Marco Arment

And there are things about the 26 OSs that do look nice.

I don't think maybe any of them are on the Mac, but there are things about the other 26 OSs that look nice visually.

So I'm not saying that the old ones were better.

Um, the old, and, or at least I'm not saying the old ones are what we should go to, which is definitely not the case.

Um, but I do like a lot of the old ones.

I do have a lot of nostalgia for like the Panther and Tiger era.

Um, and even just going like when I, even just when I look back,

five or six years you look back at like you know like high sierra or something like when you see these these kind of interfaces like oh yeah a lot of that is just what the mac looks like with little tweaks over time you know maybe a grading gets a little bit more solid or a pinstripe goes away or you know like a spacing gets adjusted a little bit on some icons or like the icons change like

i like a lot of these things so i don't really have a strong opinion on that um the as for ios when i was designing for 26 all summer when i would go back to my ios 18 devices it would look old um so i so i recognize like okay this this new one does look new and fresh um in some ways i like some of the

Um, but I think it, I think everything that involves a blur is a mistake.

Like, I think there's a lot you can take from 26 that is good.

That's like some of like, you know, the icon shapes and some of the designs and of the buttons here and there, like they look cool.

Um, but every single time a blur is used, I think that's a failure.

and it does not hold up in practice.

That's like the way bars are handled, the way scrolling content goes under them, the way buttons are handled when they are floated on top of content.

Anytime there's a blur, it's a failure.

But setting aside that,

When I look at past iOSes, I mentioned earlier, I think there was a really good era from the iOS 12 to 15-ish era where the design was in a really good place.

It was a very good evolution of what it was trying to be from iOS 7, but better and evolved and refined.

And, you know, I hope to get back to that in the next few years.