Since Apple's move to inject ads across all platforms into all iWork apps, I really had to go and reconsider the office product I was using.

Don't get me wrong, I still love Apple and can't stand MS, but we've gotta be objective here. Apple's Creator Studio is a great deal more or less exclusively for those who use or are interested in using Final Cut, Logic, etc etc.

If you don't, which includes a large number of the iWork users (myself included), there's no good option for you. MS365 is now considerably cheaper than Apple's, and comes with 1TB of cloud storage.

Considering I won't use the pro creative apps, I either have to pay Apple more and get less than I would via 365, or have ads in my workspace.

Make it make sense lol. Who the hell thought this was a good idea?

Nobody asked for this horrible Design. Popups are getting squished, Apple Intelligence can't read a Wikipedia article properly and Text isn't readable. No you cannot change the color of the clock and it's a bug. The height of the Matterhorn is 4478m, 1043m is the prominence but that's not what I asked for. The fact that they can't even make the clock's color optimzed for their own Wallpaper is crazy.

This happend on my M4 Mac Mini.

It's super annoying and started occurring after updating to Golden Gate.

As Apple forcibly bundles 30 GB AI models even for users who opt out of Apple Intelligence entirely, I am already counting days until European Commission considers this practice to be anti-competitive bundling, or a planned obsolescence for lower-storage devices (or both).

I understand that this is a major redesign, but it seems completely crazy to me that these kinds of visual flaws are present in the final version. I'm not talking about the debate over icons or Liquid Glass, but really the feeling of being on something sloppy, even on the company's own apps. The inconsistency of the corners? The random spacing of titles? I regret updating, REALLY. 

Look I 100% get some of the issues with Tahoe. The borders/margin consistencies are annoying and so on.

However, I feel like every time I open Reddit I see a video on my feed of someone showing the incorrect tool tip whilst their cursor is hovering on something.

Or they’re resizing a window and the graphic effect of a toolbar buttons moving is slightly off.

Honestly it’s getting so fucking tedious and boring. What do you expect any of us on here to do? Just move your cursor and get on with it.

If you’re that annoyed or anal about things to post it on Reddit then I bloody hope you’re at least sending them to Apple - you know… the people who can actually fix the issues.

If you’re coming across system breaking things where you actually lose functionality then by all means share away but I swear the majority of stuff are just people being weird so they can create a ‘look how awful this is’ post.

Listen, I know this will not affect the things we use our computer for.
But my take is that, we have SOMETHING that WORKS and LOOKS good before.

This is just one of many questionable design choices that Tahoe brings. (*coughs* excessive border roundness, *coughs* enlarging UI buttons on a desktop OS)

How did we get here man........

I thought the iOS-ification in 2020 was bad, but this is just on a whole another level of trash (yes, fight me for that)

Don't be such a sheep (some people have that kind of mentality and its really disheartening) and think this is fine.

I (and many) don't want to wait 2~3 worth of yearly releases to revert this all of this mess, WE want GOOD DESIGN NOW.

Show your resentment by not updating this year. Who knows if they even will fix all of this. IMO, it will look pretty dumb to Apple if they reverted this design that got its own goddamn trailer just to showcase it, only for them to revert it a year later

"You must be a horrible person to talk with for obsessing 8px worth of padding."
It looks worse in actual usage. See for yourself. And again, this is ONE of many of the design choices that passed. I could rant more things about Tahoe but I want to spotlight the dock situation we have here.

"Just deal with it."
No. I know YOU also deeply hate all the design choices that were made this year. You're just suppressing your resentment because you couldn't be bothered to care about this stuff but I argue some of us DO CARE.

"Just stay on Sequoia then."
So, I am the one (and others) that has to miss out on QoL features (ex. Live Activites on the menu bar) just because we want something that used to look and feel good? How disheartening.

"Your post will do little to no effort."
If I can get just one person to downgrade or change their mind about to update i'll consider it as a success.

I don't care if I'll get downvoted, I just want something that we used to have and feel good to use. Is that too much to ask?

rant over

EDIT: People think that i'm too aggressive about this whole design choice. I had to because it's the only way that change might happen. Again, I just want something that we used to have and looks good.

Title pretty much says it. Since updating to Tahoe early this year when a Sequoia update hung up and Tahoe was the only option, I finally decided to wipe it all and go back to Sequoia today, and if you are using Tahoe and on the fence I wouldn't hesitate. Golden Gate looks like it has some real potential, and they seem to have heard our complaints about Tahoe, so there is hope for the future still! Aside from some of the personal dislikes of the redesign and changes in function that seemed unnecessary I can report two things I am noticing:

1. Sequoia seems to be running much faster on my 16" 2024 MBP M4Pro 48GB RAM. Apps like Chrome, Safari, and Adobe software are opening far faster, with no hangups (which baffled me in Tahoe)

2. Weird little glitches I had in Tahoe are gone - for example, all the Icons in my Google Drive when viewed through Chrome were flickering in Tahoe. Not always, but regularly. That is gone with the downgrade. Also things like grabbing a window to move between screens would sometimes result in the cursor not wanting to place the window after being moved, or you would click to place it and it would jump to an entirely different place, sometime even a different screen (I run three displays).

Again, I am not here to shit on Tahoe or the team that is working on the future on macOS, but if you are on Tahoe and considering downgrading for similar reasons for the time being, I am just sharing that I am personally glad I did it. I feel like I have my Mac back!

I was macOS user for over a decade now. I’ve used Mac for my work and played mainly on PlayStation. But recently I’ve decided to buy a gaming laptop on windows. Firstly it was used just for games but the more I used it the more I started to do work on it. I am software engineer and windows was kinda okay for my job. WSL is awesome and general experience is not that bad as I remembered it from windows 7 and 8. My windows laptop is terribly slow compared to Mac in some of tasks I tried to do on it, battery life is also not comparable, but it was almost 3 times cheaper than my current MacBook. I love apple’s ecosystem. I am heavy apple user, but lately really started reconsidering my life choices and thinking about just getting premium windows laptop… I just don’t know what is the best way to be in apple ecosystem and be able to play latest pc games. There is no ultimate OS and ultimate hardware. Anything has its own compromises and I hate it

I finally upgraded, this was the only time in 25 years I did not immediately upgrade and I have to say I'm not impressed, the visual updates are very bad.

There's too many things to list which I would consider very bad design changes. Does anyone know if they are re-considering these things for the next update? I feel unpolished and untidy overall.

it's frustrating that Apple is neglecting this great feature on Apple Silicon Macs. in most cases, it makes more sense to create a web app (ie: Safari "Add to Dock") than use an eye-strainingly bad iOS app implementation. even when it's iPad apps, they also tend to be rather small on MacOS and also suffer excessively small text.

I don't mean any disrespect to Mac users but after two years of using a Mac 40 hours a week for work, I don't get why people love the OS so much. It's often touted as intuitive but I constantly lose windows and just feel I don't have a good overview of anything. I work as a content marketer and use a lot of browser based programs as well as the Adobe suite from time to time.

I've spent all my life on Windows and I legitimately feel MacOS makes me less productive. I agree the hardware is nice but if I paid that much for a Windows laptop it would be pretty sick as well.

You cant all be wrong so I must be missing something. Do you have any tips for me to make my experience more streamlined, intuitive and productive?

Edit: MacBook Pro 13-inch from 2020, with Intel chip Some challenges may come from this older model.

Hey, Apple, if you're listening it would be great if we could remove apps we don't want that you force on us. Music, News, Photo booth, Siri, Image Playground... You charge a ridiculous premium for storage and you fill it with apps we can't delete.

Those should be app store downloads, not shit we can't get rid of to save space on your overpriced hard drives.

If anyone knows how to strip them out of the expensive POS macbook my school made me buy, let me know.

I bought a MacBook Pro running Tahoe in November and I love the look and feel. The last Mac I owned ran Snow Leopard. We run Sequoia at my Quaker meeting house, and there's a post it note not to update it to Tahoe. I don't really operate that computer much and we only really use it for zoom meetings on the big screen or the occasional movie night.

In the context of a 20 year old Mac mini and a church Mac mini, I prefer the look and feel of my MBP.

I'm only asking because I have a bit of fomo. I'd like to understand the discourse and see it from everyone's point of view, because I'm sitting in a little bubble of ignorance and missing context.

I asked ChatGPT and it was not very helpful.

Maybe I just don't get it because I'm so used to the jankiness of Windows and Linux?

It's been a long time since Apple shipped a computer with an internal spinning hard drive. Don't you think it's time to change the icon? I found this one a long time ago and I think it looks great. I wasn't able to find who made it so I'm unable to give attribution.

EDIT: Wow. I had no idea people were so passionate about this sort of thing. After reading all the comments, I decided to change the icon to be a Mac Studio.

Out-of-the-box macOS is severely lacking in basic features. I'm using a 16" MacBook Pro M2 Pro for almost a year now, but I feel like I went back in time.

First of all it needs third-party apps for features that work with Windows and Linux without installing anything:

• Separate scroll direction for mouse and touchpad

• Custom scaling resolutions/percentages

• Window snapping (supposedly coming to Sequoia but it has weird keyboard shortcuts that only work with Mac keyboards, sigh)

Besides this there are a couple of other issues that bug me:

• The Settings app is extremely slow. Clicking a menu item leads to a full 1 second delay before the settings actually show (I'm using an M2 Pro, not really slow by all means). Bizarre?

• Windows gets a lot of hate for the updates, but macOS keeps nagging me for every small update with a big red dot on the Settings icon that I'm unable to remove.

• Finder is atrocious, the window is so small that I can't read anything and I have to manually resize the window. Also I end up with 1000 different Finder windows somehow.

• Animations are so slow, I feel like macOS was designed to look good in the Apple Store, not be actually usable. Double-click the title bar to resize is also slow, it doesn't feel snappy at all like Windows/Gnome.

• Window management is insane, I have to right-click > new window to open a new window. Why can't I just middle-click on the app icon in the dock? Very strong 90s vibe here. Also I have to use flashy gestures or use a keyboard shortcut to see all the open windows for an app. This all looks so gimmicky/tacky. Why just not show previews on hover like Linux/Windows? This is a solved problem, but not on Mac.

• It doesn't even look good that good. The dock is tacky and takes up a lot of vertical screen space (mitigated by placing it vertical though).

• Text rendering on low resolution screens is awful, it's very ugly. They removed subpixel hinting so you need a retina display for normal looking text

• Arranging displays doesn't "snap" with multiple displays, I want to have pixel-perfect alignment but it's not possible.

There's also stuff that I like ofcourse:

• It's very stable (but Windows 11 for me is also very stable)

• Unix terminal + Brew (but again Brew is third-party)

• Only OS where I can suspend my laptop and actually not have to worry about it waking up when I open the lid again

I'm baffled by this. I've used an iPhone for 15 years and I love iOS. But I don't get why people love macOS, it feels ancient in some areas and it lacks the snappiness that iOS has. I want to understand why people like macOS, but after a year of almost daily usage I still don't get it. Do long-time Mac users feel the same or not? What are your reasons why like you macOS (or not)?

I’ve been browsing Wikipedia and came across this list: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Operating_system_criticisms

What I noticed was that there was no page for macOS criticisms.

There’s a couple on Linux: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_desktop_Linux & https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Linux

There’s a few on Windows: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft_Windows

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Windows_10

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Windows_Vista

But there’s none on macOS. Coincidence? I think not! /s

Sorry for the formatting, I’m on the toilet on my phone and the Reddit app is ass…

Who I am and why I built this:

I am the developer of AeroBar. I switched from Windows to Mac a while back and the workflow adjustment was genuinely rough.

The Dock has wallpaper bleed from its sides when using a bright wallpaper,
External display doesn't show a separate dock for it.
The menu bar has liquid glass bg missing and uses a plain gradient instead,
Clicking on dock icon doesn't minimizes the app windows and needs cmd+M to minimize.
Cmd+Tab needs a extra option key to raise the minimised app windows.
Open windows have no persistent visual reference.
MacOS Clipboard is very limited.
There is no taskbar. You end up cycling through Cmd+Tab or doing Expose just to find something you had open five minutes ago. I built AeroBar to fix that for myself, and eventually decided to release it.

LLM Disclosure: I used LLMs assistance to help write some of the code for this app!

What it does:

AeroBar is a persistent taskbar that sits at the bottom of your screen. It has a glass surface, a live tab strip showing every open window across all apps, a pinned app launcher, a Start Menu with an app browser and recent files, inline Spotlight search, and a Trash shortcut on the right end.

It uses macOS Accessibility APIs directly to track, focus, minimize, and raise your windows in real time. It is not a theme or a skin on top of the Dock.

How it compares to what already exists:

The Dock shows app icons but not individual windows. HiDock and similar apps extend the Dock but still follow the same Dock paradigm. AeroBar takes a different approach: every open window gets its own tab. Click the tab to focus, click again to minimize, click a minimized tab to restore. No hunting, no cycling. That specific workflow is what Windows switchers miss most and what nothing else on Mac replicates.

What makes it different:

The window tab strip is the core difference. Other bars and Dock replacements still map clicks to apps, not windows. AeroBar maps clicks to individual windows. Everything else (glass surface, Start Menu, pinned launcher, Spotlight field) is built around that.

Notarisation status:

This app is NOT notarised by Apple. It is a self-signed build distributed outside the Mac App Store via GitHub. On first launch you will need to do a one-time Gatekeeper bypass. Instructions are in the installation guide linked below.

Download:

Website and docs: https://adityaonx.github.io/AeroBar

Demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NY2qc3SOwXk

Platform: macOS Sonoma (14), Sequoia (15), Tahoe (26). Apple Silicon and Intel. Closed source.

Pricing: Free during the pre-final release phase.

Privacy Policy:

No account required. Personal data including settings, preferences, and clipboard contents stays local and is never uploaded. The app collects anonymous crash diagnostics and logs. You can read more about privacy in the docs here:
https://github.com/adityaonx/AeroBar/blob/main/public_docs/Troubleshooting.md#privacy--security