Manuel was annoyed

All these screenshots are a couple of weeks old – I took them while my personal laptop was still holding out on 15.8, when reproducing something I had encountered on my work machine which had already been forced into macOS 26’ ugliness. The header photo above is a bonus bug which I only encountered while trying to reproduce the actual problem I wanted to highlight here. I can’t say that I encountered this again since, but what a bizarre stroke of “luck” that exactly when I specifically needed to interact with System Settings to verify if some broken behavior was already present in 15.8, it would greet me with this very empty state. Searching for anything didn’t yield results, clicking on Spotlight or Backblaze didn’t do anything. Quitting the app notably did not fix it, I had to reboot. What I actually wanted to show was this, though: Despite normal macOS usage now requiring a trip into Privacy & Security on a regular basis, I still find the new UI so disorienting that I usually…