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Appearance matters: Get Tahoe looking in better shape
macOS 26 Tahoe’s big thing is its redesigned interface, with additional variations to appearance modes and its new Liquid Glass effects. Whether you’re installing the upgrade because of those, or in spite of them, allow me to take you on a quick tour of how you can set its interface up, and which controls do what.
There are three sets of controls:
- Appearance mode, Light or Dark, in Appearance settings;
- Display variations to Reduce transparency or Increase contrast, in Accessibility settings;
- Icon & widget style, in Appearance settings.
That comes to a total of more than 20 combinations before factoring in icon tinting colour, so there’s no shortage of choice.
Light mode
There are three overall variations of light mode, depending on those Accessibility settings.
The starting point and default is in light mode without Accessibility, and icon & widget style set to Default. Note the effects of transparency on the menu bar, widgets, the Liquid Glass effect in the left side of the Dock, and the upper row of icons in the Finder window. If you like those, you don’t have to change any settings.
This is light mode with Reduce transparency enabled in Accessibility settings. This disables all Liquid Glass effects and restores the traditional menu bar and Dock. The effect on Desktop widgets is perhaps less beneficial.
In light mode with Increase contrast (automatically coupled with Reduce transparency) enabled, the predominant effect is the outlining of controls within each window, rather than any change in contrast. Colours used by the system, such as the traffic light controls at the top left of each window, and those in themes, are darker, but those elsewhere, as in icons, aren’t changed. The effect here is to make controls clearer rather than actually changing contrast.
Dark mode
Without changing Accessibility and leaving Icon & widget style set to Default, dark mode shows transparency and Liquid Glass effects as you expect. These are again most visible in the menu bar, Dock, and the upper row of icons in the Finder window.
With Reduce transparency enabled in Accessibility settings those transparency and Liquid Glass effects are removed.
Enabling Increase contrast outlines controls clearly, but any changes in system colours are more variable than in light mode.
Icon & widget style
This is new to Tahoe and only affects the rendering of icons and widgets.
Using light mode without any Accessibility changes, the Default setting for Icon & widget style is the baseline, showing icons in their ‘normal’ state.
Dark icon settings in light mode contrasts more but their readability may suffer.
When Icon & widget style is set to Clear, most are decolourised, making them significantly harder to read, and impossible to distinguish in the sidebar of System Settings.
The final option is for Icon & widget style to be Tinted, where they’re rendered in monochrome using a colour of your choice, selected from the popup menu below. On iPhones and other devices that are available in several case colours, some have decided to set tinting to match the case, something you might like to try with an Apple silicon iMac, for example.
However, be careful in both Clear and Tinted styles, as it’s easy to end up making many icons unreadable and almost indistinguishable, here by setting the last of those to Graphite colour. This is one of the obvious drawbacks in Tahoe’s flexibility, in that many combinations of appearance mode, Accessibility settings and icon and widget style degrade its human interface rather than enhancing it. At least you now know what not to try, and how to return it to its defaults.
Summary of controls
- Appearance mode, light or dark, in Appearance settings;
- Display variations to Reduce transparency or Increase contrast, in Accessibility settings;
- Icon & widget styles, in Appearance settings, with Icon, widget & folder colour when appropriate.
Have fun!
