We’re all pretty much in agreement: macOS 26 Tahoe is a god damn mess. There are people to blame but the fact remains that the macOS Interface is a hodgepodge of last years ideas, thawed and warmed over. Through years of half-aborted attempts at merging the interface styles of the mouse-based macOS, magic-based visionOS, and touch-based iPhone and iPad platforms, the mighty have been made low. Don’t even get me started on the usability and accessibility problems of the latest UI glaze, Liquid Glass. Apple was once the recognized leader in accessibility, and their Human Interface Guidelines was a sort of quasi-holy book to UX and UI designers for decades. Now I can’t tell which window is the active one without installing a fucking app.
Tahoe 26.1 was released with options introduced to mitigate some of these UI bombs. macOS is still kinda shitty now. In this series I’m going to help you make the Mac better to use overall. These will be geared toward the normie audience, who maybe aren’t super familiar with the command line, so keep that in mind with your inevitable criticisms.
(An aside — In their official docs, Apple refers to the menu bar always in lowercase, because it’s just a menu bar. The ‘desktop’ is the same way. This is interesting, because we live in an era where everything is a branded product whose name is a proper noun– see the Dock– and we are not allowed to merely use things, we are forced to experience using them and you legally can’t ‘experience’ a regular ‘ol noun. Everybody knows it’s gotta be a proper noun in order to be experienced. The Las Vegas Demon Orb Experience. The Microsoft Windows Desktop Experience. The ESPN Experience Brought To You By Sports Gambling. The 6th Street Hostel Bathroom Experience. But our friends “menu bar” and “desktop” are just two things, average, normal, unobtrusive. This says something about how the people who created these things thought about them.)
Anyway macOS kinda sucks now and there isn’t much we can do about it, but we can do more than nothing. So let’s do some more-than-nothing to it to make it suck a little less.
Fixing The macOS menu bar, Dock, and Control Center readability with “Reduce Transparency”
Best I can figure, the head designers of macOS Tahoe absolutely hate the menu bar and Dock. These are two of the main things people use when they use macOS, and macOS kinda sucks to use now, so this makes sense. The good news is that there is a quick way to make it so you can actually read the menu bar again, with a visit to the Accessibility settings.
The trick to getting your menu bar readability back, and a lot of other much-easier-to-read fixes around macOS, is to hit up the Settings app, then click Display, then toggle the ‘Reduce transparency’ setting to the on position. That is it. It looks like this:
Maybe I’ll do more of these maybe not. Ok that’s all for now bye.