alt Hacker NewsMake macOS consistently bad unironically
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Clearing notifications on macOS Tahoe is ridiculously tedious. The "Liquid Glass" button is slow to respond, the notifications hang for a bit before being cleared, and then sometimes you have to jiggle the cursor to clear the next one. It's absurdly frustrating.
And the updates to Music (formerly iTunes) are so bad the entire team should be dressed down, Steve Jobs style.
I must say that all this fuzz about the corners actually reflects rather well on macos.
If the biggest flaw of a OS is the border radius of its windows, you've got yourself a pretty decent OS!
It's not gonna make me leave my darling Linux, ofc, but i think this whole debacle can only be interpreted as praise.
On second thought, it might also be considered a mediation on people's tendency to bike-shed.
Not to mention that WindowServer seems to take 100+% cpu since the upgrade. Also I can't paste filenames in the save file dialog in some apps. And the URL field in Safari is just weird.
My computer was running so slowly that I had to minimize transparency in system preferences somewhere. I think I also turned off opening every app in its own space. And I hid the icons on the Desktop in Finder settings somehow, which helped a lot. There are countless other little tweaks that are worth investigating.
I also highly recommend App Tamer (no affiliation). It lets you jail background apps at 10% cpu or whatever. It won't help with WindowServer or kernel_task (which also often runs at 100+% cpu), but it's something.
I can't help but feel that there's nobody at the wheel at Apple anymore. When I have to wait multiple seconds to open a window, to switch between apps, to go to my Applications folder, then something is terribly wrong. Computers have been running thousands of times slower than they should be for decades, but now it's reaching the point where daily work is becoming difficult.
I'm cautiously optimistic that AI will let us build full operating systems using other OSs as working examples. Then we can finally boot up with better alternatives that force Apple/Microsoft/Google to try again. I could see Finder or File Explorer alternatives replacing the native ones.
People obsess about SIP but just remember that SIP does nothing to prevent the most common type of malware (ransomware).
If you use SIP and use package managers (npm, cargo, pip, etc) outside of a VM you are substantially more vulnerable to attack than someone who doesn't use SIP and doesn't use package managers.
So if you want to fix your corners, you can do it guilt-free by adopting some better security practices around the malware delivery systems / package managers that you have installed on your computer.
I'm not a fan of the look in Tahoe (especially Apple Music wtf happened there) but most of it I can totally ignore, and don't even notice anymore. Except for the tabs. I have Sequoia and Tahoe machines, and the tabs in Tahoe are so unbelievably bad in comparison. Like this ugly pill shape. I rarely hear this get brought up but they're astonishingly ugly, worse than the previous design in every way.
I think it's a happy quirk of the blog's tagging system (#Programming is a category tag), but the ending feels quite profound:
> Now at least everything is consistently bad. #Programming
I see in this story organisational boundaries between teams. Teams which don't have common coordination space (or used for something more __important__). Responsible people don't care enough to mitigate such deviations earlier
I love that there are people who are observant enough to notice these kinds of things, a vanguard for those of us who are blithely unaware and protected due to their vigilance.
Between the rounded corners that don't reach the edges of the viewport, and the behavior when opening a new app for the first time, it feels like Mac's UI is optimized around the assumption most users won't expand windows to fill the whole screen, but rather leave them half-sized somewhere in the middle.
Does anyone actually do this? Especially for heavy-duty applications like my web browser and IDE, this has always felt like a bizarre assumption to me.
Mac OS has become what would happen if Harley Davidson merged with Volvo Truck and some high up said that to "reduce costs" and "homogenize the brand", the design groups needed to be merged and put forward a unified design. If I was less lazy, I'd have a !AI thing whip me up a mashup drawing.
The pill tabs are what get me too. I can ignore most visual changes after a while, but those somehow manage to feel both more distracting and less informative at the same time.
I usually use Linux and Windows (pretty much split 50/50) and tbh this is why I never could switch to Mac full time even though I've have had and still have several Macs at home. The full screen beahavior is weird. Is the dock should overlay every single window all the time? If not then why is the dock not hidden by default? If yes then full screen is actually "maximum size app window without overlaying the dock"? What's even the point of the dock actually? The other one is the open window =/= running app behavior. Wait 2 hours later this app is still running in the background even though I've closed all windows?
I use this https://github.com/FelixKratz/JankyBorders to try and have a consistent feel to it, but I wish I could make it less rounded
Not a mac user here - why can't you use the same method to set the corner radius to 0.1 or something and effectively turn of the roundness, but without root?
Reminds me of Adobe Gripes (https://www.tumblr.com/adobegripes).
When Adobe suite was de facto standard for designing and coding interfaces (you know, Flash) their own software was so immensely bad that there was enough material for a guy to make fun of them on a daily basis for a good couple of years.
I tried something similar while building my tool site — biggest issue was SEO indexing. Fixed it by improving internal linking instead of relying on sitemap.
I have never been happier to be a long time Linux user. Our systems are working significantly better than ever before and I have personally converted more people to Linux in the last year than the 15 years before that.
One way to make the mac consistent
I've been running Sonoma and it's going to stay that way for foreseeable future.
This isn’t a part of macOS 26 that bothers me, honestly. I don’t spend a lot of time stacking windows and measuring their corners.
Somehow this little hidden setting via CLI
defaults write -g com.apple.SwiftUI.DisableSolarium -bool YES
Makes thing bearable....note log out to see it change.
You still need to then turn transparency off via settings see
this
https://tidbits.com/2025/10/09/how-to-turn-liquid-glass-into...
FYI, the article incorrectly claims that SIP just controls write access to /. It does way more than that.
great catch on the corner inconsistency. hadnt noticed until reading this now i cant unsee it.
this is actually one of the reasons i ended up going all in on a tiling wm (aerospace). once youre tiling, windows are edge to edge so the corner radius thing mostly disappears. the trade off is giving up floating windows,
the DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES approach is clever though. making everything consistently rounded is way more pragmatic than fighting apples design decisions or disabling SIP.
Windows gets a lot of (deserved) bad rap for bloatware but MacOS is just a little less bad. "Features" that we can't uninstall (e.g.: Siri, Apple Music), arbitrary changes in the UI, ...
True, the "blessing" of forced online accounts, telemetry and advertisement didn't arrive to MacOS, yet. But, I wonder how long it will take us to get there.
I'm sure they'll try to market this as a feature so you can see how many windows you have open
I'm not sure if these selectors are hit in SwiftUI or not.
With only a little sense of self aware irony, one thing I hate about so much dialog these days is how vehement opinions are. I don't particularly like the rounded corners, and think it's a regression. It's also... fine. It's not the difference between usable and entirely unusable. And I see this kind of attitude all over the place now. A slight change, some slightly non-ideal behavior and all of a sudden a product is THE WORST THING EVER. We will be ok with inconsistently rounded windows. I think people need to be a bit more tolerant of design decisions that are opinionated, and likely worse but also not breaking.
Ads in a start menu can die in a fire though.
This was one of the first things I noticed after upgrade and was confused. I had an understanding that people in Apple UX are extremely meticulous when it comes to every single little tiny detail. I guess those times are over.
One of my claude code projects was going to be "theghostofsteve", a social media platform where people post things they love and hate about appleOS things. Likes/Dislikes would be "genius/it's shit". And in all likelihood, the platform would surface that most users think "it's shit."
The platform would aggregate by major/minor version, and you could see in totality whether the current version of macOS/iOS would make Steve proud of miserable.
Ultimately I decided against it, for defamation/cease-and-desist reasons, and not wanting to find out. But it needs to exist.
At some point in time, Apple used nice software to be able to sell expensive but mediocre hardware.
Now they sell expensive but nice hardware and they have mediocre software.
It seems you can only choose one out of three, nice hardware, nice software, good price. Apple is always choosing high price, and they either gave customers nice hardware or nice software, but not both.
In window management, anything other than i3 is an unequivocal downgrade.
Rounded corners are just...bizarre. Just because the laptop casing is physically rounded !? (Yet the menubar squares it off off at the top, and the bezel squares it off on the bottom...)
> disabling MacOS system integrity [protection], which results in making them possibly vulnerable
Not really, if you have malware that has root access on your system I think you're already pretty screwed, especially considering that you don't even need root to read all your saved passwords and personal files https://xkcd.com/1200/
Y’all are wild…
I feel like the only dude on the planet who uses fullscreen workspaces on Mac.
The number of times I have noticed the corner of my windows is precisely zero because each important application gets its own workspace, so the window frame doesn't get rendered. Sometimes I'll tile two windows side by side on my external monitor but even then this is a complete non issue for me.
Are you guys just running everything on the one desktop workspace in windowed mode? That seems like madness.
I hate rounded corners. I use stylus to apply "*{border-radius: 0 !important;}" to a bunch of sites, including YouTube.
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Half the people in IT have no business being here.
I can't say I've had any issues with the corners, or noticed any difference after upgrading to macOS 26. But this is neat.
I've been using Tahoe since the beta and the borders haven't bothered me once.
I get the UI consistency thing but it's okay to transition to new UI things gradually than making radical changes all at once. If this is still an issue 2yrs from now it will be more of a concern about their commitment.
For all his infamy, Jobs held Apple together in large part through his uncompromising perfectionism and attention to the kind of details that have since been demoted to "we'll fix it in the next version" or the equivalent of "# temporary". Every company is a bit of an ant-farm, but this one either has no single queen to lay down the law, or the queen is "trying things out" :P
Jobs used to laugh at Microsoft for all manner of inconsistencies in behaviour and user experience with Windows, but now Apple is contending with the same problem, in part due to exposure as macOS has never been so popular and prevalent, and now there are ever growing amount of eyes calling them out for those inconsistencies that have been appearing more and more frequently without Jobs' leadership style.