That's one thing I miss from menu+hotkey UIs - the menu bar is all you have to worry about.
(Not so much UI that it's distracting, of course)
I want more than that. I want some sort of visual guidance for what's possible to do and how to do it. A blank canvas means that I have to focus more on "how do I do this?" than actually doing it.
To me that's the part we're really missing on mobile. There's times a lot of controls are needed and other where they need to disappear.
We have that in classic UIs with collapsible tool bars and optional panels, things that will stay where they're set until explicitly hidden or moved away.
Having that kind of option to pin back the buttons when/as long as needed would make minimalist designs a lot more useable IMHO.
Separately, given the size and pixel density of your typical desktop screen today, if anything I find the "100% content" apps to look kinda bare because of all the empty space. Which makes sense, given that the UI paradigm with lots of toolbars etc dates back to the days when your typical desktop monitor was 14-17". For laptops, I'm more sympathetic to the sentiment.
lol
I thought the same when ios 7 came out - hidden menus requiring multiple taps, touch targets that don't look like touch targets, small targets, terrible contrast, silly unreadable fonts, on and on...
but not only didn't this get fixed, the SAME designs leaked into the rest of the world.
for example, the tesla car UI adopted ALL the same deficiencies. Hard to read center display? critical functions that require multiple taps? all while you're driving... wow
sigh
[...or not, according to user preference. -- my addition /CRC]
In other words, give me Windows 7. Where I could select everything from the "Classic" (Win 95/NT4/2000) via the XP to the Vista UI "themes" (and then modify to my exact preference from there).
With apps from ~the XP era, when their UIs too were still useful.
I find your confidence here strange, because something so obviously stupid never should have been implemented in the first place, yet it was.
Never underestimate the incompetence and obliviousness of powerful people.
This is a design that should have sat in a research lab and been researched further. And yes, I'm dogfooding it on test devices.
In Safari, there used to be a button at the low right to reveal all the open tabs, allow, allowing you to close the current tab, or any other others using just two taps. Now you have to hit a “…” button, followed by ”all tabs”.
Also, I noticed in the podcast app there used to be a skip 15 seconds button always available at the lower right when content started playing. Perfect for avoiding those obnoxious loud ads at the very first sample of audio. Now it’s two clicks away. Incredibly frustrating.
They won't be fixed. At least not quickly, and not easily.
Because Liquid Glass is literally not designed to be fixed, and has literally never been tested in real conditions.
We've seen that with Apple's flailing in the first few betas
So yes, it will be fixed, and the fix is easy. They just have to accept the fact that the "liquid" part needs to be strongly de-emphasized in favor of readability. It would be nice if they just did that and saved us all the grief, but worst case we'll just end in the same exact spot moving there step by step.
The sad part about this is how many other products will likely blindly follow suit.
All being said, my preference is still to the old interface.
However, in my experience the mandate to drastically redesign a product or "make it look more modern" have always come from sales and/or product owners, and in turn they're driven by competitors and customer choices.
What is happening here is Apple is unifying their product lines. All OS versions have converged to 26, 27, 28. The M processor runs iPads, Laptops and Vision. You can install iOS apps on macOS.
The headset is not a hit but it's a sign of things to come. The hardware will get better and I'm expecting seamless handoff between all your apple devices. Start a facetime call on your laptop in your office? Transfer that to your visionOS headset and start walking. Move to the living room and toss that app at your apple TV and finish up the call from the couch.
We've seen apple move toward unifying their various OS interfaces for a long time. People were forecasting this when OS X 10.6 started using the app store and app icons taken straight from the iPhone.
As the article says, liquid glass works best for spatial computing. That's apple's next big bet and the whole ecosystem is going to cater to it.
Who asked for this? What do the end users have to gain from this? So far, I've seen the macOS design steadily regress for no good reason whatsoever. The new settings app in particular is a disaster. Not only is it a UI that scrolls, a big no-no in desktop UI design, it also severely lacks affordances, and the hierarchy of the settings themselves feels rather arbitrary. What I've seen of macOS Tahoe goes even further with this touchscreenification.
I've never used an iPhone as my main phone and never owned an iPad so I don't feel qualified to speak about them.
I've also never seen a Vision Pro in person, but I treat it as a cool tech demo that solves no real practical problems. So far, VR has been mostly used for gaming, but Apple doesn't seem very interested in that use case.
1. They claimed they would never do that. But we know how much words corporate bullshit carries
2. You cannot unify interfaces that are operated in completely different ways.
There's no "unified interface" that works well on a single-app-at-a-time smartphone with touch and on a 5k screen with multiple apps, a keyboard, and a mouse.
> As the article says, liquid glass works best for spatial computing. That's apple's next big bet and the whole ecosystem is going to cater to it
No, it doesn't work best for spatial computing. This idiotic statement started as a way to justify Liquid Glass on Twitter.
On top of that, if it "works best for spatial" means that literally every other device will work worse because of the unification no one asked for.
---
However, the answer is simple: it's a vanity project by a person with next to zero design experience thrust into a position of power
God I hope not, the last thing I want is having to put on a stupid VR headset everyday for work. Either we stick to good ole screens or we skip straight to neural links, none of this VR bull-shieet. And I used to own a Quest device, fun for some games, but not for prolonged work.
>As the article says, liquid glass works best for spatial computing.
I'd love to see proof of that. Because I feel like it's the exact opposite. Imagine all the street and traffic signs being also translucent and made of glass, the accident rates would spike. It looks cool in sci-fi movies, but IRL accessibility is severely lacking.
If Apple wants to make iPhones cool again, my suggestion would be to loosen their iron grip on it and let people customize and build wacky new experiences around it with no corporate oversight. People on the ground know what's cool better than some trillion dollar company. Similar to the Windows theming and shareware scene of the 90s. But that would kill Apple's golden goose, and they'll have none of that.
What's actually happening is that companies are expected to a different standards, by customers and other companies alike. By trying to anticipate these expectations, companies go ahead and do the changes that they think will strengthen the brand that they are trying to project. That's all there is to it, the rest is implementation.
And third-party app developers hate OS updates too, especially, again, the kind that change the UI design. Apple is the most expensive company in the world so the cost of these redesigns is a rounding error for them. For smaller app developers, this incurs significant extra costs for the only reason of Apple just feeling like it.
Nice hallucination though, thinking that re-designs for no other purpose than re-designing are and should universally be acknowledged as the bee's knees.
Maybe the world really just doesn't need as many designers as you seem to think it does.
You can't have designers messing with the UI every performance review cycle, if you have no designers.
Win-win for the shareholders who want to save money and for the consumers who want the UI to stay the same as they got used to.
The only wow feeling I get is the refraction effect. Like, it’s a ”novel” effect in GUIs. But when elements are still it looks the same as regular glassomorphism which we already had years ago. Buttons look totally different depending on what’s underneath, and in 90% of cases it’s messy and blurs together. The wow feeling will fade quickly, but the clutter will remain…
The only thing I like is that it makes layering a bit clearer (groupings, buttons vs indicators) compared to ultra-flat design of the last years. But that could have been achieved with subtle 3d/parallax effects, eg based on gyro.
My theory is that Apple specifically wanted an effect that can’t be replicated in webviews, to drive more devs towards native, out of FOMO for looking ”cheap”.
Same, and liquid glass so far is just...bad, in a way. I don't mind it nearly as much on the iPhone but it's particularly bad on macOS. Excessive padding, lack of clean information density. The transparent menu bar doesn't adjust text for the wallpaper, so if you set a white background you still get (now unreadable) white text, but everywhere else the text changes colors based on the background. There's not even a glass effect in the menu bar, it's just transparent.
Honestly macOS 26, still as of Beta 4, looks like a bad GNOME/GTK theme. I'm incredibly disappointed in Apple here - a company that said they would never converge their interfaces together have basically morphed macOS into iPad OS.
Meanwhile on the mobile side of things, Material 3 expressive is actually looking really nice, aesthetically and I'd prefer that but then I'm giving up all of Apple's other conveniences.
Hurray for no competition.
> My theory is that Apple specifically wanted an effect that can’t be replicated in webviews, to drive more devs towards native, out of FOMO for looking ”cheap”.
I get this vibe too - they want something that can only be made using their toolkits, drive more to the app store and that sweet sweet 30% commission.
This is weird, given that the menu bar already was translucent before, but it did adjust the text color if the background underneath would be bright.
This makes a lot of sense to me. I was also under the impression that all these lighting effects would be rather computationally expensive. This could encourage people to upgrade devices and make it hard to replicate this design on other brands’ less powerful hardware.
> Later iOS 26 beta releases show Apple reducing transparency and adding blur effects for better readability.
This is a beta release. It is a work in progress. When iOS 7’s betas came out the reaction was similarly negative. I would suggest we wait and see what the system evolves into; by the time we get to iOS 27 I am quite sure that Apple will have found the right balance.
It is just a way people try to shutdown being critical of Apple's stuff in general. It is tiresome.
Even the screenshots in the press release - Apple's best foot forward - were criticized more or less immediately; it's not like the problems with the design are rare edge cases.
Apple clearly owns the decision to go this route. No one forced them to announce it before refining it internally. It remains to be seen how drastically they will have to walk it back. Whether or not they rework it enough to reduce complaints, I can't see how they can call it a win in the end. They will anyway.
Beta 4 went back again.
As for being "sure" Apple will find the right balance, they never fixed usability regressions in macOS introduced in the last redesign. And they have ~10 weeks to fix all this.
Readability is obviously good for something. Is transparency?
I am quite sure that "the right balance" is zero transparency, but only about 99% sure Apple won't "find" that.
But so is alpha, which is where looniness gets to live without judgement. Beta is supposed to be polished and working well, except where there are explicit warnings of incomplete or sketchy functionality. I.e. small areas that are still alpha.
Which is the opposite of how Apple framed "liquid glass" in the beta.
Apple lowered the bar on its beta. Strong feedback is how customers suggest a course correction at a higher level.
The GPU compute used by this is trivial for modern SoCs.
There is so much power and efficiency in a modern iPhone processor that these simple shaders are entirely negligible.
Apple has 1bio devices out there, if each of them consumes 10% more energy due to this change, that's a massive energy consumption increase - and this change offers no functional benefit at all.
The idea that this change would consume 10% more energy seems completely unrealistic too.
Or someone high up has a Vision™, and they're so set on that Vision™ they're not listening to what underlings and users are saying.
Consider a parallel reality in which Apple did the next round of updates as a maintenance release and added some minor new features and UI tweaks. Would that have been a more positive outcome for the company?
My guess is there would have been some grumbling about not having anything new to offer, but also relief that bugs were being fixed. It would have been a bit of a non-event.
This seems more like a seismic negative event, with a lot of criticism from all quarters. (And some stanning, but less than usual.)
Depending on what Google has to say about Pixel & Gemini in August, I think it would have been much more than grumbling. Apple is in a damned if they do damned if they don't situation. Under the surface of liquid glass, there really isn't even anything new coming unless they have some hardware limited features planned for the iPhone 17 launch.
It's clear this "redesign" was as you said, a panic project to cover for not delivering on AI, again for a second year and having nothing to show for WWDC. Just coming out with "we fixed some bugs" would cause a PR shitstorm. Even more so if Google gets any further ahead integrating Gemini into Pixel w/ personal context like what Apple wanted to achieve with Siri/AI, plus their own redesign (Material 3 Expressive, which is actually looking really nice IMO).
> This seems more like a seismic negative event, with a lot of criticism from all quarters.
Except from normal users/non enthusiasts. My kids and her friends all installed the dev beta and are absolutely enamored with liquid glass and think it's the coolest thing ever. Mind you, these are generations of folks that weren't around for Vista/7 Aero, etc and are now obsessed with that era from a fashion and design POV. "Fruitigier aero aesthetic" and all that. These are also people that would never switch platforms no matter what Apple does because of iMessage and social status/social pressure, so Apple is in no danger of losing any marketshare over this unless Google/Android somehow becomes "cool" again and can generate enough social pressure amongst the youth.
Has to be. It has that Musky smell of banning yellow safety paint i.e. too stupid to be a team effort.
Legibility issues with translucency is such a basic thing and I expect Apple designers have gone deep on the topic e.g. mathematical models using human colour perception to determine hard limits for different type weights. I don't think the heavy frosting in past versions was an accident.
You may not like it (certainly I don't) but its extremely well received behavior. Humans are mostly emotional beings, just look at politics if you think otherwise.
It’s a beta for a reason.
Past betas have also had graphical weirdness in certain new features, too. They iterate on it before release.
Why has everyone suddenly forgotten what beta means?
It's a bit like someone saying "To view this website, enable JavaScript in your browser settings and reload the page" to read a simple piece of text ;)
I've found that in the creative work I do, lots of things moved away from skeuomorphism too far. Yes it's easier to read the text on a flat black background with all the controls in a grid. but you lose some intuition compared to when it actually resembled a hardware unit that has logical places for things.
I'm in the market for a new vehicle so I'm particular interested in that last line: which companies are bringing back physical controls in cars?
I have a feeling I will need to settle for finding and restoring a car from before 1990.
You don't have to go back that far. I'm with you, I'm actively repulsed by newer cars because (in part) of the touch screens and other such nonsense, so I expect that I'll never be buying a car that was manufactured too recently.
But my current car is acceptable, and it was made it 2008.
A flat touchscreen in a car is something that is now used in anything from a base Fiat Panda to the most expensive Mercedes S class. And it all looks cheap because visually there is little visual difference between that and a 25,- dollar AliExpress tablet.
At some point in time the luxury car brands must be getting this feedback from their customers.
Win95 was very much not skeuomorphic, but it had very strong visual cues in UI even so.
(I'm not a customer or an owner.)
“Your colleague Joe just hammered an 8d nail!” <Like> <comment>
That must be why everyone is using CDE...
That statement on July 20 didn't age well, because beta 4 released yesterday, July 22, doubled down on transparency, undoing some of the minor improvements in beta 3.
With material 3 expressive, Android seems to be going in the total opposite direction and it's a breath of fresh air and I'm even considering switching over if I can ever get over the loss of some Apple conveniences and an inferior smart watch.
The two OSes have largely followed each other over the years but no we are actually starting to see a divergence, at least in look and feel.
Although, I suspect if AR really becomes a thing, it will be in a form-factor with actually physical transparency. Nreal is the design to beat, not the gaming headsets.
If the display is already transparent, adding a layer of pseudo-transparency to the interface seems kinda pointless.
The optical AR system is always going to be transparent to the outside world so perhaps a vendor that expects to sell both kinds of device will add transparency to the passthrough device so it looks "the same" as the optical device.
> Apple's Liquid Glass may win design accolades, but history suggests it will join the long list of beautiful solutions that made computing harder, not easier, for the people who actually have to use it every day. Unless they get it right.
> Early signs suggest they're already realizing this.
Succinctly written.
How can the third most valuable company on the planet with computing being the core of their DNA not realize this pre launch?
I have no experience with either SF/ SV or culture in large US enterprises.
Does someone has a hypothesis?
Large companies have lots of mediocre people making decisions and the larger a company is the further away those decision makers are from the experts that can guide them towards making the correct decision.
They haven’t launched it. The version with the exaggerated effects was an early beta. The more recent betas are already far more refined.
Everyone is raging over some early pre-release screenshots and videos because they’re unfamiliar with how Apple works: The early betas of a new UI are always refined and adjusted significantly before launch.
This effect has markedly worsened from Beta 3, where using Freeze, the glaring and lack of contrast around icons and letters was decreased.
This same strategy is what brought coffee and starbucks to Japan using a ten year plan, first they had to start with coffee flavored candy to get the kids used to it, then 10 years later only then you can begin bringing in more coffee flavors, soon you have a Starbucks here and there.
iOS 6 -> iOS 7 was a huge improvement, moving towards simplicity and minimalism. Liquid Glass feels more like bloat and a lot of wasted screen estate.
I'm curious what the impact is to a11y users though—it's been a while since I had to think about it but I remember having pretty strict requirements on background/foreground font and color differences for users with suboptimal vision.
apple is an inverted pyramid:
from legal and finance there is a call for streamlining (cost cutting)
marketing comes up with the liquid ass strategy by "research"
technicians slap it together on tight deadlineI don't know. I don't want to be doomsdayer because even during its heyday Apple made lot of mistakes - remember Ping? - but they never felt like this.
> This may be the first time I will stay on an older iOS version.
- they add a new menu view
- the menu views design get updated
When you run out of menus to add you’re left with design updates for the sake of design updates.
I only use Macs on project basis, otherwise I am on PC, and is quite fun to see almost everyone on Apple side around the office carrying such dongles.
I mean, are they trying to make the phone UI so bad that people finally give up and say “well I might as well get the goggles cause the phone sucks”?
AR is old. We have things like street signs, road markings, advertising and all sorts of other signage. Almost none of it is transparent, and why would it be?
No one can focus on a thing and what's behind it at the same time. There is no correct level of blur to fix this (but I'm sure they are going to spend years trying to find it anyway).
What I would like to be able to do sometimes is to make something transparent when it's blocking my view. It shouldn't be semi-transparent or blurred. It should be a faint wireframe outline so I know that something is there.