Tell HN: Apple Broke Fitts' Law in Tahoe
In every MacOS version - all the way back to the Lisa, even - items on the menu bar could be reached by clicking on the very first row of pixels on the screen. ("Rule of the infinite edges". - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law )
In Tahoe, they broke that for 3rd party menu bar icons (and some Apple ones) See video: https://shot.3e.org/ss-20250918_074040.mp4
This worked fine until Tahoe.
It gets stranger, though - this is only broken if the menu bar is light-colored. That means it's broken if Reduce Transparency is turned on - OR if it's off, but you're using a very light (white or light gray) colored desktop background.
This isn't just the canary in a coal mine. The miners are dead. The mine has collapsed.
About infinite edges, on Windows I can mindlessly drag cursor to the top-right of the screen and click to close current window. Bottom-right edge means minimize all windows. Bottom-left click opens menu if you left the Windows button there).
This reduces cognitive load when operating the mouse. I miss that on macOS.
> on Windows I can mindlessly drag cursor to the top-right of the screen and click to close current window. ...
Try that with GOG Galaxy (it's app-dependent).
As a long time Windows user and part Linux user, I recently switched to Mac.
I absolutely love the machine. It’s by far the best hardware I’ve used and it makes up for everything and then some. But I’ve got to say the OS really sucks.
True, so many small annoyances. The swapped ctrl and alt button. the fact that you can't dock windows side by side, no alt tab with a different item for each window. Everything feels like you need to do it the apple way, otherwise macos will fight you every step of the way.
macOS has certainly fallen pretty far, but if we’re going to compare them, Windows is and has been a complete tire fire for well over a decade at this point.
Why do you say that?
Because I have used all three OSes extensively, and this is pretty incontrovertible?
Settings have been half-assed so many times that random options require going back three or four generations back into the control panel. Modal confirmation boxes that must be dealt with before you can do anything else with your computer are a constant occurrence. Everyone feels the need to completely redesign their own UI chrome. Updating drivers requires remembering going to a dozen separate vendors and manually fetching them (not to mention knowing where to go in the first place). It's filled to the brim with ads that need to be disabled across five or six different places, that need to be re-disabled every upgrade. Every developer, including Microsoft itself, spams notifications for absolutely inane things. And on and on and on.
macOS isn't perfect by any means. But the level of abject disdain for users going on in the Windows ecosystem these days is impossible to ignore.
Not sure what the name pf the law is, but OS X and later broke the UI for anyone with a working spatial memory.
I’m not surprised they’ve also broken the pointer for anyone using a trackpad or mouse.
I don't believe that a lot of the people designing Liquid Glass even know what Fitt's Law is, or why it matters, or why it should be respected.
I switched my iPhone and iPad to iOS 26. Talk about amateur hour. They took something which was refined and industry leading and turned it into... meh.
Of course the competition is the folks who made the logo for their OS a trash can and are oblivious to what that means. That's how they can get away with it.
> Of course the competition is the folks who made the logo for their OS a trash can
What do you mean? I honestly have no idea.
I assume the Android logo?
Yep. To be fair, R2D2 was rip off of
https://yamato.fandom.com/wiki/Analyzer_(OS)
and he looks like a half-walking, half-rolling trash can. (All of Star Wars was a rip-off of Space Battleship Yamato)