Main lesson seems to be, it's good to put icons on the standard, most frequently used actions. And make them colorful. That helps the eye find them.
Edit: also consistency and legibility. So basically "don't design it so it's bad!"
Liquid glass should be taught in design school as an example of what not to do when you design UX. And also in business school as a case of how middle management can fudge up something that is working normally in the illusion of progress.
They seem to be running into the same issues and didn't take the learned lessons with them
On macOS the checkbox for "Reduce transparency" is hidden away in the Accessibility settings panel which is the last place I'd look for configuring the desktop theme.
I have an iPhone 13 mini and have not experienced this.
I think Apple’s implementation and overuse of those effects is bad.
Toolbars are back!
(Rather interestingly, menus still have icons if a menu option will simply launch another app, a specific folder that has an icon, or will perform a specific action like a window resize or category sort change that already has an icon you could click elsewhere.)
They also have cleaned up the mess of differently rounded borders (not complete yet but progress is being made). The OS also feels a lot less sluggish. I had gone back to Sequoia simply because performance was so bad.
I hope Apple learned a lesson from what happened with Alan Dye and that Ternus doesn't let something like that happen again under his leadership.
What I find to be a UI problem are sites that force me into a mobile view, which often loses features, and which removes my ability to zoom and pan as I wish. Apple had to add an option to “Request Desktop Website”, which I assume spoofs the user agent, to try and get around this issue. But for site that use other means, this still doesn’t work and the user is locked into a crippled mobile page… the exact problem modern smartphones were supposed to solve.
I’ll take Gruber’s model every time over the crippled mobile sandbox with no way out.
/* mobile device */
@media only screen
and (min-width : 300px)
and (max-width : 750px) {
#hnmain { width: 100%; min-width: 0; }
body { padding: 0; margin: 0; width: 100%; }
td { height: inherit !important; }
.title, .comment { font-size: inherit; }
span.pagetop { display: block; margin: 3px 5px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal }
Accessibility technology like reader mode is once again proving its worth.
White on black or dark gray makes my eyes bug out. I have pretty good vision but that's the only thing that actually hurts my eyes.
There are two excellent solutions built into your browser!
Flyouts, dropdowns, and other text menus make sense to me, but I could see how they might be alien and uncomfortable to someone that has only ever experienced mobile interfaces.
The reverse is true for sure, nowhere do I feel more frustrated and old-brained then trying to make sense of a new mobile app that everyone else seems to think is great.
They are different devices. Just because you can drive a sedan does not means you can drive a bulldozer. Or playing piano qualifies you to play the organ. So going from touch and a small screen to keyboard/mouse and a bigger screen, you should expect that the interactions will change.
Phones and desktops are so radically different that your sedan/bulldozer analogy seems like shades of grey. It’s more like taking a Saturn V rocket to the local shop for a pint of milk.
From a review at an attempt to butcher Safari interface several years back, by Riccardo Morri https://morrick.me/archives/9368
--- start quote ---
The utter user-interface butchery happening to Safari on the Mac is once again the work of people who put iOS first. People who by now think in iOS terms. People who view the venerable Mac OS user interface as an older person whose traits must be experimented upon, plastic surgery after plastic surgery, until this person looks younger. Unfortunately the effect is more like this person ends up looking… weird.
These people look at the Mac’s UI and (that’s the impression, at least) don’t really understand it. Its foundations come from a past that almost seems inscrutable to them. Usability cues and features are all wrinkles to them. iOS and iPadOS don’t have these strange wrinkles, they muse. We must hide them. We’ll make this spectacular facelift and we’ll hide them, one by one. Mac OS will look as young (and foolish, cough) as iOS!
--- end quote ---
(power users don't use mobile devices for their work, and yet...)
However, as time has gone on Skeuomorphism has lost value, because people don’t necessarily recognize the old things they’re trying to reference. So we’ve been seeing a movement away from that for the past 10 years. But, then we run into another issue: the icons are new, and therefore unknown if not obvious. In addition, every software company seems to go their own way and have their own “style”, which is actually a big problem because users have to keep an absurd amount of iconography in their minds to use all their day to day software.
Text solves this, because text can inherently be read.
Hence Apple using the same set of SF Symbols across all their platforms. And I don't think icons are intended to be used to initially identify the purpose of a button, but instead to provide a quick visual anchor once you are already familiar. Sure, there are some buttons that everyone will use more (like Save or Open), but I don't think there's anything wrong with allowing every button to have this sort of quick visual lookup. Predicting user behavior is hard.
Curiously, I haven't heard him talk about Apple Intelligence in Shortcuts, or any of the cool new features in Tahoe. Design is how it looks, I guess.
It’s a knife’s edge.
I thought this was funny to see as well, although these icons redesigns happen with every MacOS release I think: https://basicappleguy.com/basicappleblog/macos-golden-gate-i...
I was unaware Apple still maintained such a document? There was a time when TOG's HIG [1] was the Bible for the Mac interface. UI nerds at Apple (and likely elsewhere) would enjoy debating/interpreting them for some project or another. (I don't recall anyone being burned at the stake but there were definitely discussions that could reach a heretical pitch.)
The HIG preached a kind of nuance and balance—when it allowed for somewhat less "staid" UI elements it would advise moderation.
This came about in an era when the graphical user interface was a fairly new thing to the public and inconsistency (Do What Thou Wilt) would only have destabilized the gentle adoption Apple was treading.
It was a marketable advantage for Apple as well. Consistency on the DOS side, as far as I know, came about only as companies tried to adopt familiar patterns from popular apps of the day. (Related: I talked to an engineer at Adobe about the hideous UI (my opinion) of Adobe Acrobat on the Mac and was told they wanted it to look like it belonged alongside the suite of Microsoft Office apps. le sigh.)
From 1992, see Page 72 for menu widgets: [1] https://vintageapple.org/inside_r/pdf/Human_Interface_Guidel...
They kinda do. For a long time HIGs were well researched documents with great examples and explanations.
For the past few years they've been used as post-hoc justifications (or just examples with no justifications) for whatever designs vomits out.
Bad customer experience for a company like Apple.
But I now plenty of people who bought Win machines and with the next update they basically turned into molasses, all while dealing with horrible trackpads and bad performance.
Just get a new Mac Neo for ~$500
I'm not sure that's even OK. I find icons disruptive to reading the menu, but at least Apple still has text to read. Microsoft Word doesn't even have "Save" as text for saving your file, never mind that the icon isn't even in the file menu these days.
I know little about Apple, but have quite a bit of experience with how software products get "designed". Goofy and offensive things happen when corporations decide not to pay attention to customers.
The decision to ignore customer and focus on market wow is not the software design team. It is a systemic and structural thing.
Weird sentence given that three staunch supporters of liquid glass are still in that team, including Lemay. I highly doubt it's going anywhere, hopefully it gets a few more improvements before it will be replaced for The New Thing in MacOS 29.
I can't say the following for sure, but there's evidence of it: One of Apple's real strengths and differentiators is that it listens to customer feedback to the point that it will say: "Hey, this was dumb. Customer feedback proves it. Let's just get rid of it like it never happened."
Other examples include getting rid of the earlier getting rid of Magsafe.
I don't know whether it's something taught in Apple School, but in the absence of not doing dumb things in the first place, which seems to be unavoidable in the real world with real people, it's probably the next best thing. And it may be enough better than the norm from tech companies that it's a real cultural differentiator.
I also vaguely recall issues with their magsafe connectors and lawyers.
But my Apple TV 4K 2nd Generation turned into a 15 fps mess until I turned off the worst parts of transparency effects.
You'd get the performance back if they gave up on the translucently to the point of removing the code.
Screenshots:
https://logandark.net/files/3SQ5P9OP-PP373NQ7-RS6RP2QR-P772S...
https://logandark.net/files/3SQ5P9OP-PP373NQ7-RS6RP2QR-P772S...
https://logandark.net/files/3SQ5P9OP-PP373NQ7-RS6RP2QR-P772S...
Visual consistency like this is bad because it removes distinct features (like the presence or lack of an icon) that make it easier to find things.
Google's icons are visually consistent: https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/jie6b7/for_opening_...
Outsourcing their UX design to the internet badly...
I don’t find Android nearly as compelling, and Liquid Glass seems at least a bit less of a disaster on the iOS platform.
My suggestion to you is follow the Panther Lake laptops that are coming out as your potential future Mac off-ramp. I have a Framework 13 Pro on preorder [1] but some other laptops are also showing impressive results on battery life and GPU performance. If I had more money to blow I would totally grab a Zephyrus G14 2026 with the panther lake CPU and RTX 5070Ti. Although as a programmer’s laptop, the Framework is excellent and the 13 Pro looks like it’s shaping up to be a dream system.
[1] Unfortunately you can’t get the kind of RAM deal that I got for my 13 Pro anymore. As soon as the 13 Pro was announced I pounced on some new old stock of Crucial LPCAMM2 memory, which isn’t available anymore. I paid about $250 for 32GB, which is a “deal,” apparently. As of now you pretty much have to buy it from Framework as nobody else has it at a more reasonable price.
Given the current market I intend to hold on as long as possible, but I'll probably be eyeing the Frameworks when it's time to change. Apple's change of direction makes me hopeful that they'll recover, but the current trends in tech have moved me away from corporate platforms a bit.
The icons were bad, but the real issue with the new theme is the waste of space and wasting time computing transparencies.
As usual for Gruber, this is fanboy cope. Dye may be a convenient scapegoat, but he was not a lone wolf, he was operating with the full assent of executive leadership, which is to say, the same leadership that appointed his successor.
You’ll note Dye was an Ive decision. And you’ll see the successor was not in Dye’s camp. Because (work) politics.
From https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job
> Gurman reported that Billy Sorrentino, a Dye deputy who has served as a senior director of design at Apple since 2016, is leaving for Meta with Dye.3 I don’t have any other names, but word on the street is that other members of Dye’s inner circle are leaving Apple for Meta with him. But those who remain — or who might remain, if they’d have been offered the promotion to replace Dye — simply can’t be trusted from the perspective of senior leadership, who were apparently blindsided by Dye’s departure for Meta.
> Putting Alan Dye in charge of user interface design was the one big mistake Jony Ive made as Apple’s Chief Design Officer.
> Dye had no background in user interface design... Before joining Apple, he was design director for the fashion brand Kate Spade, and before that worked on branding for the ad agency Ogilvy.
> Alan Dye is not untalented. But his talents at Apple were in politics. His political skill was so profound that it was his decision to leave, despite the fact that his tenure is considered a disaster by actual designers inside and outside the company. He obviously figured out how to please Apple’s senior leadership. His departure today landed as a total surprise because his stature within the company seemed so secure.
Removal of skeuomorphism, removal of essential ports, making MacBooks so thin that they wouldn’t work without overheating to name a few.
I am so glad he is gone now, it’s not all bells and whistles for Apple now, but at least it’s way more pleasing to own Apple devices any more.
Skeuomorphic icons can be pretty. Skeuomorphic UX sucks because it inherently brings physical world limitations to software where it’s unnecessary.
I installed VLC on my phone, and I couldn't figure anything out, because it was covered in vague post-skeuomorphic icons without text.
It has a ton of cryptic options, but at least it lets you mess around with them and maybe get something usable, where other apps would just give up and shake their head.
I moved to IINA to finally get back to a video Swiss Army knife that just plays video and doesn’t force me into an experience I don’t want… after tweaking a bunch of settings.
A miss Perian, the codec pack for QuickTime, which gave QuickTime and QuickLook that play-anything experience. It played the video and got out of my way.
> This updated advice in the HIG is perfect.
> Use an icon to highlight the most common actions and key features of your app
Saving a document is the one of the most common actions in your average app, but I * never* need an icon there in the menu, there is no benefit in focusing my attention on an action I always do with a shortcut!
The perfect advice would be easy and powerful user customization, so that, for example, I could right click on the app's File>Save menu and select an option to hide the icon, reformat the rich text field and have this change propagate in all the other apps. Or click on a web link from someone who has already done it better and add the theme. Then I wouldn't even care about the back and forth design changes between major OS releases.
And that could also fix another sin in the screenshot - the text is not vertically aligned! "visual consistency" misunderstood
https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job
>My favorite reaction to today’s news is this one-liner from a guy on Twitter/X: “The average IQ of both companies has increased.”
