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

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#551

Post by OsrsNeedsf2P » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 5:01 PM UTC

threethirtytwo wrote: post #547

Little UI elements like that are generally inconsequential. I agree they have changed for the worse in a negligible way. The reason for all this change is simple. The first reason is planned obsolescence. The GUI has to change enough such that it looks like there’s constant progress so users think the company is moving forward when in reality GUI design plateaued decades ago. The second reason is designers need to st…

> The second reason is designers need to stay employed. So they change inconsequential things and make up reasoning to justify it. Liquid Glass is one of these things.

Working at BigTech, this is the answer. ICs need to find their own impact. That's how you get things like Material Design 3 which talked about how "Bold" it made a brand look - "Boldness" is something you can measure with user tests, and designers need something they can point to and call success; even if everyone knows it's stupid.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#552

Post by gmd63 » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 5:01 PM UTC

hnlmorg wrote: post #471

wang_li wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 con…

If it's coming down from the C suite, that just makes it worse. That's cheap marketing tricks winning priority over lasting intent. It's not just the design folks trying to justify their job at that point, it's the executives surrendering to the "stock must go up during my quarters at all costs" mentality.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#553

Post by next_xibalba » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 5:03 PM UTC

This article reads like opinions and vibes without a solid grounding in data.

For example: "Look how much faster you can find Save or Share in the right variant..."

But each variant took me the same amount of time. Or so I think. But that demonstrates the issue: is any of this being measured and analyzed?

My opinion is that much of design is just "convincing opinion wins" (where convincing-ness is often not at all based on measurement of some kind), leading to crappy stuff like ultra flat design and Corporate Memphis.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#554

Post by dec0dedab0de » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 5:04 PM UTC

AlotOfReading wrote: post #489

bobbylarrybobby wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In theory, the problems highlighted in the article would have become apparent shortly into the process of assigning an icon to every menu item. Forging ahead despite the impossibility of doing a good job on the task is a sign of orders being issued from top to bottom without feedback working its way from the bottom to the top.

Top down micromanaging of design is how Apple has always worked. It's not what's different now.

Yeah, if anything it seems like there is not enough top-down micromanaging. Especially with the icon consistency parts.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#555

Post by nogridbag » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 5:04 PM UTC

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #111

Zealotux wrote: post #81

Tahoe and Liquid Glass™ solidified for me the idea that Apple completely dropped the ball when it comes to design. Clearly they needed an a-hole in charge, Jobs would've crucified a few people. It's painful to see the decay, update after update, into a more confusing, cluttered, and tacky experience.

>Jobs would've crucified a few people Jobs liked to talk this side of the business up because creatives were the substantial part of the business. Now they sell to everybody it doesn't matter so much. The average person won't even notice the complaints in the original article. They aren't sensitive to it in the way that creative people are.

I consider myself above average with UI design, but I still got confused with that dang "i" icon in the Preview app just yesterday.

I had to add my signature and write in the date so it looks like it was handwritten. So the plan was to just draw the date with a pencil tool and if that failed use the text tool to write the date.

First I instinctively clicked the pencil icon which turned out to be a highlighter. That's a great example where if they had added color for the tip and line it would have clearly looked like a highlighter. After that failed, I clicked that "i" icon because it looks like it's for inserting text. Honestly I was in such a rush I didn't even see the info pane popping up and was dang confused when nothing was happening.

I'm very familiar with info icons and have used them in my own apps, yet I had never seen one without the circle around it.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#556

Post by zaidf » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 5:08 PM UTC

My hope is that the new generation of designers/UX people question and reject many of the UI/UX patterns made popular in the past 15 years and go back to the 90s for inspiration. Resources like the Apple Design Guidelines from 1992 linked in the OP is excellent!

Perhaps my biggest gripe is that many of these terrible UI/UX patterns are built in at such a low level, it is near impossible for developers to override them in the software they build. For example, I really dislike flat UI and particularly flat scrollbars. But it is near impossible to add scrollbars that look like these in any Windows or Mac app I build: https://flowingdata.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/evolution...

Usability has become theatre across Apple products. The sad part is that since Microsoft just seems to copy Apple, over time Windows usability has also degraded severely. I am so frustrated by what Apple, Microsoft and Google have done.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#557

Post by xutopia » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 5:08 PM UTC

postalcoder wrote: post #99

This is an excellent article. Apple has been rudderless on the interaction design front for over a decade now. The windowing mess is evidence of it. We now have the cmd+tab (app switcher), Spaces, Mission Control, (full screen) split screen, Stage Manager, and now tiled window control. None of those interaction metaphors have been expanded upon since their initial launch. I'm a "mac guy". I understood why Apple initi…

Cmd+~ switches windows of a given app in case you didn't know (not disagreeing with you but it is one shortcut I find super useful and it helps switch windows).

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#558

Post by OoooooooO » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 5:08 PM UTC

xnx wrote: post #548

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beyond that, any lag from Win95 era was probably because of spinning hard drives. Running it on a SSD would be instantaneous. Also, file search might even work, instead of whatever we have now.

I don't know how I used Windows before I installed Everything.

Deactivate web search via regedit, then it works.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#559

Post by naikrovek » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 5:09 PM UTC

ethbr1 wrote: post #536

naikrovek wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

design for design's sake is bad, and that's what Liquid Glass is. There was no thought behind it. It is 2026 and UIs are still abysmally slow in many cases. How is that even remotely possible? Now, with that in mind, consider (just for a moment) why people might think that UX people don't know what they're doing.

> It is 2026 and UIs are still abysmally slow in many cases. How is that even remotely possible? Because UI/X teams were separated from engineering. (Same thing happened with modern building architecture) It's fundamentally impossible to optimize if you're unaware of physical constraints. We need to get rid of the "It's okay to be a UI/UX designer who doesn't code" cult. (Looking at you, Adobe and Figma...)

Agreed. The further you are away from how a computer works internally, the worse your product for a computer will be.

We have convinced ourselves as an industry that this is not true, but it is true.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#560

Post by saulpw » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 5:10 PM UTC

halapro wrote: post #161

wahnfrieden wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rose tinted glasses. Have a look through Jobs era UI again.

Oh yes Mountain Lion was very very bad. UI was simple, maybe too simple, but it made sense. The only complaint from that era was the thin scroll bars and the flipped scroll direction, both of which are forgotten about and accepted nowadays.

Say what you want about the design of Mountain Lion, at least it's an ethos.