In the wake of Apple’s Liquid Glass announcements at WWDC, I took some time and rewatched the Macworld San Francisco Keynote from 2000, when Steve Jobs introduced the world to the Aqua user interface:
Here’s how Apple PR wrote about it at the time:
“Mac OS X will delight consumers with its simplicity and amaze professionals with its power,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s iCEO. “Apple’s innovation is leading the way in personal computer operating systems once again.”
If you missed my previous post on the topic, the first version of Tahoe had the dark blue on the right side of the Finder icon, which was criminal.
Our 14-day national nightmare is over. As of Developer Beta 2, the Finder icon in macOS Tahoe has been updated to reflect 30 years of tradition:
Now, the background material is blue, with the face on the right side of the icon using a white glassy material. I think this looks pretty good:
I wish my 3D printer was big enough to pull this off:
The first macOS Tahoe developer beta does not support the legacy FireWire 400 and FireWire 800 data-transfer standards, according to @NekoMichi on X, and a Reddit post. As a result, the first few iPod models and old external storage drives that rely on FireWire cannot be synced with or mounted on a Mac running the macOS Tahoe beta.
Unlike on macOS Sequoia and earlier versions, the first macOS Tahoe beta does not include a FireWire section in the System Settings app.
Federico Viticci, writing at MacStories:
It’s a cool, sunny morning at Apple Park as I’m walking my way along the iconic glass ring to meet with Apple’s SVP of Software Engineering, Craig Federighi, for a conversation about the iPad.
It’s the Wednesday after WWDC, and although there are still some developers and members of the press around Apple’s campus, it seems like employees have returned to their regular routines. Peek through the glass, and you’ll see engineers working at their stations, half-erased whiteboards, and an infinite supply of Studio Displays on wooden desks with rounded corners. Some guests are still taking pictures by the WWDC sign. There are fewer security dogs, but they’re obviously all good.
I was fortunate enough to get one of the Design Labs late last week, which meant that I spent Friday morning frantically doing as many first-pass updates to the new design as I could. I then was able to discuss many of them during the lab and learned a bunch.
Like David, I was thinking that Liquid Glass should be applied in a bunch of places, but as he writes, that’s not quite the case:
Apple has determined that a very small percentage of Mac mini (2023) devices with the M2 chip may no longer power on. Affected devices were manufactured between June 16, 2024 to November 23, 2024.
If your Mac mini has exhibited this issue, please use the Serial Number checker below to see if your device is eligible for this program. If so, Apple or an Apple Authorized Service Provider will provide service, free of charge.
I would like to present, in response to the widely criticized Finder icon in macOS Tahoe Developer Beta 1, the icon I created in literally fifteen minutes with Pixelmator Pro and Apple’s own Icon Composer. Apple could very easily keep the icon’s historical appearance without compromising the Liquid Glass aesthetic by just… flipping the color palette.
To celebrate the 20th anniversary of Steve’s commencement address at Stanford, we are sharing a newly enhanced version of the video below and on YouTube. It is one of the most influential commencement addresses in history, watched over 120 million times, and reproduced in media and school curricula around the world. The talk even helped inspire an unlikely NBA title comeback for the Cleveland Cavaliers when LeBron James played a clip from it in the locker room before a critical game three against the Golden State Warriors in 2016.
Howard Oakley has spotted a change coming with macOS 26:
Disk images have been valuable tools marred by poor performance. In the wrong circumstances, an encrypted sparse image (UDSP) stored on the blazingly fast internal SSD of an Apple silicon Mac may write files no faster than 100 MB/s, typical for a cheap hard drive. One of the important new features introduced in macOS 26 Tahoe is a new disk image format that can achieve near-native speeds: ASIF, documented here.
It seems to me that Apple is learning its lesson about announcing things too early, even as it tries to (somewhat defensively) distance its future features from those shipping already by the likes of Google and OpenAI.
Looks like Finder isn’t the only Mac application to see big icon changes in macOS Tahoe. Poor Otto had his arms, legs, and pipe taken away:
