It’s just… ugly. It’s kind of a retro-ish, but chunky design. It really shows it full ugliness in the Finder windows, especially when you column view (which I default to). It looks like a design by committee mishmash of stuff that all collides. I’m not normally one to hate on stylistic choices in an OS. I’ve never had much interest in “ricing” my environment, but I’m really just not a fan of this.
All the individual little “bubbles” of things instead of buttons, or even just borderless areas denoted by an icon. The way the left column looks like it’s just plopped down on top of the rest of the content. Like it’s a separate entity, but it’s not. Especially noticeable in how the lower cookie crumb trail at the bottom of the window just abruptly ends at the border to the left column. Also, the color choice for the sliders is… bold. Almost the most noticeable thing in the screenshot! This looks like a Linux Enlighenment DE theme from the early `00s trying to emulate OS-X. The dark view looks slightly better.
About the only positive thing I can find is the tolerances around the edges of windows for resizing feels more forgiving than in the past & w/ other operating systems (ahem: Windows). On some OSs/desktop environments, it seems like there’s a 1-2 pixel area where the cursor changes and you can resize a window. In contrast, this works pretty good in Tahoe.
Snow Leopard is where ui peaked
I thought this picture was a render, a joke
This is not an unpopular option. Every other post is about this being ugly or buggy.
Not a Mac user, so I’m seeing this for the first time. At first I didn’t get what you meant, but the longer I looked the more things I found that bothered me.
Here’s a list (feel free to add things):
- corner radius on rounded edges is too large
- sidebar menu blends poorly with the rest of the UI (lighter color, white frame, no horizontal padding)
- status line at the bottom is inefficient (could be one line instead of two, not sure why one has a close button) and seems inconsistent with the rest of the UI (thinner lines, no padding at the line ends)
- horizontal separators in the file tree are too thick (makes them look like scroll bars)
- tabs at the top look like a giant toggle button (not like tabs)
- buttons on the top right have a white background that seems unnecessary (the active button goes from light gray to white to medium gray, which is too busy)
- forward/back buttons on the top right have inconsistent design and look like one of them is active
- colors for active elements in the outer UI don’t match (light gray in the sidebar menu, medium gray for the top buttons, white for the tabs)
This is just visuals. I can’t judge the functional aspects of the design.
Personally, I like the eye candy. However, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. We should get an option to opt out. Or, better yet, allow us to reskin on our own with our own themes.
Looks a lot like GNOME (i.e. ugly)
Worse, it looks like Pop_OS!
It’s unfinished. Like iOS 26. Unacceptable little bugs everywhere.
I’ve grown to like the iOS version of this update over the past month, or at least i don’t find it as abrasive anymore, however they have clearly just not spent enough time designing Tahoe. It’s buggy, it’s laggy, it’s unfinished, and there are elements that have just not been updated at all
The rounded corners all all inconsistent sizes. Worst of all, for the really large rounded corners like in the settings app it clips off the scroll bar.
Yea. It’s like they are getting ready to make macOS a touch interface.
It feels, to me, like they are doing a very slow merger of the iOS and macOS systems, eventually I believe they want it to be just one that scales to the device.
We’re only a bit behind https://xkcd.com/1508/
