I don't know, I always see this pattern with iOS or MacOS releases. Everyone piles on at the time.

I've actually quite enjoyed some design changes in Tahoe, and looking at older versions of MacOS just looks old fashioned once you're used to them.

Almost every update I'm skeptical at first and then after a while I see a screenshot of the old UI and think "how did I ever use that?"

Tahoe I've been using since it came out and every time I see a screenshot of prior versions I think "wow it used to look so much better"

Yeah, there was a post recently about how window chrome changed over the years and the Tahoe era does not make me recognize Apple anymore:

https://pxlnv.com/blog/window-chrome-of-our-discontent/

The usability of older versions was so much better. Tahoe is a huge regression, making everything look like one big drab.

(Though Big Sur already entered the path of monochromatic toolbar icons, etc.)

It’s a shame, because their hardware has improved significantly since Jony Ive left.

> Everyone piles on at the time.

Not this much, they don’t.

> looking at older versions of MacOS just looks old fashioned

It’s an operating system, not a dress to parade around on a catwalk. I don’t want it to be fashionable and change with the seasons, I want it to be usable and intuitive. And yes, it should look good (which Tahoe doesn’t) but to the extent that it makes usability better, never in detriment of it.

I've always been "pro-change" for UIs, as opposed to the bunch of people in the "bring the old UI back" camp, but Tahoe looked like fecal matter from the moment it was introduced.

On iOS it's manageable with reduced transparency, but on macOS it's just so awful I won't upgrade.

I was forced to upgrade at work.

So I’ve enabled reduced transparency and all the other accessibility settings I can find to remove the terribleness.

The UI is now mono-coloured gray and looks like MacOS back in the days before OS X was a thing - but it’s still better than what Apple “envisioned” with Tahoe.

I'm sure this is true, and that there will always be a (likely disproportionately) loud group of complainers, many of whom will forget about their complaints. I haven't really publicly complained about Tahoe before, and I don't intend on whining about it again. But...

It's fine. I'm not going to rail about how it's unusable, or say that it makes me want to gouge out my eyes, or whatever. But it's enough to dissuade me from ever wanting to buy another Mac, if I have the option of using a desktop Linux system.

That's a pretty big caveat. But those curved window borders and the rounded widgets in e.g. the settings menu are kind of awful. Not unusable. But every time I open a terminal and I deal with the choice of either having obscene padding around my content or seeing a few pixels of my prompt's corners shaved off, I get just a little more irritated, and a little less likely to pick up my Macbook the next time I'm deciding which device to use.

Good UI for tools, physical or digitial, should reduce the friction between picking it up and using it for something, that's the problem at the core of design. With the small caveat that sometimes technically good but perhaps unethical design solves stupid business problems well, like deliberately making chairs uncomfortable to keep traffic moving through a busy cafe, or making anti-homeless benches, design should not dissuade you from using something you purchased to solve other problems; it's unprincipled.

That's actually a problem with Tahoe, it is not something new and bold, it's old-fashioned. Transparency already has come and gone as a UI fad, and it doesn't really make any big difference if you throw computationally expensive effects at it.

I got a Mac mini and was very positively surprised that it still ran the older version. I can use the size setting I'm comfortable with in the display menu. When I use Tahoe, I need to make the setting smaller to have a reasonable amount of apps open, but then it's uncomfortable to read.

Good because damn, there is some AI slop out there.

And their conduct in Lebanon is just appalling. It constitutes outright terrorism.

They have no right to be there.

It's a very impressive phone and will likely be the case that Apple and Samsung dominate western phone sales. But you can get way better phones from China right now with these new silicon carbide batteries which is just a game changer.

I still think it has a lot of potential, and is the logical next storage system, because of its performance advantages over NAND flash. Because input costs can come down.

"here's one I prepared earlier" would be cute. I think other people's threads pointing out to scale globally it has to be something anyone can do, and right now Intel appear to have set the RAND conditions or whatever IPR they lock into this higher than other people want to pay.

It's all about trust at the end of the day. And given that it was exposed that Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Google etc all collaborated with the US government to provide surveillance (PRISM) by Edward Snowden, how we can trust them ever again?

Did they collaborate? Google freaked out when Snowden revealed what the NSA was doing.

They definitely did collaborate with the NSA.

Today when cropping an image in Preview.app on Tahoe I ran into an issue where you can't use the bottom of the crop selection rectangle because the rounded corner of the window blocks it.

Pinch (or CMD + minus) zoom out slightly as a workaround.

Europe was getting cheap gas from Russia. It makes a big difference, the US gas is much more expensive.

China is deploying more nuclear and solar than anyone, and their coal use actually went down last year.

India is still developing and per capita uses a fraction of the western world.

But globally solar and battery use are exploding. We really are living in the green revolution that was so talked about in the 90's and 2000's

It can be good to reduce chrome and focus on content, and have minimal UI's but there's a limit. Your UI still has to be discoverable, and intuitive. With everything hidden away it's unfriendly, particularly for new users.

I don't understand how decreasing the contrast between content and chrome helps you "focus" on content. The older design screenshot has better content clarity than the current design.

Sure, but why can't we have both? Sensible, usable defaults for new users, configurable views for everyone else. I'd like a version of Pages where I can turn off the toolbar, turn off the title bar, fullscreen the remaining window and focus purely on the document. That really shouldn't be difficult.

It would be extremely easy to have both. Tab to hide/show chrome and controls. The Affinity software does this, and it's intuitive and works flawlessly.

I presume the difficult question there, would be what you would expect users to do to engage with that mechanism on iOS (since many Apple first-party apps, e.g. Notes, are now designed once to run on macOS + iPadOS + iOS as essentially a single [responsive] UI.)

I'd say, if it doesn't make sense to have the equivalent feature on iOS, just leave it out.

Absolutely. It's totally doable. But Apple is swinging a bit too far into the minimal aesthetic right now.