This one really bothers me. Whenever maximizing or tiling my windows (which is all the time), I see multiple layers of oddly rounded corners.

I think if there's any upside to Tahoe, the grievances may push me into blogging for the first time ever, because I can't keep these to myself.

I actually feel sorry for Apple's developers because there's no way you ship software this bad and inconsistent unless you've been handed a terrible design spec from Dye's team.

edit: On my screen, three layers' corners https://hcker.news/tahoe-corners.png

• kace91

  today at 8:27 AM

  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.

  • stateofinquiry

    today at 12:13 PM

    "Clear issues caused by a seemingly bright idea, but the idea still pushed forward no matter what." .. well put. It occurs to me that this is the case on the HW front with Apple as well. I remember the butterfly keyboard, the notch, everything glued in and unservicable, the removal of ports like magsafe, ethernet, USB-A... well, at least some of the HW mis-steps have been reversed. We see some movement in that direction from the later versions of Tahoe.

  • merlindru

    today at 9:00 AM

    > seemingly bright idea

    i disagree about that one.

    im not a UX expert by any means but my first impression at WWDC seeing liquid glass was "holy shit, they pulled that off? i know apple would never compromise on legibility, so... how? there are so many situations where this won't work, and they can't exactly control the content that the buttons are overlaid on top of"

    cue my confusion when it was exactly that: an obviously problematic idea implemented with all the obvious flaws showing up

    they have largely fixed it now, half a year later, but the liquid glass isn't very liquid anymore. it's frosted. which is fine, but obviously not the original idea they were going for

    contrasty backgrounds are fundamentally incompatible with legibility

    • kace91

      today at 9:56 AM

      >im not a UX expert by any means but my first impression at WWDC seeing liquid glass was "holy shit, they pulled that off? i know apple would never compromise on legibility, so... how? there are so many situations where this won't work, and they can't exactly control the content that the buttons are overlaid on top of"

      That's what I mean, even if worded badly. Someone probably managed the glass distortion effects as an experiment, or demoed a transparent redesign of a small portion of the UI, and it looked awesome. I think it's cool that they can green light weird ideas, otherwise there's stagnation. But it is obvious that there were fundamental unresolved issues, and yet something in the process pushed the idea forward anyway.

      It signals something very wrong in company structure. If you can't trust the process to drop what doesn't work, then trying new things is risky. And as you say, it's an experiment that feels so unlike apple, to disregard polish and accessibility that way.

    • chilmers

      today at 11:25 AM

      I think a primary concern when Apple evolves their new design language nowadays is competitive differentiation. Because so many people try to clone their UI, they seek to add visual elements like frosting, glass, squircles, etc. that are difficult or impossible to achieve in competing platforms. Gradually others catch up and they need to evolve it again. Liquid Glass seems like an aesthetic choice made purely for the technical difficulty of the simulated physics necessary to accurately recreate it.

      • jlnthws

        today at 12:12 PM

        Wouldn't that imply that design is solved (at least regarding visual elements discussed here)? Then why not move onto other things? Why self-sabotage their success?

    • threatofrain

      today at 9:16 AM

      If AR/VR took off then something along the lines of liquid glass would be the only option for the entire design space. Early on there's going to be a lot of embedding of app context into the AR/VR setting to get a jump-start on content. But if people are going to be walking around with rectangular panes around their head, it's better that part of the app chrome is transparent.

      Is this compromising readability? Yes, but now there's another kind of perception problem, and it's whether you can see what's literally in front of your eyes in physical space.

      • kace91

        today at 10:12 AM

        The AR push is also an issue in itself. There are very fundamental issues that remain unresolved, and I would say untackled even.

        VR setups make you isolated and vulnerable. Any VR device is really awkward to use in public (read: in your living room or in an office).

        In turn, AR setups that let the world through reduce image quality by virtue of being transparent, and it is unclear that they provide advantages. You get a slightly more immediate access to notifications in return for permanently pointing a camera towards anything you look at, which is understandably not well received.

        And that's just for content consumption. When you introduce work, input is still significantly worse unless you're sitting in front of a keyboard and mouse, in which case you might as well have a full laptop.

    • hulitu

      today at 9:54 AM

      > i disagree about that one.

      Why ? I'm sick of square windows. I want disc windows. And instead of scrolling them, i want to rotate them. /s

      Fixing bugs is hard. Better focus on the aesthetics.

      • dmd

        today at 11:24 AM

        I've got great news for you! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shape_extension

  • s3p

    today at 9:51 AM

    This one has always confused me. And then, to be even more confusing, if you start sliding up slowly, the background does not disappear. It stays this time around. Pull down slowly, no background, just the glass effect. Pull up slowly, still have the background, no glass effect. I guess I don't necessarily hate it, it's more of a neutral thing, but who is deciding these strange things??

    • coldtea

      today at 11:32 AM

      >I guess I don't necessarily hate it, it's more of a neutral thing, but who is deciding these strange things??

      Probably nobody, just some artifact of the overlay APIs used default behavior that they didn't bother to streamline.

      • StilesCrisis

        today at 11:45 AM

        In this case, the behavior is so weird and easy to trigger that I'm sure someone has filed a radar by now. So somebody has at least written a post-hoc justification?

  • aucisson_masque

    today at 8:54 AM

    Yeah I found that surprising too and assumed it was a bug.

    I see this kind of trend with apple since big sur. It's not new but it's becoming more obvious with every release.

• WillAdams

  today at 10:59 AM

  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.

• unfunco

  today at 10:31 AM

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

  • embedding-shape

    today at 11:47 AM

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

    Does it matter if it's 3rd party apps or not? Wasn't a huge part of the sell with Apple's own GUI toolkits that all native apps work uniquely, but look familiar and like part of one and the same? The consistency and "all apps look and work great" I seem to recall being one of the "features" people used to tout about OSX.

    FWIW; TFA compares the border radius of TextEdit and Calculator, both two Apple apps, built-in nonetheless.

  • isanengineer

    today at 10:45 AM

    Yes, I noticed this shortly after the update. I forget the specifics, but Apple first party apps definitely have this issue.

  • coldtea

    today at 11:33 AM

    Some do, yes.

• create-username

  today at 8:04 AM

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

• ajkjk

  today at 9:41 AM

  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?

  • otikik

    today at 9:52 AM

    It's like getting invited to dinner at a friend's house and you notice that half of the knifes and forks they put on the table are a bit dirty.

    If they have managed to fumble something so basic then one can't help but extrapolate what the state of the rest is.

  • TheAngush

    today at 10:47 AM

    I have to look at it all day, so no. What would you call bad software? Bad code? Electron? None of that has any meaningful effect on my day to day experience as a user. But no matter what apps I'm using, Apple's terrible design decisions are ever-present. It's like having dirty glasses.

  • coldtea

    today at 11:34 AM

    >for the life of my I can't understand why y'all care so much about this.

    Because we fucking have to see it every day. And the sloppiness compounds and is indicative of further rot.

    Of course the different radii also means different code paths were used, which points to a mess of APIs and frameworks underneath too.

    And that's before we add the usability issues (like hard to read labels due to the glass effect and such, or bizare dragging boundaries, etc).

    >Doesn't that seem a bit... particular?

    Good software is about being particular.

    If we wanted any random crap, we'd use any random crap.

  • Towaway69

    today at 10:40 AM

    There are people who have OCD and can’t help but seeing these things. It’s great for coding and seeing minor changes but its shit for real life - trust me.

    The number of times auto update of some app has caused the thought process “but that wasn’t like that yesterday… or was it… hm… oh it was an update”. Just minor things, small mostly unnoticeable if don’t have an “eye for details”.

    • ileonichwiesz

      today at 11:38 AM

      That’s not OCD, it’s just paying attention to detail.

    • embedding-shape

      today at 11:49 AM

      > There are people who have OCD and can’t help but seeing these things. It’s great for coding and seeing minor changes but its shit for real life - trust me.

      I don't have OCD, but easily notice inconsistencies in various design choices these mega-corporations continue to fumble.

      It's less "OMG I can't focus on coding because Calculator and TextEdit aren't sharing the same border radius" but more "The UX/UI department seems like they're on perpetual vacation if Apple is letting simple things like this slip through", and this specific case is just an example, every version of macOS seems to get worse when it comes to consistency.

The justification by Apple is that it keeps the concentricity between window corner and the red/green/yellow window controls. Which, as you may notice, it does.

It's wrong though, because the window is the higher element in the hierarchy (container) and should not be affected by what is inside. It creates a larger inconsistency than the "consistency" it supposedly brings.

• trymas

  today at 11:42 AM

  my other comment on this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47321852

  Traffic light buttons were already equidistant to the edge of the window. Now they are trying to center circles in squircles[1], breaking window edges and draggability, etc.

  > It creates a larger inconsistency than the "consistency" it supposedly brings.

  That's why I am baffled (as many commenters here) - how did this went out all the way to release, instead of ending as an experiment at design floor.

  [1] parent comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47321065

• lapcat

  today at 11:18 AM

  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.

• WillAdams

  today at 11:00 AM

  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?).

Mac OS's UX design has been in free fall the last 5-10 years (ever since the "iOS-ify everything" zeitgeist took root). Sincerely hope that they one day revert back, because the current UX is just godawful for any usecase I can imagine.

• bonesss

  today at 9:35 AM

  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.

• Reason077

  today at 8:46 AM

  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...

  • aucisson_masque

    today at 8:57 AM

    I wish too but they can't just back up, that would be a very bad sign for investors.

    • Towaway69

      today at 10:44 AM

      Why? What happened to the magic bar? There are many things Apple changed their minds on.

      I won’t be surprised if there is a rollback in 27 (i’m hoping there will be - else going to buy a retro mac with a magic bar upon no tahoe runs).

    • blackhaz

      today at 9:59 AM

      They'll just come up with round displays. Like on PDP-1.

• EdiX

  today at 9:46 AM

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

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

  • trymas

    today at 11:04 AM

    IMHO it started with iOS 7 [1] - year 2013.

    Uber flat, you don't know what's a button, what's a text. I dunno if I just adjusted to it or it actually somewhat got better up to iOS/macOS 15. Though with iOS/macOS 26 - it's iOS 7 moment yet again.

    NB: not sure about Liquid Glass - though I was recently (and weirdly) recommended to watch iOS 7 trailer on youtube[2]. Comments are overwhelmingly positive. Dunno if it's just people who were kids/teens looking through rose tinted glasses. Though I am not sure anymore, maybe people actually like such designs and it's just HN bubble complaining (IMHO complains here are 110% valid) about nothing. Maybe in 10+ years ordinary guy will praise iOS/macOS 26.

    [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_7

    [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xzLr7xSr-g

  • nnwright

    today at 10:34 AM

    How dare you remind me how old I am ;)

• marxisttemp

  today at 8:56 AM

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

  • Ultimatt

    today at 9:03 AM

    Because Spotlight now rarely finds your applications in search so you can't just quick launch anything.... from a launcher widget

    • andix

      today at 9:58 AM

      They finally managed to get feature parity with the Windows start menu :)

      For around a decade typing "word"+return into the windows start menu search box usually opened Edge with a search result of "ord". Recently it opens Word most of the time.

    • prawn

      today at 10:40 AM

      I hide my Dock completely and used to rely entirely on Spotlight for launching. After it failing to work so often, I found Raycast which has not failed me once. I can't see how they don't decide an indexing method/schedule based on a user's Spotlight settings.

    • chedabob

      today at 10:47 AM

      Love it when it forgets the Mac apps exist, and launches Maps or Calendar in phone mirroring. I use mirroring a fair bit, but never for anything where I have the Mac app installed.

    • marxisttemp

      today at 9:06 AM

      I haven’t had a single issue with this. I’m guessing many people had this issue immediately after upgrading while Spotlight was still re-indexing and are just running with it since it’s cool to hate Tahoe right now.

      • jasonvorhe

        today at 9:39 AM

        No, if this happened to people 2-3 times right after upgrading this wouldn't be something they bring up because the indexing doesn't take months. It's broken. Spotlight used to work almost perfectly since it was introduced and it's been lagging and somewhat defunct since Tahoe.

      • threatofrain

        today at 9:22 AM

        My search never recovered but I just didn't care to fix it, too many things to fix and my IDE has its own spotlight. I'm normally a vanilla-don't-touch-settings guy.

      • muro

        today at 9:28 AM

        When I try to launch system settings through spotlight, it launches system info. They have the same prefix, but that's no excuse. Never happened since Tiger or so.

  • nnwright

    today at 10:38 AM

    > What is godawful about it?

    I'm specifically commenting on their UX decisions, and in that respect literally everything. Tahoe, like every major upgrade, is iterative. Very few things that bowl a person over. Somethings are good, some things are "meh". But Liquid Glass is an abomination.

Today when cropping an image in Preview.app on Tahoe I ran into an issue where you can't use the bottom of the crop selection rectangle because the rounded corner of the window blocks it.

This is an issue on Linux too, especially when Wayland is used and applications are responsible for drawing their own chrome. Ugh.

HOWEVER, due to the open nature of the platform, you can install an extension to clean this up. Now, all my windows have identical corner radii, strokes, shadows etc. My Linux desktop is, surprisingly, more consistent now than macOS in this regard.

https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/7048/rounded-window-c...

This specific design decision makes so little sense, really curious on how it got approved. It's not an accident or a miss, since the variable radius got quite heavily promoted during WWDC.

Hopeful they don't wait 7 years to change stance.

This was one of the very few advantages of moving from Linux => MacOS, that at least most of the software was beautiful and consistent by default. I'm saddened to see that this is not true anymore. Been holding the Tahoe upgrade, and might just keep my macbook air m1 much longer than originally intended because of this.

• mrcarrot

  today at 8:03 AM

  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.

• dagi3d

  today at 9:44 AM

  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

• eastbound

  today at 8:12 AM

  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.

  • vbezhenar

    today at 9:48 AM

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

    I really miss that in Linux. That said, some terminals implement smart Ctrl+C which will interrupt if there's no text selected and copy otherwise. But terminal I use (Gnome Console) does not, so I have to press Ctrl+Shift+C to copy text and then I press that in browser and everything exploded because it opens developer tools. So annoying.

  • ant6n

    today at 8:38 AM

    What I find confusing and unhelpful is how The Apple OS deals with windows. Say if you have 4 safari windows, 3 excel windows, 5 window word documents and a bunch of terminals spread across a bunch of desktops. To me, I have clearly conceptionalized different work streams into desktops.

    Apple doesn’t understand and respect that.

    Firstly, alt-tab doesn’t consider windows, it considers apps. So if you have multiple browser windows or word windows open, you can’t alt-tab between them. It’s totally confusing. So I install an app just to get the normal alt-tab behavior of other OSs, to alt-tab between windows (mine is called alt-tab, and it’s a bit buggy and slow, I think they all are)

    Next, Apple does not respect the multiple desktop boundary. If I click on the safari icon in the dock, it will switch to some seemingly random safari window in some other desktop. If I close any window, it will also run off to some other window of the same app in some other desktop (who came up with that behavior?) when I dismiss an outlook notification, it will run of to another desktop to look at outlook (actually I think this one is Microsoft’s fault, but Apple could probably do something about this one).

    The result is that while working, I have trouble staying on the desktop I’m working on, I constantly am getting sent off to some other random desktop, and have to find where I am and where I was.

    There must be a better, more productive way to manage windows and desktops.

    (Also what’s up with the autocorrect, I had to retype every instance of “I think” in this message, because it insists it should be “o think”)

    • marxisttemp

      today at 9:01 AM

      > Firstly, alt-tab

      I assume you mean cmd-tab.

      >doesn’t consider windows, it considers apps. So if you have multiple browser windows or word windows open, you can’t alt-tab between them. It’s totally confusing.

      You use cmd-tilde to switch between windows.

      >So I install an app just to get the normal alt-tab behavior of other OSs, to alt-tab between windows (mine is called alt-tab, and it’s a bit buggy and slow, I think they all are)

      You don’t need an app.

      >Next, Apple does not respect the multiple desktop boundary. If I click on the safari icon in the dock, it will switch to some seemingly random safari window in some other desktop. If I close any window, it will also run off to some other window of the same app in some other desktop (who came up with that behavior?) when I dismiss an outlook notification, it will run of to another desktop to look at outlook (actually I think this one is Microsoft’s fault, but Apple could probably do something about this one). The result is that while working, I have trouble staying on the desktop I’m working on, I constantly am getting sent off to some other random desktop, and have to find where I am and where I was. There must be a better, more productive way to manage windows and desktops.

      This is a configurable setting.

      >(Also what’s up with the autocorrect, I had to retype every instance of “I think” in this message, because it insists it should be “o think”)

      This is a configurable setting.

      • Ultimatt

        today at 9:07 AM

        I am mildly shocked after almost two decades of Mac use I never came across cmd+tilde thanks a lot!

        • jaffa2

          today at 10:33 AM

          Next try CMD+H to hide instead of minimising, like in Windows Land.

Apple is no longer about Jobs' "simplicity as the ultimate sophistication". It feels like a bunch of kids with no proper design education competing for the security of their salaries. Apple is dead without Steve. The company has no focal point. They're running solely on the inertia from Mac OS X and the first generations of the iPhone.

• interpol_p

  today at 9:57 AM

  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

It just seems to me that that Macbook Neo is basically them telling us that come next year they will unify iOS and MacOS and they are testing the waters at the moment.

All this version alignment, the blurring of "here is a laptop with A processor and iOS" points to that direction.

The errs of Tahoe are basically a result of the rush on that direction

• aurareturn

  today at 11:39 AM

  If anything, Neo signals they will not merge macOS and iOS.

  Why would they if they just released a brand new MacBook?

  The SoC is just a way to differentiate from the Air and to keep costs low.

• merlindru

  today at 9:06 AM

  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

  • roysting

    today at 10:17 AM

    I hope they don’t ever do a touchscreen MacBook. They already have every angle of that use case covered far better than the competition; either you get an iPad if you absolutely need to be pawing at a screen, or you have the excellent trackpads that are far and away par excellence. I don’t see how a touch screen on top of also the industry standard for screen quality will in any way improve by having greasy finger trails distorting the tiny pixels.

    Maybe I’m missing something. How would a touchscreen MacBook improve on something?

    That being said, based on what I’ve been seeing at Apple, I would not be surprised if they did go down that mediocrity route.

    • ileonichwiesz

      today at 11:41 AM

      > How would a touchscreen MacBook improve on something?

      It won’t, but there’s now an entire generation of users who get confused and angry if any kind of display doesn’t react when you poke it with your finger.

• nashashmi

  today at 8:45 AM

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory

It is difficult to put into words how much I dislike macos 26. I held out on upgrading for a long time since there were so many horror stories, but to my surprise both iOS and ipadOS 26 aren’t really any different than 18. Maybe because you don’t really do any proper work on it? The graphical differences aren’t anything major when the apps fill the whole viewport anyway.

But macOS? Good lord. I can only hope 27 will unfuck things somewhat, there are so many small annoyances and all of them add to a constant sense of unhappiness throughout the day. I’m really tempted to downgrade back to Sequoia. At least the M4 will be good enough for years if this truly is the new path Apple will take.

The only question remains, why our community (programmers and scientists) continues funding this completely voluntarily?

The rounded corners is such a key element of apple design. They patented rounded corners on the iphone for precisely this reason. They wanted to trademark this but got a design patent instead. And then samsung notoriously copied this one almost verbatim same radius which pissed off apple.

• dchftcs

  today at 11:20 AM

  >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?

• hulitu

  today at 11:36 AM

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

  See Windows 11.

  • nashashmi

    today at 11:44 AM

    Windows corner is a lot sharper/smaller than the apple corner.

I know a lot of people have brought up the corner radius but the left aligned title is such a weird step backwards.

They missed some other type of windows like Activity Monitor graphs. Those are even sharper corners!

There is a work around if you don't mind lowering the Security settings: https://github.com/aspauldingcode/apple-sharpener

• TheFuzzball

  today at 6:48 AM

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

don't know why this bothers me but apple is losing attention to detail

Feels sloppy (is sloppy) but I think the idea is to prioritize OS unification for hardware reasons, and UX across product suite — devices can share data, apps, screens, everything.

• iainmerrick

  today at 10:30 AM

  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.

I hadn’t noticed this before, but now I can’t unsee it. UI inconsistencies like that tend to stand out once someone points them out.

I will never upgrade from Sequoia and when I'll have no other options migrate to another laptop!

• asimovDev

  today at 9:13 AM

  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

• marxisttemp

  today at 9:05 AM

  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.”

  • cpt_sobel

    today at 10:32 AM

    Just get Raycast for what you mentioned, + much better (the bar is really low tbf) search

  • Nekorosu

    today at 9:58 AM

    Design is much more than that.

    Also, it’s almost as if you can’t imagine that other users might have needs and preferences different from yours.

  • bschwindHN

    today at 9:57 AM

    Why are you shilling so hard for these features?

    • marxisttemp

      today at 10:00 AM

      Because they’re significant improvements to the way macOS works for power users

    • greenchair

      today at 10:28 AM

      their username..

I dislike Tahoe too, but this particular thing is not new.

I just did an image search for "classic macos" and one of the first hits was from https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/classic-mac-os. Look at those System 1 screenshots, from 42(!) years ago -- round corners on Puzzle and Calculator, square corners on Note Pad and Control Panel! No consistency at all, isn't it infuriating?

• afandian

  today at 10:00 AM

  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.

  • iainmerrick

    today at 10:19 AM

    That led me to https://www.folklore.org/Desk_Ornaments.html which is a very fun read. Interesting to note that the UI style of the DAs is actually not consistent at all, some have round corners and some don't.

    I particularly like this Bill Atkinson tidbit at the end:

    Bill Atkinson complained to me that it was a mistake to allow users to specify their own desktop patterns, because it was harder to make a nice one than it looked, and led directly to ugly desktops. [...] So he made MacPaint allocate a window that was the size of the screen when it started up, and filled it with the standard 50% gray pattern, making his own desktop covering up the real one, thus protecting the poor users from their rash esthetic blunders, at least within the friendly confines of MacPaint.

    (He was totally right, making your own desktop patterns was fun but the standard checkerbard was far and away the best choice.)

• bestham

  today at 10:04 AM

  “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.

  • iainmerrick

    today at 10:09 AM

    Yep, I'm aware. Just like Tahoe, it's intentional and there's a rationale behind it. It may or may not be immediately obvious depending on the user, and people may or may not like the way it looks.

It keeps annoying me, too. How can their developers not see this?!

• galad87

  today at 6:53 AM

  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.

  • mikae1

    today at 7:03 AM

    > they even explained it at WWDC

    Did they explain the reasoning?

    • Zafira

      today at 7:29 AM

      > 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…

      • conductr

        today at 7:50 AM

        Just a bunch of words that raised no red flags, maybe sounded like a decent idea even, but when you see it how is your reaction not “oh, that’s bad”

        I feel like this is the design process. You have ideas, they sound ok, you try them out, and then immediately you revert a lot of them. The ideas without the taste to know when not to do something is becoming the new Apple way

        • AdamN

          today at 9:46 AM

          I think what they're saying is that larger radii are for 'real windows' that have toolbars and such but there are 'mini windows' and those get smaller radii. It doesn't seem well enough baked for them to release it like it is but there are other UI problems that I've been annoyed about for a long time (in particular shadows around window boundaries so you can never get a truly flat tiled experience).

        • nnwright

          today at 10:56 AM

          Rounded corners (and the utterly massive drag area next to them) are touchbar 2.0. Features that no one asked for, has questionable value, and that provides marginal benefit even for its intended audience (touchscreen macs, no doubt).

      • altern8

        today at 8:24 AM

        So, there was no reasoning.

      • today at 7:59 AM

    • galad87

      today at 7:23 AM

      To align the window corner radius to the window close/minimize/resize buttons distance from the edge of the window.

      • Karliss

        today at 9:49 AM

        Except it kind of fails at that too. The window corners seem to be either based on those squircle things or some kind of other varying radii curve which eases out into sides much more gradually than proper circles. The window buttons (close, minimize) the round toolbar buttons anchored to top right corner are based on proper circles. Attempting to center circle in a varying curvature corner results in varying spacing between the circle and corner, which defeats the whole point of why different windows have different corner size (not calling it radius because they are not circles).

        When the top right corner contains a search field instead of rounded button, that also seems to use varying curvature instead of capsule with proper circles at the ends. Still results in varying spacing between window corner and the toolbar content.

        And that's just the 2 top corners. Attempts to align top corners result in even bigger mismatch with the rest of the window content. For example calculator -> it has a grid of round buttons. While the window corners might match top bar (as good as they can due to different shapes) the main calculation buttons don't match the corners at all.

        Similar problem affects many of the popups which have something like confirmation button anchored to bottom right corner.

        Rounded scrollbar handle - not aligned with bottom left corner size, instead it awkwardly gets cut of by different amount in each program.

        Menus also have this disease. The non circular corner curve of overall menu shape extends way past the corner of item highlight resulting in varying spacing and making it feel almost like whole menu has bulged out instead of flat sides.

        • trymas

          today at 11:33 AM

          Exactly!

          And to OC you're replying to: window close/minimise/resize were already equidistant from window edge on macOS 15 and probably earlier.

          Here is a screenshot (safari in the background, textedit in front): https://pasteboard.co/OeMBTDKGsTx9.png

          In MacOS 26 it's only weirder, because as you say - due to squircle window corners, now we have this constantly varying distance to the edge.

          EDIT: I "get" apple's fascination to squircle, but why they made it such a big radius. Probably no one would've complained if they just have changed from current ~15-20px rounded corners into ~15-20px squircles, but they went 50px+ on toolbared windows.

      • nikolay

        today at 7:30 AM

        I'd rather have my corners perfect and not have the constant eyesore of pixels bleeding from other windows' corners!

• riffraff

  today at 6:49 AM

  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.

  • pjmlp

    today at 7:04 AM

    I won't be public shaming, but on a .NET podcast I just heard of an internal Microsoft project that took 7 years (!), to become public, it was a plain single Assembly .NET library nothing special (1 DLL).

    • littlecranky67

      today at 7:52 AM

      Which one?

• hurfdurf

  today at 9:03 AM

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

• pjmlp

  today at 7:02 AM

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

• jiehong

  today at 7:26 AM

  Yep, it’s just ugly IMO

• mulmen

  today at 7:22 AM

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

Finally, the update we've all been waiting for

This feels like one of those "done for backwards compatibility and we tested not doing it and it was worse" things where everyone assumes incompetence over good-faith trade-offs being driven by release schedules.

• jeroenhd

  today at 8:37 AM

  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.

  • troupo

    today at 9:50 AM

    Design for the sake of design. That entire paragraph reads like a post-hoc justification for a design decision they never thought through

• iknowstuff

  today at 7:46 AM

  Did the radius need changing

  • afandian

    today at 8:17 AM

    Something needed changing! And the radius was something!

    • duskdozer

      today at 8:27 AM

      What if they randomized the radius on every launch? A fresh, modern experience every time!

      • afandian

        today at 8:50 AM

        Make it “on every corner” and we have a deal.

        (EDIT - and Gemini could create a plausible explanation post-hoc each time)

        • agos

          today at 10:34 AM

          different radius on every corner and we're back in the winamp skin era, not bad!

      • egorfine

        today at 9:56 AM

        Don't give them ideas

I actually really like that certain windows have a different corner radius. It wraps around the chrome of the app properly.

If you made it this far, know I am totally messing with you. It really is unnerving.

[dead]

Why should the two window varieties have the same corner radius? There's no design analysis here, only conservatism.

read somewhere that maybe they’re preparing for OLED screens

• ant6n

  today at 8:13 AM

  How does that argument work?

  • defraudbah

    today at 8:17 AM

    which will be even worse so you don't get that angry after years of bad design, lol

• Y-bar

  today at 8:18 AM

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

  • Reason077

    today at 8:52 AM

    There's also been rumours of a new high-end OLED MacBook ("Ultra"?) in the works, possibly this year.

• crote

  today at 8:23 AM

  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.

• today at 8:11 AM

• ulbu

  today at 11:03 AM

  is there a reason to downvote this?

Im gonna go against the grain here, so hold your pitchforks please, but I think its better than if it were consistent. Let me explain:

The author notices that adding a toolbar changes the radius, and to me it makes sense. If theres a toolbar, I know how much I can cut the corners, because the icons in the toolbar are not gonna be in far corner. At the same time, when I am unsure about what type of content might get cut by the corner, I will reduce the cut slightly to give that content more space.

I couldnt care less that one radius is not the same as another, I guess my OCD levels are not that high (yet?).

And I say all of this as someone who dislikes the glass design, and especially hates the small, slowly fading in volume/brightness indicators in the corner replacing the mid screen beautiful instant indicator.

• gattilorenz

  today at 7:57 AM

  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? :)

  • oniony

    today at 8:20 AM

    No, because circles are not as cool as squircles.

Containers with different contents look different?

I don't see the big deal. That seems like a reasonable design choice. Make nice rounded corners when content allows, but rectangle them up as needed?

Seems like a nice adaptive design choice.

Honestly making different apps slightly more visually identifiable in a sea of sameness doesn't seem like a big deal.

Maybe this is intentional? Either way, doesn't look bad.

• steve_adams_86

  today at 7:56 AM

  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.

  • nnwright

    today at 10:50 AM

    This 100%. I _like_ new features and new UX when it enhances things or makes them easier to work with. That used to be a huge selling point when purchasing a Mac vs PC, genuine thought and consideration had been given to every single interaction and user impact.

    And then ... Apple lost its way. Now when I get a new Mac I spend the better part of a day turning off as much of the pointless eye candy as I can so that I can focus on the task I'm working on, not the distracting UX conventions.

    I want a computer, not an iPad with a keyboard. That already exists, and there is a reason I don't have one.

• wahnfrieden

  today at 8:03 AM

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

  • altern8

    today at 8:25 AM

    OK, Tim Cook, nice try but it looks awful.

This is one of those stories that I read and I'm like, "Someone wrote an article about that? I am definitely among my people, but I smell a front end developer."