Apple's macOS UI loses its design edge as Liquid Glass looms
Native Mac interface design has degraded from Aqua's pixel-perfect standard into inconsistent Catalyst ports and web-like apps, prompting debate over custom UIs.
What to know
- macOS native UI design has deteriorated from the distinctive, pixel-perfect Aqua standard into inconsistent Catalyst ports and iOS-influenced apps that feel interchangeable with web views.
- The decay stems from Apple's shift toward cross-platform iOS-derivative interfaces rather than platform-specific design, undermining the company's historical UI leadership.
- Developers are split on whether custom UI frameworks (like Liquid Glass) are a necessary correction or a further fragmentation, and whether consistency with web standards should override platform distinctiveness.
- Nostalgia for pre-Catalyst Mac UI—particularly System 7 and Mac OS 9—reflects frustration that Apple abandoned its own interface design principles.
The dispute Whether distinctive native UI design that isolates a platform from web standards (and other systems) is a value worth preserving, or whether cross-platform consistency and user familiarity should take priority. · positions read across 23 posts and comments
Apple's shift to Catalyst and iOS-derived interfaces destroyed native UI coherence; the company abandoned its own design principles.
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“I think Apple lost all of their native UI advantage (it's not that anyone else beat them, they're all a mess now).”
kornel · Lobsters ↗
Consistency with web standards and existing user training matters more than platform-distinctive custom UI that isolates users.
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“I place no value (actually, a slight negative value) on the ability to do things in the UI that are so fancy that no other system can easily emulate them.”
mcherm · Lobsters ↗
Older Mac OS versions (System 7, Mac OS 9) offered superior usability and aesthetic experience despite technical limitations; a faithful revival would be preferable.
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“I was doing nerd work in CodeWarrior this weekend on Mac OS 9.2.2 and it felt like a pleasure, even if the operating system underpinnings are best not looked at over a meal.”
classichasclass · Lobsters ↗
Brent Simmons Developer, Inessential authorApple Platform vendor
How it unfolded 4 developments, newest first · click a bar or a number to jump postscomments
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Commenters divide on whether consistency or distinctiveness matters more
Discussion emerges over whether macOS should prioritize consistency with web and existing user training over platform-distinctive custom UI. One commenter prioritizes consistency and web familiarity; others express nostalgia for System 7 and old-Mac aesthetics that stand apart from web norms.
“I place no value (actually, a slight negative value) on the ability to do things in the UI that are so fancy that no other system can easily emulate them.”
— mcherm -
Apple is in a weird place. They clearly wanted the Mac to die around 2017. They were doing everything they could to effectively sabotage the platform, from letting hardware just sit on the market for too long, not fixing the broken keyboard for years, stripping off all the ports for the Mac. The only stuff coming to MacOS were basically ports of…
2 more of the top 3 · 18 posts in this stretch
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interesting take on native versus non-native user interfaces on macOS: https:// inessential.com/2026/09/22/tha t-about-wraps-it-up-for.html the obvious response is that it’s funny to have to ask if people care if software they’re using looks and behaves the same as other software they’re using. they don’t. of course they don’t. they use computer…
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I think that was largely a coincidence. There were also a lot of ex-NeXT and ex-early-Apple people who really understood design that reached retirement age in the last 10-15 years. If you were 30 when NeXT was founded, you'd be 65 in 2020. My impression was that Apple wasn't good at explaining to new hires *why* things were the way that they were…
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Critics cite Apple's historical design leadership before degradation
Commenters invoke Apple's past authorship of human interface design principles, suggesting the company has abandoned its own standards rather than being surpassed by competitors.
“Quite astonishing, considering that Apple (quite literally) wrote the book on human interface design*. They didn't necessarily kill the golden goose, but they certainly poisoned it and let it die alone in the corner.”
— DragonMaus -
Quite astonishing, considering that Apple (quite literally) wrote the book on human interface design*. They didn't necessarily kill the golden goose, but they certainly poisoned it and let it die alone in the corner. *Well, Jobs and his crew of best-in-the-industry NeXT engineers did, after Apple begged him to return after they canned him.
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Developers argue Apple's design consistency has collapsed
Commenters on Lobsters characterize Apple's UI direction as having lost native advantages, with one noting that Catalyst and "half-assed iOSification" made "native macOS UI" unrecognizable—apps like Home and Music now feel arbitrary rather than distinctly Mac.
“I think Apple lost all of their native UI advantage (it's not that anyone else beat them, they're all a mess now).”
— kornel -
I think Apple lost all of their native UI advantage (it's not that anyone else beat them, they're all a mess now). Lucida-Grande-era Aqua was unique and its pixel-perfect widgets were impossible to fake. But Catalyst and half-assed iOSification introduced so much inconsistency that "native macOS UI" stopped being a recognizable thing. If the…
2 more of the top 3 · 3 posts in this stretch
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Currently I think the biggest UI annoyance with macOS is the rounded content window corners, which was a thing even pre-Tahoe. It even cuts off corners of images. Who thought that was a good idea? Meanwhile, I was doing nerd work in CodeWarrior this weekend on Mac OS 9.2.2 and it felt like a pleasure, even if the operating system underpinnings are…
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Codewarrior was so nice to use. I'm sure the passage of time has caused me to forget some papercuts from those days. Given some of the other disagreements I have with the direction of the OS and the iDevices, if there were a really good Mac OS 9 theme for Plasma, I might switch back to Linux and just leave the Mac for when I actually need to build…
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Brent Simmons publishes essay on decline of macOS native UI design
Developer Brent Simmons posts "That About Wraps It Up for Stock Mac UI" on Inessential, examining how Apple's native interface design has degraded from the Lucida Grande Aqua era through Catalyst and iOS-influenced ports that introduced inconsistency into the platform.
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Hitchhiker's Guide reference? (So, the stock Mac UI is "God"?)
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What people are saying 15 voices from 2 sites · best of 23 · verbatim
- What is Liquid Glass and how does it relate to this UI decline being discussed?
- Are major macOS apps like Home and Music actually Catalyst ports or web views, or is that characterization oversimplified?
- Yesterday
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https:// inessential.com/2026/09/22/tha t-about-wraps-it-up-for.html
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> It even cuts off corners of images. Who thought that was a good idea? So say we all!
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Yeah, bad engineering was creeping in even while Jobs was still at the helm. Those of us watching it happen described it as Apple "hiring random Joe off the streets to write code", and slowly supplanting the dedicated and highly skilled engineers. Interesting point about the retirement falloff, I hadn't considered that before.
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> I found it doesn't scale well to complex projects or play nicely with version control. I'm not surprised. That's probably a sharp edge I just didn't hit because at that point I was flying solo (so my projects' complexity was limited in that way) and my idea of version control was a `.sit` file and a changelog backed up to an external hard drive…
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I fully agree with your assessment. It started to go downhill fast in 2012-2013, coincidentally right after Tim Cook became CEO. I can support this with first hand anecdotes from Apple employees from that time: So one of the first things Tim Cook did was kick out Scott Forstall (extremely underrated guy, definitely read up on him) in 2012, who at…
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The project manager GUI metaphor seen in CodeWarrior and other Mac development packages like Lightspeed C / Pascal is a decent way to get started, but I [found](https://www.metamage.com/text/relix/origins.html) it doesn't scale well to complex projects or play nicely with version control. > if there were a really good Mac OS 9 theme for Plasma, I…
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Nice catch! I'm a little embarrassed that I didn't spot that. :-)
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Rounded corners in Cocoa windows go all the way back to 10.7. In windows that display an emulated screen, I resorted to adding a "bezel" around it so that the corners would clip the bezel and not the screen pixels. There's no reason a delightful look-and-feel has to be chained to a baroque implementation.
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the web one appeared years later. I believe that the macOS and Windows apps are fully native using something called JetUI/JetEngine. Until you get to the old iTunes store, that's obviously web.
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> Apple's Music.app feels like a web view (is it?) I think Music.app might actually be one. They have a [web version](https://music.apple.com/) that looks nearly identical, and the “Home” tab simply doesn’t load without an internet connection! (Which is annoying, because some things that don’t need internet—such as recently played—are on there.)
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> the level of developer effort was higher for the stock Mac app This seems to be the case for native desktop GUI development *everywhere*. It is genuinely easier to cough up an Electron app on Windows than it is to go through the ceremony of WinUI2/3 or even Win32, unless you really want to fill in `struct` after `struct` and pass a dozen…
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I'm pretty sure a lot of the design was enforced by Jobs (either through respect or intimidation) since when he died bad decisions started to creep in, picking up the pace over the years.
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Aw it would be so good if someone could just write a Mac OS 9 like GUI and slap it on top of a FreeBSD fork or something. ;)
- Sep 22
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I wish there were, but they all seem to fall in the uncanny valley in some ways. I have an old attempt of mine at doing an X11 window manager with System 7 titlebars and a global menu bar. It looks pretty good, but I never finished it, and I really don't feel like converting it to a Wayland compositor.
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I care a lot about usability in my UI interfaces, and I put some value on consistency (but it should be consistent not just with other Mac apps but also with "the web", which is where I spend much of my time, and with "old stuff" which I have spent years getting trained on). I place no value (actually, a slight negative value) on the ability to do…