icons (new, open recent, close, save, duplicate, print, share etc), do make it easier, faster and more pleasant for my brain to parse the menu vs no icons.
Again, I don't disagree that you could do it better, I just disagree with the premise that the 1992 manual is "the authority". Display density has increased dramatically; people use their computers more and have been accustomed to those interfaces, which makes the relationship of the people with the interfaces different. Quoting a 1992 guideline on interfaces in 2026 feels like quoting the greeks on philosophy while ignoring our understandings of the world since then.
At this point I'm just hoping Cook (who bears ultimate responsibility) or Ternus will see the error of his ways, but I'm not holding my breath. I doubt they understand what's wrong with this or that they even know about the HIG.
It seems like Apple's hardware design is universally loved with much acclaim, why is their software getting progressively worse?
It's not Microsoft-add-all-the-bloatware-and-adverts-we-can worse, but it's 20-year-old-operating-systems-were-better-designed worse.
We're getting to a point where I think Linux windowing systems like KDE are better designed. And it seems that all they had to do was not change much over the span of a few decades.
Or am I out of touch? It feels like I could use a computer better back when XP was the mainstay.
> It seems like Apple's hardware design is universally loved.
To be fair, the bar is really really low in terms of mobile hardware. It’s just really hard (and expensive) for new players to design, build and manufacture hardware with competitive processing power.
It used to be the opposite! From the end of the PowerPC era throughout most of the Intel era, the Mac OS X was the main selling point, while the hardware was slow, overpriced and overheating (they've had some nice touches like MagSafe and "ears" on power supplies for the cable, but that didn't make up for everything else).
People used to build hackintoshes to get Mac OS X without paying Apple's RAM tax or suffer having mid-range laptop GPUs in the top-of-the-line desktops.
Apple's outstanding success with their ARM chips is more of an exception than the rule.
Looking at the old Microsoft menu gave me a pang of nostalgia for what we lost. It was so clear and readable. The icons were clearly colored and so easy to understand.
I think the key issue with macOS is that they don't seem to have someone who is looking at the whole ecosystem holistically to make sure that there's consistency and integration across experiences. You probably have development silos for different applications and they don't really integrate with each other. There should really be a role like Integration Emperor that exists outside of the traditional corporate hierarchy who can go to different teams to push for increased consistency.
275 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 118 ms ] threadThat explains my other comment, which speculated the snow as the cause for my iPhone instantly overheating, followed by screen-dimming throttling.
Also: this is not a plea to stop putting snow/etc on pages. I miss the days of such things in earlier internet. I'd trade back janky plugins and Flash player crashes for the humanizing & personalized touch many sites had back then.
Do you not realize that the stakes are different between that and a whole OS?
That snowflakes were the author’s preference? That’s too much madness for one day.
It's chock full of old screenshots from a variety of old desktops.
[edit] I just discovered the snow icon, which does turn off the snow but turns the background into bright yellow. Oh and the other icon which turns your cursor into a ...spotlight? On an otherwise black page? Do I have that right? Which one of those things was a design decision that enhanced usability, or readability, or... anything at all? These choices can best be described as sophomoric. You can disagree with menu icons, but they at least in theory serve a purpose. What purpose is served by any of the gizmos on this site?
I agree that colors could help.
Don't hesitate to give KDE/Qt a try, it apparently happens to get all these things right according to this article from a quick glance: everything is correctly aligned, even when in the same menu some items both have an icon and a checkbox, and some don't have anything; icons are mostly meaningful, some icons are colored (most are monochrome though, there's a move to this), and not all items have icons.
I guess it's the kind of things that are hard to get right for a hobby OS like macOS that lacks professional UX designers. :-)
A key problem is that big US corps have always had a product design mentality that can produce monstrosities like your average cable TV remote and think it is in any way a good solution. That was clearly already an influence on things like XP.
This is a symptom of no strong leadership that's capable of enforcing standards, Apple downslide as a whole firm where departments and people are fighting each other for resources.
This is a bad sign for design at Apple. It suggests a fundamental lack of attention to detail that would have been harder to imagine a few years ago.
What's driving it?
Still, my primary OS is Linux, but for laptops I prefer macOS, and it's still in acceptable shape.
However, I'll agree that Tahoe has far more papercuts than its predecessors. It needs a "Snow Tahoe" version.
Another wrong rules I've seen blindly followed is making everything an edge-to-edge canvas, so that the sidebar floats on top. Having a full-window canvas with floating sidebars can make sense for applications where content is expansive and inherently spatial (like say, Figma) or applications where the sidebar is an actual floating element that can be moved around (like Photoshop once was).
It doesn't make sense in Finder, or Reminders, where the content is ultimately just a list. Forcing the sidebar "to float on top of the content" yields no benefit because the content wont ever scroll under it, and because it can't be moved anyway, but it does lead to wasted space, that ugly "double border", etc.
The article starts with this: > Sequoia → Tahoe It’s bad
And I look at the image... And I like it? I agree with the author that it could be better, but most of the icons (new, open recent, close, save, duplicate, print, share etc), do make it easier, faster and more pleasant for my brain to parse the menu vs no icons.
Again, I don't disagree that you could do it better, I just disagree with the premise that the 1992 manual is "the authority". Display density has increased dramatically; people use their computers more and have been accustomed to those interfaces, which makes the relationship of the people with the interfaces different. Quoting a 1992 guideline on interfaces in 2026 feels like quoting the greeks on philosophy while ignoring our understandings of the world since then.
It's not Microsoft-add-all-the-bloatware-and-adverts-we-can worse, but it's 20-year-old-operating-systems-were-better-designed worse.
We're getting to a point where I think Linux windowing systems like KDE are better designed. And it seems that all they had to do was not change much over the span of a few decades.
Or am I out of touch? It feels like I could use a computer better back when XP was the mainstay.
To be fair, the bar is really really low in terms of mobile hardware. It’s just really hard (and expensive) for new players to design, build and manufacture hardware with competitive processing power.
People used to build hackintoshes to get Mac OS X without paying Apple's RAM tax or suffer having mid-range laptop GPUs in the top-of-the-line desktops.
Apple's outstanding success with their ARM chips is more of an exception than the rule.
I think the key issue with macOS is that they don't seem to have someone who is looking at the whole ecosystem holistically to make sure that there's consistency and integration across experiences. You probably have development silos for different applications and they don't really integrate with each other. There should really be a role like Integration Emperor that exists outside of the traditional corporate hierarchy who can go to different teams to push for increased consistency.