Tahoe Toolbars
The new design on the Mac doesn’t feel light and glassy, as it does on iPhone and iPad. It’s just a bit of a muddle. I keep noticing how terrible toolbars look in macOS Tahoe, and toolbars are everywhere on the Mac. Apple’s stated design philosophy is to build interfaces that allow content to flow behind them, showing through (a glass, darkly?). The official line is that this makes more space for your content—but, of course, sometimes using computer software means using interfaces to manipulate content and data and other stuff, and it feels like Apple has lost its balance in a quixotic attempt to make every app look like a photo editor.
The new design (which includes the Liquid Glass materials and other design changes, like moving search bars to the bottom of the screen on iPhone) is a letdown on macOS. It’s ungainly and reeks of lowest common denominator thinking, rather than designing something specifically for the desktop experience.
Contrast that to iOS 26 and iPadOS 26, which are mostly great. The awkward sensibilities of the iOS 7 era have finally been supplanted with a new system theme that feels fresh, dynamic and modern. You can quibble about exactly how transparent the tab bar should be, but even if Apple shipped the current developer beta as final, I’d unequivocally say those platforms look and work better than ever.
I can’t say the same about macOS Tahoe. The toolbars might be the worst part. As well as looking a bit ugly, I don’t understand the metaphor they are going for. The drop shadows on the buttons are so harsh, they are almost overpowering. The window sidebars also have heavy shadows. I think the sidebar is meant to be layered above the toolbar, but the shadows are illogical and make it appear like the buttons are floating atop.
The Liquid Glass material is carefully crafted to shine through the content that it is underneath, but this doesn’t really translate to Mac toolbar items, as so many Mac apps use ‘hard’ scroll edge dividers. This means most toolbars simply have solid white backgrounds. The end result is grey button platters sitting on a grey background. Most windows in Mac apps have a toolbar, so this mildly repulsive construction is pervasive across the system. Even when you do find a toolbar with a soft edge, that allows for colourful content to flow behind it, the glass refractions somehow just look worse than they do on iPhone and iPad, punctuated by the unrefined nature of the drop shadows that accompany the elements.
With the redesigns, iOS was obviously always going to be the priority. But I had hoped that they would take more care in translating the new design system to the Mac than they have demonstrably done so far. The Tahoe UI feels unfinished, and unloved.