As we near the end of Tahoe’s incubation period, and Apple’s engineers code its last fixes and tweaks ready for its launch in just a few weeks, I’d like to reflect on what macOS 26 has to offer beyond its marketing headlines.

While there are several worthwhile new features such as the Phone app, Magnifier, and live translation, there’s nothing to compare with the fundamental changes in recent versions of macOS that brought the SSV, Shortcuts, System Settings and Apple Intelligence. Instead Tahoe is overwhelmingly about its human interface.

Every new design of the Mac’s operating systems that I can recall has elicited outcry from many. Understandably, the majority almost invariably want constancy, the same Finder and app icons that we’ve become so familiar with. It’s only human. It’s also a sure route to what others will condemn as stale, as it hasn’t been refreshed for so many years.

Personally, I don’t like to see a design on my Mac. If I notice it, then it’s a distraction. I’d much prefer to have an interface as clean as the whistles of the late Classic Mac OS period: lean, purposeful and lacking in visual trickery or frippery. But I accept that, without all the adornments and animations, many today would wonder why their Mac needed a GPU. I confess that I was never a fan of the original Aqua interface either. Given that its declared goal was to “incorporate colour, depth, translucence, and complex textures into a visually appealing interface”, I wonder whether much the same could be said of Tahoe.

Perhaps the most striking feature of this redesign is its lack of contrast between elements and tools in window controls and their contents, whether its appearance is set to light or dark mode, or one of its new in-between variants. You can see this clearly in most screenshots of Tahoe, such as those posted by Apple, and as far as I can see it hasn’t improved during beta-testing. This is also universal, and isn’t confined to apps using the more novel SwiftUI, although I have to keep pinching my thigh to remind myself that SwiftUI is now six years old, only two years younger than APFS. The contrast in stability and maturity between the two couldn’t be greater.

You can of course ‘improve’ contrast by enabling Reduce Transparency in Accessibility settings, but in doing so you lose most if not all of Tahoe’s Liquid Glass effects, as they depend on the transparency you’ve just turned off.

Transparency is a good example of design being given priority over readability or content. Because the appearance of the upper layer containing controls or content depends on what is underneath, it’s down to chance whether the greyed text you’re struggling to read happens to be over a background that further reduces its contrast. In the worst case, you could find yourself having to move a window so you can read part of it clearly, not a sign of a good human interface.

My other major concern with Tahoe’s new look is that it seems not to recognise the differences between Macs, iPads and iPhones, in terms of displays, input controls, and apps. Rather than sameness, I’d much rather have consistency that recognises the difference between manipulating Xcode’s compound windows containing dense structured text on a 27-inch display, and checking a family photo filling the 6.1-inch display of an iPhone.

One of my favourite controls in macOS is the Combo Box, a versatile and elegant hybrid of the popup/dropdown/pulldown menu/button and a text entry box. I can’t recall seeing one used in iOS, as it would be clumsy and inappropriate. It’s well supported for macOS in AppKit but hasn’t yet been implemented in SwiftUI. If controls are going to be common across all Apple’s operating systems, then macOS is about to lose one of its best.

It seemed only appropriate that, in the weeks before Apple releases OS 26 across Macs and devices, Tim Cook should go to the White House to pay its corporate tribute in a block of materialised Liquid Glass mounted on pure bling. But the image that I keep thinking of in fear, is that of Elon Musk demonstrating the resilience of his Cybertruck’s window by throwing a metal ball at it, in November 2019. I just hope Tahoe’s Liquid Glass doesn’t go the same way.