I swear I don't usually complain about UI styling updates, because it's usually not a big deal - but this looks really, really bad [1]. It's less functional with bizarre transparency choices destroying legibility, and big rounded corners taking up more dead space. And stylistically, the layouts just look unbalanced and amateurish (It reminds me of what happens when I attempt to do CSS layouts). Most Linux desktops unironically look better than this.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/09/macos-26-tahoe-the-a...
It's ironic that Apple makes screen size incredibly expensive for every millimeter - and then designs UI which proceeds to waste that pricey real-estate as well as user time by burying options (or worse, simply removing many advanced user options "because they don't fit").
Same irony applies to storage
> Sequoia install used 21.6GB and a Tahoe install used 27.4GB, a nearly 6GB increase
6GB of absolute shit, as if that wasn't enough.
As a rule almost any UI redesign of just about any product in the last decade will increase padding and reduce information density. I don't know if it's because the average designer/user is getting older or large screens are more common so it seems like there's lots of room available thus it can be wasted.
Sadly, this often applies to Linux as well, so there's no escape. I guess Xfce is still around at least.
People tend to behave as they're treated, so treat them like toddlers and ruling them becomes a lot easier.
Wow. I know I’m not the first to say it, but it really does give me Windows Vista vibes. No bueno.
vista was pretty nice looking tbh (or, it was to me, especially the black ultimate edition with the frosted glass).
It just chugged like madness, the UAC dialogs were slow to fade in (and numerous) and the widgets and moving wallpaper was about 10y too early.
I was distinctly not happy with the control panel changes, but hindsight tells me that I should have been.
Vista made me jump ship to Linux on 2006, where I remained for a good 17 years.
Maybe I'm going to jump back to Linux because of this update.
It’s funny how different people saw things. UAC was hated back then but I was a Linux user primarily and when I bought my laptop I kept the Windows Vista while dual booting. UAC mostly made sense and worked like gksudo.
I remember saying so once and got flamed by people online because of course Microsoft didn’t copy this from Linux and of course gksudo was much better.
But the subjective experience I had was the same. IMHO the greatest victory with Electron has been that the OS wars have practically ended.
I see people making this comparison but as someone who used vista back in the day and someone who has been using all flavors of 26 for over a month now, it really bears no resemblance in UI or UX to vista at all.
I kind of think the people making this comparison are doing it off screenshots and not actual experience with the two operating systems.
Imagine if Steve saw this...
https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/tahoe...
Steve saw this and approved it...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f2/Apple_US...
The iMac mouse looks amazing though! Ergonomics, not too sure about those.
Right, so now everything is a fcking web page, great.
These are machines with SSDs with multiple GB/s of throughput and memory throughput of over 200GB/s. How it is even possible to load this slowly these icons ?
At some point "Premature optimization is the root of all evil" morphed into "optimization is evil". Your PR will always get shot down if it tries to improve perf by making code less clean. Imagine applying this handbrake to every single layer of every single thing running on your computer https://www.computerenhance.com/p/clean-code-horrible-perfor...
Seems like it takes the worst feature of React and moves it to the desktop.
Major throwback to icon rendering on the Amiga Workbench.
I had the same issue on first start, the icons had to load while I was scrolling.
my iphone 16 and m1 mac are much slower on this.
Think something is borked there. Mine doesn't do that.
Something is indeed borked: Apple's (lack of) QA, bug fixing, and attention to detail.
Windows Aero is back
Aero didn't have absurd padding. It made good use of texture, colour and shade. It actually looked quite appealing. We've been steadily downhill since.
Aero was peak HCI compared to this
Agreed. Very few UI's has surpassed Windows 7's Aero
oooh, nice burn ^^
Didnt vista try and do a similar thing when it came out, lots of "widgets" and transparency crap that felt cool then tacky after 2 minutes...
I'll give it a try, I installed the iOS and iPadOS betas and I actually like some of the changes.
But I do not understand how the color-tinted UI/icons ever got shipped. They just look... bad...
That’s just a psychological experiment to see how many people go through the standard: enable puke disable cycle.
I too fell for it.
I absolutely hate it. I guess we’ll probably get used to it but until then… gah ugliest MacOS ever?
Don't think of it as the ugliest MacOS ever, think of it as the most beautiful MacOS of the rest of your life.
Ugliest macOS... So far!
Hoping the next update is the iOS 8 to the iOS 7 redesign and then it'll be fine.
What's not to love about macOS Vista?
You'll get used to it.
I'd rather get used to Linux.
Do it.
So far the only thing bothering me so far is the way the tabs look (in Finder and Safari). And I did turn on the menu bar background.
Have the tabs in Finder always been slow to appear? Right now there is a noticeable delay from when I press cmd+tab to when tab animates itself into existence, reminds me of lag in windows 11.
For me it is very fast to appear. I am on a M3 MacBook Pro.
It seems instant to me?
I do dislike how toy-like the user interface looks, but I really hate how illegible notifications are on iPadOS. I had to turn on the reduce transparency setting so I could read the notification text against my lock screen wallpaper.
You've been disabled by Apple. There's no other way to characterize your (and my) need for an accessibility setting to make the OS usable.
You're just old, kids love this shit