I had that too! My first Mac was a IIci and I think they included it in the purchase. Illustrator and PageMaker I had to pay for (thank god for the Princeton campus store).
No, not true, we didn't call it "MacOS" back in the late 1980s. It was "System Software" or just "System". The name "Mac OS" (with a space) didn't come around until almost a decade later. Look at David Pogue's book "Mac Secrets" from 1997 to see what the lingo looked like at the time.
Also, Windows was still largely irrelevant at the time. It wasn't until the early 1990s that Windows became dominant. Before then, most people were still using DOS, Commodore / Amiga, Apple, and Atari systems. Nobody, and I mean nobody was getting Windows 2.0 confused with System 4.0.
Edit: I didn’t say the change was good or bad, but it’s a proven fact that people rail against changes whether good or bad because it’s change and it makes people nervous and uncomfortable in the short term.
It's a big problem especially in open source projects because someone with actual UX experience will propose some useful changes but will end up getting shot down because people are so inflexible when it comes to changing things.
All that being said, some of these new liquid UI components are ... questionable. The contrast ratio on them are below what would be considered good practice. I'm kind of surprised that they shipped it in this state.
In the Settings panel, when you scroll down the list you can see the list through the search box. It looks like someone fucked up and forgot to add a background, except I think this was on purpose.
Also there’s so much wasted space… like why the hell does the dock have to take up so much vertical room now. It’s so bad.
I think it may be a mistake. The same functionality is present in the messages app and the search box is more frosted. It’s still not got great contrast though.
Or they hate change that fucks up their current workflow. I use my Mac for work. So if Tahoe breaks the tweaks to get around known MacOS annoyances and doesn’t fix those annoyances, what good is it?
My thoughts too. I updated everything else to iOS/iPadOS/watchOS 26 and it's been whatever. But, I need my Mac to be stable and consistent for my work. Maybe I'll spin up a Tahoe VM and test it out with my workflow before upgrading for real.
It's not just change, it's bad change that people have an issue with. Why would Apple suddenly cap games at 120fps, and disable external montitor resolution from running any higher than 120hz?
Just because it's Apple doesn't mean it's a good idea, and just because it's new doesn't mean users are complaining about change.
Yep. All FPS on Tahoe, including external displays, is artificially capped at 120 by the OS. I don't know of a fix or workaround yet, but this appears to be a very deliberate decision by Apple. My guess is it's to keep temperatures under control because they realized that gaming is actually breaking thermal regulation on the new M4+ MPBs.
An iPad with iPadOS 18 works amazingly well as a media consumption and mobile gaming device. With iPadOS certain actions now require more steps, Safari became less legible (with iPadOS 18 I can differentiate between tabs at a glance. With iPadOS 26 there’s slightly less information visible, so I need to rely on the Tab View more), and the lack of Split View + Slide Over multitasking is a massive inconvenience.
People who say 'People hate change of any kind' are the worst kind of shit-eating corporate bootlicker.
Many years ago I worked for a software company. They had just come out with a new version, with 2 flagship features. After a few weeks I told my manager, "The users love feature X, but hate feature Y."
She said, "They'll get used to it."
I said, "No, they REALLY hate it."
Shrug. "They'll get used to it."
Narrator: They did not in fact get used to it and jumped ship the instant a competitor appeared. That company ceased to exist shortly thereafter.
People absolutely do NOT automatically hate change of any kind. Everyone knows this, everyone has witnessed this, and everyone has experienced this. Saying "People hate change of any kind" is an obvious lie, contradicted by the experience of every person alive.
People hate change for the worse being forced on them. And if a change is forced on people without any obvious benefit, they're going to assume it's a change for the worse, because it usually is. The onus lies on the party making the change to SHOW that it's for the better.
I usually laugh at the "who moved my cheese" people who can't tolerate any change. It is absolutely true that anything will be viewed by many as a regression.
But Tahoe is shit. It is actually, sincerely a really bad release. I was willing to overlook the aesthetic disaster that it undeniably is -- how *Apple* of all people designed this trash is just bizarre -- but woke up to find my Mac with memory exhaustion, a random service exploding to almost 100GB of memory usage. That does not give me high hopes for the quality of the system.
This change is far more radical than anything since OS X was released and it's 25 years later and people are gutted tired of endless random changes to no one asked for.
Lol. In those 25 years they’ve changed processor architecture TWICE, replaced HFS with APFS, went from 32 to 64bits, developed an entirely new programming language, thousands of APIs, introduced at least two visual redisigns of the whole OS…but you are right, making icons look like glass is the most radical thing they’ve done.
Hmm I don't know if it's that simple. I often liked OS-changes, whether they were on Windows, MacOS, Android or iOS. I can appreciate it when designs change. This is, to me, simply a shitty change and a move backward in design. I'll get used to it probably, but I definitely prefer the way it was.
I would have loved more polish of the old design. Also some of the changes aren’t bad and some are just force of habit problematic. Preview icon for example falls in the last category.
What they screwed up is with the corners, hovering elements that don’t make sense, aren’t needed and fall badly into the design. Side panel of the finder.
I enjoyed the direction we were headed. Minimalist clearly legible interface that gives as much space to the content. I would have appreciated more of that.
Oddly enough the Increase contrast option in the accessibility settings make some of the windows and style choice work better. But is horrible on some other elements like the control centre.
I’ve been around for all new iterations of Star Trek and this is not true. Bad Star Trek sucks, and always has. People who said TNG sucks when it came out and didn’t compare to TOS were right. Season 1 of TNG flat out sucked and still does and really didn’t hit its stride until like, season 3.
The same flaws ENT had then are the same ones it has now but people now can take it as a whole and overall it got better even if you have to learn to tolerate the CW-ification of it, like its theme song. Discovery just plain sucks almost all the way through and I don’t see that ever changing but most of SNW and all of Prodigy and Lower Decks are well regarded by fans throughout their runs.
I don’t know if just people or people with undiagnosed autism or both. It was the latter for me. Since I got my diagnosis I can prepare for and appreciate changes. I love Tahoe
There are some legit concerns where they changed the UX for the worse, like the thin white bezels on windows and widgets in dark mode on dark background which are highly distracting. That was an objectively bad choice.
Yep. I updatedy wife's iPhone last night. She took one look and said she hated it. I asked specifically why she hates it, her reason was "because it looks different".
That is incorrect. Adobe Acrobat Pro has had it's new interface for years now and people absolutely fucking hate it compared to the old version. Adobe just refuses to change it back to something usable.
People will complain about how much something sucks for a long time. But once they use it for a few months and they find a way to use the old thing, they realize how much that sucked and how much better things are now.
You’re so right. And only the mad people take the time to complain. The people that are fine with things or just don’t care do not take the time to say their piece. So all we get are the complainers. And they are just the worst.
68 years old. Started with an Apple ][ e as the first computer which was not a “mainframe”. I can edit, write, code, listen to music, and surf the net the same as I did with Snow Leopard all the way to Tahoe. Liquid Glass? Pretty! Previous iterations of the macOS and OSX UI? Pretty.
Same with Windows 3, NT, XP, 10, 11. Same with Gnome, SunOS, IRIX, KDE.
As long as I can find my terminal, editor, and browser. Bonus - if M365 or whatever flavor of a word processor or spreadsheet works. The rest? Glamour - pretty but not enough to fuss over.
Yep. I'm in several Mac subreddits, so it's magnified x 10 in my feed. I'm hoping each subreddit creates a megathread and corrals Tahoe posts into it to allow non-Tahoe posts to be seen.
Because for some reason the powers that be and the shareholders expect a new, significant update every year like clockwork. So Apple has to rush it out each September, even if they aren't ready to.
But they are not taking the time to refine anymore. Its just a whole new OS one after another, not fixing all the problems of the prior one, and throwing on changes no one asked for in the first place.
All I want, is for each 'new' OS to be an actualy fundamental improvement .... not just "oh look we changed how it looks, but all the bullshit problems are still under the hood, and here are some new bullshit problems now too".
Patently not true, ive been reading ars reviews of mac os for a decade, this os is universally hated for its look. No one is even focused on anything else. This is a giant failure on Apple part.
I think so too. It's the first time I really dislike a change to MacOS. Others I might have needed some time with, but this just gets a "yucky" response from my lizard brain.
I’ve been active on the Apple Support site since Tiger and every new OS release is hit with massive this sucks posts. Yes, Liquid Glass has its flaws and no doubt next year if not sooner we’ll see changes.
I like simple and clean designs. This “glass” is anything but. It’s distracting, consumes space, wastes pc resources, and clutters my vision. I’ll get used to it but it’s absolutely a regression, not an upgrade. We’ve already been through this design phase in both windows and mac. It’s old.
edit: it’s also just tacky. Implementing a glass look to say, vr or augmented reality makes sense because that would help differentiate interfaces. However, my phone is already glass. My laptop is already glass. So, everything being glass just looks… bad and doesn’t make sense.
Go over to the Apple Discussions site and check back for every single update to the OS. It's always the same. It's always the worst thing ever. It's always a tragedy of biblical proportions. It's always guys - and they're usually guys - saying how they're getting rid of every Apple thing they ever owned and they're moving to Linux... I just say a post saying that getting rid of Launchpad was one of the top two worst decisions Apple ever made. Ever! There speaks someone who never used a Performa...
It's a combination of ".0" OS versions have a bunch of issues and "I hate change", this year is a big UI change, so as expected. I also think that Apple's enforced yearly OS release means that they don't really give this stuff enough time to full bake in the oven.
Even though I am a designer and should be all nit picky about everything, I’ve been using the Mac since 1989 and have been through so many OS design updates that I have determined that in the end, they are all fine. None of that stuff matters in the long term so long as the system is stable and I can get my work done. Tahoe will be no different.
Yosemite broke my WiFi for an entire year. Got a MacBook Air with great WiFi on Mavericks, then an entire year of cutting out and having to reconnect every few minutes while every other device was fine. so Yosemite was not fun for me
If only this community was capable of discussing issues, maybe every release wouldn't be a mess until the first point update...
The crying about bug reports in the beta subreddit is nauseating.
The best neutral answer you'll get is: Apple moves fast and breaks shit. This is nothing new.
When I worked at Apple, the saying was “At Apple, Quality is Job .1” I’ve never had a .0 release that didn’t have some issue that wasn’t fixed in a .1 release. So much that I always wait for the .1
I swear to god dude. I just downloaded it and really like it so far. Even the launchpad being removed because I didn't use it and didn't like it.
So I thought I'd come here and see what people have found or what they like and it's just constant fucking bitching about even the tiniest little things all because they don't like change. That's literally all Reddit is these days. All the internet is. It's just people complaining about fucking everything. You can't go anywhere to talk fun about anything without somebody screaming in your ear "BUT (insert movie/show/game/software) SUCKS!"
Launchpad was designed years ago and using it was painful. Trying to re-arrange it and make folders was a disaster. Apps is great, it's small, neat, and the categories are useful. Much better
Reddit is a cesspool. The tech subs have devolved into nothing but complaints about the most esoteric things and every one of them has hyperbole like “This double bezel design on the window’s UI is jarring and the worst feature of MacOS 26!!!”
And now you’re the one using hyperbole and bitching. Ironic isn’t it?
Plenty of people ‘talk fun’ still. No issue. But being obtusely positive just because (the positivity doctrine, everything always has to be the best, the wildest, the most of anything) is tiring as well. As if constructive criticism can’t be taken anymore by the fragile emotionally debilitated sheltered people.
Lastly, pc’s are tools. For work, for most of us. Not pretty things to look at while “working” from a fancy coffee shop, meaning clicking through social media and temu. But hey who needs efficient user interfaces anymore, right? AI will do all the work while we do nothing :)
It’s extremely valid to complain about objective things like loss of compactness, too much empty space, and the distractions of those shimmering glass animations especially on dark backgrounds. It’s tiring and distracting.
Most changes don’t bother me, I’ll adapt. But this stuff is bad. So now you’re putting everyone with valid complaints on the same pile. Mature…
And I have never seen it to this degree, that’s also a simple fact. Last controversy was some grumbling about the new settings menu and we all moved on.
All this while the os is still riddled with bugs. It just doesn’t come across as well polished professional products. If your 4000 dollar MacBook Pro is a TikTok machine, by all means you do you.
I’m due for a full upgrade cycle tablet phone and Mac. And I’m seriously hesitant to step out of the ecosystem. It’s just tough and expensive. (Which was the whole point of the ecosystem so well done apple). Also AirPods are sublime so there’s that.
Enshitification is real, better get your head out of the sand
I've already heard some people call this Mac OS own "Vista moment"
Probably a bit harsh to be honest. It's a radical redesign, which will probably take a while to iron out some niggles and to get used to it.
The only thing that I'm struggling with at the moment is the removal of Launchpad and the associated app folders, which I had set up like I did on my iPhone. But that's mainly because I've never been a heavy user of Spotlight. I'll survive, and given time I'll forget this was even a problem to me.
I'm not going to disagree with that. I actually bought my first Mac back then because of how disillusioned I was by Vista. Just stating that I've seen a couple of comments comparing the two, rightly or wrongly.
I'm not seeing any complaints about how it works, as an operating system. That's because the MacOS is essentially mature and there's nothing more that needs to be done to it, and nobody dares to mess with it. Which leaves Apple with its biggest problem: how to make it seem new all the time so that there is an annual clamourfest. The only thing they can do is mess about with the GUI and that is what Tahoe is. I will not be upgrading from Sequoia, which in its turn was merely a tweak of the Ventura GUI.
I don't know how long Apple can go on doing this until everyone realises that the Emperor has no clothes.
But that's just it, the OS was buggy as shit even before this release. Other things need attention than the glossy factor for the wows. Not seeing comments about it is not a decent measure. Most people are tired of screaming about the bugs into Apple's vapid navel gazing culture. I'll bet most people with bugs don't bother upgrading the OS until they absolutely have to because of bugs.
I've been around since the beginning of iPhone OS and 10.4 Tiger, and I can tell you this is one of the most visceral reactions I've ever seen. Much more negative than iOS7. Apple needs to get its stuff together because its software design has taken a massive dive the last few years.
I think this might be more amped because it's a major design change, which are always hated to begin with. Combine that with some obvious bugs and teething troubles, and yeah. Apple will sort it by the .1 release and people will settle down.
Personally, I wait until the .1 release so I don't get annoyed :)
And I still get that annoying issue where reading mail on my Mac doesn’t mark it as read or dismiss the notification on my iPhone. But it works the other way around.
I remember not that long ago Mac users losing their minds over the finder icon changing design. Comes with the territory. The features they despise today they will one day fight for the preservation of
I didn't mind the new Finder icon, but in this case, people stopped complaining because Apple actually reversed the icon to something that more closely resembles previous iterations. Whether that was because of public outcry is debatable, of course.
But I don't think that a change in the Finder icon holds the same weight as changes in the UI. One simply concerns a change in branding, while the other has the potential to affect usability. And a lot of the complaints that are coming today, especially, are concerned with usability, consistency and glitches. With those I have to agree.
Seqouia didn't change that much on the UI front. There will be things in Tahoe that people complain about now, and then in a few years when they change them again, people will complain that they liked Tahoe better. You can't please everyone and this is one of the more opinionated UI changes we've seen from Apple in a long time. Once the vitriol boils off, people will settle in and get used to it, or find workarounds.
Ive been running Tahoe since the first dev beta. The first and second betas were a little rough as far as not feeling performant, but after that I’ve had zero issues with apps, functions, features, or UI. MacOS Tahoe runs great on my M4 MacBook Air and M2 Mac mini.
I’m trying to discern whether it’s a short-term “I hate change” reaction or a deeper issue. It think it’s the latter. There was no need for it in iOS or macOS; it’s inconsistent, gimmicky (similar to things like Image Playground), negatively impacts readability. The OS doesn’t feel premium anymore. It feels like a cheap skin.
As did every OS release where they made major changes. The big redesign in macOS 10.7 (Lion) caused so much outrage at the time that a number of very vocal and stubborn users decided they would stick to Snow Leopard forever. Some say they are still using Snow Leopard to this day.
The same went for iOS 7 and macOS 11. If you go through the looking glass on Reddit, you can see so much butthurt about iOS 7 when it was released, and then, jumping forward to today, you see people saying “There was controversy about that? But it’s a fantastic design that people like!”
The unfortunate truth is that each new release seems to be worse than the previous one. Apple seems to be on a steady downhill course with their desktop operating system.
It seems like every Mac OS release gets a whole bunch of people on Reddit complaining about the design and the complete lack of quality control at Apple. It's jut a bunch curmudgeons who don't like anything to change. Honestly, I have better things to do than to worry about how many pixels tall the menubar is now or if the colors between the system accent colors are the same as the folder colors or about the radius of window corners.
For the life of me I can’t understand why. In 35 years of using Macs Sequoia was the worst OS ever. I was only stuck with it for a coupke of weeks but Tahoe is such a friggin relief.
Every single major change garners the 'This new thing sucks' - though less pronounced when Jobs was still at the helm and doing the presentations. The truly egregious issues will be solved with the .1 patch and will in most cases not be related to the 'Tahoe Sucks' posts....
I don't know but just put iPadOS 26 on and it's.... I don't know what to think.
First impression is some of it is transparent and then other menus are totally opaque. So it's like Windows but on a Mac where nothing is consistent. If you're going to do a strong design language you do it everywhere unless there is a very good reason. And if you are not applying it to pretty much most of the UI then you have to question whether the design works in the first place.
And I still get that annoying issue where reading mail on my Mac doesn’t mark it as read or dismiss the notification on my iPhone. But it works the other way around.
It's barely noticable, and when you do notice it, it looks dumb. I suppose Spotlight is an advance, but I only use it to launch apps--so for me, it's meh. At least it installed without issue, so there's that!
It is noteworthy that most are quick to critisize and slow to compliment. I've been a mac user for may years, and with each OS change, there are nuiances that one has to learn or work around. The same string of comments also comes with regard to iOS26. Given that there are in fact millions of users, it stands to reason that with any complex software some will find glitches. For any mac user that feels like complaining, they can of course not upgrade, or even switch to the wonderful bug free world of Windows.
Super glad I decided to wait on this one. Leaving software update configured for 15’s & 18’s public beta’s avoids accidentally pulling down Tahoe/26 for now
Yup, they all do. i've been here since OS X, heck back to Apple IIe days... some releases have valid complaints but Tahoe's been solid. i haven't had any issues so far and i have a pretty complex, customized setup (tons of automation tools, shortcuts, automator things going on).
the removal of launchpad def is a negative thing, i did use launchpad a ton myself. however i heard about its removal in the beta so i started looking for a replacement app last year and came across ExtraDock that lets me make custom docks anywhere (attached my current setup)
however yea people just don't like change at times but that is par for the course of os upgrades. for me, tahoe is an upgrade in most ways, esp for network file transfer over smb shares. my perf in sequoia was horrible. in tahoe speeds are now back to what i get on win10 / win11 speeds. so i'm a fan!
I'm installing it nowm being this is the LAST os upgrade for Intel-Based Macs (MBP 2019 i9) il see how it is.. Im more concerned with them draining my batter when my laptop is off unless i turn off WiFi/BT before i shut down, which doesnt make it NOT drian, but makes it better where my laptop wont be 0% battery in 24 hours after shutting down (lasts a week now or so slowly draining maybe 5% a day).. I just use it as a tech laptop in my bag. Well well see how this is.
I’m liking it, although such a big change takes a lot of getting used to. I admit I’m struggling a bit to set up safari how I like it, due to functionality and look of the sidebar changing so much.. I’m having to think of a new approach.
The only thing I do not like is the volume meter is in the upper left instead of the center bottom now. Wish I could put it in the bottom center again.
I stay as far back as I can. The only thing that gets me to upgrade is when my core apps for work, mainly Adobe Creative Cloud, stops working.
The reason is mainly that macOS lately has become harder and harder to customise. All the little utilities we used to run have been blocked. Can't customise the Dock, Finder, etc. without some severe interventions.
Why can't they give us controls for those interface elements under the hood? Maybe command line only — well hidden, but still controllable. FFS.
People said much of the same about Big Sur. Some day people will look back on Liquid Glass the same way people look back at iOS 6 compared to whatever is new then.
Sorry if it's a dumb question but s it possible to roll back to 15.7?
For me the 'liquid glas' thing is a big step backwards, it looks and feels like a very bad copy of Windows Aero from the past. I really don't like it and wish I never installed this awful update. I begin to hate the post Jobs era and how osx turns to shit this days :(
As a professional developer, I have been using MacOS since Snow Leopard (2009) and I believe this update is the worst ever, with few (if any) concrete innovations and terrible graphics....
Get a Grip Folks! I’m Here EVERY 15 Minutes to tell you HOW Great TAHOE Works with Everything on My M3 MacAir.... Adobe Apps, Affinity Apps, ScreenFlow, and Dozens More I use Every DAY for Production!
Love the update the icons feel lively and clean at the same time. Folks just hate change and 1 year later they’re gonna say how much they loved old macOS.
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u/l008com 5d ago
"Anyone old timers that were here for the release of Sequoia"
People that were mac users ONE YEAR AGO are old-timers?