When I first saw macOS 26 revealed at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June 2025 – particularly its new Liquid Glass design language – I admit I was impressed. It looked smooth and visually appealing, and was nothing like anything Apple had ever released. Paired with one of my favorite default macOS wallpapers for years, it was a sight to behold.
But perhaps more than that, it was a nostalgic invocation of Windows 7’s glassy Aero theme, a design I first experienced during my computer training years and have had a weakness for ever since. This connection cemented him in my good books.
Much of the blame has been placed on former Apple design chief Alan Dye, who recently left for pastures new, and I suspect it’s more or less about money. But what’s more important is understanding how Apple resolves the malaise and where it goes from there. For many people, myself included, something needs to change.
An epidemic of carelessness
To be clear, the issues I’m talking about are not critical errors, security vulnerabilities, or disastrous crash causes. They won’t burn your Apple silicon chip or erase your files.
Instead, they’re more subtle, but say as much about Apple as anything I just listed. That’s because they point out something that has always been anathema to the Apple experience: negligence.
This problem is present everywhere you look in macOS 26. For example, Apple rounded window corners, but in a completely inconsistent way. Compare, for example, the rounded corners of the App Store and TextEdit apps: they are different shapes and sizes.
Or try resizing a window from its horizontal or vertical edge; your mouse pointer has to hit the window before you can grab it. Try it from the corner and your pointer will be able to grab it from miles away from the window. This directly contradicts the years-old logic that you resize an element by positioning your mouse pointer inside it.
It’s annoying, but there is a more serious indictment when we realize that Apple often breaks its own design guidelines. Open a menu from the menu bar and each item will have an icon next to it. Apple’s old design guidelines advised third-party app designers against doing this because it was distracting: icons clutter menus. So why did Apple ignore this good advice in macOS 26?
This kind of situation sends the message that either Apple didn’t put much effort into testing its brand new operating system, or it did, but didn’t care about the botched results. And let’s be honest here: a good overview either.
Through liquid glass
Ironically, Liquid Glass is still one of my favorite parts of macOS 26, even though it’s getting a huge amount of negative press. Yet there are still some aspects of Liquid Glass that I don’t like much anymore.
Here is an example. As you scroll through the content, you may notice that it disappears when it reaches the top of the application window. This isn’t always a problem, but it becomes a problem when this content interferes with the controls at the top of the window. The content overlaps and, in bad cases, becomes completely unreadable. Try it for yourself by opening the System Settings app and scrolling down the left sidebar. Sidebar items overlap the search field, making the text of both items unreadable.
Try looking elsewhere. Enable a settings toggle in the system settings, and it jumps into the air, distracting your eye and slowing down the animation in an indulgent display of overengineering. The clear option for Dock icons, meanwhile, makes them indistinguishable from each other. The point of an icon is to convey information, even when you just glance at it. The fact that they don’t always do this anymore suggests that Apple no longer understands what icons are for.
In many cases, it seems the motivation was simply to create something pretty without considering anything else. The feature appears to have been far behind, if it was even considered at all. You might expect this at other companies, but it happens at Apple, especially. For a company whose entire reputation is built on design excellence, this profuse neglect is deeply worrying.
Why is this important?
But why, one might ask, should we care? Isn’t design just about making things look good?
Not according to Apple, this is not the case. Steve Jobs himself famously said that “design is how it works.” The idea here is that design isn’t just about putting a new coat of paint on a terrible product, but rather about making that product work well inside and out. Design must have an integral purpose in the product.
Good design makes the software easier to use. Consistency means that people know how to use something even if they’ve never touched it before: they’ve become familiar with it by using apps from the same company that work the same way. This avoids jarring interactions that can make the experience worse.
Yet it seems that Apple, under the leadership of Alan Dye, has abandoned several decades of great design understanding for a system based entirely on aesthetics. This is something I didn’t appreciate when macOS 26 was revealed to the world. Now that I’ve spent more time on it, it’s clear that Apple needs to rediscover the design principles that made it successful in the past.
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