tahoe is definitely the worst i’ve seen things since leopard. maybe we get lucky and apple does another “ok sure, maybe that one was an oops” and anounces another snow leopard style rewite of everything. pause a year to clean up the flashy bloat that only kinda half works. not like they’ve been innovating, they could at least stop slipping and making lazy mistakes regularly.
I think the new Liquid Glass UI is meant to better support the rumored upcoming MacBooks with touch screens. The Mac’s UI has been wasting more and more space over the years, I think with this target in mind.
a touch screen macbook is already a thing, it’s just an ipad pro with a ‘magic’ keyboard. I used that set up as a daily driver at work for a couple years before getting to work remote. unless the failure to innovate continues on and they just make the macbook screen detachable like a surface book clone. before apple laid off all it’s vendor relations staff a few years ago they were constantly talking about the push to unify macOS and iOS UI. I suppose the default experience between macOS and iPadOS is pretty close now.

I have an iPad myself and try to use it to work every now and then. I always run into pretty basic limitations on iPadOS very quickly. For example working with large file on a network share is painful. The file manage is a slow toy compared to the Finder. The limited RAM and no swap means app will lose state regularly. Transferring data between applications is still cumbersome.

they were constantly talking about the push to unify macOS and iOS UI

They made several attempts at it and none succeeded. There’s lots of shared frameworks, Mac Catalyst, and Swift UI. None of them work consistently or are particularly good.

iOS and iPadOS have fundamental limitations baked into the design that severely limit it.

Making a unified mobile, tablet, touch, and desktop OS was also tried by Microsoft and Ubuntu and the results were weak to mixed.

What Apple really needs is a new paradigm. For that they need a vision, which they don’t have since Steve Jobs died.

oh yeah ipados is limited. the windowed gui option in 26 makes it more usable for keyboard/mouse if you’ve got a large screen model. but it still seems geared to sidecar usage not a standalone tablet computer. which makes the removal of sidecar a hilariously apple thing to do. honestly gnome on an old surface is a very solid competitor to ipados if you don’t need to do any creative work. and the issues i had when testing gnome and krita could have just been the cheaper 2nd hand hardware i used.

The Vision Pro had potential as a new vision, but it’s still quite not there yet, too unaccessible to mainstream both by cost and practicality like its weight, and not being supported enough.

It’s become another disappointment.

Even Meta isn’t very successful with their much cheaper Meta Quest Series. VR Headsets are mostly toys.