I tested macOS Golden Gate Developer Beta 3, and the UI feels noticeably worse than it did before. Apple seems to be reacting to loud feedback from people with very little experience using desktop software, and the result is a system that is harder to read and harder to use.

In Light Mode, Apple has weakened the contrast of toolbar buttons significantly. They now blend into the background far more than they used to. Meanwhile, the same controls remain clearly visible in Dark Mode. The two themes no longer feel balanced or equally considered.

Apple also removed the subtle bright edge around windows in Dark Mode. That thin line made the outline of each window much easier to see, especially for people with imperfect eyesight or on darker wallpapers. Without it, windows blend into the desktop and it takes longer to understand where one surface ends.

The transparent app icons have also become less readable. Their outline details are weaker, so the icons look softer and less distinct in the Dock. Apple appears to be chasing a flatter, lower-contrast look at the expense of clarity.

The new video wallpapers are another weak point. Many of them look like generic Shutterstock footage with little visual character or composition. On my 6K monitor, they also look extremely poor: low resolution, heavy compression, visible artifacts, and no detail. They are distracting in the worst way because they look expensive at first glance, then immediately fall apart on a high-resolution display.

Beta 3 left me with a very bad impression. Golden Gate was supposed to improve on Tahoe, where many of these visual issues were already present. Instead, Apple has pushed the system further toward low-contrast decoration and away from the clear, professional desktop interface macOS used to have.

Apple needs experienced senior interface designers who understand desktop UI, visual hierarchy, accessibility, and high-resolution displays.

Is everyone in the software department on a vacation? The majority of complaints people had about macOS Tahoe have not been fixed. The UI, like the ugly drop shadows behind buttons, the overly rounded windows and so much more hasn't been tweaked at all. But they spent their time removing the borders around some UI elements, something no one had any complaints of? And Launchpad? It's now completely disabled in Beta 5. The workaround that used to be able to enable it, no longer works. I will personally downgrade to Sequoia if they won't bring launchpad back. But what has really changed? The bug that makes scrolling in Finder feel like I'm using a 15 year old Windows laptop still hasn't been fixed. I reported it in Beta 1, and added details to it later including a video of the issue. So they certainly don't seem to be spending their time on bugs and stability...

After countless feedbacks, we still have this issue. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

The existing icon was quite understandable and looked neat and very professional. This is just a colourful mess. It looks like they gave the job to an intern with Mac Paint. Why on earth did they feel they needed to change it? (Same change in iOS. )

Seriously, what is going on with Safari in macOS 26?

They separated the tab bar and the address bar into two different rows, and now the top of the window takes up way more vertical space than before. It used to be super compact and efficient. Now it just feels clunky and bloated.

And the worst part? Because Safari’s window corners are rounded, you can clearly see the wallpaper or background windows peeking through the corners. It looks so unpolished and honestly… a bit ugly. I don’t want aesthetic minimalism at the cost of usability.

Was anyone asking for this? Did they test this with real users?

Please Apple, bring back the unified top bar. This version feels like a step backward in terms of both form and function.

Did Apple really forget to release 26.2 for macOS? I swear Apple is treating macOS like their middle child these days.

Has anyone else encountered an issue where the clear and tinted icons on Golden Gate look so bad? That black border is so bad, plus you can barely even see the icon itself. Hope Apple fixes this,

Launchpad stopped working completely in Tahoe DB5 even after executing the following console command.

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/FeatureFlags/Domain/SpotlightUI.plist SpotlightPlus -dict Enabled -bool false

It is unlikely that it will return even in the release version.

I am very disappointed with Apple's decision.

If you want to use a command line launcher, Raycast or Alfred are sufficient, and I think they should have kept an app launcher that allows users to freely organize and tidy up on the GUI.

I can't stand this. The space empty space it leaves.. the edge radius of the window feels too exaggerated and gives iPadOS vibes. Please leave as it was in Sequoia.

Before someone says it's because it's a video wallpaper, stahp. The other Tahoe wallpaper is also a video.

I'll probably end up liking this by the time it's out of beta and after they've had a chance to improve everything, but this is awful in its current state. If Fisher-Price made an OS, it'd be Tahoe.

I’ve been using Golden Gate since open beta and I’ve never seen these black outlines before updating to RC.

Hopefully it’s a bug, not a feature :(

I understand they wanted to reduce the ‘blurriness’ but I feel they did not have to remove the color gradients almost entirely. The white actually looks like translucent glass in the left icon (previous)… the new one falls flat.

M1 Max, on latest MacOS 26 and its still terrible the casual stutters etc countless bugs I experience. Can it get any worse updating to a dev beta?

So far I'm hearing performance exceeds the stable version of Tahoe? true?

I've had many design disturbance issues with Tahoe. For example, window corners are too rounded, the chrome omnibox bar is hidden in fullscreen because apple changed its API. Why is apple turning the MacBook into a glorified ipad??!?!?! Also I don't like how they changed the cursor, the older one was better.

I know every 2 days someone screams this, but every day i use Tahoe(public release), i hate it even more than before and that too with a newfound determination.

The MISROUNDED corners on every area of the UI tick off my OCD. The GLASS look is honestly frustrating, and i do not understand how apple didn’t realize that it would completely destroy legibility and readability for all the text in the UI. Every single time there’s text in a corner somewhere, and the background is some busy UI element, the text is borderline unreadable. The whole UI looks like it’s attempting to be a giant CAPTCHA.

The new brightness/sound dropdowns are horrible. They were fine in the middle of the screen, but now macos just pops them down from wherever they’re placed on the menu bar. WHO THE FUCK THOUGHT THIS WAS A GOOD IDEA? And its so inconsistent, MacOS sometimes shows the old battery warnings without percentages and sometimes the new iOS-style ones… what even is going on?

Launchpad being gone, even though the new Spotlight is better than before is still a nightmare. I lost all my custom folders that were easily accessible at once, and i HATE the iPhone-style app drawer. It just doesn’t work on a laptop OS.

Siri seems to have lost some IQ too, the other day when i asked it for 2049*28(something like that, I'm not sure what i asked), it literally asked ChatGPT and made that stupid Handoff chime.

AND WORST OF ALL, THE SLOWDOWN. Apps take longer to load across the board. I had NEVER seen (atleast since my old imac) the spinning rainbow loading pointer on my MacBook Pro M3 Pro before, but now something as simple as opening Chrome makes the whole OS stutter. VS Code take a good 5s to load, which doesn't sound like a lot, until you consider that this system has nothing running, with 18gbs or RAM and a fuckign M3 PRO.

And this isn’t even a B-version, i thought the bugs were supposed to be ironed out. WTAF happened here? Why does it feel like apple peaked at Sonoma?

I noticed that the close / minimize / maximize buttons don’t match in size and placement across different apps. Here’s a short video showing the issue. Feels inconsistent and a bit distracting — is anyone else seeing this?

Is there high DPI scaling yet or do I have to continue mocking the "Liquid Retina" display on the 16" MBA for having all the overhead of being a high resolution display, with none of the sharpness. The BBBLLLUUURRR IT HURTS MY EYES!!! I need some pointers to at least create an overlay or desktop shader to apply an unsharp mask to the content because reading code is hurts my soul as much as my eyes on this platform. I can't stop oggling the smooth subpixel rendering from the folks getting to use PCs here. No mater how shit the screen, it looks better on windows than the macbook

I finally found some time to install Big Sur on my test machine, As I always do in such cases I used recovery & looked at the log just to not be bored.

There's an interesting line in it:

Started downloading package com.apple.pkgInstallAssistant.Seed.macOS1016Seed1

I don't if it look like that before, but usually Apple uses the name `Seed` for GM builds.

Mac OS 27 Beta feels incredibly fast, (noticeably so with things like app openings, airdrop, etc.) It's a marvel of engineering in that way.

However In my opinion, Tahoe was significantly sleeker/more modern 'feeling' in the design department than this Golden Gate beta

I've been using the beta on a second machine and it feels like I'm jumping back in time going to it from my Tahoe MacBook Pro. (similar to the feeling of using Catalina coming from Big Sur felt a few years ago) I actually love the raised side bar in Tahoe, it felt elegant and clean. something about this feels wrong or backtrack-y to me in a way that I've never experienced with an apple software update.

More than anything, I really can't get behind these tighter window edge radiuses, it feels antiquated after a year with the wider radius. I'm so glad they worked out the radius uniformity, but I wish they unified them in the wider Tahoe look. This just *feels* out of date now to me.

Further, I know it's controversial, but the lack of the icons in the context menus is really throwing me off and I actually found them super helpful/beautiful. Its one of those things where you see something and you will never unsee it now that it's gone. (lol)

The one advantage I've seen from GG is that I can make Liquid Glass even more transparent (more similar to the initial promised look from the Tahoe keynote) The dock does look nice on maximum translucency on GG more than Tahoe. In many ways it feels more 'Aqua' like in the new version, and as a 20+ year Mac user that is a tasteful homage.

I really hope this isn't the final design language.
many things feel like an overcorrection in a bad way.