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I see you point, but I think that Jobs not per se held Apple together. This is Tim Cook doing as well and arguably on a way larger scale.

The one thing that distinguished Jobs from the rest ever since is the fact, that he was Apple's greatest fan boy. If you have a look at the Itunes introduction, Jobs sits there and for around 2 hours showcases every feature and function. He was so into the product, that this keynote is for me the most nerdy ever conducted by him.

The others as well always show him being the company's No 1 fan and host of every feature there is.

Imagine to have a boss like this. He set the standard for product development in every regard.

And this is what slipped. Consistency is lacking and according to biographies about Cook, he has a very huge focus on him as a person. This is always wrong. It is about the product, nothing else.

There will never be a Jobs again. And it is getting worse from here: the old guard is mostly gone. Even the myth of Steve Jobs is nothing Gen Z cares about.

We live in the Post-Jobs phase and Cook seems to be overshadowing Jobs, as sad as this is. All innovations except the headphones date back to Jobs. All the scale that Apple reached to Cook.

I bet Jobs would rather have a way smaller scale with great products. This luxury lifestyle is nothing Jobs liked.

Sad, but true.

I think these buttons weren't too responsive for about three major MacOS versions

The "Liquid Glass" button slowness on macOS is tolerable (coz I can really point at the center of a button with the mouse pointer) compared to the same problem on iOS 26. I have to literally tap several times on core system UI elements like navigation bar left and right buttons for the touches to register, this is Bad.

Agreed, I've blocked all notifications for years. Maybe it got worse recently, but I thought they were annoying since at least Big Sur.

Also went from one click to two clicks

The notification buttons have always felt a little squishy and unresponsive since they were added. They’re terrible.

I disagree as it shows a fundamental flaw in terms of separation of concerns that's probably manifest throughout the operating system.

Or to stay it another way, if we see shit like this then we know the whole thing is a hack.

I think it is more like the newest incarnation of sub-optimal user experience decisions. 20 years ago, their system was great for the time. However, nowadays it feels like a system that has been developed over time by different people with different concepts in mind.

Currently, MacOS has the worst window management compared to Windows and (all) the Linux desktop environments. I mean, where else do you have such problems with resizing windows or just switching between windows, not to mention the inconsistent feature sets when you want to work with virtual desktops...

It's not the biggest flaw, there are plenty others, but it does seem to be universally disliked.

For example, there is not much you could do to Finder to make it worse.

> If the biggest flaw of a OS is the border radius of its windows, you've got yourself a pretty decent OS!

This argument would also make Windows 11 a pretty decent OS by extension via "If the biggest flaw of a OS is the position of the start menu you've got yourself a pretty decent OS".

In general I could use any minor nuisance as a proof of decency - or inject some to form this argument on purpose as a manufacturer.

People don't like if their environment changes in minor unsolicited ways. There's always gonna be fuzz about these things and that means that the fuzz itself can't be used to make any strong argument whatsoever.

I was thinking the same thing. I actually agree with most of the complaints people have made about the corners, but it seems so small compared with literally every interaction I have with Windows.

As someone who works on Windows, Mac, and Linux; Windows stands alone in my opinion as the "stepping on legos with no socks on" of operating systems.

The biggest flaw is that the system is opinionated, so you cannot change anything you dislike.

The border radius would be less jarring if the UI was actually designed for it. But it just cuts off elements like the scrollbar, which looks quite janky.

Or maybe people focus on corners because it’s one of the few visible things they can actually complain about — the real issues are harder to pin down.

It is just the most obvious, macOS is a death by thousands cuts

On the other hand the fact that it sometimes makes it hard to resize windows means that it breaks something that Apple operating systems have been capable of doing without issue for nearly 45 years.

Yeah "notorious inconsistency issues in windows corners" almost feels like an oxymoron to me. Perhaps it is notorious among graphic designers, but I'm sure the vast majority of MacOS users will never notice or care.

It's not even close to the biggest flaw, it's just the most obvious one.

> If the biggest flaw of a OS is the border radius of its windows, you've got yourself a pretty decent OS!

There are loads of other flaws with the OS. It just so happens that people care a lot about the design of Apple's products, so people talk about these details.

This is not the biggest flaw, this is just the most recent flaw.

MacOS has been shit for as long as I've used it (8 years) and probably for much longer than that. There are many lists available of MacOS problems (https://old.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/12rw1sn/a_long_list_... for example), it's just that there's not much point making a new article about the Finder that's been shit, and unchanged, for a decade.

I think you miss the point. How would you feel if you had a Ferrari with a noticeable scratch? Yes, it is great to have such a nice car, but it'd be a pity. So much much effort was put into the whole thing and this little detail is what lingers on your mind.

> Computers have been running thousands of times slower than they should be for decades

I've been hearing this complaint for decades and I'll never understand it. The suggestion seems completely at odds with my own experience. Regardless of OS, they all seem extremely fast, and feel faster and faster as time goes on.

I remember a time when I could visually see the screen repaint after minimizing a window, or waiting 3 minutes for the OS to boot, or waiting 30 minutes to install a 600mb video game from local media. My m2 air with 16gb of memory only has to reboot for updates, I haphazardly open 100 browser tabs, run spotify, slack, an IDE, build whatever project I'm working on, and the machine occasionally gets warm. Everything works fine, I never have performance issues. My linux machines, gaming pc, and phone feel just as snappy. It feels to me that we are living in a golden age of computer performance.

I think we're already seeing the operating systems that AI can build, and I don't think they've been an improvement.

> Not to mention that WindowServer seems to take 100+% cpu since the upgrade

That's because some app is spamming window updates.

It's been an ongoing problem for many releases. AFAICT, WindowServer 100% CPU is a symptom, not a cause.

QubesOS seems a great migration target: it runs Apps/OS in secure sandboxes - and even with that overhead doesn't seem worse than the terrible MacOS 26 performance.

> I'm cautiously optimistic that AI will let us build full operating systems using other OSs as working examples.

Why? No one has shown that LLMs produce particularly good code. You can get a lot of useful shit done with what is still slop, but there is no reason to believe there's any evolutionary improvement.

Kernel_task is often the os thermal throttling, when was the last time you hit the vents with a can of compressed air?

Nobody's been at the wheel for a while, it's just not a race car, it's a barge.

Yeah this is my actual issue with Tahoe. It blows my mind people keep bringing up the corners when WindowServer is complete trash now.

kernel_task using 100% is the system thermally throttling and the OS spamming NOPs to cool the CPU down

>I'm cautiously optimistic that AI will let us build full operating systems using other OSs as working examples.

Even if that would be possible, you can't run commercial software. And for many people, the software they run is more important than the OS.

I'm very worried one day Apple will start enforcing upgrades to Tahoe just like Microsoft is doing with Windows.

Is this a case of "It Just Works" or "You're Holding It Wrong"?

SIP protects the OS, not you nor your files. If you run third party software that can run `rm` of course you're vulnerable to data loss. Apples and oranges.

SIP guarantees that you will be able to turn on your computer in safe mode and remove the malware, whereas without it your OS is toast.

Sure, if you run software from strangers on the internet, while explicitly giving them access to your systems, bad things can happen. But SIP is definitely a net good that makes many things directly impossible.

Do you have a system in mind that prevents the user from doing this?

You're not alone, I was calling out how ugly Safari is in Tahoe a few weeks ago!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47282085#47310011

Probably my least favorite redesign in the whole update. Why is everything an oval? It's just bizarre.

Apple used to know this. You don't notice these things, but your subconscious does. You start to trust it less when things get inconsistent and don't "just work".

I wish I were less observant.

My neurodivergency makes me feel actual distress over those corners. I am not being dramatic. It sucks.

> it feels like Mac's UI is optimized around the assumption most users won't expand windows to fill the whole screen, but rather leave them half-sized somewhere in the middle

IMO, this has been their assumption for years, and it actually turned me off when I tried getting used to Mac circa 2006-2007. Coming from Windows at the time, I just couldn't get over a weird anxiety that my application window wasn't maximized, because it didn't look like it completely snapped into the screen corners.

Now, using 34-inch ultrawide monitors almost exclusively, I never maximize anything... it'd be unusable.

macOS only recently got an option to make windows fill the screen. For most of history what most people would assume is a maximize button (the green one) was actually a zoom button. It sized the window to what the OS thought was appropriate for the content (to the best of my knowledge and experience with it).

Apple then made things go full screen, but in a special full screen mode, so macOS worked more like the iPad.

By the time they added a way to maximize windows in the way Windows does, the idea of maximizing an app has largely worked its way out of my workflow. It was always too much trouble, and I find very few apps where it provides much benefit. Web browsers, for example, often end up with a lot of useless whitespace on the sides of the page, so they work better as a smaller window on a widescreen display. In an IDE, it really depends on what’s being worked on and if text wrapping is something I want. Ideally lines wouldn’t get so long that this is a problem.

With the way macOS manages windows, I often find it easiest to have my windows mostly overlapped with various corners poking out, so I can move between app windows in one click. The alternative is bringing every window of an app to the front (with the Dock or cmd+tab), or using Mission Control for everything, neither of which feels efficient.

I could install some 3rd party window management utility, I suppose, but in the long run, it felt easier to just figure out a workflow that works on the stock OS, so I can use any system without going through a setup process to customize everything. It’s the same reason I never seriously got into alternative keyboard layouts.

Just wanted to note that this is how I work. I rarely have any window full screen/maximized and hate it when a website or application is built assuming a giant monitor with a maximized window.

I’ve never found a setup with multiple desktops or similar with a way to quickly switch between apps I’m using more than “editor slightly more left, browser slightly more right, …” and just clicking on a border I know brings that app to the front. I’m sure many think I’m crazy. That’s ok. :)

That said, I generally hate the new OSX UI. Every UI element that is non usable just became larger and wastes space I should be able to utilize. Likewise, it made some operations insanely frustrating (here’s looking at you, corner drag resize!).

Probably not the norm, but I use a large 4K monitor and no scaling.

I haven’t maximized a window in years. They look ridiculous like that. Especially web pages with their max width set so the content is 1/4 the screen and 3/4 whitespace.

I've seen half a dozen Mac users and none of them maximized the window very often. They usually had a mishmash of like 12 windows open and randomly all over the screen. Then they used the Alt-Tab to get between them. Basically wherever it opened is where it stayed.

> Mac's UI is optimized around the assumption most users won't expand windows to fill the whole screen, but rather leave them half-sized somewhere in the middle

The assumption is that the window should be the size of the content of the document inside.

It turns out that this approach works well for many applications, especially what the mac was designed for in the 80s and 90s. And it's horrid for modern "pro" applications.

Yes! After many years of using only linux or windows machines, I was assigned an iMac at an internship and noticed the friction with fullscreening things. I decided not to fight it and spent the next year happily working in little windows and making frequent use of the "mission control" gesture.

However, after the internship I went right back to fullscreen/window tiling in linux, so I can't say I really preferred it. Even now as a Gnome user with a big monitor and magic trackpad on my desk - which gives me ~equal access to either approach - I fullscreen everything.

This has always been quintessential Mac for me. First thing I noticed people do on macs much more than PCs was not expanding the windows. Windows are always just floating around. There's no equivalent to the maximize button, it's funny but I don't even know anymore what that "maximize" button on macs does but I remember it's not what I would expect.

I use Rectangle [1] for window management. I only use three shortcuts: full screen, left half of the screen, and right half of the screen. My editors and Chrome are always running in one of these modes.

But for other apps where interactions tend to be brief like Finder, Messages, Notes, Music, etc - yeah I don't usually expand them to full screen.

[1] https://rectangleapp.com/

Yeah this is the assumption, even pre-OSX. I won't claim to know the majority of mac users, especially not since the large uptick in the 2010's... but it seems, in my experience, very much the norm to not maximize windows and I wouldn't be surprised if people who do maximize are mostly Windows converts (not that there's anything wrong with that).

I know lots of people on laptop screens who don't maximize windows. It seems weird to me to only use like 80% of the screen's real estate, but sure, whatever.

On large external monitors, I think it makes total sense not to have every window maximized, though. Probably less usable that way.

I almost never use full screen windows on a Mac. Things like video are full screen, but that's a swipe to another workspace. Half-screen windows on a 27" screen are already bigger than a sheet of letter paper. Lots happens in terminal windows, which vary a bit, but are usually around 100x60, and maybe 1/6 of the screen.

I do have Rectangle installed, so apps generally get at most the left or right half of the screen, with a shortcut for badly behaved websites that need 2/3 to look right. Apps are usually pretty good about remembering window positions, so mostly you futz with it once and you're done.

Actually yes, I have all windows overlapping and none expanded to fill the screen, unless I'm really doing something very specific that needs as much space as possible. But the rounded edges are still slightly annoying.

It’s painful for me to watch senior engineers drag windows around and resize, hunt and peck for what they’re looking for. I suppose that’s what an emacs user may think of me when I move code around, but I suppose such things aren’t critical for overall productivity

Yes, all the time. I understand that if you have a setup where you do everything in your IDE you could reasonably leave it full screen all the time and I get why that works for some people. I'm not one of those folks and I use separate IDE, terminal, browsers, and other windows and use window management to allow myself to see multiple of them at the same time and switch between them by clicking on what I want.

Also just want to be 100% clear: Tahoe is bad and I hate the changes and I don't think the OS should prefer one way of working over the other. I just hope it's helpful to explain my perspective.

“Maximising” windows full screen, apart from the genuinely-full-screen-takeover mode you can put windows in (where they take a virtual desktop slot too) has never been an idiomatic part of the Macintosh UI, since the beginning. The “zoom” button traditionally meant “toggle between a user defined window size, and a size that is just big enough to avoid scroll bars appearing, where possible”. It goes back to the spatial desktop metaphor.

Personally I try and work with that as much as possible, though it’s not always ideal.

I've always disliked MacOS because it is so janky about maximizing windows.

I have a 39" ultrawide and I keep every window maximized. I have OCD about this. I can't stand things all layered on top of each other. I like to focus on one screen at a time.

Chromium browsers have been rolling out split tabs and I use that on a couple of tasks where I'm constantly cutting/pasting between sites, but that's about it.

I never have any window in the fullscreen/maximized mode. Some are pretty large, such as IDE, and they sometimes touch one or more edges of the screen/dock/panel, but never occupy the entire space. That was true even on my 14in MacBook with 125% DPI.

That said, I am a huge fan of manual window management.

I never understood running apps in full screen. Unless it's an IDE, Video Editor, or some other app with tools filling all nooks and crannies, I want windows that fit the content. I don't want to launch a text or document editor in full screen, read a PDF in full screen. Typically I don't even want to watch a video full screen. I also generally don't want tiling. I want to arrange windows with parts peeking out behind other windows to reference while I'm working on something else. I want some sense of "space" related to where I left a window.

When I'm using my macbook's screen, I usually expand a browser window to fill the whole screen -- it's a 13" screen so not using the whole thing makes things feel small. But most of the time my computer is plugged into an larger external monitor (20-something inches, maybe 27?), and there I don't expand any windows to fill the whole screen. I like having separate not-full-screen windows which partially (or mostly) overlap.

Somewhat relatedly, we use Windows at work, and it drives me crazy when I hop on a computer after someone's been using it and they have every single thing maximized, even Windows Explorer, on 27" monitors. A maximized browser, I get... I don't do it myself but I understand how it can be useful, but maximizing Windows Explorer is just insane to me, and yet a lot of my coworkers do it.

I use several non-fullscreen windows over desktop. Stage manager makes switching between them very convenient. But I do use full screen windows, they live in their separate spaces. I see no reason whatsoever to maximise any window without it going full screen mode

It depends very much on the size of the screen. On a small 13” laptop screen? Sure, you’re going to be running apps full-screen a lot of the time. On a big desktop monitor? No, except for games and playing movies, I’ll almost never expand an app to fill the entire screen.

I almost never expand an application to be full-screen, even on my laptop. This despite the fact that I'll resize an application's window to fill the whole screen except for the dock. I think that's why I don't maximize it: I want the dock to remain accessible.

A lot of stupid things about Mac window management stems from the mistake of forcing all applications to share a single menu that's glued to the top of the screen. This essentially turns your entire desktop into ONE application's window, within which its actual windows float around.

Historically this led to the Mac's penchant for apps that spawned an irritating flotilla of windows that you had to herd around your screen. Not only did this deny users a way to minimize the whole app at once, but it also sucked because you could see everything on your desktop (or other apps' UIs) THROUGH the UI of the application you were trying to use. A dysfunctional mess.

Around 15 years ago, I estimate, the huge advantage of a single application window finally permeated the Apple mindset and things have gotten much better in that regard. But Apple should have abandoned the single menu in the transition to OS X, and put menus where they belong: on applications' main frames. That would make the desktop a truly unlimited workspace and eliminate the daily irritation of the menu changes its contents behind the user's back because he clicked on another application's window (perhaps to move it).

Multiple times a day I minimize an application and then attempt to do something in the application that's now filling the screen... only to find that the menu still belongs to the application that isn't even shown. It's just so dumb.

But then... this is the GUI that, for decades, would only let you resize windows from ONE corner and NO edges. Apple grudgingly, half-assedly, and unreliably addressed that in the 2000s, only now to make it even less reliable in the shambolic Tahoe UI.

It’s very rare that I maximize an application. I’m always stacking. However, I don’t think it’s an optimizing assumption: I am frequently fighting with the window manager as I rearrange my windows and it automatically maximizes them because I got too close to an edge of the screen

In general my browser is dead center or slightly to the right so I can access my other windows (terminal, throw away text editor, etc) easily where command tab is insufficient (when I have multiple terminal windows, eg)

I rarely run my apps fullscreen. It's because I have multiple 4k monitors connected to the machine. Using an app even chrome or an IDE fullscreen would be too big.

But do use apps fullscreen when Im traveling. The laptop screen is too small to use chrome or vscode any other way.

I do this on macOS much more than I do on Windows, yes. MacOS flows a lot better if you're willing to adopt its window management style.

As you said, browser and IDE are the big exceptions, plus things like Lightroom or my 3d printer's slicer.

Even VS Code usually lives as a smaller window when I'm using more a text editor rather than as an IDE.

> Does anyone actually do this?

Yes (but not for a browser). My terminal windows are 80x24, pretty much always. I do this today on Linux, I've done it through multiple versions of Windows, and I did it in my childhood on a 9" B&W "luggable" Mac screen.

I just like it, okay?

for the longest time I never did this, but then I got a gigantic 4K screen, and I realized that it was almost giving me vertigo having apps like my IDE fullscreened, because I literally have to move my head in order to look everywhere.

so in response I changed my windowing strategy to having a set of windows floating around at exactly the size I want them, and then the advantage of the enormous screen is just how many windows I can have open at once

that being said, I use KDE not MacOS, and 90% of Mac users I'd guess are on laptops, so using this strategy sounds completely insane to me. On laptops I still default to fullscreening or "half-screening" most apps.

I’ve been using Macs for development for 20 years, and even on a small laptop screen I don’t expand windows to fill the screen. So I guess, yes, there are a few weirdos out there at least?

I exclusive use complete fullscreen mode for apps i'm actively using and on large screens connect the workspaces, on small screen swipe back and forth. So I you never actually use that.

Some users switch apps by dragging windows around the screen, like a messy stack. A friend of mine didn't even know about Cmd+Tab to cycle through open apps. Users are weird.

People do this, yeah. Even on Windows I've been over someone's shoulder walking them through something and it drives me nuts they work in a tiny window in a random part of the screen.

That’s because you use the button to make them whole screen?

I hate maximized windows. I like it when my windows are not maximized but I usually do have significant overlap between windows. Then I switch between windows based on the sliver of window that’s visible even when other windows are in focus. It’s the spatial way of thinking; just like how Finder purists think each folder on your disk should remember its own window size and location so you use your spatial memory to locate Finder windows. I find that this is significantly faster for my brain to process compared to the Windows style where almost all windows are maximized and people use Alt-Tab to switch between windows.

I would in fact say that the culture of not maximizing windows was a small reason why I switched to Mac OS X in the early 2000s.

Maximizing everything whether the document fills the screen or not is very Windows user behavior. macOS is not meant to be used that way.

A lot of it is just old Mac UI dogma. On a multi-monitor or ultrawide desk the default behavior still acts like everyone wants a few polite little windows drifting in the middle, so browsers, IDEs, and other dense apps start half-crippled until you drag everything into place by hand. Apple seems weirdly attached to the idea that the desktop should feel like an oversized tablet, and it's anoying.

I actually feel the opposite? The current green button action not only makes the window fill the entire screen, it also hides the menu bar AND creates a new virtual desktop and hides all of my other apps. And it seems to me that's what the majority of people want.

Meanwhile, I want to use my graphical, mutli-window preemptive multitasking operating system to, you know, use multiple applications at the same time.

I just use yabai...

I use a MacBook and a Mac mini personally, and I do not generally maximize any application that isn't implicitly a full-screen experience (e.g. a video player or a computer game).

Yes. I think the assumptions are made by people with two displays of at least 32" and ≥4K resolution.

In the office I have dual 24" monitors. At home I have a single 38" ultrawide. In desktop mode I almost never have one app taking up my full screen. In portable mode yeah, all full screen. The only exception is IDEs which get their own spaces and are basically self-contained tiling window managers anyway.

Yeah, anything that has an MDI metaphor going on should be ran fullscreen. Otherwise, what's the point? If the idea is to use the OS desktop space as the application window organizational space, then don't let people make apps that have different document panes.

This goes towards something that I've felt for a little while: at some point in time around the early 2000s, operating system vendors abdicated their responsibility to innovate on interaction metaphors.

What I mean is, things like tabbed interfaces got popularized by Web browsers, not operating systems. Google Chrome and Firefox had to go out of their way to render tabs; there was no support built into the OS.

The OS interfaces we have now are not appreciably different from what we had in the early 2000s. It seems absurd that there has been almost no progress in the last 25 years. What change there has been feels like it could have been accomplished in user-space, plus it doesn't get applied consistently across applications, thus making it feel like not a core part of the OS.

MacOS in particular was supposed to an emphasis on the desktop environment being the space of window and document level manipulation, as exemplified by the fact that applications did not have their own menubars. All application menu bars were integrated together at the top of the screen. Why should it be any different with any other UI organizational feature? Should not apps merely be a single window pane, accomplishing a single thing, and you combine multiple apps together to get something akin to an IDE out of them?

Well, I don't know if they should be. But they can't. Because OS vendors never provided a good means to do it. Even after signalling they wanted it.

I never work in full screen. It’s bizarre to me that people do. I don’t need full screen for anything, even Pycharm.

MacOS assumes you won’t full screen every app because all of them ship with large enough, high enough resolution monitors that full screening a single app is a waste of valuable space. Unlike on cheap laptops with 1080p screens.

I suppose you could splurge for a Mac desktop and then get the cheapest, smallest screen possible, but I hope it’s rare.

I’m not trying to defend because I don’t like it either. But the Mac workflow has always been much more alt-tab focused than windows. With alt-tab and alt-shift-tab (reverse order) I feel like I can fly through my apps at the speed of thought.

Lots of native applications also pop up multiple windows with the expectation that they kind of just float around. But at least in Mac you can scroll on an app that isn’t in focus…

What about the minimize and maximize buttons being swapped without any way to customize it. That one drives me crazy.

Apps and windows things is actually great though if you learn yo use it and don't disable minimizing windows to the dock

Seems like it just depends what you're used to, change is frustrating and sometimes totally unnecessary.

>The reason why you need to disable SIP, is that to edit the dynamic libraries that system apps like Safari (which has crazy bad corners) use, you need to edit system libraries that exist the root.

I’m honestly intensely curious what you thought this comment would contribute.

Particularly KDE. They have had some ups and downs but finally they have built a great foundation with Plasma and Plasma dark mode with Breeze is such a great balance of flexibility and fairly consistent look and feel. I stuck around with Gnome for too long in the name of simplicity but once you appreciate that Plasma gets out of your way once things are exactly how you want it, I have come to appreciate not having to install extensions for everyday "normal" things a lot more.

wish I did that :(

In other words, MacOS is fine as long as you're undiscerning and not at all detail-oriented. Imagine telling Steve Jobs that this was the prevailing attitude needed to make using a Mac bearable.

i use a an auto-layout tool, so having windows stacked on top of each other is super-common for me, and the fact that they all peak thru each other (like the screenshot in the blog) looking absolutely terrible drives me crazy

To me it's a little like the situation with charging the Mighty Mouse. It's become a meme to post a picture of it on its side being charged, but if you own one it doesn't really matter, as you charge it once a month for 15 minutes while you're at lunch.

There are things which definitely do bother me like the Liquid Glass, but the window corners really don't bother me. And I'm into design and constantly inspect parts of ui with Digital Color Meter app.

I truly hate it, so so much. Mentally I'm already planning out what OS I'm going to migrate to.

I don't either, the only thing that annoys me is it's much harder to resize windows, so the usability is worse

I don't see where it says that. Can you provide a direct quote?

I feel the opposite. macOS has had excellent UI in the past, and the rationale was usually that Apple took designer feedback seriously. Designers told Apple that advertisements in the notification menu was a no-no, they warned about layering text on low-contrast glass effects. They stopped OSX' UI from becoming visually bloated and low-density like the eventual Big Sur+ design language. We only get these kinds of issues when the chain of communication is cut: https://noheger.at/blog/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/scrambled... https://noheger.at/blog/2026/01/11/the-struggle-of-resizing-...

If you want ads in Spotlight or Launchpad, telling people to tolerate "opinionated, and likely worse but also not breaking" features is exactly how you get it. It's how Windows got there.

They still obsess about it but they seem to be idiots, and always have been. Nobody has ever been able to explain reasonably why "about this software" is the first thing on the first menu of every MacOS program - it isn't useful exept maybe once a year. It's a ridiculous UX choice, always has been. Don't get me started on Finder.

Wouldn’t “insanely great”/“it’s shit” be more Steve than “genius”/“it’s shit”?

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were a team, and Jobs would regularly tell people their work was "shit" if it didn't make sense.

Apple traditionally burned out its talent, and is no longer structured to follow Jobs original vision. There is a lot of goodwill with the users, but just like Sony/HP/IBM/Microsoft/Sun it can't last forever. The process-people entrench themselves, and ruin everything... just as Jobs predicted. =3

Well, this is a business model, not a coincidence... They are in the battle of selling fresh hardware each and every year consistenly

I asked this same question years ago in one of those threads that was all windows people complaining about cmd+tab. No responses.

That means there are exactly two of us.