Apple’s first desktop operating system was Tahoe. Like any first version, it had a lot of issues. Users and critics flooded the web with negative reviews. While mostly stable under the hood, the outer shell — the visual user interface — was jarringly bad. Without much experience in desktop UX, Apple’s first OS looked like a Fisher-Price toy: heavily rounded corners, mismatched colors, inconsistent details and very low information density. Obviously, the tool was designed mostly for kids or perhaps light users or elderly people.
Credit where credit is due: Apple had listened to their users and the next version – macOS Sequoia — shipped with lots of fixes. Border radius was heavily reduced, transparent glass-like panels replaced by less transparent ones, buttons made more serious and less toyish. Most system icons made more serious, too, with focus on more detail. Overall, it seemed like the 2nd version was a giant leap from infancy to teenage years.
↫ Rakhim Davletkali
A top quality operating systems shitpost.
Very clever! 🙂
Where have I heard this Fisher-Price critique before? Oh, I know, it was Windows XP, one of the most successful versions of Windows ever, beloved by many even today.
Thom, eat your heart out! 😛
That doesn’t mean Luna was good. The Windows Classic theme was better, but the Sequoia theme isn’t an option here.
Luna was exceptionally good, at least using Olive or Silver themes, and TweakUI to narrow down a little the title bar’s thickness to something more bearable. Something like this :
https://github.com/Kochise/win32-WinTextFilePatch/blob/master/WinTextFilePatch.png
I loved Luna Silver. I wouldn’t mind it today on Windows.
No need to “go back” to Monterey … but yeah, while Tahoe works very well and is feature packed, the UI annoys me a bit, it loses the sense of “clean” previous versions have, not every part of the graphical stacks but modals/dialogs lose quite a bit of realestate… and the excessive transparency leaves a feeling of lost GPU power (it’s probably more than well accelerated under the hood, but the feeling remains)… and there are quite a number of glitches or pourly thought paddings, even on native apps, that makes me think they didn’t figure out everything yet. Steve wouldn’t have approved :/
Even on iOS I don’t really like it, but it has less issues, probably better tested throughout.
I’m pretty sure they’ll end up adding options to remove much of the crap (without putting those options under accessibility)
I won’t throw shit at my former employer, I just think they’re struggling a bit and trying too hard to catch up on AI stuff and forgetting the most important things
SJobs would not have approved. This is a Windows quality release, and it probably needs another 1.5yrs of development before being released.
Sequoia was visually tight and crisp. Tahoe is unfocused and change for the sake of change, which is very anti-Apple. Apple has had some clunky UIs (ex: brushed metal, way too into skuertomophism), but they were interesting for the time and fully baked.
Yeah, it looks like they’re caving to the pressure for the new shiny and aren’t paying attention to the details. Apple has been good about releasing tech when it’s ready and makes sense, but not this time.
“Apple’s first desktop operating system was Tahoe.”? Obviously no fact checking was done before publishing this nonsense.
Wooooosh.
Oh wow – Have you read 3 lines of the article?
Or perhaps you don’t know what Benjamin Button is?
I didn’t bother reading further; generally if the very first sentence is wrong it’s a good indicator that it is not worth continuing.
You probably should have read the first two words of the title as that would have clued you in to the premise. “Benjamin Buttons” is reference to a somewhat well known short story by F Scott Fitzgerald, made into a movie starring Brad Pitt — “The Curious Case of Benjamin Buttons”. In the story and movie, he appears to age in reverse, going from being an old man to becoming a child. Thus the premise of the joke is laid out in the title that this review will look at the OS in reverse chronological order, like it was aging backwards.
Thanks SterlingNorth, I did read the first two words but assumed it was the name/handle of some Mac blogger. There are thousands of movies released each year, it’s not reasonable to expect everyone to be familiar with them all. If he wanted to review OS versions backwards he could have done that without making incorrect statements and unnecessary references to obscure fictitious characters. And he doesn’t even follow through on the premise; it stops at OS X Cheetah when there were decades of OS development prior to that.
You trippled down on being ignorant, well done! Regardless of who Benjamin Buttons is, it’s clear what the author is doing. If you still don’t understand it – that’s okay – it just means you aren’t the target audience.
POWER9,
Be nice. I didn’t understand the reference either and the article doesn’t make sense without it. To me it looked like it was meant to be a joke like something found on theonion.com, and I guess I wasn’t too far off, but the “why” didn’t make any sense to me.
Movies and books are no longer the shared medium that they used to be simply because there are so many of them competing for our attention. It’s even a trope that Oscar voters themselves don’t watch all the movies they’re voting on, haha…
https://culturacolectiva.com/en/entertainment/movies/oscar-voters-skipping-films-voting/
They had to pass new rules to require the movies actually be watched.
https://variety.com/2025/film/awards/oscars-required-viewing-explained-process-1236375352/
Anyway, it gives credence to Minuous’s point.
Love this.
Took me a while.. In my defense, I dont use Apple products at all.
Great post/link. Wish I had thought of it.