Reading List
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Howard Oakley on the MacOS 26 Tahoe UI
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.
‘Icons in Menus Everywhere — Send Help’
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.