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

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#771

Post by llmslave2 » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 9:29 PM UTC

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #102

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…

Maybe Apple just got so many things right early on, then the people with experience slowly left and inexperienced people kept showing up and they felt compelled to keep making changes to justify their jobs. How do they justify their job if they can't roll out huge visible changes? So they rationalize whatever change they wanna make and keep advocating for it until they get the green light, regardless of whether or no…

Yeah I think this is a well known problem. Humans tend to get a lot of stuff right on the first try, and then it's subsequently thrown away in the name of "progress".

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#772

Post by zythyx » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 9:30 PM UTC

Are they really trying to tell me how bad the icons on a Mac are while presenting the website with a constant snow animation, which when turned off turns into a horrible bright yellow colour, and the dark mode toggle is a joke turning the website into a pitch black nothing where your mouse becomes a torch...

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#773

Post by drewbeck » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 9:31 PM UTC

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…

These directions come from above the PMs, especially at a place as design-focused as Apple.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#774

Post by dbgrman » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 9:31 PM UTC

I miss the time of Exposé and Mission Control, 3 finger drag, touch-to-tap, force click, even natural scrolling, Macbook Air, Magnetic magsafe.

Then something changed.

Touch bar was a miss. LaunchPad was a miss. I don't see a use of "Stage manager". iPad has gone to shit. Widgets came back, on mac... for no reason.

In Tahoe, the new spotlight search is one of the better features of Tahoe but i am fine with Alfred. But by and large, there are more annoyances in Tahoe than improvements.

For the iPhone and liquid glass, I am convinced that it was done to force people to upgrade to a new device. There *has* to be a reason to upgrade, and when hardware and software feature plateau, then we even the planned obsolescence era.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#775

Post by TeMPOraL » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 9:31 PM UTC

xnx wrote: post #744

dlisboa wrote: post #734

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Style matters, maybe unfortunately depending on the point of view. Products like consumer electronics have a large amount of fashion to them. Just like the t-shirt was perfected in the 1950s people still make new ones with little style changes for no functional reason. Designers at Balenciaga don't have to justify their jobs when they make oversized t-shirts, neither do the ones at Apple.

Fashion is a very appropriate place for style. Tools, less so.

Corollary: the extent of fashion-driven variability those "tools" support over generations tells us just how little utility those tools provide.

In actual tools, the form and function are strongly connected. Tools of competing brands look pretty much the same, except for color accents, because they can't look any different without sacrificing functionality, performance and safety characteristics.

You don't see power tool vendors trying to differentiate their impact drivers by replacing rubber handles with flat glass because it's more "modern", because it would compromise safety and make the tool unsuitable for most jobs its competitors fulfill. This happens in software mostly because the tools aren't doing much of anything substantial - they're not powerful enough for design to actually matter.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#776

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 9:32 PM UTC

Nextgrid wrote: post #30

safety1st wrote: post #15

It's pretty wild how the best screenshot of a usable menu is from, like, Office 2000. What the hell have we been doing for the past 25 years?

Technology moved from being a tool to an ad delivery vehicle. Tools' success metric is how much they make your task easier/faster. Ad delivery machines' success metric is how much of your time they waste. Shitty UI making you spend more time in front of the screen is considered a good thing according to those "designers"' performance metrics.

[deleted]

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#777

Post by dbgrman » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 9:34 PM UTC

friendzis wrote: post #189

bdelmas wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Liquid Glass was actually a big surprise for me, and it was a shock to see Apple moving forward with this and nobody stopping it. Microsoft did that with Vista back in 2006 and they stopped doing this. So Apple is copying a 2006 design? From Microsoft? Where even Microsoft stopped doing it because of all the known issues? So many questions...

I would be very tempted to place a bet that nobody in the decision making chain used Vista or Compiz to any degree. Commercial software coding glorifies denying anything older than 10 years exist outside of museums, let alone learn anything from it. The same has merely infected design world.

But they did use early builds of liquid glass and that should've triggered nausea and someone must've said "Don't"... yet they still did. You don't have to have gone through Windows Vista time to understand UI/UX (least of all, Apple Designers).

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#778

Post by jonwinstanley » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 9:34 PM UTC

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…

Just a note on Vision Pro - as it’s been priced at $3,500 - I’m not sure I’d say it’s unsuccessful.

I bet they’ve sold approx as many as they thought they would.

This product is a placeholder for a cheaper and lighter one in the future.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#779

Post by nomel » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 9:35 PM UTC

OsrsNeedsf2P wrote: post #551

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…

For any bureaucratic system, the system will slowly transition away from the reason it was put into place and towards self preservation.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#780

Post by lossyalgo » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 9:36 PM UTC

matthewkayin wrote: post #645

wolvoleo wrote: post #616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft totally screwed up the windows interface with windows 8 to suit tablets which they viewed as the future of computing. Not only were they wrong, they also really broke the UX for the users they did have for a new product that hardly sold and still doesn't (windows tablets). Eventually they had to cave in but Apple is more stubborn than Microsoft. Even if Apple is right, why shoehorn the future into the prese…

Microsoft may have "caved", but we're still stuck with two different settings menus and a start menu that prioritizes ads and search results over your own programs.

2 settings menus? We have every version of Windows from 3.1 all the way to 11 styled settings menus, sometimes multiple styles depending on which settings you want to look at. It's a total shitshow.