alt Hacker NewsBeen on HN for many years now, and the one thing that never changes is people posting angrily about small UI changes. It makes me wonder- if things have only ever gotten worse, what was the peak UI? MS DOS?
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Perhaps it is the annoyance of change for change's sake. If you buy a car and then the interior changes after an update, it'd be pretty annoying, yet that is what is foisted on us.
Windows 2000 / XP in classic mode / XP / Vista / 7. For OSX I'd say High Sierra to Catalina.
I'd say Snow Leopard was peak.
Liquid Glass was not a "small UI change". It disrupted many accessibility aspects of macOS, so much so that Apple toned down quite a few aspects of the design in subsequent updates, even adding a slider to reduce the effect. [1]
The quantity of requests for how to disable Liquid Glass on Apple Discussions is staggering. [2]
[1]https://www.macrumors.com/2026/06/09/macos-golden-gate-liqui...
You're probably less likely to see posts saying "I'm glad they kept the UI the same, I already liked it".
I think the biggest thing isn't really whatever it is but the act of changing and forcing everyone to change into the new ui that is the disruptive part. It is a combination of window dressing changing but also sometimes functions breaking. It is ironic because software written for developers prides itself generally on maintaining compatibility with say depreciated flags, or if things will be depreciated plenty of notice ahead of time. But that only holds for cli software. GUI software and the OS that all goes out the window. Stuff breaks, workflows break, you have no recourse and in fact they might make it genuinely difficult to go back to an older version. Like this part of it is the shitty part. Never mind how it happens to look. It is the forcing effect.
If you consider the transition from macOS 15 to 26+ 'small', I think you should see an optician.
Like GP, I despise the new design. I'll say the old design was pretty peak design. Windows looked like windows. Buttons like buttons. With accessibility tweaks (for transparency and borders) I could make it very, very usable.
This new thing is a crime against UI. Every icon now sits in a circle, and takes up % more room as a result. Because … it's pretty? It isn't pretty.
I upgraded my laptop thinking I was going to develop an app and that I'd need to be on the latest design. I ended up developing a TUI so I needn't have bothered. Every time I see my partner's laptop, still on Sequoia, I shed a little tear.
NeXTSTep
Small improvements don't get much accolades. And for the most part, the UX is so good that most changes tend to be neutral or for the worse. And when you're really attached to something and there's on an unnecessary change, it feels almost like betrayal!
I, for one, prefer Apple products because they sweat the small stuff more than the other options, and when they have put in effort to make things worse it's kind of infuriating.
I do a bit of desktop Linux work too, and it's OK, but hard to complain when it's all open source volunteer work! Windows is so terrible that I wouldn't even know where to start. What's the point? There's nobody at Microsoft that even gives a damn.
No, it was Windows 3.11
Small?
On the Windows side, Windows 2000 and XP/Vista/7’s Classic mode, though Aero was quite nice. I’m not a fan of the interfaces from 8 onward, and I didn’t like Luna in XP.
On the Mac side, it’s a toss up between the platinum interface of Mac OS 8/9 and Mac OS X Tiger. With that said, I have a work-issued MacBook Pro running Golden Gate as my daily driver, and Liquid Glass is alright. It’s not what I’d prefer if I had a choice, but it’s not a dramatic departure from previous versions of macOS. A Cheetah or Puma Mac OS X user should be able to navigate Golden Gate with ease, mostly.