Grabbing Air

Norbert Heger describes the absolute embarrassment that is the struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe:

A lot has already been said about the absurdly large corner radius of windows on macOS Tahoe. People are calling the way it looks comical, like a child’s toy, or downright insane.

Setting all the aesthetic issues aside—which are to some extent a matter of taste—it also comes at a cost in terms of usability.

Since upgrading to macOS Tahoe, I’ve noticed that quite often my attempts to resize a window are failing.

This never happened to me before in almost 40 years of using computers. So why all of a sudden?

I have struggled with this every single day since Tahoe was released. I fail on nearly every first attempt at resizing a window. I have used computers since 1990. I dealt with SCSI chain termination and BIOS IRQ conflicts, and that bullshit never made me nearly as frustrated as this does.

Every once in a while, I get lucky and just happen to grab the magical invisible handle floating in the air off the coast of the window’s giant corner radius, but it’s rare. Instead, I find myself clicking and dragging over and over to do something that should be simple and effortless.

Imagine taking one of the most core, we-take-this-for-granted features of a windowing system and throwing it away. And why? Oh, because iPhones have rounded corners and therefore so should all windows on every Apple platform. This logic is so obviously flawed—what is this, the Battlestar Galactica universe?—but it’s even worse that this breaks an essential operating system feature for zero gain other than to cater to the aesthetic taste of a small team of fixated designers.