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There is so much of that in modern apple. Clear issues caused by a seemingly bright idea, but the idea still pushed forward no matter what.

One example that I hate on iOS: the notification/lockscreen curtain is supposed to cover the content as it slides down. That’s what a curtain does, this has been the language for years. Now the curtain is transparent, so it can’t cover the content behind. How does the content disappear then, as you slide the curtain down?

… it doesn’t. Icons do a buggy looking animation crashing toward the user and through the screen, and if it’s an app there is just no transition. You can check by sliding the curtain down slowly and then letting go.

The thing which killed me is this is one of the things Windows 10 got _right_ (well, took the path of least resistance) with square corners which made screen grabs look good/work more easily --- I run a utility to get them back in Windows 11 (and have seriously contemplated investigating if removing the glass from my laptop screen and scraping away the paint which obscures the corners is an option to get those pixels back....)

Used to be this sort of thing "just worked" on Mac OS --- you'd think with a diminishing number of UI tool kits/dev tools this sort of thing would get better/more consistent.... always liked "Themes" and this just gives me one more reason to wish that they would come back.

Are the Apple-owned app windows inconsistent too? I see some inconsistencies but it's generally 3rd party apps mixed with Apple's apps.

“Calm down, Postalcoder. We can vent tonight on our blog”

for the life of my I can't understand why y'all care so much about this. This is what bad software is? The corner radii are slightly off? Doesn't that seem a bit... particular?

Agreed.

A better solution would be to adjust the sizing/placement of the window controls (and allow the hit area to include the original placement maybe?).

Here's a Finder window screenshot from Mac OS X 10.0 Cheetah: https://512pixels.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/10-0-Cheeta...

Notice two things:

1) The window chrome with traffic lights and title is entirely separate from the toolbar, not unified with the toolbar.

2) The top of the window is rounded, but the bottom of the window is not!

I think the old design was superior for several reasons, one of which is that it made the windows much easier to drag around the screen. In any case, though, even if there's an argument about concentricity and window controls, it makes no sense that the bottom of the window has the same corner radius as the top when the toolbar is only at the top.

In hindsight, 90s through 2000s, I think we were coming up in an era of consistent UX refinement and improvement that we took for granted, and that improvement got nailed by mobile transitions (first to phone then to pad and now to AR). MS missed the web, then missed the phone. Apple surpassed them on the desktop but they also made the golden goose (iPhone), pulling focus and consistency away.

I assume it’ll rectify in the vast future, but it’s weird to see regressions in core areas because the new hotness has made it so that these gigantic-corps can’t walk and chew gum at the same time.

I really hope they roll back some of the more obnoxious and pointless aspects of "Liquid Glass" in macOS 27. And the super-rounded window corners are high up on my list. Looks childish, wastes screen space, causes so many little annoyances...

> ever since the "iOS-ify everything" zeitgeist took root

That started in 2010, a bit more than 5-10 years.

What is godawful about it? Tahoe is great. Spotlight shortcuts, LLM actions. “Design is how it works.”

I've started using Linux recently after not touching a desktop distro for 20-odd years, and I was surprised how good both Gnome and KDE look these days.

It certainly doesn't feel like there's a trillion-dollar-company difference between those two and Tahoe.

I am in the same boat. I would like to buy a new m5, but being forced to keep Tahoe is preventing me to get it until they fix this clusterfuck

Beautiful, it’s nice, but the polished user experience was the ultimate argument.

- Raising the lid of the laptop and the base wouldn’t stick and fall off on the desk,

- A single-button click,

- A Cmd+C to copy and Ctrl+C for the interruption 7 in the terminal,

But now you have to configure that, yes, activate the right-click; yes, activate the three-finger click (wtf, 3 fingers); yes, activate the swipe-across-desktops on the magic mouse, all those items were selling points, so they should have studied the best behavior and implemented it by default on all deployments. But that requires studies, aesthetics, and a taste that only Steeve Jobs had, otherwise everything becomes an option. That’s right, I’m going to paraphrase Jobs’ argument against the 1990ies Microsoft:

The problem with Apple is they have no taste.

That's a pretty extreme take. I've been using the Mac since about 2001. I like Tahoe and a well designed Tahoe app can look really nice on the platform. There are bugs, inconsistencies and other issues, but it doesn't feel that different than many previous macOS / OS X releases

i hope you're wrong. they certainly have seemed to test the waters on many other fronts. the $99/yr notarization fee is now basically required as running unnotarized apps is made hard and scary enough to turn off probably 97% of average users

they also briefly took away the ability to disable gatekeeper per terminal command (now back)

next they wanna launch a touchscreen macbook, presumably this fall

I think they have the pathway to merge it right now. But it will cannibalize their sales so they dont want to do that.

>one almost verbatim same radius which pissed off apple

So this is what they decided to do? Use so many different rounded radius variations that competitors don't know which one to copy?

> The rounded corners is such a key element of apple design.

See Windows 11.

It's annoying, sure, but it's not worth disabling SIP.

I'm seeing a lot of comments here about macOS/iOS unification, but I think people are getting worked up about nothing.

What do macOS window styles have to do with iOS? iOS (mostly) doesn't have windows!

What does the MacBook Neo have to do with iOS, other than coincidentally using some of the same components? Maybe Apple decided to make a cheaper Mac because they thought people might want to buy a cheaper Mac.

They are trying to use a common design language across all their devices, sure. But you would hardly expect them to do the opposite! They might try to make a hybrid tablet/laptop or something at some point, sure, but none of their current moves point inevitably in that direction. Except maybe for software notarization, but that has nothing to do with window corners or cheaper laptops.

Puzzle and Calculator were Desk Accessories (DAs), a special kind of app.

Some cool details here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desk_accessory

Like Tahoe, it was deliberate and there's an explanation for the difference.

But I do wonder if people at the time felt the same way.

“Well actually” in System 1 and later Classic macOS the puzzle and the calculator are ”Desk Accessories” that is applications that can run simultaneously as other apps, even though the operating system does not support multitasking. The rounded corners are there to distinguish them from the current running application.

I bought a 3k M3 Max mbp just a couple months away from the Tahoe and liquid glass announcement which I am a little miffed about, but it's still an awesome machine I enjoy using while it's on Sequoia. I am really hoping macOS 27 will be this decade's Snow Leopard

Wow, you’re leaving a lot of great features like Spotlight shortcut calling, Spotlight clipboard history, and LLM shortcuts on the table because of a couple UI inconsistencies. “Design is how it works.”

Because that's by design. The windows are meant to have different corner radius, they even explained it at WWDC. Then people forgot and rediscovered it again, like it was some new thing.

I am not saying that it's a good idea to have different corner radius, just that it's nothing new.

I'm starting to suspect most people at Apple (and Microsoft) just spend time in a browser these days and so they don't notice how the desktop has gone shitty.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47320534

Priorities on what tickets to work on, and Apple being proudly underresourced.

Yep, it’s just ugly IMO

Because they did it on purpose to demonstrate their utter contempt for their users and to show us how wrong we are.

It's by design. This isn't a bug or a skipped test case.

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2025/310/?time=4...

> Each element is designed with a curvature that sits neatly within the corner radius of its container, in this case the window itself. And this relationship goes both ways. In the new design system, windows now have a softer, more generous corner radius, which varies based on the style of window. Windows with toolbars now use a larger radius, which is designed to wrap concentrically around the glass toolbar elements, scaling to match the size of the toolbar. Titlebar-only windows retain a smaller corner radius, wrapping compactly around the window controls. These larger corners provide a softer feel and elegant concentricity to the window but they can also clip content that sits close to the edge of the window.

Did the radius need changing

How does that argument work?

All iPhones since the iPhone X (2017), and not the iPhone SE line, has an OLED display. iPad Pro also has OLED.

If it is that crucial, they should add a few pixels of margin around the entire desktop, and randomly shift everything around. Doing only corners and not straight edges, and doing it by a fixed per-app amount, seems a bit silly.

is there a reason to downvote this?

So… the moment the Interface Designer in XCode can identify the app only has a single button at the center of a window, the window should be a circle? :)

I suppose that's subjective, because to me it looks distracting and tacky. I want the window chrome to be present, opinionated, yet consistent and plain. This is one of the many Tahoe-isms that violates the latter two. It's visual noise that detracts from one of the most basic utilities of the UI, which is to simply hold my applications in a regular, cohesive, predictable manner.

Maybe it shouldn't irritate me, but it's the first time I've encountered it in 30 years. I'm all for change and trying new things, but this doesn't feel like progress.

It is intentional - it was explained at WWDC. And it looks good.