Mastodawn

soheilpro 6d ago

Hide macOS Tahoe's Menu Icons

https://512pixels.net/2026/03/hide-macos-tahoes-menu-icons-with-this-one-simple-trick/

Hide macOS Tahoe's Menu Icons With This One Simple Trick - 512 Pixels

I really dislike Apple’s choice to clutter macOS Tahoe’s menus with icons. It makes menus hard to scan, and a bunch of the icons Apple has chosen make no sense and are inconsistent between system applications. Steve Troughton-Smith is my hero for finding a Terminal command to disable them: Here’s one for the icons-in-menus haters […]

512 Pixels

Usually I like Apple’s OS updates but Tahoe is absolutely awful from the glass to the noddy sizing of everything. MacOS does not have to harmonise with VisionOS at all and it’s been a disaster for macOS to try.

I agree. Tahoe is disgustingly unusable; I'm happy that Alan Dye left Apple.

I hope Apple will backtrack on Liquid Glass after Tahoe. Otherwise, I'll just switch to Linux.

radicaldreamer 6d ago

They will likely tweak it but very unlikely that they’ll remove it altogether, especially with the upcoming touch screen MacBook Pro.

Companies like Apple typically don’t make reversals quickly (the butterfly keyboard took years to remedy).

They'll do what they always do, it'll be the greatest thing ever just getting minor tweaks for 3-4 releases and then will be superseded by the greatest thing ever.

tomalbrc 5d ago

Your "upcoming" touch MacBook Pro has been a pipe dream of apple consumers for 2 decades now

isametry 5d ago

I’d even say pipe dream of just Apple commentators and pundits. I’ve yet to hear from a normal, real-life Mac user who legitimately wishes for a touchscreen MacBook.

fragmede 5d ago

Kids raised on iPads totally try and touch three laptop screen, ah it's not all Internet pundits who want one.

isametry 5d ago

A kid raised on an animal sounds toy keyboard might also expect the computer to go “moo” when pressing the “M” key, but that doesn’t mean Apple should build that in. Expectations from previous platforms sometimes don’t fit others, and can be unlearned.

egeozcan 5d ago

Sorry to break your streak but I'm a "real-life Mac user who legitimately wishes for a touchscreen MacBook", but maybe you may argue that I'm holding it wrong and my wish is illegitimate :)

isametry 5d ago

Nope, no bad faith here, I’d genuinely like to hear your use cases for the touchscreen.

I just hope you could exclude speculative new interfaces and gestures in future macOS that straight-up cannot be done with a mouse. In which case, yeah, the TouchBook would be degrading the experience for me and a huge portion of Mac users, thus making me sad.

egeozcan 5d ago

I just don't want to switch to an ipad when I want to sketch something. Also some tagging interfaces for photo review work exceptionally well with a touch screen. So I don't want to carry a macbook pro and and ipad, long story short.

> I just hope you could exclude speculative new interfaces and gestures in future macOS that straight-up cannot be done with a mouse

I agree 100%. I'm already annoyed about how some stuff that's easy to do with a touchpad are straight-up broken with a normal mouse.

> disgustingly unusable

Any specifics in mind? I, personally, haven't noticed much, beyond the initial difficulty in resizing windows.

A lot of the controls are unreadable depending on the background behind it, for example. Which is crazy. Sometimes it's also hard to figure out if something is a control, part of a site/application, a visual bug, or something else.

They've even doubled down on it, I don't see this going away in the next 2 major OS versions. I expect them to have a lot of WWDC sessions about it again this year.

That said, Apple's own apps are a crazy mixed up mess of different design systems and technologies, so maybe it will all fall apart and something new comes along in ±3 years time.

Why would they backtrack? Alan Dye wasn't the only person at Apple pushing this with God-like powers overriding everyone's decisions. [1]

New head of design, surprise surprise: Apple's new software design chief, Steve Lemay, was "a driving force" behind Liquid Glass and was "deeply involved in its development." https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/15/ios-27-macos-27-no-majo...

[1] I have small rant about this pervasive view here: https://dmitriid.com/the-curious-case-of-alan-dye

No Major Changes to Liquid Glass Expected Across iOS 27 and macOS 27

Apple's new Liquid Glass interface introduced across iOS 26, macOS Tahoe, and its other latest software platforms is apparently here to stay. ...

MacRumors

Steve Lemay, who now replaced Alan Dye as the design lead, allegedly was a driving force behind Liquid Glass and deeply involved in its development, so I wouldn’t expect any reversal. (https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/15/ios-27-macos-27-no-majo...)

No Major Changes to Liquid Glass Expected Across iOS 27 and macOS 27

Apple's new Liquid Glass interface introduced across iOS 26, macOS Tahoe, and its other latest software platforms is apparently here to stay. ...

MacRumors

drfloyd51 5d ago

Will you really switch?

There are so many other wonderful reasons to switch beyond “my current OS has a few issues”.

And it’s not as if Linux is without issues either.

I mean if Linux was “SO GREAT” why are you bothering with an inferior OS now. Just switch already.

Synaesthesia 6d ago

I don't know, I always see this pattern with iOS or MacOS releases. Everyone piles on at the time.

I've actually quite enjoyed some design changes in Tahoe, and looking at older versions of MacOS just looks old fashioned once you're used to them.

I'm sure this is true, and that there will always be a (likely disproportionately) loud group of complainers, many of whom will forget about their complaints. I haven't really publicly complained about Tahoe before, and I don't intend on whining about it again. But...

It's fine. I'm not going to rail about how it's unusable, or say that it makes me want to gouge out my eyes, or whatever. But it's enough to dissuade me from ever wanting to buy another Mac, if I have the option of using a desktop Linux system.

That's a pretty big caveat. But those curved window borders and the rounded widgets in e.g. the settings menu are kind of awful. Not unusable. But every time I open a terminal and I deal with the choice of either having obscene padding around my content or seeing a few pixels of my prompt's corners shaved off, I get just a little more irritated, and a little less likely to pick up my Macbook the next time I'm deciding which device to use.

brailsafe 6d ago

Good UI for tools, physical or digitial, should reduce the friction between picking it up and using it for something, that's the problem at the core of design. With the small caveat that sometimes technically good but perhaps unethical design solves stupid business problems well, like deliberately making chairs uncomfortable to keep traffic moving through a busy cafe, or making anti-homeless benches, design should not dissuade you from using something you purchased to solve other problems; it's unprincipled.

Almost every update I'm skeptical at first and then after a while I see a screenshot of the old UI and think "how did I ever use that?"

Tahoe I've been using since it came out and every time I see a screenshot of prior versions I think "wow it used to look so much better"

microtonal 5d ago

Yeah, there was a post recently
about how window chrome changed over the years and the Tahoe era does not make me recognize Apple anymore:

https://pxlnv.com/blog/window-chrome-of-our-discontent/

The usability of older versions was so much better. Tahoe is a huge regression, making everything look like one big drab.

(Though Big Sur already entered the path of monochromatic toolbar icons, etc.)

It’s a shame, because their hardware has improved significantly since Jony Ive left.

The Window Chrome of Our Discontent

In a WWDC 2011 session, Dan Schimpf explained some of the goals of the refreshed design for Aqua in Mac OS X Lion were “meant to focus the user attention on the active window content”. This sentiment was echoed by John Siracusa in his review of Lion for Ars Technica: Apple says that its goal […]

I've always been "pro-change" for UIs, as opposed to the bunch of people in the "bring the old UI back" camp, but Tahoe looked like fecal matter from the moment it was introduced.

On iOS it's manageable with reduced transparency, but on macOS it's just so awful I won't upgrade.

josteink 5d ago

I was forced to upgrade at work.

So I’ve enabled reduced transparency and all the other accessibility settings I can find to remove the terribleness.

The UI is now mono-coloured gray and looks like MacOS back in the days before OS X was a thing - but it’s still better than what Apple “envisioned” with Tahoe.

kryptiskt 5d ago

That's actually a problem with Tahoe, it is not something new and bold, it's old-fashioned. Transparency already has come and gone as a UI fad, and it doesn't really make any big difference if you throw computationally expensive effects at it.

> Everyone piles on at the time.

Not this much, they don’t.

> looking at older versions of MacOS just looks old fashioned

It’s an operating system, not a dress to parade around on a catwalk. I don’t want it to be fashionable and change with the seasons, I want it to be usable and intuitive. And yes, it should look good (which Tahoe doesn’t) but to the extent that it makes usability better, never in detriment of it.

mrweasel 6d ago

Maybe it looks better on a nicer monitor or something. To me there's nothing terribly broken about the Tahoe UI, but it's clearly rushed because there are a ton of weird little things that just look off.

The dock is suppose to look like the icons float in a class panel, but the reflections in the glass look pixilated and the effect isn't there. The dock icons are centred in the dock, but the activity indicator on the "glass" pane make it look like they're not.

In the control panel, and other windows with a left panel, it's clear that the window curve and the panel curve aren't the same and the transparency of the panel makes it even more clear. I don't understand why some panels can be transparent, but other parts of the window isn't. There's no reason for the transparency.

The Tahoe looks like Gnome theme from 2005, it's interesting, sort of pretty, but the details makes it clear that the authors doesn't quite have the skills to perfect it.

Apple have been slacking in the UI quality control department in the past few years. I have similar issues on my iPhone SE, Apple (and app authors) clearly doesn't test on this phone, because UI elements frequently overlap.

Also I'm still annoyed about the control panel being ported over from iOS. You can't find anything and the window can't even be made wider.

Tahoe's UI looks like a generic, "futuristic-like", user-created theme for KDE circa 2009.

microtonal 5d ago

The only missing thing are wobbly windows and a cube desktop switcher.

(Yes, I know, don’t give them ideas.)

Like the cube user switcher in MacOS?

microtonal 5d ago

Oh, yeah, I completely forgot about that. No multi-user Macs in the house anymore.

isoprophlex 5d ago

I kinda want a new mac because the hardware looks so ... performant. But I can't bear this tahoe glass bullshit, every screenshot I see of it looks terrible. I just don't get what Apple's play is here.

drfloyd51 5d ago

Apple fired the head of UX after Tahoe. Apple didn’t know what Apple’s play was.

The new guy is very well respected and hopefully back off of glass.

'The new guy' is one of the driving forces behind Apple Glass....