macOS Tahoe's Liquid Glass is what happens when a platform company stops caring about consistency

Apple used to be the company you pointed at when someone asked what good UI consistency looked like. macOS Tahoe has changed that.

The new “Liquid Glass” design language shipped with inconsistencies that would get flagged in a code review at most software companies — and the reaction from developers, designers, and long-time Mac users has been unusually brutal.

The corner radius problem

Jeff Johnson at Lapcats Software documented one of the most obvious issues: windows in Tahoe have different corner radiuses depending on what’s in them.

Add a toolbar to a window and the corners get rounder. Add a sidebar and they change again. A plain TextEdit window has smaller corners than Calculator. Two windows side by side — same OS, same desktop — with visibly different shapes.

Apple’s explanation at WWDC was that the radius wraps “concentrically around the glass toolbar elements.” Johnson’s response: “If this isn’t the stupidest user interface ‘feature’ ever invented, I don’t know what is.”

John Gruber called the overall look “goofy” and compared it to Fisher-Price. He delayed upgrading specifically because of the UI.

White on white

The visual problems go deeper than corners. Howard Oakley described the Light Mode experience as a “whiteout” — everything bleached to near-white with no visual landmarks. Gus Mueller identified the core issue: window backgrounds are 100% white, making light-coloured UI elements effectively invisible.

The glass effect only looks good when there’s something underneath it to refract. Most of the time there isn’t — it’s just white on white with the faintest drop shadow. Menus and window titles become illegible in normal use, not edge cases.

The Mac got no guidance

Steve Troughton-Smith made the point that probably stings most if you care about the Mac as a platform. Liquid Glass wasn’t designed Mac-first. The parts that work — floating elements, translucent panels — make sense on iPhone and iPad. The parts that don’t work are everything Mac-specific, left to internal teams with “no guidance, thought or care.”

The result is that different control types apply glass effects inconsistently. Each beta changed something. Developers spent hours experimenting just to make their apps legible. And the released version still has controls that behave differently from each other for no apparent reason.

Accessibility broken for months

The worst part: Reduce Transparency — the accessibility setting that visually impaired users rely on to cut through translucency effects — stopped working in Tahoe 26.1 and 26.2. For months, the escape hatch was broken. It wasn’t fixed until 26.3.

That’s not a design disagreement. That’s shipping a regression that affects the people who need accessibility features most, and taking months to fix it.

Why this matters beyond Apple

Consistency is the foundation of trust in a platform. When a button looks the same everywhere, users build muscle memory. When a window behaves predictably, people stop thinking about the window and focus on their work. Apple understood this better than anyone for decades.

Tahoe shows what happens when that discipline breaks down — when a design concept that works on one device gets forced onto another without the attention to detail that made the original good.

For anyone building software: if Apple can ship an OS where the corner radius changes depending on whether you’ve added a sidebar, consistency clearly isn’t something you achieve once and forget about. It takes ongoing attention, and it’s the first thing to go when a company prioritises aesthetic novelty over how things actually work.

If you’re building a product and want it to feel coherent rather than cobbled together — that’s something I can help with.