Discussion
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post-it: I can't say I've had any issues with the corners, or noticed any difference after upgrading to macOS 26. But this is neat.
gnarlouse: One of my claude code projects was going to be "theghostofsteve", a social media platform where people post things they love and hate about appleOS things. Likes/Dislikes would be "genius/it's shit". And in all likelihood, the platform would surface that most users think "it's shit."The platform would aggregate by major/minor version, and you could see in totality whether the current version of macOS/iOS would make Steve proud of miserable.Ultimately I decided against it, for defamation/cease-and-desist reasons, and not wanting to find out. But it needs to exist.
skrrtww: I'm not sure if these selectors are hit in SwiftUI or not.
pram: I'm not a fan of the look in Tahoe (especially Apple Music wtf happened there) but most of it I can totally ignore, and don't even notice anymore. Except for the tabs. I have Sequoia and Tahoe machines, and the tabs in Tahoe are so unbelievably bad in comparison. Like this ugly pill shape. I rarely hear this get brought up but they're astonishingly ugly, worse than the previous design in every way.
amarant: I must say that all this fuzz about the corners actually reflects rather well on macos.If the biggest flaw of a OS is the border radius of its windows, you've got yourself a pretty decent OS!It's not gonna make me leave my darling Linux, ofc, but i think this whole debacle can only be interpreted as praise.On second thought, it might also be considered a mediation on people's tendency to bike-shed.
intrasight: I disagree as it shows a fundamental flaw in terms of separation of concerns that's probably manifest throughout the operating system.Or to stay it another way, if we see shit like this then we know the whole thing is a hack.
amarant: Hmm, that's a good point actually! Hadn't considered that!
_jab: Between the rounded corners that don't reach the edges of the viewport, and the behavior when opening a new app for the first time, it feels like Mac's UI is optimized around the assumption most users won't expand windows to fill the whole screen, but rather leave them half-sized somewhere in the middle.Does anyone actually do this? Especially for heavy-duty applications like my web browser and IDE, this has always felt like a bizarre assumption to me.
doubled112: Probably not the norm, but I use a large 4K monitor and no scaling.I haven’t maximized a window in years. They look ridiculous like that. Especially web pages with their max width set so the content is 1/4 the screen and 3/4 whitespace.
alex_c: I use a 40” 4K screen.If I ever accidentally full screen a window, and it’s not in night mode, I am instantly blinded by a wall of mostly white empty background!
bigyabai: Window corners weren't really an issue before Big Sur. This is a downgrade and reflective of Apple's slipping software QA.
moron4hire: Yeah, anything that has an MDI metaphor going on should be ran fullscreen. Otherwise, what's the point? If the idea is to use the OS desktop space as the application window organizational space, then don't let people make apps that have different document panes.This goes towards something that I've felt for a little while: at some point in time around the early 2000s, operating system vendors abdicated their responsibility to innovate on interaction metaphors.What I mean is, things like tabbed interfaces got popularized by Web browsers, not operating systems. Google Chrome and Firefox had to go out of their way to render tabs; there was no support built into the OS.The OS interfaces we have now are not appreciably different from what we had in the early 2000s. It seems absurd that there has been almost no progress in the last 25 years. What change there has been feels like it could have been accomplished in user-space, plus it doesn't get applied consistently across applications, thus making it feel like not a core part of the OS.MacOS in particular was supposed to an emphasis on the desktop environment being the space of window and document level manipulation, as exemplified by the fact that applications did not have their own menubars. All application menu bars were integrated together at the top of the screen. Why should it be any different with any other UI organizational feature? Should not apps merely be a single window pane, accomplishing a single thing, and you combine multiple apps together to get something akin to an IDE out of them?Well, I don't know if they should be. But they can't. Because OS vendors never provided a good means to do it. Even after signalling they wanted it.
dbatten: > it feels like Mac's UI is optimized around the assumption most users won't expand windows to fill the whole screen, but rather leave them half-sized somewhere in the middleIMO, this has been their assumption for years, and it actually turned me off when I tried getting used to Mac circa 2006-2007. Coming from Windows at the time, I just couldn't get over a weird anxiety that my application window wasn't maximized, because it didn't look like it completely snapped into the screen corners.Now, using 34-inch ultrawide monitors almost exclusively, I never maximize anything... it'd be unusable.
dcrazy: FYI, the article incorrectly claims that SIP just controls write access to /. It does way more than that.
lapcat: I don't see where it says that. Can you provide a direct quote?
amelius: Without scaling, those rounded corners look not so rounded.
eightys3v3n: I've seen half a dozen Mac users and none of them maximized the window very often. They usually had a mishmash of like 12 windows open and randomly all over the screen. Then they used the Alt-Tab to get between them. Basically wherever it opened is where it stayed.
jasonhemann: I love that there are people who are observant enough to notice these kinds of things, a vanguard for those of us who are blithely unaware and protected due to their vigilance.
nostromo: Clearing notifications on macOS Tahoe is ridiculously tedious. The "Liquid Glass" button is slow to respond, the notifications hang for a bit before being cleared, and then sometimes you have to jiggle the cursor to clear the next one. It's absurdly frustrating.And the updates to Music (formerly iTunes) are so bad the entire team should be dressed down, Steve Jobs style.
amelius: The biggest flaw is that the system is opinionated, so you cannot change anything you dislike.
tencentshill: Apple used to know this. You don't notice these things, but your subconscious does. You start to trust it less when things get inconsistent and don't "just work".
Wowfunhappy: Do you have the brightness on your monitor set really high or something?I frequently use macOS on a projector, it doesn't quite fill my wall floor to ceiling but it comes close. I don't use full screen often, but I do it occasionally as a focusing strategy, and it's fine.
streetfighter64: > disabling MacOS system integrity, which results in making them possibly vulnerableNot really, if you have malware that has root access on your system I think you're already pretty screwed, especially considering that you don't even need root to read all your saved passwords and personal files https://xkcd.com/1200/
ykl: Wouldn’t “insanely great”/“it’s shit” be more Steve than “genius”/“it’s shit”?
chimeracoder: > If the biggest flaw of a OS is the border radius of its windows, you've got yourself a pretty decent OS!There are loads of other flaws with the OS. It just so happens that people care a lot about the design of Apple's products, so people talk about these details.
amarant: Projectors are way easier on the eyes than monitors though.You're shining a bright light on a wall, which you are looking at.With a monitor you are shining a bright light at your face, while staring directly at the lightbulb!
Wowfunhappy: Doesn't bouncing off the wall just effectively make the "backlight" dimmer? The light reflected off the wall is hitting your face versus the light from the screen hitting your face. It's still light regardless.If you're using a monitor in the dark the way you use a projector, you should turn the backlight down. If you're using it in a well lit room, the brighter backlight should have less of an effect.
dcrazy: Footnote 2.
LatencyKills: As someone who worked on macOS, SIP wasn't designed to process your passwords or personal files - that's not even remotely what it does.So yes, disabling it is an absolutely ridiculous thing to do to make some window corners less round.Love xkcd though.
throwaway27448: One of the refreshing things about watching people fight online is that I discover I just don't care about things that drive others crazy. What a blessing!
thesuitonym: As tumblr user ommanyte said, "how dull for you to live your life without any hills to die on, you, on your vast flat barren plains of compromise, acceptance, and accommodation, while I reign supreme over the lush, rolling highlands of stupid shit I have irrationally chosen to stake my entire identity on"
ablob: > If the biggest flaw of a OS is the border radius of its windows, you've got yourself a pretty decent OS!This argument would also make Windows 11 a pretty decent OS by extension via "If the biggest flaw of a OS is the position of the start menu you've got yourself a pretty decent OS".In general I could use any minor nuisance as a proof of decency - or inject some to form this argument on purpose as a manufacturer.People don't like if their environment changes in minor unsolicited ways. There's always gonna be fuzz about these things and that means that the fuzz itself can't be used to make any strong argument whatsoever.
bloomca: It is just the most obvious, macOS is a death by thousands cuts
mulmen: [delayed]
eszed: This is me. I tend to order projects onto their own desktops[0], each with several app windows open. With an external monitor there's plenty of space, and... Yeah: with command-tab thoroughly committed to muscle memory it usually doesn't matter much if they end up on top of each other. If it does, I'll put them next to each other. Stickies usually go out of my eye-line to the left side of the screen, so I'll keep that otherwise clear.I sometimes maximize something - other than video calls: those are always full-size - on the laptop screen, but otherwise not at all.I can see how a full-screen IDE makes sense, but I don't use one, so I always want a couple of terminal sessions running alongside my editor.There are vanishingly few contexts in which I find full-screen helpful. Not criticizing anyone else, or recommending my way of working, but it's what works for me.[0] I would like better support for desktop management: naming and shortcutting, particularly. Years ago I tried some (I think it was Alfred, or a predecessor) add-on that promised that, but it was super flaky. Does anything exist that works well?
htx80nerd: absurdity. mac users are not serious people.
gcapu: I think you miss the point. How would you feel if you had a Ferrari with a noticeable scratch? Yes, it is great to have such a nice car, but it'd be a pity. So much much effort was put into the whole thing and this little detail is what lingers on your mind.
htx80nerd: Half the people in IT have no business being here.
haunter: I usually use Linux and Windows (pretty much split 50/50) and tbh this is why I never could switch to Mac full time even though I've have had and still have several Macs at home. The full screen beahavior is weird. Is the dock should overlay every single window all the time? If not then why is the dock not hidden by default? If yes then full screen is actually "maximum size app window without overlaying the dock"? What's even the point of the dock actually? The other one is the open window =/= running app behavior. Wait 2 hours later this app is still running in the background even though I've closed all windows?
lapcat: The footnote 2 link doesn't actually work for me, for whatever reason.What does it say?
zarmin: one of the stupidest comments in HN history
tines: He didn't say that he had no hills to die on, just that rounded window corners isn't one of them.
akdev1l: I think people are more complaining about windows crashing on updates or Microsoft putting ads everywhere or forcing one driveThat’s way more than just the “position of the start menu”
Latty: People do this, yeah. Even on Windows I've been over someone's shoulder walking them through something and it drives me nuts they work in a tiny window in a random part of the screen.
crest: Yes. I think the assumptions are made by people with two displays of at least 32" and ≥4K resolution.
bobthepanda: While I don't maximize anything on a monitor that wide, I do appreciate Window's snap to half/quarter functionality for monitors that wide, and I wish Mac had the same ability natively.
thesuitonym: I actually feel the opposite? The current green button action not only makes the window fill the entire screen, it also hides the menu bar AND creates a new virtual desktop and hides all of my other apps. And it seems to me that's what the majority of people want.Meanwhile, I want to use my graphical, mutli-window preemptive multitasking operating system to, you know, use multiple applications at the same time.
akdev1l: It does weird things in multi monitor because dragging a window on top of the newly “maximized” window somehow does not work
jiehong: One issue with windows maximised with the green button is if you have more than 1 window of the same app: you might alt-tab to the app, but cmd-` is not switching to the other window of the same (while id does if not maximised.
SunshineTheCat: I was thinking the same thing. I actually agree with most of the complaints people have made about the corners, but it seems so small compared with literally every interaction I have with Windows.As someone who works on Windows, Mac, and Linux; Windows stands alone in my opinion as the "stepping on legos with no socks on" of operating systems.
rafram: This isn’t a part of macOS 26 that bothers me, honestly. I don’t spend a lot of time stacking windows and measuring their corners.
mabedan: To me it's a little like the situation with charging the Mighty Mouse. It's become a meme to post a picture of it on its side being charged, but if you own one it doesn't really matter, as you charge it once a month for 15 minutes while you're at lunch.There are things which definitely do bother me like the Liquid Glass, but the window corners really don't bother me. And I'm into design and constantly inspect parts of ui with Digital Color Meter app.
al_borland: I think it’s more of a carryover from the original Mac’s in the 80s.Trying to maximize a window, even 23 years ago when I first moved to OS X, was a completely manual process. It was designed around windows, not walls. And screens were much smaller and lower res back then.
fwip: [delayed]
gib444: In window management, anything other than i3 is an unequivocal downgrade.Rounded corners are just...bizarre. Just because the laptop case is physically rounded !?
dstroot: > “mac users are not serious people.”I can’t tell if this is a serious comment or humor.
freetime2: Yeah "notorious inconsistency issues in windows corners" almost feels like an oxymoron to me. Perhaps it is notorious among graphic designers, but I'm sure the vast majority of MacOS users will never notice or care.
zackmorris: Not to mention that WindowServer seems to take 100+% cpu since the upgrade. Also I can't paste filenames in the save file dialog in some apps. And the URL field in Safari is just weird.My computer was running so slowly that I had to minimize transparency in system preferences somewhere. I think I also turned off opening every app in its own space. And I hid the icons on the Desktop in Finder settings somehow, which helped a lot. There are countless other little tweaks that are worth investigating.I also highly recommend App Tamer (no affiliation). It lets you jail background apps at 10% cpu or whatever. It won't help with WindowServer or kernel_task (which also often runs at 100+% cpu), but it's something.I can't help but feel that there's nobody at the wheel at Apple anymore. When I have to wait multiple seconds to open a window, to switch between apps, to go to my Applications folder, then something is terribly wrong. Computers have been running thousands of times slower than they should be for decades, but now it's reaching the point where daily work is becoming difficult.I'm cautiously optimistic that AI will let us build full operating systems using other OSs as working examples. Then we can finally boot up with better alternatives that force Apple/Microsoft/Google to try again. I could see Finder or File Explorer alternatives replacing the native ones.
AceJohnny2: > Not to mention that WindowServer seems to take 100+% cpu since the upgradeThat's because some app is spamming window updates.It's been an ongoing problem for many releases. AFAICT, WindowServer 100% CPU is a symptom, not a cause.
girvo: I’m pretty sure it does? I haven’t installed anything and it has the ability to do half and some other layouts through the window menu and snapping IIRC
diego_moita: Windows gets a lot of (deserved) bad rap for bloatware but MacOS is just a little less bad. "Features" that we can't uninstall (e.g.: Siri, Apple Music), arbitrary changes in the UI, ...True, the "blessing" of forced online accounts, telemetry and advertisement didn't arrive to MacOS, yet. But, I wonder how long it will take us to get there.
peacebeard: Yes, all the time. I understand that if you have a setup where you do everything in your IDE you could reasonably leave it full screen all the time and I get why that works for some people. I'm not one of those folks and I use separate IDE, terminal, browsers, and other windows and use window management to allow myself to see multiple of them at the same time and switch between them by clicking on what I want.Also just want to be 100% clear: Tahoe is bad and I hate the changes and I don't think the OS should prefer one way of working over the other. I just hope it's helpful to explain my perspective.
