This problem is endemic to the industry. All mainstream operating systems have been done products for quite a while. But because full-time designers need to be designing something even when nothing in the company needs designed any more, they start redesigning existing products. And the more radical and courageous the redesign, the better for their performance review.
I hear this complaint about designers wanting radical redesigns or chasing trends, but the actual UX designers I've worked with seem to prefer spending time on usability testing, eliminating workflow steps, clarifying hierarchy, making consistent design systems, that sort of thing. True, some of them make things too minimal or rearrange the layout for minimal gain.
However, in my experience the mandate to drastically redesign a product or "make it look more modern" have always come from sales and/or product owners, and in turn they're driven by competitors and customer choices.
Well, whoever is responsible, there's far too much "change for change's sake" going on. And the vast majority of those changes are degradations of the user experience.
I'm not sure I entirely agree. The design of smartphones has largely been unchanged for a decade. Prior to that there was a renaissance of various designs, shapes, folds, panels, buttons, keyboards, etc. Today everyone carries around rectangular slab.
What is happening here is Apple is unifying their product lines. All OS versions have converged to 26, 27, 28. The M processor runs iPads, Laptops and Vision. You can install iOS apps on macOS.
The headset is not a hit but it's a sign of things to come. The hardware will get better and I'm expecting seamless handoff between all your apple devices. Start a facetime call on your laptop in your office? Transfer that to your visionOS headset and start walking. Move to the living room and toss that app at your apple TV and finish up the call from the couch.
We've seen apple move toward unifying their various OS interfaces for a long time. People were forecasting this when OS X 10.6 started using the app store and app icons taken straight from the iPhone.
As the article says, liquid glass works best for spatial computing. That's apple's next big bet and the whole ecosystem is going to cater to it.
> What is happening here is Apple is unifying their product lines.
Who asked for this? What do the end users have to gain from this? So far, I've seen the macOS design steadily regress for no good reason whatsoever. The new settings app in particular is a disaster. Not only is it a UI that scrolls, a big no-no in desktop UI design, it also severely lacks affordances, and the hierarchy of the settings themselves feels rather arbitrary. What I've seen of macOS Tahoe goes even further with this touchscreenification.
I've never used an iPhone as my main phone and never owned an iPad so I don't feel qualified to speak about them.
I've also never seen a Vision Pro in person, but I treat it as a cool tech demo that solves no real practical problems. So far, VR has been mostly used for gaming, but Apple doesn't seem very interested in that use case.
It's obvious iOS will become the desktop OS in the next 5 years or so. I've been worried since Lion that MacOS will become iOS, but with the recent changes on iPad it's clear the opposite will happen. That's why I'm getting out now. MacOS has been going downhill anyway. It still has no great way to manage windows or workspaces. It doesn't have tiling built in or even a clipboard manager. The only way to make the OS usable is turn on accessibility reduce motion, but that still doesn't allow multiple workspaces to be usable.
Not only who asked for it, but who believes it? This tired line has been the same drum for well over a decade with no proper evidence to support it other than “tHeY lOoK tEh sAmE”.
All desktop OSes are getting rid of desktop design patterns in favor of touch ones for some stupid reason. At least for Windows it can be explained by the fact that Microsoft is very desperate about putting touchscreens into everything that runs Windows. But for macOS there is no such explanation because there are no touchscreen Macs.
And yet macOS Tahoe reverses a lot of "getting rid of desktop design patterns", such as Launch Pad (which emulates the iPadOS home screen) being replaced by a more generic list of apps using the same interface as Spotlight.
Again, I think what people see as "getting rid of desktop design patterns" in macOS is mostly aesthetic. Mac apps remain Mac apps, they retain all the aspects of their interfaces that make them Mac apps.
More evidence in the way iPadOS 26 adopts certain aspects of the macOS interface, but does them in an iPadOS-oriented way that you wouldn't really say the two OS are converging, more that they're doing really weird impressions of each other — but underneath the grease paint, the same actors as always remain, each with their strengths.
(In saying that, System Settings is an abomination)
> Again, I think what people see as "getting rid of desktop design patterns" in macOS is mostly aesthetic.
Have you seen the settings in the new Xcode? This iPad-ass crap keeps infesting various apps.
Overall, the current Apple seems to be very scared to lay things out in two dimensions. Every new UI they build and almost every old UI they redesign is just a sad vertical stack of stuff.
The combined title bars and toolbars that were introduced in Big Sur are not an aesthetic change. It's a very visible downgrade. Tahoe further downgrades that by removing the bottom border of that top bar.
> such as Launch Pad (which emulates the iPadOS home screen) being replaced by a more generic list of apps using the same interface as Spotlight
That is a welcome change. But that's about the only one. They also made the alerts denser, reverting part of the Big Sur redesign, but, again, because they are so afraid of horizontal layout, the icon is just awkwardly above the text instead of to the left.
> Have you seen the settings in the new Xcode? This iPad-ass crap keeps infesting various apps.
Yes, and I agree that it's bad. Though, I did say the System Settings app was crap, and it's taken a leaf from that.
To be honest, I think that Apple could do this split view settings window well in macOS. Other operating systems have had something like it for years. Apple just shits the bed repeatedly here for some reason.
> Overall, the current Apple seems to be very scared to lay things out in two dimensions.
I'll grant you this to be true. Though, I noticed this a much longer time ago than just now. Specifically, the way that they removed the context-sensitive toolbar in Pages, Keynote, and Numbers '09 and shoved it all into the sidebar. When they revealed the iPad and web interfaces, though they look similar, much of the mobile interface is actually radically different from the macOS design.
> The combined title bars and toolbars that were introduced in Big Sur are not an aesthetic change. It's a very visible downgrade.
I'm not sure that those are particularly iPad or iOS inspired, though. That feels more like Dye doing his "trying to get rid of the UI" thing rather than anything indicating a platform merge.
That said, I'm a bit scared we'll get the iPadOS '26 traffic light window controls (that are tiny until you hover them) in macOS…
I take your point that this change was functional, not just aesthetic, but I still don't see it as part of any conspiracy to displace the Mac. Just a lack of care.
> That is a welcome change. But that's about the only one.
Ironically, it's one I can't stand! I missed being able to do the pinch gesture to bring up Launchpad and then find my app icons without having to type or scroll a ridiculously long list in a teeny tiny window.
Launchpad made sense to me, but it should've had an option to automatically sort or tidy up the icons in the style of the App Library or the new Spotlight-based interface.
Who is MacOS even for anymore though? It reminds me of the touchbar, removing ports and Macbook Pro. Know your audience. Professionals use MacOS, everyone could get by with a $200 Chromebook. Why cater to the wrong crowd.
Professionals use macOS. They also use iOS and iPadOS. I think Apple's success is their own poison in that the definition of who or what a professional is has expanded with their market share.
Yet, in their eagerness to transition their newer fanbase of loyal bicycle riders to the Mac mega-truck, they didn't so much as add oomph to the bike as attach pedals to a lorry.
It's happening. They've probably had iOS on Mac laptops for 5 years at this point. Similar to when they had been compiling MacOSX on Intel for 5 years before switching off PowerPC. The cursor on iOS on iPad is the nail in the coffin. I'll make sure to ping you when it does.
Only ping me if it's in the next five years, which was the claim from the other poster. ;-)
We have until 2030!
That said, if macOS continues to receive such shoddy treatment from its design team, I may not be using macOS by then to even care if it's going out the door. I may already be gone.
> UI that scrolls, a big no-no in desktop UI design
Is it?
I like a UI without a minimum screen size. I am livid when I can't use a fixed-size-settings dialogue because a driver/monitor is misbehaving so I'm at min resolution. The sort of issue where you have to find another machine so you can "count tabs" for keyboard navigation to get at things off-screen.
Many other cases: e.g. I like to use VMs or RDP in small windows. I also like to resize a settings window into something tiny or tiling it when doing something I need to do toggle something back and forth.
I agree it's bad if it's a long list of barely related things you have to scan each time to find what you want. The "categorised scroller" type dialogue vscode uses for settings in in theory the best of both worlds... but I keep finding myself accidentally scrolling beyond my intended category causing myself much confusion.
The right way is to design your dialogs such that they fit into the minimum screen resolution that the OS runs at. Some of the Windows ones are optimized for 640x480 because that's what the basic VGA driver runs at. If I remember correctly, macOS requires either 800x600 or 1024x768.
> We've seen apple move toward unifying their various OS interfaces for a long time
1. They claimed they would never do that. But we know how much words corporate bullshit carries
2. You cannot unify interfaces that are operated in completely different ways.
There's no "unified interface" that works well on a single-app-at-a-time smartphone with touch and on a 5k screen with multiple apps, a keyboard, and a mouse.
> As the article says, liquid glass works best for spatial computing. That's apple's next big bet and the whole ecosystem is going to cater to it
No, it doesn't work best for spatial computing. This idiotic statement started as a way to justify Liquid Glass on Twitter.
On top of that, if it "works best for spatial" means that literally every other device will work worse because of the unification no one asked for.
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However, the answer is simple: it's a vanity project by a person with next to zero design experience thrust into a position of power
>As the article says, liquid glass works best for spatial computing.
God I hope not, the last thing I want is having to put on a stupid VR headset everyday for work. Either we stick to good ole screens or we skip straight to neural links, none of this VR bull-shieet. And I used to own a Quest device, fun for some games, but not for prolonged work.
>As the article says, liquid glass works best for spatial computing.
I'd love to see proof of that. Because I feel like it's the exact opposite. Imagine all the street and traffic signs being also translucent and made of glass, the accident rates would spike.
It looks cool in sci-fi movies, but IRL accessibility is severely lacking.
Not introducing any changes can lead to becoming “uncool” among the younger generation, which can be detrimental to the longevity of the business. Generally I agree with you, but it’s not that simple as our (HN crowd’s?) attitude of “function over form” is not that common out in the wild. People will spend money on stuff that makes them feel or look better. However, designers can screw that up too, and make the new”thing” uncool.
At least when it comes to smartphones, they're basically commodities these days. Everyone has them. It's hard to see what "wow" factor a mere UI redesign has when everyone and their mother (quite literally) will get it.
If Apple wants to make iPhones cool again, my suggestion would be to loosen their iron grip on it and let people customize and build wacky new experiences around it with no corporate oversight. People on the ground know what's cool better than some trillion dollar company. Similar to the Windows theming and shareware scene of the 90s. But that would kill Apple's golden goose, and they'll have none of that.
This is a tired take, not unlike when people bash web developers to make slow and bloated web pages. Completely disregards how little say the individual has in the final product, and especially in the design of that product.
What's actually happening is that companies are expected to a different standards, by customers and other companies alike. By trying to anticipate these expectations, companies go ahead and do the changes that they think will strengthen the brand that they are trying to project. That's all there is to it, the rest is implementation.
Huh??? Have you actually tried talking to non-tech people? Customers hate software updates. Especially the kind that change the design for no reason and/or break their established muscle memory by rearranging the UI layout.
And third-party app developers hate OS updates too, especially, again, the kind that change the UI design. Apple is the most expensive company in the world so the cost of these redesigns is a rounding error for them. For smaller app developers, this incurs significant extra costs for the only reason of Apple just feeling like it.
Insult aside, consider the following. Are almost all companies doing this much effort just because of some rouge elements within the company, or are they doing it because they see a direct benefit from it with regarding to sales?
What people tell, and how people act are two very different things. For multiple reasons too, I'm not meaning this in a malicious way at all. Feedback is very useful, but needs careful interpretation. Tangential, but this is why telemetry works very well: it paints a more realistic picture compared to what people report.
Competition forces innovation, but in the absence of real innovation you get this crap. Change for changes sake. Nobody is really competing anymore - oh a ANOTHER camera? It's 10 nm thinner! Literally almost all these features are who cares to users, they are just creating an update treadmill for a product that proxies as a social status symbol.
If consumers make their choices according to features like this - then the competition is real and the innovation must happen, otherwise the company is left behind. Exactly as you say: "they are just creating an update treadmill for a product that proxies as a social status symbol" - that is exactly what's happening. Not just "full-time designers need to be designing something", as grandparent put it. Companies live or die by these developments.
There might be competition, but competition for status symbols is not actual innovation. You seem to have got your concepts muddled by corporate marketing-speak.
As a designer I can say that the truth is that customers expect things to get remade and updated and if you wait too long the stale aesthetic begins driving away new AND existing users who want to try out shiny new things. Nice hallucination though blaming it on designers, the folks with no decision making abilties who are often blocked by PMs and devs.
As a useer I can say that the truth is that customers expect things to stay put and keep working, and if you futz around with that just because you think "the aesthetic" is "stale", that sure as fuck begins driving away existing users who don't want to "try out shiny new things" but just want their shit to work. (And whaddoIknow, perhaps also potential new users who also want just that, but have caught wind of your software having unneccesary UI design changes all the time.)
Nice hallucination though, thinking that re-designs for no other purpose than re-designing are and should universally be acknowledged as the bee's knees.
Maybe the world really just doesn't need as many designers as you seem to think it does.
Performance review driven development is the bane of the whole industry. People inventing bullshit work for absolutely no reason other than to pad their yearly reviews. I've been through two large useless rewrites at my current job just so a bunch of folks could get promoted.
IMHO it's not specific to design - in big companies incentives (for unknown to me reason) set in a way that small incremental improvements are discouraged by managers and delivery of a big shiny project is the best way to get a bonus/promotion. Managers don't want designers and developers to keep improving things, they want something completely new (a project they can attach their name to) or at lest some big change - the bigger the better.
