It's hard to justify Tahoe icons • Hacker News Board

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#471

Post by hnlmorg » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 4:14 PM UTC

wang_li wrote: post #437

bargainbin wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My main gripe is that the visual shenanigans alone were enough of a change, why rearrange the buttons?! In the early iOS beta, the new tab button was at the top of Safari, as far away from your thumbs as it could be. Genuinely believe Apple’s design team are rudderless or have unintentionally been forced to produce something to justify someone’s career, because this whole thing is disastrous.

> to produce something to justify someone’s career, This is the curse of being a UI designer for a long lived product. Once a thing has been created and future work consists of 99% code and 1% UI, your UI designer job has evaporated. And so we see that everything changes every major release of an operating system, so the UI people can justify their pay checks.

I think you have cause and effect the wrong way around.

These changes in design are intended to appeal to our magpie brain of wanting the latest, shiniest, things.

You have to understand the vanity of consumers. If every new product looked the same then a lot of people wouldn’t both buying the latest gizmo because there’s no magpie appeal. So when the market stagnates, you need to redesign the product to convince consumers to throw away a perfectly good, working device.

And it usually works as a sales strategy too.

So designers then get told thy has to come up with something that looks newer and more futuristic than the current designs. Regardless of how much those designers might love or hate those current designs.

They come up with this shit not to justify their jobs but because they’re hired exactly to come up with this shit.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#472

Post by drnick1 » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 4:14 PM UTC

It's time to try GNOME. It's MacOS-like (without really copying any specific aspect of it), incredibly clean and polished. Add a dock with the Dash to Dock extension if you want to make it even more similar.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#473

Post by AlexandrB » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 4:14 PM UTC

fragmede wrote: post #201

einsteinx2 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's just enshittification. That’s not what enshittification means. Somehow its usage has quickly devolved from a very specific pattern companies used to squeeze “value” out of their customers over time into just “something getting worse in any way” or even just “something I don’t like now but I did before” which is not at all the point.

Last time pointed that out here, Cory Doctorow himself popped up to tell me it's okay, we don't need to word police other people. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44776712

So let's run this shit into the ground then until it's meaningless. Got it.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#474

Post by carlosjobim » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 4:15 PM UTC

gessha wrote: post #235

gnarlouse wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I'm hopeful that they spend the next software update atoning for their UI sins. I remember being really excited for Liquid Glass, because it felt like a return to the good old days of Skeuomorphism, at least in some spirit. In reality, it was a botched delivery, I suspect for two reasons: 1. Trying to unify all of their design (in one year no less) against one style -- developed primarily on Apple Watch & the no…

> software update atoning for their UI sins But how would they do that without scrapping the whole version? Their marketing for this year heavily relies on liquid glass but if they remove the shiny stuff, it’s not very pretty, it’s just functional. Functional is what people with work to do appreciate, marketing people will want the shiny back now that it was introduced.

> But how would they do that without scrapping the whole version?

There is a way for them to fix this while saving face. You see, Liquid Glass™ was just the first of their incredible new Material Design paradigm. Now introducing Apple Stone™, Apple Paper™, Apple Linen™ and Apple Brushed Metal™. All just as realistic as Liquid Glass™.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#475

Post by AlexandrB » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 4:16 PM UTC

ascendantlogic wrote: post #463

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's Christmas, lighten up. I think the animation adds a glorious bit of irony: "look, here's a horribly distracting effect that is almost designed to make it difficult to read the article, and it's still not as egregious as Apple's Tahoe design!"

I couldn't tell if the author was being ironic or just breathtakingly hypocritical.

This is hypocrisy in the same way that a rock star complaining about construction noise outside his home is hypocrisy. Context is everything.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#476

Post by solfox » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 4:16 PM UTC

xnx wrote: post #455

sirwhinesalot wrote: post #247

It's hard to justify Liquid Glass in general. The wastefulness of flat design (in terms of space) married with the visual excess of skeuomorphism, but without even providing any affordances (does the sidebar being raised give you any new information on how to use a sidebar? No). If you're a designer at a top 10 S&P 500 company making 6 figures, you owe it to yourself to have some love for your craft. If a PM tells yo…

> If a PM tells you to shove a UI style More than likely designers are making up work to justify their jobs. Not good for your career if you admit the desktop interface was perfected in ~1995.

100% this. I recall watching their launch video about Liquid Glass. It was filled with ego-driven "we're changing the world here" nonsense. They were designing in a bubble and wanted to do something different so they could justify the work. It was never about the user.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#477

Post by drnick1 » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 4:17 PM UTC

Noaidi wrote: post #425

coffeebeqn wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Liquid Glass is horrible on my iPhone SE 2020. Slow and looks weird on the smaller screen. I tried to turn most effects off but it still is just worse in every way

I had a 16E and it was buggy, cramped, confusing, and drained my battery. My fault for being poor and not wanting to spend the extra $400 for a 16. IOS26 broke my device, and what recourse do I have? None.

> what recourse do I have?

Buy a Pixel 9a for $399, flash GrapheneOS.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#478

Post by wlesieutre » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 4:19 PM UTC

LoganDark wrote: post #442

bargainbin wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My main gripe is that the visual shenanigans alone were enough of a change, why rearrange the buttons?! In the early iOS beta, the new tab button was at the top of Safari, as far away from your thumbs as it could be. Genuinely believe Apple’s design team are rudderless or have unintentionally been forced to produce something to justify someone’s career, because this whole thing is disastrous.

> In the early iOS beta, the new tab button was at the top of Safari, as far away from your thumbs as it could be. Can't you swipe past the end on the tab bar (along the bottom by default) to create a new tab?

Only when you're currently in the rightmost tab, but yes

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#479

Post by temp0826 » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 4:20 PM UTC

torben-friis wrote: post #342

sirwhinesalot wrote: post #247

It's hard to justify Liquid Glass in general. The wastefulness of flat design (in terms of space) married with the visual excess of skeuomorphism, but without even providing any affordances (does the sidebar being raised give you any new information on how to use a sidebar? No). If you're a designer at a top 10 S&P 500 company making 6 figures, you owe it to yourself to have some love for your craft. If a PM tells yo…

My main gripe with Liquid Glass is how distracting it is. Many top bars have become a group of bubbles over the content, which we’ve been conditioned to see as floating notifications for years. Things shine and move when they don’t require attention, just because. The end result is that my OS feels like a browser without ad blocker. As much as people hated flat design, at least it didn’t grab your attention with tack…

I'm usually in linux (dual boot on a mac) but had to boot into macOS for something. I was utterly confused when I moved my cursor to the top-left and missed clicking the apple menu

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#480

Post by kibwen » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 4:21 PM UTC

Sharlin wrote: post #109

flumpcakes wrote: post #65

It seems like Apple's hardware design is universally loved with much acclaim, why is their software getting progressively worse? It's not Microsoft-add-all-the-bloatware-and-adverts-we-can worse, but it's 20-year-old-operating-systems-were-better-designed worse. We're getting to a point where I think Linux windowing systems like KDE are better designed. And it seems that all they had to do was not change much over th…

To be fair, they also made several infamous hardware design choices back in 2016, all of which they’ve later reverted.

Yes, we can all look forward to the breathless bots lauding Apple's visionary hardware prowess when they remove that damned stupid notch ten years from now, while replacing it with something equally egregious.