Last Year on My Mac: Look Back in Disbelief

I don't mind how Liquid Glass looks at all. It's just insane how buggy the system has become. Even Messages will bug out, like deleting my first word if I type too fast after opening a conversation or auto scrolling and not letting me scroll down until I exit and re-enter.

Unacceptable for the premium you pay for Apple software. Unacceptable for any software one is paying for. I hope they get their shit together and start fixing before they continue adding new stuff. 26.2 doesn't inspire me that they're on that trajectory.

The thing that amazes me most is that everyone on the teams responsible is probably using their Apple devices and running into these same bugs!

I think for the first time I’ve been considering moving off iOS because of liquid glass. The bugs on apple products have hit a breaking point for me. Mac is still unequivocally the best laptop around imho, but it’s less clear cut for phones. My iPhone 15 pro is borderline unusable. Every day is a new issue. I’m very much over it.

You used to be able to count on the basics working smoothly, but stuff like the camera and messaging are frequently broken for me

I just hope that my current Mac keeps being usable long enough that Liquid Glass has been fixed or replaced entirely by the time I'm forced to upgrade to whatever's shipping on my next computer.

One of the most egregious issues with macOS 26 is the accessibility/usability regression. Apple prided itself on making their operating system accessible. Good ux is inherently accessible.

There are so many parts of the os that flagrantly ignore well-established accessibility standards, some of which Apple themselves advocated for

> That was little more than a decade ago, in 2014. Not that I want to turn the clock back, but it would be really helpful if I could read clearly what’s on my display once again.

I want to turn the clock back. It’s not a reflexive opposition to anything new. I thought OS X clearly got better from 10.0 to 10.4. But in the last vie versions it’s been a regression.

liquid glass is a total disaster. what the hell is going on in the ux teams at apple? this is like their windows vista era. i hate it so much

> Maybe this is because I’m getting older, but that gives me the benefit of having experienced Apple’s older interfaces, with their exceptional quality and functionality.

i really missed snow leopard for about 10 years all the way up to when i moved on from my macbook circa 5 years ago.

Perhaps the thing I hate most about Tahoe is the embedded rounded rectangle around the menu inside of the larger rounded rectangle window. They're trying to go for this look of a menu floating above the rest of the window it belongs to, but it just looks sloppy to me in dark mode.

Since macOS went to a yearly cadence, I usually upgrade during Christmas break, this allows for a couple of point releases to work out the kinks. I won’t be upgrading this year. I hope macOS 27 fixes this abomination. Otherwise, this 30+ year Mac user will be moving on…

There are claims that Liquid Glass was in development for three years. If that is accurate, the results are even more appalling.

its very odd that apparently everyone working in Apple software dev either refuses to dogfood this stuff or just uses iPads for everything.

Adding insult to injury, my fans are constantly going now because I have to pay for this disastrous upgrade with tons more resources.

Design got worse since Maverick for professional users.

Not upgrading to Tahoe for as long as $DAYJOB allows. ‘Defer update‘ dialog can be conveniently moved away to the second display almost out of sight.

M2 MBP here. Definitely skipping Tahoe. Sequoia is already just terrible, not only is the UX clunky and hostile, but Apple seems to have flat out broken its Bluetooth and networking stacks in multiple ways, and in general the system is extremely unstable.

Best hardware around, but at this point I might even take W11 over this locked down mess. At least Asahi support is decent these days.

And I'm tired of paying for things that should be stock, such as proper window and mouse management, or reasonable fan control so that the keyboard doesn't burn my fingers under moderate workloads.

It seems obvious to me that liquid glass is no designer's idea of a good UI. It's a business move to force developers to support the upcoming iGlasses where transparency is actually necessary.

Perhaps Apple is willing to accept that most macOS users will enable "reduce transparency" so long as devs implement support for transparency.

But there is another explanation making the rounds, possibly a conspiracy theory. Some people claim that Apple is doing this to make cross-platform technologies look obsolete and hard to implement.

If there's any truth to this, it's a terrible idea that could easily backfire. People could get used to there not being a consistent platform look and feel. Like on Windows, "native" could lose its meaning.

Whatever Apple promotes as "native" could become just another style among many.

While the UI designers are rearranging deck chairs, the UX is totally failing to love up to the promise of an ecosystem. Cross system cut n paste is a neat trick, but I just want timers and alarms to actually work as expected.

I shouldn’t be surprised given that the mac save as dialog box has a name field that is still hard coded to 32 characters visible. Whenever I bitch about it I get pushback that filenames shouldn’t be longer than that! Um hello - tell me you have never worked in the real world outside your iphone bubble without telling me.

Tahoe has to be the worst software Apple has released in three decades. It's unbelievable it got through. If Macs and macOS were not a tiny portion of their revenue I would short the stock.

The answer is KDE and GNOME, at least on the machines that support some form of Linux.

I do enjoy the liquid glass controls in some places. The glass effect is really beautiful. What I hate about it is the way the overall UI constantly gets in the way of my content.

i switched this year from windows to mac because windows is unbearable.... but apple seems to want to get rid of desktop user also

Tahoe is such a criminal worsening of UI quality, it really is worrisome that Apple is proudly releasing it.

If this kind of software trend continues in 2026, it might be the first time I take a serious look at Linux distros on Mac.

MacOS aesthetically peaked with Leopard in '09, but speaking frankly the OS has felt abandoned to me since around 10.2, with so many basic interaction issues with window management and the dock just never getting fixed properly and a long list of half-assed bandaids and abandoned experiments over the years.

There is no true passion in MacOS, and the marketing has come face to face with reality in 2025. It's the neglected step-child of a company distracted by other things.

There's been some impressive engineering done by lower-level folks under the hood of it all, though.

Updated iOS overnight and what the fuck man. Also Settings search is so totally broken I can’t even

I am trying hard to have strong feelings about it, but I just can’t bother. The only thing constant is change.

What I do know for a fact, is that for each error I have on my MacBook, I’ll have ~10 ungoogable errors on any other OS. I rage-sold my last Windows due to losing my Java installation (or just confusing which terminal I installed it in).

Please, crop all thumbnails in the corners, as long as you come pre-installed with just one working terminal.