2026-01-07 07:31:31
Howard Oakley, writing at The Eclectic Light Company
macOS Tahoe’s visual interface:
- Fits largely rectangular contents into windows with excessively rounded corners.
- Enlarges controls without any functional benefit.
- Results in app icons being more uniform, thus less distinguishable and memorable.
- Fails to distinguish tools, controls and other interface elements using differences in tone, so making them harder to use.
- Makes a mess where transparent layers are superimposed, and won’t reduce transparency when that’s needed to render its interface more accessible.
Maybe this is because I’m getting older, but that gives me the benefit of having experienced Apple’s older interfaces, with their exceptional quality and functionality.
It’s just remarkable how much better-looking MacOS was 10 years ago, compared to MacOS 26 Tahoe at its best. And it’s equally remarkable just how bad MacOS 26 Tahoe looks in many typical, non-contrived situations, where entire menus or the title of a window are rendered completely illegible.
2026-01-07 06:09:48
It’s extra noise to me. It’s not that I think menu items should never have icons. I think they can be incredibly useful (more on that below). It’s more that I don’t like the idea of “give each menu item an icon” being the default approach.
This posture lends itself to a practice where designers have an attitude of “I need an icon to fill up this space” instead of an attitude of “Does the addition of a icon here, and the cognitive load of parsing and understanding it, help or hurt how someone would use this menu system?”
The former doesn’t require thinking. It’s just templating — they all have icons, so we need to put something there. The latter requires care and thoughtfulness for each use case and its context.
To defend my point, one of the examples I always pointed to was macOS. For the longest time, Apple’s OS-level menus seemed to avoid this default approach of sticking icons in every menu item.
That is, until macOS Tahoe shipped.
Nielsen’s post on MacOS 26 Tahoe’s tragic “icons for every menu item” design edict was published a month ago, before Nikita Prokopov’s post on the same subject yesterday. Both posts are crackerjack good, and complement each other. Nielsen makes the point that the Mac stood as a counter to platforms and systems that put icons next to every menu item. Of course Google Docs has icons next to every menu item. It sucks. Google sucks at UI design. We Mac users laugh at their crappy designs.
Well, who’s laughing now? It might sound hyperbolic but this change is the reason why I’ve decided not to upgrade to MacOS 26 Tahoe. I could put up with the rest of Liquid Glass’s half-baked who-thought-this-was-OK-to-ship? nonsense, but not the whole menu bar. I can tolerate being angry about UI changes Apple makes to the Mac. But I can’t tolerate being heartbroken.
2026-01-07 05:41:19
My folks are in town visiting us for a couple months so we rented them a house nearby.
It’s new construction. No one has lived in it yet. It’s amped up with state of the art systems. You know, the ones with touchscreens of various sizes, IoT appliances, and interfaces that try too hard.
And it’s terrible. What a regression.
Examples include: light switches that require a demo to use, a Miele dishwasher that requires the use of a companion phone app, a confusing-to-use TV (of course), inscrutable thermostats, and:
And the lag. Lag everywhere. Everything feels a beat or two behind. Everything. Lag is the giveaway that the system is working too hard for too little. Real-time must be the hardest problem.
Now look... I’m no luddite. But this experience is close to conversion therapy. Tech can make things better, but I simply can’t see in these cases. I’ve heard the pitches too — you can set up scenes and one button can change EVERYTHING. Not buying it. It actually feels primitive, like we haven’t figured out how to make things easy yet.
In this period of the computerization of everything, so many systems have lost the innate intuitiveness from their analog counterparts. Light switches were easy and obvious. Flip the switch. Thermostats were easy and obvious. Turn the dial until the indicator points to the temperature you want. Light switches and Honeywell thermostats were so simple they seemed like they weren’t “interfaces” at all, which is why they were such great interfaces. The best interfaces almost literally disappear.
One of the mottos of the Perl programming language is that easy things should be easy, and hard things should be possible. That’s the ideal when designing anything. But the more important part is keeping easy things easy. A house full of old-fashioned analog light switches is better than a house full of smart switches that need a demo to use at all, even though with the old-fashioned switches, you can’t do hard things like turn off the lights remotely, or turn off every light in the house with one action. The smart switches might seem like an improvement because they make possible hard things that were previously impossible. Making possible the impossible is surely a win, right? But not necessarily. Making possible the heretofore impossible isn’t axiomatically a win. It’s a loss if it comes at the expense of keeping the easy things easy, consistent, reliable, and intuitive. Nothing exemplifies that more than the decline in user experience of watching TV, and attempting something as previously simple as flipping between two games on two different channels.
The guiding principle when creating computerized versions of analog systems ought to be “First, do no harm.” Everything should be as easy, obvious, reliable, and intuitive as in the old system. Only add to that what doesn’t introduce any regressions on those fronts.
Alas, that’s not how the world has proceeded.
2026-01-07 04:49:02
The Financial Times has a nice illustrated guide to the leadership team at Twitter/X, where things are going about as you’d expect.
2026-01-07 00:51:27
Welcome to Philadelphia, Donnie Baseball.
2026-01-06 11:24:21
This essay from UI critic Nikita Prokopov is just devastatingly good. If you’ve looked at MacOS 26 Tahoe, you’re surely appalled by the new UI guideline that recommends putting icons next to every single menu item. Prokopov argues — with copious screenshot illustrations every step of the way — that this is a terrible idea in the first place, and that Apple has implemented it poorly. There’s no defense for any of this. Don’t make the mistake of thinking Apple just needs better, more consistent icons. The fact that Tahoe’s menu item icons are glaringly inconsistent and often utterly inscrutable is the fudge icing on a shit cake, but the real embarrassment is that the idea ever got past the proposal stage. No real UI or icon designers think this is a good idea. None.
A shitty idea that works against usability, inconsistently implemented, all in the name of adding some ugly visual bling to the UI. Perhaps the epitome of a Dye job.
Simply a must-read piece. I have much more to say about the menus in Tahoe, but thanks to Prokopov, I don’t have to say it all.
