Rounded Corners and Fidelity ⇥ folklore.org
By now you’ll have guessed I’m no fan of Apple’s new-found obsession with rounding every right angle in sight. I have yet to see any objective evidence that this has any purpose beyond aesthetics. If you’ve seen screenshots of the first developer beta-release of macOS 26 Tahoe, then you’ll surely have noticed that, rather than restoring fidelity to Quick Look, this fiction has grown and only become more prominent. I demonstrate this in a series of four screenshots showing the same image that have been rescaled to similar display sizes.
Oakley illustrates the presence of rounded corners clipping the edges of an image in Finder, Quick Look, and across the bottom of a Preview window. Perhaps I am missing something, but I do not believe this issue is new to MacOS Tahoe. Preview in MacOS Sequoia also has rounded corners, albeit not to the same extent. If the corners are bothersome, the image can be zoomed out to show it rendered faithfully.
But this is actually a good theoretical design question: are squared-off corners more honest? Is that something which only applies to images? QuickTime has, since 2009, rounded the corners of its video player. What about webpages, seeing as the bottom corners of Safari are also rounded? Are right angles ultimately the only honest corners as we use square pixels on our screens? I am not being entirely facetious. Rounded corners may be a little cheeky, a little less than honest, but they soften the otherwise stark way applications are drawn.
Andy Hertzfeld, in 1981:
Bill fired up his demo and it quickly filled the Lisa screen with randomly-sized ovals, faster than you thought was possible. But something was bothering Steve Jobs. “Well, circles and ovals are good, but how about drawing rectangles with rounded corners? Can we do that now, too?”
“No, there’s no way to do that. In fact it would be really hard to do, and I don’t think we really need it”. I think Bill was a little miffed that Steve wasn’t raving over the fast ovals and still wanted more.
Steve suddenly got more intense. “Rectangles with rounded corners are everywhere! Just look around this room!”. And sure enough, there were lots of them, like the whiteboard and some of the desks and tables. Then he pointed out the window. “And look outside, there’s even more, practically everywhere you look!”. He even persuaded Bill to take a quick walk around the block with him, pointing out every rectangle with rounded corners that he could find.
The Bill here is, of course, the late Bill Atkinson, who softened the corners of a great deal of Mac apps and system features.
Invoking Atkinson, Jobs, and the history of the Mac is not a valid explanation for the MacOS of today or tomorrow. But I cannot object to rounded rectangles on fidelity grounds alone.