Apple introduces a universal design across platforms

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/06/apple-introduces-a-delightful-and-elegant-new-software-design/

738 1201 1 year ago

nharada• 1 year ago

I wonder how much of this transparent/glass design language is setting Apple up for AR interfaces where UI is overlaid on what you're looking at. Since you literally cannot have fully opaque elements with AR glasses this would be a smart way to ensure overall design is unified across platforms.

9283409232• 1 year ago

This is 100% for that reason.

detourdog8• 1 year ago

I had the same thought as soon as they announced quartz. I'm really happy with the new GUI. I think it really demonstrated the flaws of the previous design.

chakintosh3• 1 year ago

Right before the unveiling, Craig specifically said visionOS was the driver for these changes. So the new UI is literally because Apple is still betting on visionOS.

copperx• 1 year ago

good god. this never ends well.

crooked-v2• 1 year ago

The thing I find really weird there is that visionOS panes and windows are more opaque than this. They have some transparency, but it's a heavily tinted frosted glass effect with entirely readable contrast. This may be "inspired" by visionOS, but this looks like somebody really just threw out that design and the usability with it.

layer87• 1 year ago

It’s more likely because the visionOS designers needed something to move on to, so Liquid Glass is just their next project, and it’s less work to do a similar thing as they did on visionOS. The new look also isn’t actually the same as visionOS, just adopts some design elements.

_aavaa_2• 1 year ago

Also a great way to speed up hardware upgrades. Each new os update can add more computationally expensive frills to make the older phones slow down.

diggan• 1 year ago

This was also my first thought, "imagine how many who think their device is too old after installing this "everything transparent" OS update". I bet shareholders will love it though.

basisword4• 1 year ago

It seems to be largely based on the visionOS stuff.

r00fus• 1 year ago

Bingo. It seems like the same mistakes made by MS in the 2000s when they prioritized a touch interface onto devices without them... why is Apple so desperate to make Vision happen?

bombcar5• 1 year ago

Because it's the only thing they have that even has a chance of being "the next big thing".

So they're gambling everything on it; Steve would have shitcanned it a year ago and fired everyone involved.

mulmen2• 1 year ago

Since you literally cannot have fully opaque elements with AR glasses

Why not?

tsimionescu5• 1 year ago

Because AR glasses, by definition, overlay an interface onto the real world that you are seeing through the transparent glasses.

VR glasses like the VisionPRO can add a video stream of your surroundings, but they are physically opaque and thus don't suffer from this limitation.

montag2• 1 year ago

I love the switcheroo thought experiment: imagine we have always had transparent glassy user interfaces; for whatever reason, that's what the techology allowed. And in 2025 we have made a breakthrough and finally achieved opaque buttons. Would this change be just as controversial?

No, it would be a massive net positive. Everyone would love these new opaque buttons that obscure the noise underneath so that you can easily read foreground text.

In light of AR glasses, this thought experiment is even more relevant...

tsimionescu5• 1 year ago

Wouldn't that be a crazy bet, given how much AR has flopped? Or do people still think it's more than a fad of the early 2020s?

sneak2• 1 year ago

You are incorrect. Apple’s (current) AR system uses cameras and video feeds, not translucent/transparent displays. You absolutely can have fully opaque elements; when the AVP is worn, all you see are displays. When it’s off, you see nothing but pure black.

leakycap14• 1 year ago

Apple's new video presentation style is so cloying, it really didn't help with the letdown this software is.

paxys• 1 year ago

Some Windows Vista designer is shedding a tear right now. Got such a huge nostalgia hit watching the "liquid glass" demos during the keynote. Installing a leaked "Longhorn" OS on a PC back in 2005 and seeing all the translucent refractive glass really felt magical and futuristic. 20 years later, everything old is new again.

timeon2• 1 year ago

My nostalgia with glass goes bit further to KDE 2 or 3.

Apocryphon• 1 year ago

Someone at Apple shared a video about Frutiger Aero

bitwize3• 1 year ago

That's exactly what I thought. Look, they invented Windows Aero. Bet the John Gruber types who laughed at Aero and called it an Aqua ripoff are going full "two soyjaks pointing meme" over this.

detourdog8• 1 year ago

Was Aero trying to look like Quartz? The big improvement I see is that the plumbing has better integration and with Continuity it's really impressive. Even if it looks like Aero the functionality the OS is providing is the real feature.

sumtechguy• 1 year ago

The 'win32' way, layers.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/winmsg/windo...

jvreeland• 1 year ago

Awesome I wasn't having enough trouble figuring out what I could tap and not now everything has this crappy distorted look.

ypeterholmes• 1 year ago

Liquid glass is gorgeous. But it's hard to reconcile next level design like this with complete disasters like Apple TV. Maybe spend some time on getting the fundamentals right too, before inventing the future

reissbaker7• 1 year ago

Why do you view Apple TV as a disaster? I don't own any Apple devices other than an Apple TV, since IMO it's better than basically all of the alternatives: it has no ads and it's extremely fast.

throw0101d• 1 year ago

* […] it has no ads and it's extremely fast.

See recent "Breaking down why Apple TVs are privacy advocates’ go-to streaming device":

* https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/06/all-the-ways-apple-t...

redczar10• 1 year ago

Apple TV certainly has ads. It’s just that it’s ads for Apple products.

shaftway• 1 year ago

I always find this take amusing, because there are ads. They're just for Apple services and they do a better job of blending in.

Case in point, the largest screen in the lead image in the linked article does nothing to showcase this new UI, but it does promote Fountain of Youth, a show on Apple TV.

wmeredith4• 1 year ago

I've used them all and Apple TV, while not without faults, is by far the best.

graypegg2• 1 year ago

Genuine question, what happened to Apple TV to make it a complete disaster? I feel like I probably missed something. (There's no good way to ask that without sounding like a fanboy, sorry haha. I just genuinely don't know.)

rconti2• 1 year ago

I'm not sure what you call it, but the "unified view" thing where you're supposed to be able to view content across providers is a complete nightmare. I'm not actually sure how I end up there -- I think it happens after I finish watching a program on AppleTV+ (oh, yeah, the naming is a disaster too). I'm not sure how I'd launch it if, for some reason, I _wanted_ to use it, and the navigation is just incredible strange.

Figuring out which elements are selected in the UI is often hard.

The trackpad on the remote is not good -- I've tried setting it to disable trackpad and click on, but then I'll inevitably find an app that needs a trackpad.

Overall I'm quite happy with the AppleTV as a device, but the UI could use quite a bit of help.

redczar10• 1 year ago

Can you share what you don’t like about Apple TV? I have one and really like it. I very much prefer using an Apple TV over using apps built into the tv.

AlanYx2• 1 year ago

It's an excellent device overall, but getting content onto the device to view is frustrating. Apps like VLC can have local storage, but the OS periodically purges locally stored content inside app storage.

arnaudsm2• 1 year ago

On top of wasting GPU cycles, such low-contrast graphics are terrible for older users. The Apple Music navbar is hilariously unreadable and distracting.

pat2man• 1 year ago

Accessibility -> Display -> Reduce Transparency?

detourdog8• 1 year ago

Also it looks entirely customizable which will be really helpful for creating the correct text contrast for each individual.

arnaudsm2• 1 year ago

Basic visibility should be the default, most people never change their settings.

drdaeman• 1 year ago

The URL bar at 02:11 in the video looks awful, with all the background shining through making the text hard to read from a distance. This is sort of hidden by the video having 3x zoom, making the text thicker, but unless they tweak the transparency it's gonna be a real visual mess on a real device.

fidotron2• 1 year ago

This looks tailor made to be hard to recreate easily in CSS.

Which is just going to make people try even harder.

graypegg2• 1 year ago

Raytracing and lighting effects in CSS 3D transforms! ;)

diiiimaaaa• 1 year ago

Similar thing happened in iOS7(?) where they released glassy panels. Not far from that `-webkit-backdrop-filter` was added that allowed similar effect, I expect similar will happen. For new glassy effect it seems you need a separate filter for border, or maybe it's just gradient + blend mode.

fidotron2• 1 year ago

Refraction effects like that require a surface normal, even inferred from something like a bump map, or the result of a blur filter used as a bump map. I'm not aware of any CSS filter that could take a normal and do the appropriate ray redirection.

In raw shader code it's verging on trivial, like old school environment mapping. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflection_mapping

nikeee2• 1 year ago

The lighting is depending on the devices' orientation to which a web site running in safari on iOS has no access to due to fingerprinting protection. Maybe you need to request permissions to the gyroscope, but doing that for a reflection in the UI is a bit overkill.

detourdog8• 1 year ago

Isn’t it better to not limit GUIs to what can be achieved in CSS?

unsupp0rted3• 1 year ago

That's like saying this is hard recreate easily in playdough.

It's not at all a concern for Apple, nor should it be.

spartanatreyu2• 1 year ago

We already have "standards" to implement this the web-standards way, but they don't have wide compatibility yet.

1. Use CSS Images Module Level 4's element() function to capture an image of the layer below. (currently only implemented in firefox)

2. Feed that image into an offscreen canvas.

3. Use a shader to distort the image as needed. This can be done in a paint worklet so it doesn't slow down or hold up the main thread.

4. Use CSS Painting API Level 1's paint() function to paint the contents of the canvas onto the background of the button. (currently only implemented in blink based browsers)

creata• 1 year ago

How can you use element() to "capture an image of the layer below" and pass it to a canvas?

I might be wrong, but without more context, that sounds like it'd defeat browser protections to avoid leaking your browser history via the color of :visited links.

Insanity• 1 year ago

Based on the demo and screenshots I don’t quite like this. It seems more distracting and gimmicky than actually nice to use in a day to day setting..

But I’ll probably get used to it.

behnamoh2• 1 year ago

more distracting and gimmicky

This. The animations on iOS are already a bit too much—now they've taken it to the next level.

wmeredith4• 1 year ago

Turn them off in accessibility

ThatMedicIsASpy• 1 year ago

I wonder if there will be a big difference between a 60Hz and 120Hz Display. Blur is distracting if the content is dynamic.

qgin• 1 year ago

Like the flashlight. There’s no reason to have that much pageantry behind turning on a flashlight.

unsupp0rted3• 1 year ago

Also it looks bad.

bitwize3• 1 year ago

Oh God, it's as I feared.

Apple UI designer #1: Well, the flat design has been largely a success so far, but those darn users -- they can still easily pick out widgets from the background, and with a few tries still reasonably guess what they're for and how they'll respond!

Apple UI designer #2: I know! Let's make the widgets semitransparent. That way they'll be harder to pick out from the background, and Macs and iPhones will become delightfully fun puzzle boxes users will love trying to figure out, much like my dog loves his snuffle mat!

mikeortman• 1 year ago

Apple claiming that Liquid Glass is a technique only Apple can achieve, will be replicated, or at least indistinguishably replicated, in pure CSS... within 48 hours of today, out of spite

captainmuon2• 1 year ago

It's just a shader, so maybe not in pure CSS, but you could probably achive something like that in WebGL.

About "only Apple can achive that": It would be pretty simple for MS to do something like this in Windows. DirectComposition (or whatever it is called nowadays) could set the appropriate shader when drawing windows. You cannot do it as a normal user, because you can only pick from a select set of backdrop shaders (but if some hacker wants a challenge, you could inject the code into dwm.exe to do so :-)).

drooopy• 1 year ago

Here's hoping that they'll keep the options to disable unnecessary transparencies and animations.

Klonoar7• 1 year ago

What makes you think they’d remove accessibility options like that? They’re generally pretty considerate in that realm.

ProfessorLayton4• 1 year ago

Apple Music on Mac ignores the 'Reduce Motion' accessibility setting for their very distracting animated playlist covers, while apps like Weather respect it.

megaman821• 1 year ago

I have had both of those disabled for the last five years but I am really wondering what it is going to look like now with so much transparency everywhere.

SebastianKra• 1 year ago

Eh, it could be worse. It looks like the over-the-top effects are limited to a few top-level elements such as the Navigation View, Homescreen, and Control Center. I wouldn't be surprised if these get dialed back in the future - especially the elements that break all contrast guidelines.

Many elements are still completely flat or more subtle. So, to me, it feels more like a new tool to convey hierarchy, rather than a complete new design: Secondary < Primary < Glass.

Also, the Safari-Redesign is back for round 2? It'd be funny if it runs into the exact same backlash again.

mosdl• 1 year ago

Seems overly distracting, and not a lot of contrast.

lordfrito• 1 year ago

Yeah I hope this doesn't last long

9d3• 1 year ago

"... and a fluidity that only Apple can achieve ..." (from the promo video on https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/06/apple-introduces-a-de... )

I'm excited to see this effect turned into a WebGL library in literally a week by some smart devs out there, and then adapted by Material Design in another month. Really? Only apple? This kind of rhetoric might have worked on me 20 years ago, but today it's just sad how obviously false it is.

9d3• 1 year ago

Don't get me wrong. I'm all for people sharing what they created with joy. And I'll even rejoice with you if it's genuinely cool. But to say "only we can do this" is like saying "we're the best, all of you are beneath us, and you always will be" and is just really off putting. I get that it's a marketing tone, but you could have just omitted those words "only apple can achieve" and just showed off the really cool thing you had and got us excited about that, rather than putting focus on the company itself. It's like how in movies they say show don't tell. Just show us the product, don't tell us how great you are.

cynicalsecurity• 1 year ago

This gives Windows Aero vibes, but somehow even worse.

bigyabai14• 1 year ago

Honestly? It lacks the visual contrast that made skeuomorphism so popular. Material You gets this right by using accent colors to break up the uniform interface. It feels cohesive and well-made without feeling clinical or hard-to-read.

It's also, somewhat curiously, not neumorphism. All the interface layers appear distinct, which makes me worry if things like Dynamic Island and Control Center will be mistaken for app controls and not distinct phone controls.

bamboozled• 1 year ago

Looks great, looking forward to trying it...

gherkinnn3• 1 year ago

https://www.lux.camera/physicality-the-new-age-of-ui/

This blog's prediction got remarkably close. I've been a sucker for glass UI since the first Longhorn (later Vista) screenshots.

dmix6• 1 year ago

I figured out why I don't like the icons

https://www.lux.camera/content/images/size/w2400/2025/05/Mai...

zoomed out they look blurry and unrefined, but when viewed zoomed in and large (like how a designer probably created them) they look kinda nice. Too bad they will all be small on iphone.

wmeredith4• 1 year ago

I find the assumption that these icons were designed huge and never tested at smaller sizes kind of baffling. There may be a difference in taste, but to think that Apple wouldn't look at their icons at different sizes is really, uh, something.

2d8a875f-39a2-4• 1 year ago

I mean, that just blog sums up the whole attitude issue here.

"It’s an exciting time to be a designer on iOS. My professional universe is trembling and rumbling with a deep sense of mystery."

This person is excited that their job designing iOS apps will be more interesting (and the prospect of plenty of work in the pipeline doesn't hurt either).

Fuck the end users who need to adapt to this needless change, suffer newly slow devices or invest in new ones, and put up with a hodge-podge of different UIs. Fuck the orgs who need to fund all this rework if they want their app on new devices. Fuck the waste of energy spent in the extra client-side cycles rendering all the needless new bling.

gherkinnn3• 1 year ago

Indeed. This attitude is found throughout the tech industry. It stinks from a product manager's spreadsheets down to the infrastructure that runs it all. The design is just what is immediately obvious.

In this case I am lucky, as I find glassy UIs visually appealing.

kej3• 1 year ago

This feels suspiciously like the goals of Microsoft's "Metro" design from the Windows 8 era. It will be interesting to see if Apple can do a better job of keeping the same design without damaging the desktop experience than Microsoft did.

jmkni2• 1 year ago

Definitely in the minority here but I liked Metro, I always felt it was just a decade ahead of it's time (as was Windows 8 generally)

bowsamic3• 1 year ago

I really liked metro on windows phone but I did not understand it on desktop. It didn’t help that they took away the usual UI

jhickok• 1 year ago

The issue with Metro, imo, is that it was dizzying to use as you were swept away into new interfaces and for many tasks we lost a lot of usability.

max513• 1 year ago

The esthetic wasn't bad, the problem is that it was a massive reduction in functionality. For example, the fact that Metro apps included on windows could only be use in fullscreen mode and only one copy of it could be used at the same time. The new Metro settings they included to replace the ones from the control panel had only like 10% of the functionality of the old one and they actively tried to prevent you from finding the old one. The content density was significantly lower and dialogbox/dropdownmenus couldn't be resized to display more items (eg. list of keyboard layouts that can only display 3 items at the same time)

moralestapia6• 1 year ago

Metro was, and is, my favorite UI ever.

BirAdam3• 1 year ago

A Win8 tablet on Snapdragon X Elite would be a wonderful thing. Also, Metro on phones was amazing.

pndy10• 1 year ago

Metro was terrific on mobile - especially for older people who had no issues reading information from tiles or navigating sharp interface. Once my mother's HTC 8S broke and she had to temporarily switch to iPhone she complained how the interface was small and barely readable. It's the desktop where it failed - you can't just force users into a mobile interface, at the same time remove the most recognisable element of your product (start button and menu) and believe people will adapt.

What I find wild is that there were internal W8 releases with a proper start menu but they abandon it at some point to fully embrace Metro.

grishka4• 1 year ago

They've already started ruining the desktop experience with the macOS 11 redesign and there's no sign of them stopping. For example, the recent settings app redesign that no one asked for broke the fundamental desktop UI design rule that controls never scroll, only content does.

n422• 1 year ago

one of my favorite examples of how bad the System Settings app is: find where the Default Browser setting is, without using search.

gherkinnn3• 1 year ago

Metro on phones worked so well but MS failed to translate it to desktops.

As for the second part, Apple does a remarkable job at updating all of the OS to a new design language. Unlike Windows, which last time I used it, had three different settings panels and UI controls resembling archaeological layers going back to pre XP.

kevin_thibedeau2• 1 year ago

You can still get the Windows 3/NT 3.5 directory picker if you dig around enough.

bluSCALE44• 1 year ago

Window's problem has always been their legacy systems. I believe to this day you can bring up windows 95 era dialogs somehow in Windows 11?

whatever1• 1 year ago

It’s also a much deeper and broader ui. In the past 20 years of using windows I don’t recall one time that I needed to bring up the command line to do something. Linux on the other hand is a constant battle with random commands with close to zero discoverability. macOS sits somewhere in between, but definitely a way more ui friendly system compared to the various Linux desktop distros

jcranmer• 1 year ago

That would be a surprise, since Windows XP and newer are based on Windows NT, not the Windows 9x family (Windows 95, 98, and Me).

pndy10• 1 year ago

Everything is deep down beneath all this W11 acrylic translucency. MS did a good work around W7 when they patched majority of old icons and resources and then made widgets flatter in W8 and W10 so they would fit better. That gray 9x legacy is here and will stay - for compatibility reasons

whiteboardr3• 1 year ago

It’s terrible and an unsolvable “problem” that many have tried before and there’s no way of getting this right.

Transparent UI components always add noise by nature, especially glass that is intended to be realistic - see all the refractions shown in the keynote.

Aqua was also playful and suggested the same feel but never got in the way of clarity and was beautifully implemented almost feeling revolutionary at the time.

What is on point for VR use cases where this is taken from, unfortunately ruins a desktop or handheld experience.

A massive loss of precision, focus and a big step backwards.

out-of-ideas• 1 year ago

It’s terrible and an unsolvable “problem” that many have tried before and there’s no way of getting this right.

except apple dictates to its fans whats right. i feel apple has already begun a slow process of making them similar;

what im more curious about is how they will improve the settings app (it seems the desktop settings is the worst its been design and flow wise - ive never liked the ios settings design - i do hope they change both of these for the better)

edit: more newlines

cosmic_cheese7• 1 year ago

The biggest problem with Metro is how little effort was put into properly adapting it to desktops. It tried to handle everything from smartphones to tablets to non-touch PCs with 27” monitors with the same UI. It’s an understatement to say that it was awkward to use with a keyboard and mouse, because it almost acted like those forms of input ceased to exist.

If Apple makes the right platform-specific affordances (which they have a much better chance of doing) I think it can work.

max513• 1 year ago

It tried to handle everything from smartphones to tablets to non-touch PCs with 27” monitors with the same UI

That was a big part of the problem, but the issues with the UI/UX went far beyond that.

For exemple, if you used the search bar in the "start menu" to get something from the control pannel, it would ONLY show the new W8 Metro dialog box that barelly has 1/5th the features and would refuse to show you the real one. It also took multiple years before the metro apps inlcuded in the OS (eg. pdf viewer) could be used in windowed mode (they were fullscreen mode like a video game, without taskbar), even the ipad at the time had better multitasking than the W8 Metro apps.

satvikpendem4• 1 year ago

Not Metro, which was flat, but their newer Fluent UI, shown in their design videos [0].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/@microsoftdesign/videos

wmf• 1 year ago

Do you mean Aero Glass from Windows 7? Metro is a flat design that looks nothing like this.

basisword4• 1 year ago

Do you mean Aero Glass from Windows Vista?

llm_nerd2• 1 year ago

I assume they might be talking more to the "universal design" aspect.

Though Apple has long had a universal design across platforms. Not always in lockstep, but visual traits and behaviours and traits and appearances end up in all of their platforms, which even if it wasn't logical from a design perspective, there is loads of shared code so it's inevitable.

But really a lot of what they showed today reminded me most of Aqua from 25 years ago.

kej3• 1 year ago

I was referring to the idea of having a universal design across mobile and desktop, which was one of the goals of Metro, rather than the specific visual style.

al_borland6• 1 year ago

It doesn’t look like Apple changed how the desktop fundamentally works. Microsoft put a touch-first UI on the server, and replaced the start button with a hot corner. Using that with RDP was a horrible experience.

If anything, we saw the iPad make serious roads towards functioning like macOS.

ilt3• 1 year ago

Metro never had this much transparency ingrained in the UX - and where it had, it was tastefully done with no/minimal accessibility concerns - doesn't seem like a valid comparison. Windows 8, especially 8.1 was a very pretty piece of software, the whole gesture- and card-based interface fiasco ruined its good name.

kej3• 1 year ago

I didn't mean the visual style so much as the "let's use the same design on phones and on giant desktop monitors" philosophy.

Bondi_Blue• 1 year ago

It is weird that they acted as through the design system hasn't changed much since iOS 7. They've overhauled and tweaked it every year since 2011- increasing font weights, using slower floaty/bubble animations, increasing corner radiuses and adding more negative space, adding depth and shadows to icons, etc. Control Center, for example, looks nothing like it did in iOS 7. iOS 7 was much more minimal, the least skeuomorphic, and a bit more geometric than the "neumorphic" changes they've made since then.

This updated design language seems to have similarities to Microsoft's Material/Fluent design system that brought more of that same glass material to Windows 11, with the more 3d-looking edge outlines on ui elements. So the glass metaphor seems to be a trending metaphor in these UIs, for better or for worse.

croes• 1 year ago

So Apple goes Windows Aero?

xattt2• 1 year ago

I propose Apple Jello!

jq-r2• 1 year ago

To be honest, aero looked better.

Klonoar7• 1 year ago

Every Electron app is going to feel incredibly out of place.

And for the few that aren’t okay with feeling out of place, the devs of those apps will now have to contend with shipping more macOS specific styles and workarounds.

I’m not looking to discuss Electron performance/etc so please ditch that discussion before it starts. I just find it interesting how comparatively tricky this particular UI styling might end up being for cross-platform developers.

afavour2• 1 year ago

I won't be surprised if we see a CSS filter that attempts to model this in Safari. Then it'll just be a question of whether Chromium (and thus Electron) get it.

Klonoar7• 1 year ago

Yeah, for sure. That solves part of it.

17186274402• 1 year ago

Can't you access rendered elements from JS? Then this will be a massive security issue, because anybody can read all the content from behind.

kylehotchkiss3• 1 year ago

I mentioned this elsewhere, but if LLMs are improving developer performance so drastically, why are none of these gains being used to get back towards native app development?

afavour2• 1 year ago

if LLMs are improving developer performance so drastically

IMO the jury is out on how much they are.

why are none of these gains being used to get back towards native app development?

because the different platforms are still radically different in a way an LLM can't easily and simply paper over. How do I specify a UI in a way that an LLM can competently implement it in HTML, SwiftUI and whatever Windows is using these days?

Klonoar7• 1 year ago

why are none of these gains being used to get back towards native app development?

One argument might be that, like with any LLM output, you still do need to know it well enough to know if it's good or not implementation-wise. You still need that knowledge to understand if your performance for rendering in some scenarios is going to fall off a cliff.

Web (via browsers or Electron/etc) are mostly one train of thought. When you're doing native application development using host OS frameworks, you have to actually know the framework. LLMs don't really save you from that; i.e, I could have an LLM spit out whatever flavor of Windows-specific UI I need. I have zero way of knowing whether it's correct or not.

mattgreenrocks2• 1 year ago

Because devs lack the will to build native apps. Even on HN, native app dev is seen as somewhat esoteric because it isn't cross-platform by default.

There's plenty of pragmatic reasons not to build a native app. The concerning thing IMO is the hegemony of opinion here. After all, nothing says "hacker" quite like following all the rules properly and always doing the sensible thing. :)

socalgal22• 1 year ago

Every Electron app is going to feel incredibly out of place.

AFAIK, most people do most things on the Web. So, no, Electron Apps will feel like what most people use most of the time. It's native apps that will feel out of place.

mattgreenrocks2• 1 year ago

Nah, native apps end up feeling nice and cozy by comparison. :)

The design language of native controls is usually much quieter and more subdued than the garishness that is allowed in the name of branding.

irskep3• 1 year ago

Electron apps are already out of place. In the space of Mac-apps-for-SaaS-products such as Linear, Slack, Notion, Asana, Figma, GitHub, and Spotify, they inflict the company's own design system on Apple's OS rather than try to ship Apple's design system applied to their product. Even the most popular IDE, VSCode, is just a wrapper around a web page.

And they're rational to do it this way. These companies shipping apps to millions of people all came to the conclusion that investing in native Mac software is not worthwhile to their business. Users don't avoid Electron-based products, and building native Mac apps slows you down. It's easier both technologically and organizationally to ship your web site as an Electron app. It costs less and you don't lose any users.

So I would be surprised to see _any_ popular Electron app get design updates to accommodate these changes.

As a user it makes me sad, but I find myself blaming Apple for losing this fight, not the hundreds of successful companies that all somehow make the same choice. If building native were an advantage, people would take it.

rdsnsca• 1 year ago

I certainly avoid Electron apps on macOS and konw I am not the only one who does.

Klonoar7• 1 year ago

Electron apps are already out of place.

You're taking the boring argument track here. Yes, they use their own design system language, but they still roughly fit in with an OS that's not random transparency/glass effects everywhere.

They clearly will not fit in with the new UI styling without significant thought and work.

microtonal2• 1 year ago

Every Electron app is going to feel incredibly out of place.

It's not going to matter, most Electron apps look out of place on the Mac already. The developers are not going to care and probably most users are not going to care either (I used to be staunchly against Electron for this reason, but gave up, and now I choose just enjoy apps looking the same between platforms).

Apple neglected the desktop from ~2016-2020 and made two frameworks that are unpopular among developers (Catalyst and SwiftUI) after that. Outside some indie devs, the native Mac app ship has sailed. Even developers that had their roots in macOS (e.g. AgileBits) have given up and switched to Electron.

cageface3• 1 year ago

Even if you like the general direction of SwiftUI it's way less mature on the mac and being tied to the OS version means you have to deal with all the churn it's had in the last three years to ship with it on the mac. Very few devs are going to bother with this.

cosmic_cheese7• 1 year ago

I think differing app styles can work under this new macOS design, they’ll just need to have more physicality, dynamism, and overall more involvement from the design department. Devs just won't be able to drop a dumptruck of flat roundrects on the screen and call it a day if they don’t want their app looking bad.

GloriousKoji• 1 year ago

Ever since the death of WinForms and Cocoa we've moved away from apps having a unified visual experience on an OS to apps pushing their own consistent theme across platforms. A big contrast between app and OS theme in recent times was when apps offered Dark Mode before it became an OS wide setting.

kreco2• 1 year ago

Every Electron app is going to feel incredibly out of place.

Consistency with native app/style had never been an issue, ever. It's stylistic choice. while I get that someone would like to have the same theme everywhere it does not prevent anything.

Every single webpage is different that the other and yet everybody browse the web.

eviks2• 1 year ago

The form over function school of design continues its grim march towards decreasing usability.

Look at the most basic UI interaction - text cursor movement - and note how this new liquid glass adds more confusing visual noise by adding text reflection for no good reason, which makes, for example, an empty line appear as a line with some text due to this reflection, thus making it harder to see that your cursor is located at the top line.

more focus to content

it's the opposite, you dilute focus on content by manufacturing non-existent noise.

And the claim to being "natural" in the video falls flat - compare to the actual physical movements a few frames before - the lens doesn't change in width or height! So the digital animation noise is unnatural!

Similarly with the menu sheet adding new rubberband effect in the corner- what underlying natural interaction does it reflect? What signal does that jiggly noise send?

But yeah, if you live in a "lively delight" fantasy of design, nothing would stop you.

dmix6• 1 year ago

The icons look pretty bad and the glass reflection/blurring during scrolling looks distracting. But I do like the focus on fluid animations, transparent bgs by default for overlaid controls, and smaller contextual control areas.

ambyra• 1 year ago

Would be cool if they started using displays with multiple layers, kinda like the looking glass 3D display, to get actual 3d layering of UI. Would look amazing with this new UI design.

fxtentacle• 1 year ago

Am I the only one that hates the concept?

I want a good UI to fade into the background. But this one is like a UI designer's promotion fever dream: The UI is at the center, no matter the content. The promotional video says "This material brings a new level of vitality to every experience" and then they show a video player where now the control overlay has more contrast, more movements, and more bright lights than the actual movie. And then the other features are just bull*: "It responds in real-time to your actions". Gosh I hope other UI frameworks would respond to my actions, what a novel idea! And yeah, ever played a video game? Things reacting to user input in real-time isn't exactly groundbreaking. And then they top it off with "a fluidity only Apple can achieve", which is just delusional. Desktop Linux box + RTX 5090 + current video game + 240 Hz screen => a fluidity that exceeds everything that Apple can achieve on a phone.

I mean I like SwiftUI and I like how apps look on the current iOS. But I think it's already borderline intense just to use the OS. It certainly should not have any more additional glitter, blinking, movement, or animations. It might be the direction that GTK could benefit from, but not SwiftUI.

In short, this feels like a step in the wrong direction for Apple to me.

Bluestein3• 1 year ago

Why can't we leave good enough alone?

Heck, we hit "peak-UI" with Win 2K, AFAAIC.-

unsupp0rted3• 1 year ago

peak-UI was Visual Basic 3. Any component that wasn't in VB3 was post-peak UI.

detourdog8• 1 year ago

From what I saw they were making more available screen space for content.

pseudalopex10• 1 year ago

Content behind and in between controls is not available. And I saw padding which opaque controls wouldn't need. But excessive padding was common already so it could have been unrelated.

j45• 1 year ago

This looks nice, but I can’t say it’s clear how a touch interface can be sent to macOS when MacBooks continue to not have touchscreens.

Maybe this is the start of replacing macOS with some form of iPadOS experience in the medium to long term.

dougbrochill• 1 year ago

It looks cool, but I'm worried about readability on the phone. The text in some of those menu bars and notifications really blended in with the wallpaper in a few of those screenshots.

wdb• 1 year ago

Yeah, struggling with reading things

athriren• 1 year ago

yes, legibility—at least during the presentation—was really bad. hope it’s better on device.

asciimov2• 1 year ago

Can’t wait to be told, “You’re viewing it wrong.” /s

But yes, terrible visual usability. Otherwise it looks nice, better than flat.

seanalltogether• 1 year ago

I noticed the same thing while watching their youtube promo video. I grabbed this screenshot that shows exactly how problematic this design is.

https://imgur.com/a/AEEj5w1

jrmg• 1 year ago

There are definitely compression artifacts in there that are making it look significantly less crisp than it would in reality.

ncr100• 1 year ago

Yes.

IMO it should "opaque up" the glass stuff when the blur detects significant similarity between the text / icon content on top, vs the blurred background on bottom.

"COOL" is not "success".

sanbor2• 1 year ago

In this screenshot you can hardly read the app names because the color of the text is white and the background is also very white:

https://imgur.com/a/HrfhA8E

I am surprised they forgot the important detail of good contract to be able to read the name of apps.

hbn4• 1 year ago

Is this even a change from the new design? You've been able to have white text on a light background as long as the iPhone has had wallpapers.

RedShift1• 1 year ago

Anything that moves away from flat colorless rectangles is a good thing, I welcome this change.

wmeredith4• 1 year ago

I also welcome the return of buttons. The en masse replacement of buttons with what looks like text links had driven me crazy for a long time.

bowsamic3• 1 year ago

It seems over the top to me, fatiguing even. Like I might have to take breaks from being so overwhelmed from using these interfaces. I have been mac exclusive for a long time now but I recently installed xubuntu for an intern and it made me quite jealous

jcalx• 1 year ago

The children yearn for ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶m̶i̶n̶e̶s̶ Frutiger Aero

(https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frutiger_Aero)

isoprophlex• 1 year ago

I was going to comment something similar; this is just Aero with higher DPI and more GPU-intensive gimmicks, right?!

carlosjobim4• 1 year ago

15 years later, Shine 2.0 for Windows is still the most modern and best designed GUI for computers:

https://www.deviantart.com/zainadeel/art/Shine-2-0-for-Windo...

russelg• 1 year ago

Wow this unlocked repressed memories for me! DeviantArt was a treasure trove back in the Win7 days for windows theming. I used Shine for quite a while!

sirwhinesalot4• 1 year ago

Take me back... All downhill from there.

chakintosh3• 1 year ago

Interesting how it seems now Apple's realized they should have marketed visionOS for Enterprise from the beginning. Nobody was gonna be a $3k AR headset to edit text. The Enterprise is where the use cases are. And now seems Apple has pivoted towards that.

adrianmsmith2• 1 year ago

Then again in the keynote today Apple proudly said Vision Pro was used by "thousands" of companies. So it sounds like it isn't such a success (yet?) in the enterprise either.

chakintosh3• 1 year ago

Yes, because in 99% of the marketing material from launch, you see it being used by some rando in their living room.

jama21112• 1 year ago

They did, the only people who thought Apple Vision Pro devices were people who intentionally or not were taking the release in bad faith in an attempt to ridicule the device and its price.

Apple has never pretended to be anything other than a luxury goods company, they bang on endlessly about how high end everything they make is, yet people keep acting all surprised pikachu that they’re priced like luxuries and are sometimes aimed at markets that go above the average consumers head.

anotherhue• 1 year ago

Why, why, why, do all the Apple announcements have the exact same ASIMO stiff hand gestures? Hostage videos have more fluidity.

ejpir• 1 year ago

thought the same, how on earth did they think this looks like a smooth presentation. Almost like he doesn't believe what he's saying

leakycap14• 1 year ago

At least they didn't use 3d-generated hands holding fake phones this time. The uncanny valley in prior presentations was jarring when they'd go to a 3d "human hand"

jq-r2• 1 year ago

It is so fake and scripted it makes generated videos look extremely realistic and natural.

yborg• 1 year ago

Patiently awaiting the Teams AI filter to automatically apply Apple Keynote Hands in video conferences.

ahartmetz• 1 year ago

Might be an attempt at Steve Jobs imitation with special focus on the worst aspects. Regardless of his reported reality distortion skills in person, I always found his big public presentations stiff and fake. I, as not-a-fan of game consoles, think that Mark Cerny gives fantastic presentations. He is always fluent, comfortable, and has an air of sincerity (while the contents are a little salesy). Kinda like a much more polished but slightly more fake John Carmack.

thinkingemote2• 1 year ago

They undergo intensive training for weeks before. Scripted, rehearsed, perfected, trained. I've witnessed it. There's not much space for natural expression in these talks. Everything is choreographed. Where to walk, look up, wave hand, smile etc all planned!

The stiffness is because the presenter is mainly a techie, developer or manager and not a natural performer. Their bodies are resisting the conformity by conforming to the letter but not the spirit.

kylehotchkiss3• 1 year ago

I really dig apple's work. It's so refreshing to get a tech event in 2025 where design is a huge focus and not just duck taping another LLM to everything. Design is expensive and it's clear they've invested a massive amount of resources into liquid glass. It's not perfect, but I think they'll iron out some of the contrast bugs.

Agreed with other commenters that crappy electron apps will look increasingly out of place (... slack ...). Too bad LLM's coding efficiencies haven't been used to try to get us back to native UIs from electron yet. Companies would rather pocket the savings.

microtonal2• 1 year ago

It's so refreshing to get a tech event in 2025 where design is a huge focus and not just duck taping another LLM to everything.

I don't want to make this an Apple vs. Google comment (Mac user since 2007, iPhone user since 2009), but Google spend a good chunk of time on their Material Design 3 Expressive redesign at the Android event a few weeks ago.

cosmic_cheese7• 1 year ago

MD3 feels pretty tame in comparison, though. Mostly still the same flat look but with more roundness and louder colors. I think it’s going to end up dated looking much, much more quickly than MD1/MD2 did.

leakycap14• 1 year ago

Apple didn't talk about AI or Siri because they're currently flailing and so behind it's concerning.

This was design-focused because skin-deep was all they accomplished.

Manfred• 1 year ago

A company with thousands of developers can focus on multiple things at once. I'm happy they are trying to improve all parts of the operating system and not just AI features I personally will never use.

nicoburns2• 1 year ago

Apple didn't talk about AI or Siri because they're currently flailing and so behind it's concerning.

Either concerning or reassuring depending on your perspective. I for one will be glad if there's a platform left that hasn't been invaded by AI.

rebasedoctopus• 1 year ago

only concerning if you have major investments in apple, and rely on ai hype to drive the stock up. I don't know if it's because I watch so much sports but to see someone fall behind doesn't really make me believe they lack the ability to catch up

BirAdam3• 1 year ago

There were a ton of tweaks across their ecosystem that I think are great. What I would truly have preferred, however, is a feature freeze and bug fix while Apple Intelligence improves…

al_borland6• 1 year ago

They did still have a lot of AI features, just not AI chat.

Users can now use AI in Shortcuts, developers can use the various on-device models, I assume the call and text screening uses AI. Those are a few things off the top of my head. We need to some thinking the start and end for AI is a text field with a submit button.

MangoToupe3• 1 year ago

because they're currently flailing and so behind

...behind what? Siri doesn't have a meaningful competitor on iOS. Nothing else even has access to my personal data.

lxgr4• 1 year ago

Mission accomplished: Users are now angry about something else?

pndy10• 1 year ago

When they announced Apple Intelligence, I had hopes that it would come with Siri supporting more languages.

These features, that duck taping llm as parent comment says looks nice but not when your language isn't supported. 13 years pass by since Siri was introduced and I still can make use of it beyond setting timers and managing music playback.

lxgr4• 1 year ago

Not sure a massive misallocation of resources is something to celebrate.

Agreed with other commenters that crappy electron apps will look increasingly out of place

Aesthetics is the smallest problem I've had with Electron (or generally non-native) apps.

BeFlatXIII• 1 year ago

What makes you so convinced it's a misallocation?

tiltowait• 1 year ago

I've installed the beta, and I really like how it looks and works. Like you said, it's not perfect, but I expect the small gripes I have so far will be ironed out before long.

seydor5• 1 year ago

Did you mean 2007 when Windows Vista was released"?

cmdtab• 1 year ago

There is no contrast. Wow! Why?

captainmuon2• 1 year ago

We have these brilliant high resolution displays, and these powerful, energy efficient GPUs that are always running and compositing frames like a game engine 120 times a second.

It's about time we start seeing more physicality in our user interfaces!

We can make things look convincingly like glass, or metal, or even materials that don't exist in reality. One reason for flat design is because it was the lowest common denominator and easy for devs to implement. If Apple makes it easy to implement this liquid glass stuff - Rectangle().background(.glass) or something - then it's going to be really successful.

kylehotchkiss3• 1 year ago

so what you're saying is that we need to resurrect skeuomorphism?

lukebuehler• 1 year ago

yes, I think this is exactly what's happening.

gaze• 1 year ago

I get the sense that the Scandinavian minimalism thing has worn too heavy on everyone and now we're taking a collective step back to explore things that are a bit more fun and maximalist. So yeah, maybe a little more skeuomorphism but done differently? That was a fun era!

wartijn_• 1 year ago

I would be happy with that. After years of using iOS with the current design it still takes me a few moments before I’ve found the Photos app with its meaningless icon that looks way too much like some other icons.

LoganDark• 1 year ago

Skeuomorphism in the sense of exactly mimicking existing physical interfaces probably mostly not, but skeuomorphism in the sense of using physically-inspired visual effects to add depth to a virtual interface I think so for sure. Liquid glass is so damn pretty.

Findecanor• 1 year ago

From one point of view, this design language is a type of skeuomorphism, by it mimicking pieces of rounded glass laid on top of one-other.

The problem with skeuomorphism in iOS' first design language was that resemblance to real-world objects was taken too far — at the expense of legibility. Users attributed affordances to virtual objects that they didn't have.

The problem with iOS 7's flatter interface was that the anti-skeumorphism went too far in the other direction, again at the expense of legibility. Users couldn't see what controls were supposed to do.

... And now the pendulum has swung back in the other direction, again too far, and missed the goal.

cosmotic4• 1 year ago

Just because we can doesn't mean we should. Using this new design language as an example, things are now harder to read, identify, and understand. That's a huge loss to productivity and ease of use.

dwayne_dibley• 1 year ago

Agreed. That should be the focus of any user interface.

avidphantasm• 1 year ago

Reminds me of when they added more transparency to the UI around Mac OS X 10.9 where they argued that it "helps you focus on what's important". Huh? By showing me what's behind what I'm trying to look at? The first thing I do when I setup a new machine is to go to accessibility settings and turn on "reduce transparency". Hoping there is a way to do something similar with this.

nlarew3• 1 year ago

things are now harder to read, identify, and understand

What makes you think that? Do you have a specific example from the keynote in mind?

There must be something since you've never actually used this design system yourself. Or is this just your pre-judgement?

paulcole3• 1 year ago

That's a huge loss to productivity and ease of use

Have you used it yet?

kergonath4• 1 year ago

Using this new design language as an example, things are now harder to read, identify, and understand

Wait until we have some real feedback to complain, at least.

nottorp2• 1 year ago

that are always running and compositing frames like a game engine 120 times a second

Which is complete idiocy if you ask me. Why update a static screen at 120 fps? Are our batteries too large?

satvikpendem4• 1 year ago

Why update a static screen at 120 fps?

Good thing it doesn't do that then, variable refresh rate displays that go down to 1 Hz are fairly standard now on phones as well as other displays.

kllrnohj• 1 year ago

They don't. GPU rendering only happens when something changes. Even composition only happens when something changes thanks to panel self refresh (this is independent of the more recent VRR that also lowers refresh rate when idle, this is a relatively small savings compared to the other two)

satvikpendem4• 1 year ago

It's about time we start seeing more physicality in our user interfaces!

It's actually quite resource intensive to have translucency, in many implementations across the web and mobile.

pzo4• 1 year ago

apple need to persuade people somehow to buy new iphone.

beAbU2• 1 year ago

Microsoft did glass with windows 7, maybe even vista. Can't remember.

Kinda old hat at this point tbh.

And just because we have all this powerful hardware, does not mean we need to waste it on physically accurate glass surfaces on UIs.

If this rolls out to all iDevices, how much energy (in other words CO2) will be expended worldwide on rendering things like this?

pzo4• 1 year ago

only if each iOS app experience wasn't worse with each release. SwiftUI apps feels much slower than UIKit. My iPhone 13 experience with latest iOS overall feels very sluggish to old iPhones. This design feels not bringing much benefits but only drawbacks - more energy wasted, slower performance on older iPhones (apple want you buy new phone) and IMHO is just worse UX.

snarf21• 1 year ago

Highly dynamic frames makes sense for an immersive game. It doesn't make sense when I'm trying to read my email or what the name of the song that is currently playing is.

WillieCubed• 1 year ago

This is the Jevons paradox [1] in full display here. It's much easier to take advantage of hardware to run software at 120 FPS, so why not?

And I agree about liquid glass being successful iff they make the developer tooling for this as easy as additional modifiers to components, or even the default for SwiftUI.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

noosphr• 1 year ago

It's about time we start seeing more physicality in our user interfaces!

I'm not sure if this is a joke or not.

We had that, it was called skeuomorphism: https://miro.medium.com/v2/da:true/resize:fit:1200/0*6DRkHp3...

Then we got rid of it because it looked too 2010 now we are bringing it back because flat looks too 2020.

pcurve3• 1 year ago

I don't mind physicality, but not glass. Please.

There are reasons why most controls are NOT made of glass in real life.

RollingRo113• 1 year ago

I mean probably because they would break, no? I think glass-looking buttons are great (think Sony's Dualsense controller, Xbox controllers, tbh many controllers have glass-ish buttons)

I think it's a nice aesthetic. It obviously needs some tuning (contrast, transparency, etc.), but the idea is nice! I've installed the beta, and it isn't as bad as it looks, just takes some getting used to.

I also theorize this may be some grand transition phase to prepare everyone for the visionOS future apple wants to happen, but that could just be a stretch.

9dev• 1 year ago

There are myriads of glass controls around you, just pay attention to it. From car interiors to elevator buttons, it's there.

Glas actually makes sense, given its an extension of the device's hull.

Gigachad8• 1 year ago

Probably the main reason is because they have ugly electronics behind them instead of pretty dynamic colors.

tsimionescu5• 1 year ago

By this token, why not add particle systems and fancy explosions to every button click? Why stick to squares or rounded squares etc, when you can use voxel shading to generate complex n-gons with thousands of edges?

The problem with all this - and 'liquid glass' as well - is that far from adding anything to the experience, they take away from it. They muddy and visually complicate what should be a visually clear and simple interface, one that gets out of your way as much as possible while allowing you to reach what you really care about - the content in your apps.

vijucat3• 1 year ago

One reason for flat design is because it was the lowest common denominator and easy for devs to implement.

The 3D buttons in Windows 98 (Start button, for example) must have be harder to develop due to the animation involved. Yet, that was perfectly fine on hardware much older than those on which flat UIs were developed. I think you are missing the main point, which is that designers maul designs every season exactly like in the fashion industry due to merely being employed to do so and feeling a need to produce something new all the time (, which is sub-optimal for the humans who have to bear the UX consequences, to say the least).

https://copy.sh/v86/?profile=windows98

meindnoch• 1 year ago

Looks awful to be honest.

w-hn• 1 year ago

Huh, this reminds me of the Photos app. Apple completely broke iOS Photos in the last update.

I really hope apps like Ente can step up and get better and native, offer desktop backup + sync both as well. But then there's always the chance that Apple will just find a way to shut them down. or reject their updates, just like they did in the past.

Anyway, I guess we'll have to wait and see what else they manage to screw up with this "move."

jakub_g• 1 year ago

iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS Tahoe 26, watchOS 26, and tvOS 26

Bumping from iOS 18 / macOS 15 etc. towards year-based naming, nice. I wish more projects followed this.

adrianmsmith2• 1 year ago

I liked it too with Windows 95, Windows 98 etc. Not sure why Microsoft dropped it tbh!

m3kw9• 1 year ago

First thing i thought is that they will have a setting to turn down the behind the last see through, the legibility is worse if you have a lot of graphics morphing wildly behind texts

socalgal22• 1 year ago

As someone who's getting old and whose eyesight is getting worse, this makes things strictly harder to read with lower contrast.

The 4th image on the page showing "All Of Me, Nao" is really hard for my eyes to read. I can't read "Nao" at all if I view that page on my iPhone. I can only read it on my Macbook Pro on a large external monitor.

I suppose there will be an accessibility setting to turn it off

viburnum• 1 year ago

I'm getting older too and the last thing I need is more blurriness.

seydor5• 1 year ago

i get enough natural, organic blurriness from my presbyopia after 40

paradite• 1 year ago

I hate things that are translucent. I find them very distracting, and hurt my eyes.

I hope Apple gives the option to turn this whole thing off.

I notice the borders now also have shadows / gradients due to reflection, that's also something I'd like to remove personally.

cheema332• 1 year ago

I hate things that are translucent.

Same here. I do not understand the fascination with making things harder to read and see.

xnx2• 1 year ago

This clearly wasn't in dogfooded long enough or the designers would've gotten sick of it themselves.

This is the kind of design that does great in a 15 minute user test, but is annoying 2 months on.

leakycap14• 1 year ago

I agree. Apple's been down this path before... From Mac OS 10.0 to 10.9, the march was steadily toward trimming back the excessive Aqua-ness.

Then we went totally flat in 10.10, and it was pretty awful then too. I'll stay on Sequoia until Apple irons this out in 2-3 future macOS versions, or maybe it's finally the year of the linux desktop... at least in my world.

Jordan-117• 1 year ago

I hate it. The distortions and refractions of every page element in the UI as you scroll (including moving in the opposite direction) would be maddening. I really hope there will be an option to turn this off, or at least tone it down.

whytaka2• 1 year ago

I only caught a glimpse but what I saw for iOS Safari concerns me.

The browser navigation overlaps the viewport. I wonder if this'll break websites/apps that anchor a menu to the bottom.

CleverLikeAnOx• 1 year ago

I think iOS safari already breaks bottom bars by having phone controls show up when a user taps near the bottom.

whytaka2• 1 year ago

This is mitigated by wrapping the main scrollable content in a container that has height: 100dvh and overflow: auto. It means that phone controls are always showing but it made a bottom anchored menu reliably static.

crooked-v2• 1 year ago

Thanks, I hate it.

Floating menu bars over the content at the bottom is a great way to make it impossible to actually use the bottom of web pages.

The "liquid glass" stuff, even in their handpicked promo screenshots, has functionally unreadable text and illegible controls.

The vanishing buttons are going to make app UIs even more obtuse and undiscoverable.

leakycap14• 1 year ago

With Save, Submit, Next, Continue, and other similar navigation at the bottom of the viewport, this is going to be very annoying for iPhone users

saratogacx2• 1 year ago

Floating widgets are endemic across all the platforms now. I see it on Google, MSFT, and now Apple applications. Content used to be king, now it is a wallpaper for the UI/UX team to dress as they please.

ricokatayama• 1 year ago

When Apple introduced the whole skeuomorphic analogy, they did it because they needed to make a new way of interacting with touch-based apps feel tangible. That seemed totally fair.

When Apple brought a spatial analogy to the Vision Pro, it also felt fair they were thinking in terms of volume and dimensions, after all, they were teaching people how to interact with a new reality.

I can even understand Apple wanting to unify their design approaches, but bringing the “liquid glass” look to everything feels like a massive step backward. The interface looks messy, clunky.

It feels like Apple is entering a design hell, and I don’t know how they’ll get out of it.

asciimov2• 1 year ago

I’m all for a new design esthetic, even if they have to iterate it a few times to improve usability.

kevin_thibedeau2• 1 year ago

Apple introduced the whole skeuomorphic analogy

IBM was doing it 10 years earlier.

glkindlmann• 1 year ago

It does indeed feel like a step backward - I was also weirdly reminded of the Forstall skeuomorphism era of UIs.

The video says: "It beautifully refracts light, and dynamically reacts to your movement, with specular highlights"; ugh, why? Why add dynamic==distracting high-frequency details that supply zero information?

The recent super flat UI aesthetic bugged me for awhile for its apparent lack of affordances, but when used consistently it made sense. Now it seems we still get zero affordances, but also visual noise.

Someone12343• 1 year ago

When Apple introduced the whole skeuomorphic analogy, they did it because they needed to make a new way of interacting with touch-based apps feel tangible.

Skeuomorphism was on the Apple Lisa in 1983, and they didn't invent it. Apple's first touch device wasn't until ten years later in 1993 in the Newton MessagePad. The MessagePad didn't really have "apps," that wasn't until like 2008 when it was added to the iPhone, but now we're twenty-five years after Apple's first usage of Skeuomorphism. The Xerox Star was in 1981 and had Skeuomorphic elements.

So I'm not really following what you're trying to say in that sentance.

beAbU2• 1 year ago

You are right, I believe skeuomorphism was basically the first approach for graphical user interfaces when they came out. The "save" icon being a floppy disk has been around for literal decades.

I can be argued that the Xerox Alto (1973) had skeuomorphic elements to it's GUI.

mrcwinn2• 1 year ago

You're comparing multi-touch technology to the experience of the MessagePad? Also, do you know a bunch of people who were big Xerox Starheads? It doesn't count if you don't have mass adoption.

Likewise, I'm not really following what you're trying to say in that sentence.

metadat• 1 year ago

It feels like Apple is entering a design hell, and I don’t know how they’ll get out of it.

Improvement is always only a single update away! Potentially..

thinkingemote2• 1 year ago

It's probably to train the users for augmented reality UI. We will probably all see some kind of floating transparent user interface over a camera background. That the "liquid" transparency is dynamic and can change depending on the thing underneath and the thing being shown seems to directly point to this.

nottorp2• 1 year ago

Can they fire all their designers and Cook?

And go back to Mac OS the most easily usable GUI?

I don't want to watch Avatar XXXVI when I pick up my phone to check my messages.

moralestapia6• 1 year ago

Cook added 2 trillion (more?) in market cap.

Cook stays.

mjburgess5• 1 year ago

He collected 2tr in rent

Someone12343• 1 year ago

I'm really showing off my age here, but it has been all down hill since skeuomorphic design; because the focus was primarily on usability and teachability as first-class concepts. Heck, companies were spending millions on usability research at the time, much of which was used.

I taught people to use computers in the 90s and early 2000s, and having those concepts matching to real world objects helped immensely. Recently I had to teach my kids to use a PC (they no longer teach that in "computers" at school, by the way, iPads only), and everything was arbitrarily designed without even internal rules/consistency let alone building on real-world metaphors.

You've also had this ongoing trend of content density getting consistency worse, and now Apple is accelerating a trend to make UI elements difficult to see/harm discoverability further. Liquid Glass is going to be a painful period, and all the clones that do it even worse are going to be pure hell.

whiteboardr3• 1 year ago

Attack of the clones, yes.

Just as visual design across the majority of digital touchpoints seems to have arrived at a mature level, this will unleash a giant wave of noise including gradients on text.

Brrr.

mrweasel6• 1 year ago

having those concepts matching to real world objects helped immensely

A lot of those real world objects no longer exists, or are less frequently used than their counterparts, so I sort of see why moving away from that design language makes sense.

I'll hold of judgement of "Liquid Glass" until I've seen and used, but I don't feel like it's necessary. It's certainly not "the biggest" design update ever. System 9 to MacOSX was still greater.

This isn't really Apples fault, but I also expect others to start implementing something similar, but badly. Apple do have a point that this is something that only Apple can do well, because you do need to ensure that hardware can keep up. We're going to see other attempt something similar, but it won't been nearly as polished.

Overall I still feel that Apple is trying to force to much functionality into the phone platform. It would be really lovely to have an iOS light, that does less and with a simpler UI/UX.

wavemode2• 1 year ago

A lot of those real world objects no longer exists, or are less frequently used than their counterparts, so I sort of see why moving away from that design language makes sense

This reasoning never made a ton of sense to me. Gen Z don't use devices with knobs and buttons anymore, therefore we should all design our interface elements to look like nothing in particular?

If you give someone young and tech savvy a digital UI, they will figure out how to use it. It's precisely the oldest and least tech savvy users for whom interface design is most important, as they are more like to get frustrated and quit your app. Why optimize for the young, then?

(I mean, it's a rhetorical question, as I already know the answer - the designers creating the interfaces are themselves young and tech savvy gen-Z'ers.)

overfeed• 1 year ago

A lot of those real world objects no longer exists

Yep. What would the modern equivalent of the save icon - a cloud or an generic IC representing the soldered-on SDD? Hard drives, floppies, or any other user-controlled storage devices are now out of fashion.

rollcat10• 1 year ago

[...] this is something that only Apple can do well, because you do need to ensure that hardware can keep up.

Yeah, about that.

When iPhone SE2 was first released (April 2020), it featured the A13 Bionic, which was the most powerful SoC Apple has had at the time (to be succeeded by A14 in iPhone 12 couple months later), and ran iOS 13.

Every succeeding iOS release, the phone felt a little more sluggish. Right now, by iOS 18: it sometimes takes half a minute to open the share sheet; misbehaving apps can make the phone almost too hot to touch, and can freeze the app switcher UI for 10+s; Safari takes 4s to "cold start" into about:blank; and so on. None of these are signs of CPU throttling, it's all just software. I almost can't wait for Apple to drop support for major releases - even if the current release is crap, the next one will be worse.

I pretty much expect last year's devices to start struggling with this new design after 2 releases.

zilti• 1 year ago

(they no longer teach that in "computers" at school, by the way, iPads only)

I swear, some decisionmakers deserve a brutal punch in their face. I don't even care anymore about being civil in such matters.

acheron• 1 year ago

Recently I had to teach my kids to use a PC (they no longer teach that in "computers" at school, by the way, iPads only)

The middle school here has a "computer applications" class that covers all that kind of thing. Definitely not iPads only.

pndy10• 1 year ago

This whole flat style fever which doesn't distinguish between active elements and informative text allowed to spread darkpattern tactics which lead to deploying adverse or even harmful changes for users. It also contributed to nullifying customisation under linux - looking exactly at you adwaita.

My age shows here as well and I'm not in any way excited about this design change at all. Suddenly Apple decided that this fancy acrylic glass animation for widgets, interface that says "look we aren't stagnant - we did something" will be enough to diverge attention from other problems. I sincerely doubt that it's gonna be.

This release feels like a return to transparency trend which we had somewhere around Vista and initial KDE Plasma releases.

data-ottawa• 1 year ago

I was initially excited as on paper it sounds like a fantastic throwback to the Aqua design, which I still think was fantastic.

From the preview so far I'm not excited.

I have to say app icons look nice (the borders make them pop just a bit more), the border highlights are clear without being loud, and elements like the dock look nice. The inactive button states actually look great – as shown in the Camera and Facetime screenshots – they actually do look like little glass buttons, which is good.

Where I have issue is when multiple of these glass elemenst are shown at once they fight for attention and it's persnally quite overwhelming for me. The image of the video player controls on iPhone and AppleTV are in my opinion awful and load, and that's especially where you want a quiet UI.

When the shape has a strong refractive index and that's where it becomes really noisy for me with the Safari and music tab bars being absolutely awful in my opinion.

It's a shame because I think if they kept the idea but dialed it down from 11 it could be fantastic.

andrekandre3• 1 year ago

  > Suddenly Apple decided that this fancy acrylic glass animation for widgets, interface that says "look we aren't stagnant - we did something"

like a lot of redesigns, its more about marketing and 'the new shiny' than anything else imo

jandrese• 1 year ago

IMHO skeuomorphic design had a few wins, but also plenty of losses. Sometimes the real world interface is just not as intuitive as it should have been.

But I'm 100% behind you on "make buttons look like buttons" and "don't hide functionality behind arbitrary gestures that you never tell the user". UI designers may hate menus these days, but they were so good for letting a user browse through looking for the thing they want. Search boxes are a good speed improvement, but should never be the only interface object because many times the user doesn't know exactly what they're looking for.

This is also why most voice assistants don't get used very much, there's no easily accessible list of phrases they know and they aren't smart enough to really understand what the person wants, so people end up using the one or two phrases they know the assistant can handle and forget about it otherwise.

ben_w5• 1 year ago

This is also why most voice assistants don't get used very much, there's no easily accessible list of phrases they know and they aren't smart enough to really understand what the person wants, so people end up using the one or two phrases they know the assistant can handle and forget about it otherwise.

Thank you for saying this, you've just made me realise they share all the problems of text adventures while having none of the excitement.

layer87• 1 year ago

I think we need a word for “buttons look like buttons”, as opposed to “the Contacts app looks like a real-world leather-cladded address book” skeuomorphism. I’m seeing “skeuomorphism” increasingly used for the former, where people mostly mean “not flat design”, whereas originally it meant only the latter.

bombcar5• 1 year ago

This is exactly the problem with Siri - if it was nothing but a vocal command line that I had to memorize exactly how to talk to it, and I could find a list of commands to learn, it'd be 1000x better.

keyringlight4• 1 year ago

I think one thing that is involved in this is conventions, and when you've learned one set of rules on how to communicate on one form of interface that it transfers to other applications on that interface. If there's certain ways to use graphical elements, gestures, console keywords/option flags, spoken keywords, while other applications have the freedom to do their own thing it should be seen as better not to diverge and reinvent the wheel (so each needs learning its own rules) too much without good reason.

ofcrpls• 1 year ago

I believe that new to computing populations in developing countries who were also new to literacy benefited a lot because of the shift away from skeuomorphic design paradigms because those real world object choices didn't always translate.

kstrauser• 1 year ago

it has been all down hill since skeuomorphic design

I strongly disagree. I don't mind if people like skeuomorphic graphics. Want to make the "play" button look like a 1987 tape deck? Not my thing, but everyone has different preferences. That's fine.

But I loathe, detest, hate, despise, skeuomorphic user interfaces. Remember when Calendar.app would only let you turn one month page at a time because that's how desk calendars work? How Podcasts looked like a reel-to-reel recorder and waste tons of screen space? Contacts app imitating the limitations of a physical black book because that's how real books work?[0]

If you like brushed metal or whatever, right on. Again, not my thing, but you do you! But I cannot abide the fake limitations that skeuomorphic design pushed onto software in the name of making apps work just like their physical equivalents. The UI on the magic boxes we're typing this on are limited only by our creativity. Please, please don't infect them with the real world's restrictions when it's not necessary!

[0] https://www.betalogue.com/2012/01/15/abook6-dumb/

artursapek• 1 year ago

Agreed. Use the medium’s capabilities! Don’t cripple it for the sake of familiarity.

tengbretson• 1 year ago

and all the clones that do it even worse are going to be pure hell.

This is my #1 take-away from this. At this point it seems pretty safe to assume that interfaces made by Apple will probably still be decent, in spite of this design philosophy.

The clones, however, are going going to take accessiblity to new lows.

90s_dev• 1 year ago

I think you have a romanticized revisionary memory of back then.

I went to school in the 90s and learned computers in school.

All they taught us was the basics. How to use Windows explorer. What files are and how to rename and delete and undelete them.

And some hypercard clone. Which barely taught us anything about computers except "they can do stuff you tell them to," which I guess was a valuable lesson?

radlad• 1 year ago

I've been hearing that kids do not understand files and hierarchal file systems due to cloud and iOS.

wodenokoto• 1 year ago

I taught people to use computers in the 90s and early 2000s, and having those concepts matching to real world objects helped immensely.

As I child of the nineties I was surprised to eventually learn that a file in a folder was a real thing and not only a computer concept.

pier25• 1 year ago

I like it a priori. Let's see how it holds up in practice.

dimal3• 1 year ago

Oh no. It looks like every button and menu is now a translucent layer, so that any noise from the background shows through and muddles the text. This seems like an accessibility nightmare.

Translucent layers generally make software unusable for me. In the video, I saw several instances that would be really really bad for me, where I’d be straining to understand the text. Looks really cool and futuristic though. Just like a movie. Big whoop.

I’m autistic, but this won’t only affect autistic people. A lot of people are going to have problems with this. I hope there’s a very prominent way to turn it off.

moralestapia6• 1 year ago

I'm not autistic and I don't like this upgrade, at all.

It looks so tacky.

coastalpuma2• 1 year ago

I agree, I think it extends to anybody who wants a calmer experience or has vision trouble or strain. I guess you can turn those options off but if the aesthetic appeal of the design is based on them then I assume we'll be getting a second-class version of it. I was already leaning towards switching to Linux for other reasons but I think this is the thing that finally pushes me there. I think optimizing for VisionOS is quite a bad idea from a UX POV, since they're two entirely different usecases. With augmented reality you need and want to see things in the background, whereas on other devices you don't. It's a fairly fundamental difference, and it's sad that they chose to go this way in my opinion.

coastalpuma2• 1 year ago

This is an existing and somewhat nitpicky issue, but it's also annoying how they specifically insist on rounded corners "because that matches all modern devices" in the announcement. Pretty much all third party external monitors don't, and even their latest top line laptops only have them at the top of the screen. So we're stuck with these dumb little triangles of background peeking out. It's kind of the "charging port on the bottom of the magic mouse" of MacOS.

fitsumbelay• 1 year ago

if you're switching to linux what device are you considering getting?

armchairhacker• 1 year ago

"Turning off" could just put solid light/dark under the glass. That would be decent-looking (not much different than before), accessible, and easy to implement.

jorvi• 1 year ago

To me it looks plain ugly, especially with all the bounces and transforms. Look at those sliders and toggles..

It's straight from the 2000s, with Linux users using Compiz and... Amethyst(?), stuffing their entire desktop full with gaudy transparency, transforms, jiggles and bounces.

More of a nit, but the sentence

  The new design extends across iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS Tahoe 26, watchOS 26, and tvOS 26 to establish even more harmony

is so ironic and funny. No one noticed how talking about "harmony" whilst having one single platform use a codename next to the version number just screams inattention to detail?

bsder2• 1 year ago

I think optimizing for VisionOS

Yeah, this really looks like an Apple temper tantrum of "Nobody wants to program for the Vision Pro? Fine. We'll MAKE you program the iPhone like the Vision Pro. Take that developers. Now get back to doing our job for us, you lazy slobs."

basisword4• 1 year ago

Apple takes accessibility more seriously than most. I would be shocked if there isn't a setting to instantly remedy this for people with any sort of vision issue.

rpgbr• 1 year ago

I bet there will be, but let not dismiss that good accessibility is when the UI is readable/accessible by default.

Anyway, I also bet they will tone this transparency stuff down a lot in the betas leading to the stable version in September. iOS 7 all over again…

TylerE4• 1 year ago

In some ways. But they have many failings. It’s completely Impossibly to make the gui larger, for instance.

cosmic_cheese7• 1 year ago

I’d bet there’s a toggle that dramatically increases opacity or eliminates transparency entirely while keeping the shading and gloss. If it exists I’m sure it’ll be popular.

burntalmonds• 1 year ago

I'm hoping that's true and there's still an option for a flat, minimal look.

layer87• 1 year ago

Probably, but they tend to also make for an ugly look, like the “Increase Contrast” setting in iOS. The other way around would be better: Have an accessible down-to-earth default, and a secondary “fancy visuals” mode for those who want that.

adastra229• 1 year ago

I hope it removes the shading and gloss too. Literally nothing in this design update is an improvement to accessibility.

vFunct3• 1 year ago

They say the text color adapts to the background based on contrast.

I'm just wondering if Apple is going to make matching CSS updates in Safari so web app developers have matching visuals.

reaperducer4• 1 year ago

I'm just wondering if Apple is going to make matching CSS updates in Safari so web app developers have matching visuals.

  color: contrast-color(rebeccapurple);

https://webkit.org/blog/16929/contrast-color/

pseudalopex10• 1 year ago

The problem is the background can be more than 1 color.

andrepd2• 1 year ago

It is, once again, designing interfaces based on "vibes" instead of science or principles or used feedback, optimising for looking good on screenshots and marketing materials and not for actual usability or user friendly was. With "vibes" here standing for whatever some SV asshole thinks it's cool and modern.

Alegria, flat design, pastel colors, or unholy amounts of whitespace. It's been the story of the last 15 years of UI design at least.

nlarew3• 1 year ago

Do you really think that Apple, of all companies, did a cross-platform UI refresh based entirely on vibes without considering user taste, usability, accessibility, etc?

You've already judged the system as only good for "looking good on screenshots and marketing materials" when you haven't even seen anything other than the announcement.

surgical_fire8• 1 year ago

, designing interfaces based on "vibes" instead of science or principles or used feedback

Well, this is what Apple does, and the reason I hate their devices with a passion. It always was style over substance.

rollcat10• 1 year ago

macOS (I'm still on Sonoma tho): System Settings -> Accessibility -> Display -> Reduce Transparency. (I also recommend Reduce Motion, but YMMV - some animations are really helpful.)

iOS: Settings -> Accessibility -> Display & Text Size -> Reduce Transparency.

You're welcome.

kccqzy• 1 year ago

Yeah I'm pretty sure that setting has been there since Yosemite. That was the version that first prominently featured blurred translucency. (The transparency in earlier versions like Mavericks was really subtle and would not need such a setting: see for yourself in this image found by Googling https://i0.wp.com/morrick.me/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/001-....)

WhyNotHugo5• 1 year ago

You can also disable animations on iOS.

When switching between screens, there’s just a long pause instead of the animation. These pauses drive me crazy, it’s simply not possible to configure the device to be responsive.

robocat• 1 year ago

Thanks.

Transparency confuses me regularly - and I then waste cycles trying to understand why a particular heading has a strange colour before I work out it is bleeding through from some unobvious background thing.

dimal3• 1 year ago

Everyone affected by this will know to look for those deeply nested setting, right? Or will the 70 year old with bad eyesight just stop being able to use their phone? Or use it a lot less, or be frustrated and stressed by it? A lot of people don’t bother fiddling with their settings and just take what they’re given.

I’m not just thinking of myself here. I’m concerned that a lot of people who don’t consider themselves disabled will be disabled by this.

matja• 1 year ago

Going from the ratio of adjectives on the page, it is 2.5 times less functional than beautiful.

austinl• 1 year ago

This is also likely a performance nightmare. Funny that they mention that "new hardware has enabled us to..." which means that this will perform poorly on old devices.

At a previous company, we were forbidden from using translucency (with a few exceptions) because of the performance cost of blending. There are debugging tools we'd use fairly often to confirm that all layers were opaque.

c-hendricks• 1 year ago

These transparency effects have been in macOS, ipadOS, iOS, and tvOS for years though?

slt20217• 1 year ago

these performance hungry "improvements" are forcefully introduced to legitimately slow down older devices and force the device refresh across the user base.

I have been using 8 year old iPhone just fine, but features like these over time will make the experience slower and slower and slower, until I am forced to refresh my iphone

Synaesthesia• 1 year ago

Modern iOS and Mac devices have plenty of GPU power for a shader effect. They already do one with the translucent blue.

Macha• 1 year ago

Meh, Vista laptops could run lots of translucency fine (well as long as they were actualy Vista era laptops and not just XP era laptops with Vista installed)

nikeee2• 1 year ago

Wirth's law is an adage on computer performance which states that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law

jmrm• 1 year ago

I think brand most recent iPhones are ridiculously powerful for their average use, so I don't think this would be an issue.

For older models, on the other hand, it would be an issue, and will put pressure to people to buy a new one.

WhyNotHugo5• 1 year ago

Windows Vista introduced this same concept. Performance was awful unless you had compatible graphics acceleration. 20 years later, I think most devices should be fine, especially Apple devices.

ricardobeat3• 1 year ago

Unlikely. Frosted glass blur was introduced almost twelve years ago in iOS 7, and was supported all the way down to the iPhone 4. Many apps like control center have used a full screen blur without any performance issues for a long time.

Apple at the time created their own 'approximate gaussian blur' algorithm specifically to enable this, and it ran crazy fast on devices where a simple gaussian blur would barely achieve double digit FPS. Even if this 'liquid glass' effect is heavier to compute, on the hardware we have today it will be a negligible performance concern.

cryptonector• 1 year ago

Funny that they mention that "new hardware has enabled us to..." which means that this will perform poorly on old devices.

They're going to backport this? I seriously doubt it.

RollingRo113• 1 year ago

Currently replying from my iPhone 16 pro (granted, not old by any means) on the iOS 26 dev beta. MOST things actually feel smoother/snappier than iOS 18. Safari is a joy to use from a performance perspective.

It’s in beta so ofc I’m getting a ton of frame hitches, overheating, etc. but my summarized initial thoughts are “it’ll take some getting used to, but it feels pretty fast”

raydev• 1 year ago

this will perform poorly on old devices

I don't know how long you've been following Apple but with previous "high cost on old hardware" features they just disabled them for old hardware.

Apple loves their battery life numbers, they won't purposefully ship a UI feature that meaningfully reduces them. Now bugs that drop framerates and cause hangs, they love shipping those.

drob5182• 1 year ago

These modern chips have so much graphics processing capability, I think they just throw the problem at the hardware and let it do its thing.

david-gpu• 1 year ago

At a previous company, we were forbidden from using translucency (with a few exceptions) because of the performance cost of blending.

I imagine this was on mobile devices.

Blending was relatively expensive on GPUs from Imagination Technologies and their derivatives, including all Apple GPUs. This is because these GPUs had relatively weak shader processors and relied instead on dedicated hardware to sort geometry so that the shader processor had to do less work than on a traditional GPU.

Other GPUs vendors rely more on beefier shader processors and less on sorting geometry (e.g. Hierarchical-Z). This turned out to be a better approach in the long term, especially once game engines started relying on deferred shading anyway, which is in essence a software-based approach that sorts geometry first before computing the final pixel colors.

nyarlathotep_• 1 year ago

At a previous company, we were forbidden from using translucency (with a few exceptions) because of the performance cost of blending. There are debugging tools we'd use fairly often to confirm that all layers were opaque.

I feel like a few years back when I still used an Intel macbook i noticed an increase in battery life and less frames dropping (like during 'Expose' animations) by disabling transparency in Accessibility settings.

I think this was after the BIg Sur update.

skhr06802• 1 year ago

Translucency being a main feature of Mac OS X is decades old at this point. I remember a magazine article touting it as an advantage over the upcoming release of Windows XP!

hombre_fatal2• 1 year ago

This reminds me of disabling the Windows Vista translucent UI to claw back performance on my crappy Gateway laptop in uni.

illiac7863• 1 year ago

Interestingly, in iOS 18, suppressing transparency (there’s a setting for it) makes performance worse, not better. The UI lags significantly more with transparency disabled. I expect it will be the same with iOS 26: there will be setting to reduce the transparency (which I find highly distracting) but it will make performance actually worse…

arvinsim2• 1 year ago

This is also likely a performance nightmare. Funny that they mention that "new hardware has enabled us to..." which means that this will perform poorly on old devices.

Not sure if it is planned obsolescence but it certainly is an upsell to upgrade.

thenaturalist6• 1 year ago

Not autistic, but this is just so weird.

Why would you design readability and visibility to depend on chaotic, highly varied and probably sometimes bad underlying backgrounds?

I fail to see any systematic approach/ consistent design language at play here.

Let's hope this does not survive for long.

georgebcrawford3• 1 year ago

What does autism have to do with it?

ultrarunner• 1 year ago

I’ve noticed a recurring theme on iOS where interactions intended for an app get trapped by the OS (especially multi-window interactions on iPad). The OS is less and less a foundation to support what you actually want, and more the product itself. If the actual content of the phones matters less than the fact that iOS itself is “the latest” then this makes perfect sense and is in line with the general momentum over the past several years.

delfinom2• 1 year ago

I fail to see any systematic approach/ consistent design language at play here.

O no, there is a systematic approach.

1. Bosses in UI division get promotions & raises for their new implementation of shiny

2. Marketing guys get to use their bird brains to promote shiny

3. Apple UX guys get to have their med prescriptions renewed

thesuitonym2• 1 year ago

I'd argue that it doesn't even look that cool or futuristic. Kind of looks like Windows 7.

That said, Windows 7 had an option to turn off all the translucency, so hopefully Apple ripped that idea, too.

iaaan• 1 year ago

Completely agree, takes me back to the days of Compiz Fusion, wavy windows and fire trails.

SirMaster2• 1 year ago

There has been a reduce transparency option in iOS and it has this effect on the new OS.

https://preview.redd.it/zzxh77iv906f1.png?width=2358&format=...

kmfrk• 1 year ago

Ever since we didn't use bolder text for bright text on dark backgrounds (dark mode) to keep with typographical principles, it looks like we're doubling down on the readability sins.

Surely anyone who's fiddled with the caption background opacity on their TV or video player knows this is a mess?

Would have been nice for someone to explain why we're getting Windows Aero[1] for main content and not just bezels.

I don't think this design language is mutually exclusive with readability, it actually looks really cool in many ways; I just can't fathom why the examples in the presentation seemed good enough to show.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Aero

WhyNotHugo5• 1 year ago

I’m bothered by how swaywm leaks the background into transparent gaps in windows, but I should be thankful tbf— macOS is just another level of nightmare entirely.

camillomiller• 1 year ago

they will not. Apple has accessibility features for all of the use cases and surely for this as well.

ricardobeat3• 1 year ago

There is a 'Reduced transparency' mode which you can enable in system settings. Safe to assume this will still exist in the new OS versions.

This will be a massive improvement in usability over flat design, which made UIs only learnable by trial and error.

layer87• 1 year ago

I don’t see a lot changing about the problem of labels and active controls still being hard to distinguish, and the like.

theodric• 1 year ago

I'm sure they will continue to allow disabling transparency in accessibility settings, given that the current OS version has transparency throughout which can already be so disabled.

highwaylights• 1 year ago

Ironic that it's the 20th anniversary of this other design masterpiece:

https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Scree...

I don't know that a redesign was called for at all. I guess they needed to show something if Siri still isn't ready, but this is just not it.

I'd have personally hoped for them to beef up iCloud+ but I know it doesn't sell devices to the general user.

tshaddox3• 1 year ago

I guess they needed to show something if Siri still isn't ready, but this is just not it.

This certainly is not that. Like it or not, a huge multi-OS redesign is not something you rush out for a keynote because your first choice didn't pan out at the last minute.

srg0• 1 year ago

That's probably driven by some kind of an AR headset. AR can't properly render solids, so it is stuck with having everything transparent. Now it won't look worse than everything else.

dawnerd• 1 year ago

Their existing glass effect is distracting enough.

lbotos• 1 year ago

iOS currently has "Reduce Transparency" in Accessibility settings. I suspect they will have some sort of similar feature across devices. What will it look like... that's the real question.

crazygringo3• 1 year ago

I think it's going to look alright on iOS/iPadOS where apps are inherently full-screen and the "background images" are really "foreground content" where you do kind of want the controls to "recede".

On the other hand, I can already tell I'm going to despise this on macOS. I always work with windows maximized on my laptop, because I just want to concentrate on the document I'm editing, or code I'm writing, and have maximum space for that. And the past couple of versions of macOS by default make your menu bar a weird pale purple or pink or green that is hugely distracting because it's a blurred image of your desktop. Fortunately you can turn that off with the "Reduce Transparency" accessibility option, which I do.

But the idea that people using Macs want to always being seeing some colorful desktop image around the edges and at the top just seems bizarre to me. iPhones and iPads are more for consuming, so this makes more sense. And within apps on Macs this seems like it'll be fine. But I hate that it doesn't seem designed to let me "tune out" the desktop image while I use an app. It's taking existing translucency and just making it worse...

dzhiurgis• 1 year ago

So change the background to solid color then.

I used to like solid background, but lately screens got so good that it makes sense to put something up.

pseudalopex10• 1 year ago

Background meant anything behind. Not wallpaper.

https://imgur.com/a/AEEj5w1

treetalker• 1 year ago

It's not a layer … it's a new material

oftden• 1 year ago

I agree that these changes are distracting. I don’t want effects that change things as I move it. I want fewer distractions and don’t want things all over the place.

I liked webpages in the 1990s before the blink and marquee tags. I wasn’t excited by skeuomorphic design, but it was at least fun. Then there was flat blocky design which really sucked. Then that was undone by putting curves back in, and it was ok. Then people started adding a shit ton of empty space everywhere which was the first time when Millennials started f-ing up design. I still blame them today because they’re still the most opinionated and make terrible, TERRIBLE design decisions. I don’t think I’ll ever be happy again with interface design. It’s super f-d.

pbreit• 1 year ago

Seems like they could not choose between flat and not flat.

diabllicseagull• 1 year ago

I'm on the same boat. The specularity around edges don't match the refraction patterns and it throws me off every time. Somehow they thought this wouldn't affect readability of whatever button or panel it's applied to. They also use the specular bits as a border that's also so uneven depending on which direction light hits from. I noticed that some of the dark panels had almost no borders at the lower right corner.

Another bit I'd like to pick on is the speed at which transparent context bubbles spring out. Waiting for a panel to bounce back and forth so that you know where to put your finger next is so bad as a UX choice that I'm losing confidence in Apple.

From a visual point of view, there is now flat design mixed with this voluminous transparent design which is a weird combination of skeuomorphic and abstract designs in one. I really don't know what they were thinking.

MonkeyIsNull• 1 year ago

I’m autistic, but this won’t only affect autistic people. A lot of people are going to have problems with this. I hope there’s a very prominent way to turn it off.

How can that possibly be? Didn't he say it will: "bring joy and delight to _every_ user experience"

That means YOU as well. No way he could over-selling something. Inconceivable.

steve-atx-76002• 1 year ago

Apple has historically been above average in terms of considering usability. So, I think seeing this new design as being asinine is not an unexpected opinion.

sgarland• 1 year ago

Accessibility aside, I don't see the appeal in this design. I find the current design quite pleasant and usable. Translucent 3D text sounds like teenage-me messing around in Photoshop in the early 2000s.

Gigachad8• 1 year ago

The new glass design feels fresh and playful. Like a more refined luxury version of Frutiger Aero. The current design is functional, but it feels pretty stale and mundane after years.

Theodores• 1 year ago

Apple know their customers and what they like.

I am actually Apple-phobic, a diehard linux user and incapable of doing simple tasks on Apple products. However, I think they have got a winner here. Although people talk of Vista Aero, it is more sophisticated than that, and, when this rolls out, Android will look distinctly old fashioned and low status, even if it is better as far as accessibility. I like what they have done here, even if it is not for me.

MetaMonk• 1 year ago

Haven't been able to turn it off yet. It's so awful looking and distracting, even with "reduce transparency" and "reduce motion" enabled. I actually think these settings are making it stutter more. It's definitely slower than iOS 18.

hartator• 1 year ago

accessibility nightmare.

It’s also annoying, slow you down, and anyway useless if you don’t have a physical issue with them.

lurking_swe6• 1 year ago

i think apple has historically always shipped their products with plenty of accessibility settings. Even today it’s possible to easily increase contrast, reduce transparency, reduce animations, and way more on ios.

i’m not too worried, but let’s see. The new design is super ugly though.

pxc• 1 year ago

This seems like an accessibility nightmare.

One of the accessibility features included in macOS for visually impaired people lets you reduce transparency for exactly this reason.

kelseydh• 1 year ago

The "liquid glass" design changes shown by Apple look mostly like slight tinkering around the edges of how widgets look/feel. Way less of a design change than the move to flat design was.

solfox4• 1 year ago

Yes, knowing Apple, this has probably been in development for years and seen a million internal iterations.

snowwrestler• 1 year ago

There will undoubtedly be optional low-transparency and high-contrast modes, just as there are in iOS now.

Apple is pretty good on accessibility but sometimes it does involve changing some settings.

DidYaWipe• 1 year ago

Yep, nailed it. This is such regressive, ignorant junk. I mean... WTF? Welcome to the failed "transparent UI" fad of two decades ago. Apple tried to revive this trash a few years ago, but then seemed to back off (or maybe I just disabled it)... and now this?

Even for the current sorry state of Apple's design regime, this is disappointing. It's way beyond a squandering of desperately-needed-elsewhere engineering resources; it's a dated-looking degradation of usability (and potentially performance).

Depressing.

billti• 1 year ago

Yeah. On Windows some apps (the new Terminal) used to have the opacity set to 0.9 or something by default. First thing I did was set it to 1.0. Having the background bleed through is distracting for no real value.

I’m usually a big fan of Apple design and UX. Any change faces some initial resistance, but this is first real “Ugh, hard no” reaction I can recall after seeing some of those.

cheema332• 1 year ago

Same same. And yes, I hate the translucency in Windows terminal as well and immediately turned it off. I do not understand the insanity of turning these things on by default.

A "hard no" is where I am with this "improvement".

idk1• 1 year ago

There is, they outline it in this video. It looks like there are three ways to turn it off: high contrast, reduced motion, and frostier glass. So it looks like there's just a way to have a full basic icon with just the icon and the outline and a white background.

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2025/219/

xp84• 1 year ago

PSA: High Contrast mode on MacOS, incidentally, destroys theming on Microsoft Edge (I know, I’m a weirdo who uses Edge on Mac). I use theming to differentiate between several browser profiles. For months I thought Edge had decided they wanted the themes to be ultra lame and subtle, but it was my usage of that setting that broke it.

Besides that huge dealbreaker though, HC mode is amazing for people like me who think UIs should be clear, obvious, and functional first rather than “elegant” and pretty as the main priority.

keepamovin2• 1 year ago

The future is translucent tablets ( smart glass pads ). It's not about what this UI is - it's about where it's going. This is the UI to bridge to the next hardware modality and begin to train people to prepare for (at first) HUDs everywhere, then smartglass and holoprojective displays.

Anamon2• 1 year ago

What the heck would I want translucent displays for? To be able to increase my screentime even more? And have a harder time reading stuff when I do?

CarVac• 1 year ago

The translucent blur is... alright. The refracting edges look incredibly distracting for me.

swah• 1 year ago

Someone put the Windows phone screen against this design, with opaque colorful blocks and clear text - and I was like "yep, I wish we go back to that. That is the future."

bandoti2• 1 year ago

It’s going to be really interesting to see how this UI paradigm pans out. I think this captures a shift toward the extreme in responsive, fluid, convergent, whatever-you-want-to-call-it, design.

We’ve had books/scrolls for thousands of years, laid out in beautiful proportion, and now it has all melted in the oven!

SirMaster2• 1 year ago

Fortunately you can turn off the transparency in accessibility options.

https://preview.redd.it/zzxh77iv906f1.png?width=2358&format=...

tempodox3• 1 year ago

+1. I wish they would concentrate more on bug fixes instead of adding “features” you have to turn off to make the OS usable.

hombre_fatal2• 1 year ago

Also, Apple is already bad at translucent UX as if it were beneath their consideration.

If there's a bright blue background behind the control panel buttons (like the wifi button), you can't tell if it's blue because it's on or because it's off but the background is blue.

Slide down the control panel when the blue weather app is open to kinda see what I mean.

qn9n• 1 year ago

I imagine they overdid just in case and will receive enough feedback to dial back the translucency just a tad.

garyrob• 1 year ago

I find transparency annoying enough that if it becomes more prevalent on MacOS in a way I can't turn off, I may switch to Linux for that reason alone.

mdasen• 1 year ago

You can turn off the current transparency (just search for transparency in settings)

charamis• 1 year ago

Really wish that this sets a trend like iOS 7 did and move forward from this bland flat design that exists everywhere

ksec5• 1 year ago

It seems the "Universal Design" across platforms was the only thing new in this WWDC. There are lots of little Apple Intelligence features sprinkled everywhere, but most of them dont interest me.

I guess we will have to wait for State of Union.

nytesky• 1 year ago

I like the clear transparent apps and widgets. I feel like that’s less stimulating like running my phone on grayscale. Mostly just a pretty picture with tools if I seek them out.

pfortuny• 1 year ago

What is the purpose of the windshield in a car?

What is the purpose of text in a screen?

Does something really help that purpose? Anything that does not is WRONG.

satvikpendem4• 1 year ago

This is essentially Microsoft's Fluent UI [0], right down to the translucent glass rectangular prisms (not to say that there haven't been glassmorphic UI systems since forever, including Apple's own Aqua).

[0] https://www.youtube.com/@microsoftdesign/videos

koiueo• 1 year ago

You people are funny, trying to reason about readability and distractions. Go drink your americanos in your skinny jeans (or whatever is the most recent thing falling out of fashion in favor of the next big thing).

Apple products are gonna be perceived as the icon of the beauty and usability regardless of the actual qualities. Be sure, Xiaomi and Huawei (and probably even Samsung) will try mimicking the newest Apple design language. Like it was before with crippled keyboards, enormous touchpads, glossy reflective screens, notches, etc..

dogleash• 1 year ago

Apple products are gonna be perceived as the icon of the beauty and usability regardless of the actual qualities.

ofc. but people don't like it when you say the quiet part out loud.

julienfr112• 1 year ago

something funny would be a kind of Erotic sake cups, when a safe image reveal something completely different when transformed by the the glass upon it.

hotmeals• 1 year ago

Only Apple could call an Aero-esque water based design "Liquid Glass".

quyleanh• 1 year ago

More distractions, making the text difficult to read, and increased resource consumption from rendering these unnecessary animations.

clueless• 1 year ago

so let's use up those extra CPU cycles and update the UI to slow everything down again.

plainOldText2• 1 year ago

This looks horrible to be honest.

This new liquid glass will lead to liquid brain, because my brain will be melting trying to process all that visual mess daily.

Now of course, I'll have to experience this new design in practice to be sure, but judging from the screenshots it looks really hard on the eyes. Hopefully they'll allow the translucency to be customized.

Apple had a good run, I've genuinely enjoyed using their platforms daily, but I'm afraid they're dropping the ball now.

I guess on a long enough timeline, every company is bound to disappoint. It's hard to get it right, consistently.

JKCalhoun2• 1 year ago

I agree that it seems to be a move toward lower contrast. I prefer higher contrast.

vFunct3• 1 year ago

I like it a lot. Reminds me of the OG Mac OS X Aqua theme, except a more reactive/dynamic version of it to account for accessibility.

Refreshing counter to the brutalist styles that were trending. The problem with brutalist styles is that they tend to be busy, which becomes confusing and unintuitive to new users.

This seems like it would help separate elements for easier focus, to make things more obvious.

yuehhangalt4• 1 year ago

Apple learned a lot of lessons with Aqua and eventually dialed back the translucency. Unfortunately, they seem to have forgotten those lessons.

kergonath4• 1 year ago

Reminds me of the OG Mac OS X Aqua theme

What I find surreal is that most comments are exactly like those back in the day, too! (Pinstripes, what were they thinking? Glossiness is distracting! Where's my platinum? This is a stupid toy!)

Anyway, this will be refined and fine tuned and we will all be fine.

pzo4• 1 year ago

Same. I was kind of slowly preparing myself that I might be switching to android and it seems this might be the final straw. Will wait until Sept to see how new iphone and google pixels will look like but most likely I will do the transition (even though been developing for iOS for more than 10 years.

plainOldText2• 1 year ago

Sure, it's reasonable to consider a switch. But while Android devices have come a long way in terms of physical design, capabilities, UI/UX, etc, out of the box Apple still offers a more comprehensive, user friendly and privacy focused security solution: lockdown, tighter controls of hardware/software integration, etc. So there's that.

leakycap14• 1 year ago

I've tried to escape the walled garden to Android before, and I've given up. No matter which company's phone or what version of Android, it didn't work well as a phone, alarm, and reliable device that I use for stuff like my home security. Things broke on Android like clockwork, and the clock didn't work.

The latest Google pixel devices are specifically blocked from using Wyze devices right now due to a typo in the pixel's configuration files, for example. Stuff like that happens constantly with any phone in the super fragmented Android ecosystem.

PKop2• 1 year ago

The Pixel 9 with Android 16 QPR Beta 1 is working smooth right now, and looks great. Very polished overall. I would recommend Pixel if you go the Android route as Google's implementation is imo the highest quality compared to others'

rollcat10• 1 year ago

I think it's time for me to look back at Linux.

(*Looks at Gnome.*)

Hm, they're getting worse faster than Apple does. Never mind.

lyu072823• 1 year ago

The damage Gnome does to the reputation of Linux is surreal

pseudalopex10• 1 year ago

Did you look at KDE?

christophilus• 1 year ago

I use Niri, but I like Gnome. How are they getting worse?

cayley_graph• 1 year ago

I like Gnome. I prefer my desktop to be designed around one unifying philosophy instead of a hodgepodge of customizations which don't work well together. The Gnome team has done pretty well at avoiding the classic Linux issues with the latter, though it doesn't win them any favors from people who would've been using KDE or some tiling WM anyway.

yuehhangalt4• 1 year ago

Agreed. I've used Macs since 1986 and at one point worked for Apple. I used to make the same jokes about Linux on the desktop as everyone and yet I see myself seriously considering it more every day.

username2233• 1 year ago

I never worked for Apple, but I've used mostly Macs since System 6, and am feeling the same frustration with their software. Unfortunately their laptops are way better than anything else out there, so I'm forced to tolerate it. I ran Linux on a PowerBook for awhile, but it was janky, and it seems like that has not changed. OS X is still basically Unix, so I'll go on running the Unix stuff I need, and turn off the lickable distractions to the extent I can.

simgt• 1 year ago

I recently switched to Linux Mint on a makeshift PC and it feels a bit like going back to Snow Leopard. It's snappy, pleasant to look at and has all the necessary modern features I need. Very surprisingly and unlike everything I experienced before on Linux desktops, it all worked out of the box (plus a few extra clicks on a GUI to get some proprietary drivers).

prashnts• 1 year ago

Reduce Transparency in Accessibility settings removes the glass effect, but I believe has been updated to be closer to the translucent effects in current iOS.

stock_toaster• 1 year ago

I find the "reduce motion" toggle to be a more pleasant experience on iOS as well.

thepryz2• 1 year ago

It's sad when so many settings people use to make Apple's products better/more usable seem to always be hidden in Accessibility. I'm sure that says something.

crazygringo3• 1 year ago

trying to process all that visual mess daily.

That's exactly the thing, that's what I don't get. Apple's brand is all about simplicity and visual clarity.

This is a visual mess. We've gone from clean delineated color areas to... slop?

I really expected them to use subtle glass and shadow effects, but with minimal translucency. Heck, a lot of this is barely even translucency, more like transparency.

I'm really surprised, because I didn't expect Apple to produce a design language that so easily turns into seemingly visual chaos.

bigyabai14• 1 year ago

I didn't expect Apple to produce a design language that so easily turns into seemingly visual chaos.

I don't understand how anyone can act surprised anymore. Seriously. The App Store is an absolute mess, and Apple seems to be okay with it because it makes them money. Same goes for Apple News, Apple Music, AppleTV+, Apple iCloud, Apple Fitness+ and Apple Arcade. To say nothing of the quality of these apps (for their benefit), it's brand dilution. Am I supposed to believe that MacOS and iOS are spared from Apple's attention being divided into a hundred pieces? Am I supposed to expect them to invest in high-quality tentpole software when their logo is the only thing required to make people spend money?

At some point, consumers have to distinguish between the identity that Apple markets to them, and what Apple's actual impact is on the carelessness of modern design. People have been saying this since 2013, Apple's new design languages aren't even close to the HIGs from the Macs of yore. Liquid Glass has been destined to fail ever since, it's an iteration on iOS7 and not an interface people actually like.

xmddmx• 1 year ago

Even the non transparent stuff looks bad - a plain Finder window: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/macos-tahoe-26-0-beta-1...

bigyabai14• 1 year ago

Here I was, thinking it couldn't get any worse than Big Sur like a fucking moron.

runlevel12• 1 year ago

Oh dear...

That's worse than I expected.

Clamchop• 1 year ago

Did they "squircle" the window? I've been enjoying the look of the liquid glass thing but this looks unserious, toy-like.

jmb993• 1 year ago

Apple had a good run, I've genuinely enjoyed using their platforms daily, but I'm afraid they're dropping the ball now.

I haven't owned a (personal) Mac since High Sierra. The UI had been going downhill since Yosemite in my opinion, but gradually; it took a nosedive with Big Sur (I think that's the one that introduced all the SwiftUI apps?) to the point that I realized I probably wouldn't own another Mac until they figured out that a Mac is a computer, not an iPad. Looks like they still haven't yet.

That being said, I believe that 10.5-10.9 is probably somewhere close to what peak computing looks like. It's not perfect but it makes sense to some degree. I had no problem teaching people of any technological skill level how to use Snow Leopard or Lion; and not just getting by, properly becoming competent computer users. On the other hand, I've been watching my parents (both of whom have been using computers since the late 70s) slowly lose the ability to "understand" both modern macOS and iOS, and are more and more frequently struggling to find old and new features and functionality (like being able to see all of their emails on their phone).

It's disappointing really. For a while I couldn't stand using Windows and regular Linux desktop distros were too fiddly to be useful, and Mac really was the best option for "I just want to do X" with the least friction. Nowadays, Windows sucks for a whole host of reasons, and the Linux desktop is more usable but still Linux, and apparently Mac has decided to shoot itself in the head. If my grandmother asked me what computer to replace her Mac Mini with if it died right now, I really don't think I'd have an answer.

shayway• 1 year ago

Visually very reminiscent of Win7 Aero, yet the 'unified' approach plus low information density is much more Win8 Metro (with some modern/Apple tweaks). A charming era of design but not one that deserves revisiting in such a big way.

ksec5• 1 year ago

The whole thing is Windows Vista Aero Glass and iOS 7 all over again. Repeating all the SAME mistakes with 3D translucent design.

Right now I really want skeuomorphism back.

Much like iOS 7 they will have to spend another 2 - 3 years "tweaking" or basically walking back some of these design decisions.

I believe the problem is when Tim Cook decided to merge "Design" under one umbrella. So the Design team now takes over both Hardware and Software Design when they kicked Scott Forstall out. A lot of Apple's UX went down hill from there.

laserbeam• 1 year ago

It’s not “mistakes”, it’s fashion. The cool thing about fashion is you can never run out of innovation. If something has been out of fashion for 15 years you can bring it back! It makes it seem like everything is forever changing and new. I’ll bet your ass that material design will be all the rave in 10-15 years or so.

withinboredom• 1 year ago

material design ... spsh, we call it substence design.

rweichler4• 1 year ago

When Cook became CEO, all of this was inevitable. I used to blame Jobs for not picking Forstall as his successor, but it recently dawned on me that it was never his choice to begin with. The board probably crowded him out again, just like the Sculley situation.

In a month Apple will have been on autopilot for longer than Jobs was at the company during the 1997-2011 heyday. Jobs became iCEO in September 1997. After 167 months passed, he left in August 2011. It has been 166 months since then.

m33pm33p• 1 year ago

Wow hard to believe it’s been that long but really puts this era at Apple in perspective

hn_throwaway_993• 1 year ago

Literally everything I've ever read about Forstall and his behavior post-Jobs makes me think he would have been an awful CEO. It just sounded like he was "Game of Thrones-ing" from the second Cook became CEO. E.g. it was widely reported that Ive and Forstall could barely stand to be in the same meeting with each other. I may have some criticisms in my mind about some of Ive's design post-Jobs, but I don't think I have ever heard other folks be critical of Ive's leadership style or personality - everything I've read about him uses words like "inspirational", "remarkable", "calm", etc. I've read tons of criticism about Forstall.

eddythompson804• 1 year ago

Man, if Apple 2011-2025 is "on autopilot" I wish I was on autopilot like that. Can you give me a company that wasn't? I'm curious what your bar is exactly.

ksec5• 1 year ago

Cant believe Tim Cook is about to be CEO longer than Steve Jobs. Thank You for that perspective.

On the other hand Steve Jobs has accomplished far more within the same time frame compared to Tim Cook with far fewer resources. I really like the analogy of "autopilot".

I do think Steve could push Forstall as his successor, but didn't because Forstall wasn't ready as CEO. Tim Cook was a much better choice at the time as they have to compete with Android and they need market share ( in terms of user not sales ) to not repeat the same mistake with Mac vs PC. Tim should have mediate between Forstall and Ive instead of picking sides. The restructuring created power vacuum for Craig and Eddy Cue to pick up. With Crag we end up with OS that is constantly resume / features release driven and Eddy Cue which we end up with Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Fitness, Apple Arcade. None of them in my opinion are good decisions or great products / services.

BitwiseFool2• 1 year ago

I suspect ego played a part in Steve Jobs selecting Tim Cook as his successor. Famous CEO's tend to pick a successor that is less charismatic and more risk-averse than they were. CEO's that retire 'honorably', so to speak, don't want someone who will outshine them or make sweeping changes to the brand or the company's organization. In other words, they want to preserve their legacy.

Tim Cook is exactly this kind of executive. While he has done an incredible job with leading the business and operational side of Apple, the public doesn't give credit for that sort of thing. Now imagine if Steve appointed someone just like himself and the business fumbled. Steve would hate for his legacy to be tarnished by appointing a brash successor.

All that being said, for what it's worth, I don't think anyone could have lived up to Steve's reputation. It is quite unfair to Tim Cook that he will always be compared to what people think Steve Jobs would have done.

pndy10• 1 year ago

Jobs pick him because he knew he's gonna to handle company's financials good once he's gone. My partner says Cook is just a good accountant focused on keeping numbers up and nothing else.

MangoToupe3• 1 year ago

Given that this look appears to be imitating frosted glass, it's very much compatible with skeumorphism. Maybe not the one you want, but it's very much attempting to mimic a physical look.

pcurve3• 1 year ago

Just because it mimics glass that exists in real life, that doesn't make it skeuomorphism.

skeuomorphism is grounded on real world counterparts.

How many buttons in real life are actually made of glasses clear or frosted?

pcdoodle• 1 year ago

Good point. I don't like this but maybe, just maybe there's something I'm missing that you might have brought to light.

karel-3d2• 1 year ago

iOS 7 made sense though, they really did need an upgrade back then. the design showed its age. even compared with Android at that time.

this... I don't understand the reasoning. Nobody is complaining about iOS design? Nobody asked for this? This is just bad?

xnx2• 1 year ago

We can only hope the next redesign regresses further and copies Windows 95.

dominicrose• 1 year ago

There's been a lot of hardware improvement since Vista. Apple is also in a much more commanding position when it comes to both design and hardware. They basically own the design and the hardware.

While I'm not an Apple user I believe these iOS devices are going to sell like hotcakes.

solardev• 1 year ago

I guess Windows Vista gets the last laugh, after all.

9d3• 1 year ago

It's the candy look from the early 2000s, from Mac OS X 10.1, turned up to 11.

Did Apple learn nothing from Windwos Vista and Compiz?

thewebguyd4• 1 year ago

What's old is new again. There's a whole generation of users that never experienced those days. OS X 10.1 is 24 years old now. So for them, this is all brand new and innovative.

raydenvm• 1 year ago

Funnily enough, a lot in Liquid Glass is inspired by older design systems from Microsoft : Fluent Design (Win 11) and Windows Aero (Win 7). It shows how real tough it is now to come with something really new these days in design.

alberth2• 1 year ago

Aqua, reminds me of OS X (Aqua theme) from 20+ years ago.

And while it was very pretty, the movement away from translucency was due in large part because of accessibility (for all users).

It's actually quite difficult to see controls (and read text) when not on a flat/solid background.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_(user_interface)

JKCalhoun2• 1 year ago

Looks like something you could do with a clever displacement map — or several mappings that would include a specular highlight map, etc. The tech is clever.

jauntywundrkind3• 1 year ago

The style here suggests a split between tools and content, which is something I'd love love love to see emerge. Having one and only one app be both viewer and toolkit feels like a convenience trap, one that NeXT tried to fight (as did OLE) and that feels unlikely to ever be turned back from, but I want to dream. This UI doesn't materially move us towards a more aggregative/accreted system of systems model, but it visually suggests some of the absurdity of there being such heavily coupling, if the UI is really incidental that floats atop. I'd love to see this pushed further, to emerge into a multilayered information world, where Rainbow's End discourse piles up and forms trees out and up.

I hear folks on contrast concerns. I have hope though. I really like the de-emphasis on compute. On tools being less the thing, on the content first, on getting computing out of the way, making it ambient. Unboxing the content, unframing it.

The glass refraction seems like a an amazing leap forward. Material has been around forever and there's all these developer docs showing the stack up of layers, implying the depth of the system, but in the 2d user world everything is flat, composited into indistinction. The visual sepration, allowing semi transparent motion, but using refractive style to clearly separate the layers, adds such clarity that it feels obvious in retrospect immediately to me.

I still lack hope that XR is going to be a huge huge thing, that it will be comfortable over time, but it makes such sense to me that XR would inspire & lead this shift, to depriotizing the UI & emphasizing the content.

I'm stressed a bit trying to imagine the transforms required to make this refraction happen. I don't think CSS is going to be enough. The new CSS Painting API ("Houdini") also seems more generative than able to modify & script what is?

whiteboardr3• 1 year ago

How does liquid glass unbox and unframe the content?

jauntywundrkind3• 1 year ago

Instead of the content having controls and a slide up drawer at the bottom of the screen, those are now overlayed onto the content. The content extends across much more of the screen's vertical space.

bigyabai14• 1 year ago

Having one and only one app be both viewer and toolkit feels like a convenience trap

It's a decade too late for that. Websites and mobile applications are the de-facto metaphor for using computers, trying to fight that trend ostracizes your most promising markets. Hell, it even ostracizes a lot of Mac users that like the new approach.

Maybe it's time to face the music - people like convenience. MacOS does not have potent enough windowing controls to make most users comfortable throwing around several windows to use one app. iOS and iPadOS both neglect their multitasking abilities to the point that people practically forget you can use more than one app at once.

I don't hate the idea of trying to enforce a more informative windowing model, but I also don't think most people can intuit how to use it. If Stage Manager is any indication, most people just want a fullscreen view of a single-page app.

jauntywundrkind3• 1 year ago

All local maxima are optimized into. Until there is a break.

I agree that right here right now change feels impossible. That the monolith app as everything as the sole decider of all UX feels absolute & total, a fief never to be invaded.

But I'm less confident this fortress really will hold forever. And liquid glass has some of the seeds of undoing this totality, by emphasizing content, by making tools a visually separate layer.

msephton2• 1 year ago

CSS is enough https://twitter.com/bbssppllvv/status/1932325303273271727

beached_whale• 1 year ago

I hope I can disable the transparency, nothing makes it harder and slower to read than that for me. Distracting too.

antoniuschan99• 1 year ago

In order for any of that glass design to look like glass there needs to be a background with a mix of at least 3 colors. I implemented the glass design in an app last year and afterwards thought it was ok. It makes some text difficult to read depending on the background.

alberth2• 1 year ago

Unpopular opinion: considering that last year’s WWDC was all about Apple’s vision for deep AI integration (still not yet released), and this year’s event mostly focused on a fresh coat of paint for iOS/macOS, it raises a fair question: "What has Apple actually been working on for the past two years if the AI still isn’t here and the main update is just new paint"?

Note: not being a hater and appreciate the complexities of working on huge platforms as Apple ecosystem. Just genuinely wondering, since it feels like maybe 2 years of start/stops/changing priorities.

thewebguyd4• 1 year ago

Just genuinely wondering, since it feels like maybe 2 years of start/stops/changing priorities.

I think it's exactly this. Apple got caught with their pants down on AI, had to shift quickly and that's what got us last year's announcements that never came.

Well, it still isn't ready, so they needed something to give this year since they are so committed to an annual release cycle (which I think is a mistake IMHO), so we get a design change & some love for the iPad.

OTOH, I like where Apple is going with private, on device AI. So if they need some more time to make it useful and polished, totally fine with me. I'd prefer they don't ship a half baked, hallucinating piece of crap. I personally don't/won't use any of the AI "features" so for me personally, it's refreshing to have a tech conference keynote not be "AI AI AI AI." It's worse than when blockchain was all the rage.

pmontra• 1 year ago

It's got some KDE 4 vibe https://news.softpedia.com/news/How-to-Install-KDE-SC-4-4-on... which in turn had probably a Windows 7 feel. A random image at https://www.computerworld.ch/software/windows/microsoft-deta...

normie3000• 1 year ago

How much battery life could you save by disabling these effects?

realcul• 1 year ago

looks like windows vista aero feature. wow.. we have come a full circle indeed!

willio58• 1 year ago

I agree with those saying this feels like a step back toward skeuomorphic design for Apple. I personally think it looks nice visually, but I do have some concerns: - Accessibility. I don't see good examples in their promotional videos about how contrast of text is ensured to be in an acceptable range. Even for those without visual impairments, this is important for UX. - Performance. I'm usually the guy in the room saying "Apple is not making devices slower over time on purpose", but this sort of graphical intensity is basically needless and I hope they have something in the plans around automatically disabling more complex visual animations if the phone is showing signs of slow-down.

brailsafe• 1 year ago

I don't use iOS in any capacity, but I'm sure anything they do will only improve what has always felt like a clumsy OS.

On the Macos side, I'm open to the new aesthetic, but I just hope to god they've been actually investing in performance improvements when it comes to SwiftUI, which has only barely been viable in some cases thus far. If MacOS gets a full UI update, but the Settings screen still lags when navigating between sections, someone's doing something wrong.

y42• 1 year ago

At what point do we reach this attitude, where we do not rage against everything that's new?

amegahed2• 1 year ago

I wonder how long this will take to trickle down into webdev, automotive dashboards, embedded systems, and every other thing with a GUI? It's probably already happening.

p.s. If you like Aqua, you might enjoy playing around this open source glass rendering CSS library: https://www.specularcss.org/#materials/glass

throwaway2562• 1 year ago

This is what a company running out of ideas looks like

jama21112• 1 year ago

I imagine this comment will age just as well as the comments about iOS 7 did.

I have the most controversial opinion here I think: I think it’ll be just fine. Not incredible! Not necessarily amazing! Not terrible either! Just… fine. They’ll dial it back a bit into public beta and then public release, and no one will care that much and it’ll be fine.

People getting all storm in a tea cup over this.

amegahed2• 1 year ago

I wonder how long this will take to trickle down into webdev, automotive dashboards, embedded systems, and basically every other thing with a GUI. It's probably already happening.

p.s. If you like Aqua, you might like this open source glass rendering CSS library: https://www.specularcss.org/#materials/glass

vitaflo• 1 year ago

It will trickle down and be a worse implementation than what Apple has done which is already pretty bad. Expect a lot of horrible UIs in the future.

deergomoo• 1 year ago

I am incredibly annoyed that they’ve hidden all the camera controls behind an overflow button. Hiding functions is not the same as simplicity any more than shoving all the dirty laundry under your bed is cleaning.

rogerthis• 1 year ago

It's weird the amount of not asked/not needed things we do.

andersa• 1 year ago

It's... awful? Why would I want all this distracting shimmering as I scroll?

Apple really isn't what it once was, this is embarrassing.

pentagrama• 1 year ago

I need to experience it more to have a clear opinion, but looking at those videos, these types of translucent UI layers with a magnifying glass effect feel so annoying when they move; it's distracting.

Knowing that people will be spending hours of the day with these animations, it could be overwhelming. I'm not someone who suffers from videos or video games with photosensitive content warnings, but for many people, this might feel similar, like a friend of mine who can’t play Quake 3 Arena because it gives him nausea. I’m sure there will be an option to turn it off.

I also suspect that Apple, for marketing reasons, felt the need to present something visibly new and eye-catching. They probably turned to flashy design resources meant to impress rather than serve real usability needs. It feels more like a UI concept made for a sci-fi movie than something designed with accessibility and productivity in mind.

agumonkey2• 1 year ago

Even the antialiasing is bad.. this is below Apple usual slickness.

odo12422• 1 year ago

I tried the beta on my phone and the antialiasing is mostly fine - the video was downscaled in resolution so it has more aliasing in it

(I hate the update by the way)

oofbaroomf• 1 year ago

a "clear" opinion... :)

microflash• 1 year ago

I'm all for great design but I hope that reduce transparency and motion settings just tone this thing down. I want my devices to be boring and subtle. I want to get them do what I want quickly, fade away and disappear. This redesign does the exact opposite.

__MatrixMan__2• 1 year ago

Every now and then my macbook will hide all of my windows so that I'm just looking at my wallpaper. It is a pretty wallpaper, but I don't really understand why I need a hotkey or gesture or whatever is happening just to allow me to gaze at it.

I guess this is more of the same? Some pretty picture can shine through at you because... pretty?

hotsauceror• 1 year ago

I may be mistaken but I believe the hotkey is "display my desktop, uncluttered" for those that still store files on their desktops.

__MatrixMan__2• 1 year ago

Ah of course, I had forgotten that you could put stuff there. My home directory is a terrible mess, but my desktop is pristine.

Lammy2• 1 year ago

The marketing text feels like it's trying way too hard, to the point that it makes me second-guess my positive first impression. I do think the UI looks cool, and I did like Aero Glass too, but having the headline straight-up tell me that the UI is “delightful and elegant” and having the first-sentence-of-first paragraph “beautiful new software design” hyperlink cheapens the whole thing IMHO.

Yes I know Apple have always been like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nx7v815bYUw (BOOM)

But at least the Stebe Jovs keynotes gave me the chance to be impressed for a moment in my head before laying in to the superlatives.

BirAdam3• 1 year ago

The quality of their presentations has just gone down. No one at Apple has the stage presence of Jobs.

lyu072823• 1 year ago

I think years ago I made a joke that the reason we need compute shader support in WebGL was so we could do fluid dynamic simulations for our button hover effects. Nobody is laughing now..

padjo• 1 year ago

Well that looks awful

Bengalilol• 1 year ago

From Aqua to Liquid Glass (AKA it will change over time and at some point ... disappear). I am just sad that it's the first feature announcement for Apple OSs 26. I understand Apple's point of view to communicate on that, but I have a big hollow feeling this is not enough.

teruakohatu• 1 year ago

Looks like Apple (re)discovered Sun's Project Looking Glass from 2003.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Looking_Glass

Liquid Glass looks a lot like coming up with changes for the sake of them.

robertoandred2• 1 year ago

I think they (re)discovered Mac OS X from 2001.

ch_sm2• 1 year ago

Oh cool, I had forgotten about this project, thanks for posting it! This is the first time I’ve noticed that they had the perspective "glass table" style dock that Apple used a couple of years later in Mac OS X Leopard.

submeta• 1 year ago

Good Lord, this concept of „liquid glass“ is ugly. Not visibly distinct, looks blurry, not clear and sharp. And then they overlap with the content. I never liked the overlapping menus in Notability app either.

This is a flop like the flat keyboard design. Making worse by trying to make it better. Verschlimmbessert.

And this from a company with unlimited financial resources.

seydor5• 1 year ago

Liquid glass , like windows vista before it, looks plasticky. It's tupperware and it looks cheap and almost smells of garlic.

mwkaufma• 1 year ago

my kingdom for usable bevel-gray toolbars and controls

boars_tiffs• 1 year ago

im having flashbacks from when apple introduced flat design in ios 7. i refused to upgrade for 2 years...

gausswho• 1 year ago

Same response I had for iOS 7: Clown vomit.

IAmGraydon• 1 year ago

Oh right - I almost forgot we’re in the timeline where the “experts” always make the worst choice available to them.

basisword4• 1 year ago

After installing the betas I'm very surprised at how much a departure this is on the Mac. Feels like using an iPad all of a sudden. There are some nice bits but they're going to have to tweak it significantly over the next couple of months. Safari tabs are an abomination. On other hand Spotlight has some great improvements and Launchpad is gone.

epanchin• 1 year ago

So, windows Aero?

gastonmorixe• 1 year ago

Windows Vista vibes gone wrong. What happened to Apple's design lead and taste? jeez

poisonborz• 1 year ago

What's the point of a translucent taskbar? I might understand in a taskbar of a desktop wallpaper to not disturb the scene, but what information does it hold if the search bar over a map or a link list is translucent? It's just useless noise.

sitzkrieg• 1 year ago

this ui is cosmically horrible. power users are seeing the end of the tunnel

bix6• 1 year ago

Feels very Walt Disney / multiplane camera to me.

Wanted to hate it but looks kind of cool so we’ll see how bad the accessibility is.

They call it a material so this is a new type of glass? Can I actually use a loupe on it or that’s just for fun?

chungy• 1 year ago

So I guess 19 years is the ideal time to wait before copying Windows Vista.

username2233• 1 year ago

They can't even make a webpage that doesn't have janky scrolling in Safari. And it prompts me to enable notifications? I'm not so optimistic about their new UI design.

leoh• 1 year ago

Awful everything

sarreph• 1 year ago

Perhaps contrarian (here anyway) but I think Liquid Glass looks neat, and represents the next evolution of the "backdrop-filter: blur;" effect that we've been seeing on the web a _lot_ as of late... Which, funnily enough also gained adoption in a large part IMO due to Apple's usage of it in macOS for the past few years now.

I think the new design approach here is a clever nudge towards "Neo Skeuomorphism". Interface design is clearly heading in a much more skeuomorphic direction (see: AirBnB redesign) lately with the rise of AI. Liquid Glass is an apt way to provide more material-realism without devolving back to the objective realism that the old Skeuomorphic style pre-2013 represented.

Time and time again I see people bemoan Apple's UI direction and then sure enough within a year or two it becomes ubiquitous as web designers adopt the patterns for their own work.

The funny part is that the lede is getting buried here. The big story is of course the universal design _across platforms_. We're now ultra-ultra close to a unified OS, something that has been in materializing extremely slowly over the past decade and a half.

hk1337• 1 year ago

I'm skeptical but I will hold judgment until I actually see it. Things can look weird or ugly on video or the first time you've seen it but given some time you can change your mind.

pseudalopex10• 1 year ago

Time and time again I see people bemoan Apple's UI direction and then sure enough within a year or two it becomes ubiquitous as web designers adopt the patterns for their own work.

This shows most designers follow trends. It does not show Apple's ideas were good.

jama21112• 1 year ago

At a minimum it shows they weren’t bad enough that others felt they had to avoid it.

But to be honest, people do market research, they know what the public like. And if I’m totally being honest, if I made a new design for the general public and the odd internet forum didn’t get enraged about it I’d be worried I either had made too un-impactful a change or worse, I’d made something critics like more than the general public.

WhyNotHugo5• 1 year ago

Last time they redesigned the Home Screen they dropped most of the features which I used—except showing the time, and being able to open the camera.

I hope the funky animated time can be disabled and I can still open the camera.

elAhmo• 1 year ago

I thought this was an April 1st joke.

stalco• 1 year ago

I installed it. I really wanted to love it but it’s bad. It’s very busy and the proportions in the Settings app are awful. It’s on the “cozy” side of things (as opposed to “compact”). This means you see less options at one time on the screen and have to scroll more around the OS to get where you need to.

As for accessibility… It’s hell. Have a look: https://imgur.com/a/6ZTCStC

GenerocUsername• 1 year ago

Holy cow that's bad. 2 slightly different grids overlaid with transparency feels like a joke but here t is

Axsuul• 1 year ago

That could be fixed I feel by decreasing the background opacity.

FinnKuhn• 1 year ago

This kinda looks like a fake "iOS" skin for Android from 2018... nasty

Vegenoid• 1 year ago

Wow. That is really bad. Apple already does the transparency thing with the control center menu, but it blurs the background so much that you don’t notice it. Why they’d want to lessen the blur and make it more transparent is beyond me.

hbn4• 1 year ago

Remember this is the first developer beta. I’m pretty sure a lot of iOS 7 was dialed back between announcement and release

seemaze• 1 year ago

oomph, looks like this might finally be (my) year of the linux desktop..

PKop2• 1 year ago

Looks like a soup sandwich. Layers of mixed together colors with no distinction

TriangleEdge• 1 year ago

I hope they tweak the opacity before they go live with this because I find the shared image quite unpleasant. I have no issues with the current design. Kind of like the camera button and the touch bar, I hope this goes away fast.

ethbr13• 1 year ago

The entire press release made my brain hurt.

> Meticulously crafted by rethinking the fundamental elements that make up our software, the new design features an entirely new material called Liquid Glass. It combines the optical qualities of glass with a fluidity only Apple can achieve, as it transforms depending on your content or context.

What the fuck does that even mean?

Feature litmus test: if you can't describe why it's better in plain English... it's probably not better.

curiousgal• 1 year ago

I know I am going to sound like an asshole but I scrolled, started watching the video and the guy speaking made me cringe so badly I closed the tab. This is reads and looks like satire. And here I thought OneUI 8 was bad.

McAlpine5892• 1 year ago

What the fuck does that even mean?

Nothing. It's corporate bean-counter speak. Some poo-brained exec says a lot of words that sound inspiring but adds up to mean exactly nothing.

This is the kind of garbage I have to listen to in so-very-important quarterly "huddles" with thousands of people. It's nonsensical but makes the speaker feel so very special.

I guess this really gives insight to how Apple got here. It really has been taken over by a bunch of people who like how their own farts smell. Now they're trying to gaslight you and I into liking it.

cyberax6• 1 year ago

Puh. That's pure amateur hour. They need to _at_ _least_ add something like: "synergy with ideographic interface, achieving unrivalled experience while preserving the individualized touch".

pyinstallwoes2• 1 year ago

The only thing worse than shitty design is when the shitty design changes each time you use it.

crazygringo3• 1 year ago

OMG that image is hilarious. It's a total disaster.

And it's not like someone had to go out of their way to find something clashing like that. Pulling up control center from the home screen is something you do all the time.

Like, I genuinely would have assumed that control center would need to be non-translucent precisely because of that. But... nope?

outcoldman• 1 year ago

please please please, everyone, submit feedback at https://www.apple.com/feedback/

I was ok with the system settings redesign, could get used to it. But this whole new design is a different level of bad.

Due_Winter_53303• 1 year ago

How does it look if you enable "Reduce Transparency" in Accessibility - Display settings?

wpm3• 1 year ago

It looks awful, and doesn't actually remove all of the transparency effects, though that might be due to the fact that its Beta 1.

jonplackett2• 1 year ago

Holy shit. That has to be a joke. It looks like some bad UI mockup from Jon Prosser

chupchap• 1 year ago

It's Apple Maps bad!

azinman22• 1 year ago

Apple Maps is actually great now.

hn_throwaway_993• 1 year ago

Wow, that was full in "thanks, I hate it" territory for me.

I think that design triggered me for 2 reasons. First, it really gets to something that's bugged me a lot about technological advancement in general over the past 15-20 years or so. It used to be that I felt like tech advances were great because they actually solved a human problem. Now, so much tech just feels like "tech-for-tech's-sake". Like I get you need to have a lot of designers at Apple, and now that devices have more processing power that they want to do something "cool" with it, but this just seems like someone that literally nobody asked for and nobody wants.

Second, I'm someone who thinks very "linearly". I like to do one thing at a time, and I hate distractions (because I'm easily distracted). I hate these translucent interfaces because they are literally distracting to me even if I'm looking directly and squarely at one single thing. It just seems like another way that tech is constantly fucking with our attention.

the_other2• 1 year ago

I thought the same, about distractions, whilst watching the videos. Even the highlights and speckles at the edges of the icons grab your attention. It's the visual equivalent of running your finger over velcro: slip, catch, slip, catch the whole way down.

weird-eye-issue2• 1 year ago

This looks like a screenshot from one of the jailbreak themes from like 15 years ago, and not one of the good ones

bigyabai14• 1 year ago

As a former Cydia user, my 12-year-old self takes that as validation that I was living in the future after all!

arvinsim2• 1 year ago

Glasklart?

jama21112• 1 year ago

The public beta hasn’t even been released yet, this is only a developer beta. Bit early to be assuming it will look like this by release no?

kumarvvr• 1 year ago

Wow ! That is ugly.

Wonder if Apple has any Quality Control department at all.

I mean, a designer comes up with a proposal, someone else ought to check it.

solfox4• 1 year ago

Sad thing about Apple is that this was designed by a huge design team and about a million keynote presentations to execs that sounded exactly like this.

rifty2• 1 year ago

Funny, I'm pretty sure glass on glass is one of their guidelines no-no situations. Nice of them to implement it on their own control centre to prove how bad it is.

booleandilemma• 1 year ago

Normally I don't have strong opinions on UI design but that just looks wrong.

replwoacause3• 1 year ago

My eyes don’t know where to focus. Everything runs together.

mock-possum3• 1 year ago

Ugh oh god

That evokes an immediate visceral reaction hah

CamperBob2• 1 year ago

Wow. It would almost be OK if they had had the sense to dim the background substantially, but... wow.

It had better be possible to turn this crap completely off. Is it?

thenaturalist6• 1 year ago

Reduce transparency in the accessibility settings.

Fixes it luckily.

ilt3• 1 year ago

OMG, I expected bad but not this bad. How did designers ever think this will fly is beyond mind-blowing. Visual disturbance is off the charts. I am just hoping it to have good accessibility options to turn whatever-this-is off immediately.

adastra229• 1 year ago

That screenshot is utterly unreadable. It makes my eyes hurt. For the young people out there, I'm not exaggerating or being metaphorical. Literally pain in my eyes as they try (and fail) to focus on the appropriate UI elements.

I was going to upgrade to an iPhone 16 this week. I might be checking out Google or Samsung devices instead.

CoastalCoder• 1 year ago

That screenshot had the same effect on me.

Baffling choice.

throwaway290• 1 year ago

I think it's also just ugly to be honest. Completely opposite of Apple's values of focusing on one thing at a time and even basic grid alignment. And I am an Apple fanboy....

debo_• 1 year ago

You might want to look at the new design language that Android is going for:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43975352

dotancohen2• 1 year ago

I highly recommend giving the S Ultra series a try. I use them for the built-in stylus, I had a few Note devices before the S.

Once you realise what life with a stylus is like, you'll not accept anything less.

I modify my devices slightly to make the stylus easier to remove, if you're interested I could show it off.

jama21112• 1 year ago

It’s a developer beta, don’t assume the release version will look like this mess.

solfox4• 1 year ago

That screenshot! Terrible

benplumley• 1 year ago

Is the WiFi enabled, or does it just have a blue icon behind it?

ARandumGuy• 1 year ago

The accessibility for this design is pretty terrible. There's a reason the gold standard for closed captions is still white text with solid black background. That way, regardless of what's going on in the background, the text is still readable for someone with poor eyesight.

Out of curiosity, I used this site [1] to get the contrast of some text, specifically the artist name on the Apple Music now playing bar (in the "Updated App Design" part of the page). During parts of the video, the contrast of the artist name with the background was 1.7:1, which is terrible. For reference, the minimum recommended contrast by WebAIM is 4.5:1 [2].

Maybe there are accessibility options that improve things, but the defaults seem terrible. The goal for any design should be reasonably accessible as default, with robust options for people with more specific needs. As it stands, this UI is just too hard to read, and Apple needs to make a second pass.

[1] https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/

[2] https://webaim.org/articles/contrast/

parsimo2010• 1 year ago

Oh yeah that's bad. I hope there is an option to disable translucency globally. I don't need to see a desktop/home screen under another menu, or even another app under the menu. I can't interact with something underneath the top menu and it really messes with readability from your screenshot.

pyinstallwoes2• 1 year ago

Yikes…

rurp• 1 year ago

Good lord, I started getting a headache just looking at that image for a few seconds. Apple has always preferred form over function but this UI change takes it to a whole other level.

barrell2• 1 year ago

I mean I really don’t like it either, but I have to say, it screenshots 10x worse than it really looks. There’s enough ‘glow’ that things look largely distinct.

I would still prefer 5x the blur; I really, really, really hate the shapes of the tab switchers; and they use space so inefficiently I feel like I’m using an iPhone SE… but the liquid glass is ok. Gimmicky and ugly but it is mostly usable

lofaszvanitt• 1 year ago

Straight from early 2000s. The early photoshop effects everyone applied on their geocities webpages.

OptionalDonuts• 1 year ago

That does not look good and I can already see my elderly parents having trouble with just how messy and confusing the colors from the homescreen bleed into the foreground.

t1234s• 1 year ago

Did they introduce an easy way to remove the bloatware from MacOS?

827a• 1 year ago

Running the iOS beta now. There's structural elements to this redesign that I think are generally great. Mostly, they've moved the search bar to the bottom of many of their apps (messages and settings are the most obvious). The centered island-style navigation bar feels better than the old boxy-style one.

The transparency effect is a nightmare. Its so fascinating to me how this made it through to an official iOS release. We'll see how it plays on GA. I think we're going to see some major changes to the way its designed before GA.

stevenhubertron• 1 year ago

I don't post here often, but I hope someone at Apple is reading this as this is one of the worst designs I have seen from this company. Even in their own presentation they shows text hard to read, text on top of text. It's an accessibility and usability nightmare. I really don't want to give up iMessage but if what ships looks as bad as this I may jump ship.

wraptile2• 1 year ago

truly contender for the worst redesign of the decade. It's hard to see how a trillion dollar company would stumble so bad here. They must be real zealots on AR to even go here.

__m• 1 year ago

They are probably used to the outrage. Apple removed the floppy disc drive, optical drive, headphone jack. Most people don't care. I don't think that buttons people pressed a thousand times before that are now slightly less readable are a big issue.

appleiigs• 1 year ago

It's button camouflage.

My 82 year old mother has enough trouble figuring out what is a button vs. what's not. She just taps everything on screen to find out. This is going to make it worse.

oidar2• 1 year ago

It's button camouflage.

Exactly. It's like they are trying to make it harder to use.

replwoacause3• 1 year ago

Tbh I’ll be doing the same thing when my devices get this update. It’s inscrutable. Tap tap tap….taptaptaptaptapTAPTAP!!!

pndy10• 1 year ago

Guess this is universal because mine does the same. Perhaps it's a frustration that screen doesn't responds in same way as e.g. a remote control where there's a physical press. Sure there can be a haptic feedback on phone but it's not the same. Especially for older people.

LAC-Tech• 1 year ago

Transparency has been around for a while - I remember playing around with it on linux desktops back when I was still using CRT monitors.

I turn it off now. Turns out the instances where I want to see through a window are basically nil. They make for nice screenshots though.

throw03172019• 1 year ago

Did any user or developer ask for this? This looks absolutely awful and I’m a huge Apple fan. I can’t get behind it. :/

652• 1 year ago

Designers gonna design. Even when a UI is perfectly fine, huge design teams have to justify their existence and therefore change everything for no real reason. I guess it makes more work for developers, though the utility of the work is questionable.

missedthecue• 1 year ago

God this is so real. Every saas app I pay for randomly and pointlessly changes up their UI every 6-12 months for literally no reason or productivity enhancement. I assume it's just bloated UI teams justifying the fact they're consuming so much payroll.

tolerance• 1 year ago

Dude in that one video needs to go ahead back home and put on the sweater and slacks he deserves.

squidsoup• 1 year ago

This is going to be awful for the large proportion of greybeards reading HN, but the kids are going to love it.

pcurve3• 1 year ago

I'm pushing 50 and personally I love the look. Their attention to details and execution are amazing. It's perfection.

But my aging eyes would like option to turn of the translucency altogether. That would be gold.

valleyjo• 1 year ago

There’s a reduce transparency setting in accessibility. Wonderful what this will look like if that’s on. I’ve been using it for years as I don’t like frills.

vid• 1 year ago

That video. This is why I can't take Apple, and, sorry, many of their fans, seriously.

LightBug1• 1 year ago

All I could think about is how beautiful those treetops are inside the Apple spaceship ... glorious view.

Still rocking a budget Android though ... don't see a reason to change.

oidar2• 1 year ago

From an accessibility point of view, this seems unusable for those with visual deficits. I sincerely hope that this can be made non-translucent. The ability to distinguish between icons is already hampered with all icon artwork being the same color, with this translucent "glass", it will be the hardest to use iOS, MacOS design ever.

devmor• 1 year ago

Oh god this looks like a horrible, visually indistinct mess.

prmoustache• 1 year ago

So this is MacOs Vista?

jamsterion• 1 year ago

After 16 years on iPhone and Mac, I’m finally making the switch. Apple’s latest design choices are not just aweful, they reflect a broader decline in the company’s direction across the board. I’ve considered moving to Linux, Windows, and Android for years. Now feels like the right moment.

652• 1 year ago

I'll take ugly Liquid Glass over Windows any day.

amelius• 1 year ago

Most of these effects are happening under your finger.

But maybe on the desktop you can see them if you use a mouse.

SwiftyBug• 1 year ago

All I wanted was an option in settings that allows me to turn off all animations on macOS. How hard can that be?

jordansmithnz• 1 year ago

Having used it very briefly, I think it’s a reasonable direction. Before you all jump to tell me why I’m wrong:

1. It makes depth and layering extremely clear.

2. It prioritizes focusing on the content.

These are good principles and I think they’ll last the distance. There are plenty of refinements needed, especially for accessibility. I suspect over the next few years we’ll see the direction toned back a little while still retaining the best parts.

danhite• 1 year ago

I appreciate your focus on the long run. Apple has a long history of focusing on the long run. So I am replying to tell you why you are right, given that I feel my single upvote wasn't thanks enough for your first hand take.

I am not sure we have a long run, as both dooms & destiny loom (eg Future Shock .. Singularity], but if we do then here is my background for my short take ...

1. Unlike you, I have not used the beta but I thoughtfully watched both Monday developer sessions on Liquid Glass & their new design system

2. My early computing experiences were, eg, ASR-33 teletype with paper tape to timeshare, then Altair 8800 and then punched card batches, so I have lots of personal evolution in ui/ux over many decades. Sadly my parents--born in 1922/1923--never used computers nor understood why I loved them and programming

3..665 omitted for brevity

666. in recent years I have devolved into Stone Knives & Bearskins dev mode within iPad Safari, because no one cares what I do and so I get to enjoy tinkering with tiny things in odd ways; ie I might be slightly crazy, so caveat emptor ...

Apple is threading a needle here. If they push too hard and fail they're doomed. If they don't take the lead (atop shock wave of tech) they're doomed.

Their leadership is rich and could easily retire, and Apple~ponderers need to always factor in that they dogfood their products because they believe in them.

Like Capital B Believe in Apple/products in that very real way in which one doesn't just say they dig a band but actually struggle and sacrifice to get to a concert thousands of miles away.

Allow me to observe that we already live in a trending post~Literate society and the ongoing collapse of the USA educational system, Covid~lost-years, the current Administration chaos, and the unstoppable engulfing of everything by ~AI++ makes a completely non-traditional ui/ux near term inevitable just by the principle: Flux !== inertia.

I am observing that the traditional ~marketplace deciders coupled with generational fashion du jour flocking are dwarfed by our Interesting Times just as diaspora can elevate tulips to mania and wheelbarrows full of money can fail to buy lunch.

Within that point of view (and if you're reading this far, no, to answer your question, I do not do drugs or write manifestos for public consumption) I will offer this condensed thought about Apple's current ui/ux steps ...

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Applying that to our extraordinary circumstances with a McLuhan Tetrad lens (Retrieval) suggests that all of classic myths to 20th Century SF&F invocation of magic words, gestures and holodecks are nearly upon us for reals.

Our devices are about to watch us, listen/hear us, immerse us in interactive faux reality to an unprecedented extent, ie apart from thousands of years of fanciful storytelling. Genies and demons. Dragons and Wizards.

Gods taking human form.

So.

If Apple is on a 1.5 year track to force developers to unify their runs-on-any~device ui/ux to a ~simplified magic, then I say we are witnessing Apple trying to mount their surfboard, quite calmly, incoming tsunami considered.

Lots of us may not be looking forward to getting wet.

But that is hardly Apple's fault.

Surfboards for the Mind(TM)?

lurker mode back on

jonplackett2• 1 year ago

The whole event should have been titled:

We completely ignored all the things you actually wanted and did this instead.

danielvaughn• 1 year ago

I love designing and building UIs, but one thing that really depresses me is how you’re often pressured to keep changing things just to justify your continued employment.

It feels like that’s what happened here, to be honest.

It’s okay for a product to stay the same, if the current design is the right one. I just can’t imagine what problems they’re trying to solve with this update.

thenaturalist6• 1 year ago

They butchered the swipe actions on iOS it seems.

Open notes or messages, swipe left on an item.

In iOS 18, the options (silent/delete in Messages or share/ delete) were simply icons, cleary delineated as buttons with color matching backgrounds, no text.

Now the options have descriptive text under each button which of course is cut off 99% of the time as it exceeds the tiny width these action buttons have - and the buttons are harder to hit.

How? Why?

dluan• 1 year ago

everything is mid 2000s again. this really feels anti-apple even though the design polish is top notch, but to just abandon accessibility for shinyness feels like something steve would have obviously been against.

but it definitely takes me back to endlessly tweaking with linux mint skins in my college dorm.

pndy10• 1 year ago

Can't wait for another turn to flat when '50 will be around the corner /s

The overall bulky style reminds me of the least appealing cosmic-techno-chrome Windows themes that were spawning like rabbits ~20 years ago: https://www.thepcmanwebsite.com/themes/images/themes/bounce_...

ch_sm2• 1 year ago

Haha, nice screenshot. It even has Bryce 5 in the start menu!

unethical_ban• 1 year ago

I didn't mind the preview of it on a play button or lock screen.

But why would a slider button suddenly become translucent when you move it? Awful.

raspasov• 1 year ago

I like it, I think it will be great after ironing out a few obvious issues.

tyleo• 1 year ago

Glass UI can look good but you need to frost it pretty heavily for usability and accessibility. I’m not seeing that here. Hopefully they turn that up before this is fully rolled out.

weird-eye-issue2• 1 year ago

Looks terrible. I hope that what he said in the video about "only Apple being able to achieve this" is correct because I don't want this coming to my devices

nsonha2• 1 year ago

This looks like Windows 11's promotional video but we know Apple's UI is going to look exactly like it, for real and not just for show.

hajile2• 1 year ago

I want another Snow Leopard update with less glamor and a lot more bugfixes.

laweijfmvo2• 1 year ago

the most usable UIs are, i guess “not attractive” anymore. but they are productive, and a joy to use when you need to get something done. these new UIs are a pain to use, but they trick our depressed ADHD brains to keep flipping through the screens and menus with fancy colors and animations. AND THAT IS THE GOAL. screen time. because you are nothing but a target for ads and subscriptions.

laweijfmvo2• 1 year ago

for those who doubt me, use the Accessibility settings on your current device to disable all the eye candy and switch to gray scale. it will rarely impact your ability to make a call, send a message, look up some details (OK, photos will be semi unusable). but once the task is done, you’ll have no desire to keep fiddling with your shiny toy. try it.

Groxx3• 1 year ago

Disabling animations is also the quickest way to remind yourself that computers are in fact pretty fast. No more waiting a half second after every action for things to stop moving, it responds instantly.

Groxx3• 1 year ago

Google and Apple are both on some weird bouncy shrooms or something this year. What the heck.

Both new UIs look truly awful, and seem like accessibility nightmares. I will continue enthusiastically disabling animations.

montag2• 1 year ago

It's really beautiful, but I don't want it on my device.

sakesun2• 1 year ago

The Liquid Glass terrified me as someone started in green monochrome CRT days. Software people really have endless creative ways to spend hardware resource quota.

Perhaps human should be less obsessed in twisting nature to serve our comfort, and just adapt ourselves more to what nature provides.

wvenable• 1 year ago

Software people really have endless creative ways to spend hardware resource quota.

If we have the hardware then not using it is wasteful. My iPhone doesn't get cheaper if I don't use all the power it provides.

sakesun2• 1 year ago

Perhaps, use more affordable hardware instead, and reserve resources for those who are less fortunate.

Plus your battery will thank you for this.

protocolture• 1 year ago

Apple has invented Windows Vista

nipperkinfeet• 1 year ago

It looks cheap and tacky. Apple really lost its way. Who thought this was a good idea?

jwilliams• 1 year ago

This is Windows Aero all over again - why is this a persistent design?

You can't see or process the information behind the glass - at best it's major cognitive load to do so, at worst it's just very noisy with zero added information.

bombcar5• 1 year ago

Because it looks really good in a five minute demonstration to the C-level execs.

Group_B• 1 year ago

The idea of this transparent UI is so dumb. How could anyone at apple think this would be a good idee? Sure, let’s make it 100x harder to read and navigate the UI. Genius decisions being made at Apple here. I hope they do a lot of tweaking with this before it’s forced onto my device.

mrcwinn2• 1 year ago

My bet is the new iPadOS does nothing to quiet the gripes about the iPad. Window management isn’t the main issue. The main issue is that the iPad doesn’t do enough of what a Mac does when you need it, and so you bring your laptop just in case.

Oh and the Magic Keyboard? Great. Now my thin 13” iPad Pro feels literally as heavy as a MacBook Pro.

Someone tell me what is the point?

mjmas• 1 year ago

Windows at least did it (at least conceptually) in a way that should be fairly performant with their Mica material (just showing the desktop background and nothing else with a large blur and filters).

This looks far more complex and something almost like real time ray tracing.

footlose_3815• 1 year ago

Every time Apple reinvents the wheel, they release it like it's the very first time it happened.

vlark• 1 year ago

It's just clear Aqua.

BonoboIO• 1 year ago

I'm honestly shocked at the new interface. It's like Windows Vista all over again - everything's broken. The whole thing looks like a broken HTML page with CSS slapped on top of macOS Finder. Text readability is terrible and I really hope you can disable most of the glass effects in accessibility settings.

This'll probably stick around for years until Apple decides to switch design languages again, and they'll never admit the old one was bad - classic Apple.

It's unbelievably broken... like an Android phone with 30 themes installed at once.

iOS 18 actually looks good and is readable, which makes this worse. That's the thing about peaking - it's a long way down. Feels like they had to ship something because their AI isn't just behind - it's absolutely broken like shit. Siri's been stale for 15 years, and they're not even polishing features that others have half-baked into their products. They've got... nothing.

crossroadsguy• 1 year ago

Maybe a better iCloud+, a better iCloud (maybe version/history/logs?), a better way to operate/control two different seems (hint: "differently"), easy import/export of data from various services, less software opacity etc etc?

But instead we got this.

Does this how a massively large and rich company's intellectual bankruptcy begin?

rifty2• 1 year ago

I like the glassy shader effect and concept even if lacking a bit of discipline in all of the places where it's applied at the moment. Though I think the real test of differentiation for this redesign is how approachable the 'liquid' animations will be for developers to implement outside of the UIKit elements. Will be interesting to see how this design language system changes how they approach elements of the experience as they get more used to thinking through it.

steele• 1 year ago

Windows 7 Aero

gigatexal• 1 year ago

The biggest most coolest thing is new windowing and tiling controls for the iPad. Really cool stuff.

The glass stuff I am meh on but let’s see it in practice.

cyberax6• 1 year ago

Can we get universal APIs then? E.g. no restrictions on JITs on iOS?

absurdo• 1 year ago

The death and return of Aero.

nake13• 1 year ago

I’ve noticed something no one has mentioned yet: Liquid Glass is natively HDR.

wizee• 1 year ago

The excessive translucency makes contrast much worse and complex backgrounds poke through to distract from the test. Readability suffers severely. This is a terrible design direction. Kill it with fire.

replwoacause3• 1 year ago

That’s it. I’m finally switching to Linux and Android.

Groxx3• 1 year ago

Got bad news for ya on Android... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43975352

It's not glassy (thank god), but it is just as disorientingly-bouncy.

I am quite happy with Mint/XFCE on the Linux side though. Clear and very fast. Glad to have finally shifted.

mock-possum3• 1 year ago

Yeah I tell myself that every time too

mock-possum3• 1 year ago

The new material, Liquid Glass, combines the optical qualities of glass with a fluidity only Apple can

God this marketing copy is sickening

Literally who wrote this, and who did they write it for??

cubefox3• 1 year ago

Fun activity: count how often they use the word "delight".

dankwizard• 1 year ago

Apple have done it again - This is further proof that they are miles ahead of the competition. Kudos Apple.

Stunningly beautiful.

nprateem• 1 year ago

They should call the next macOS "KDE" and give credit where credit's due.

Apple designers: Please copy wobbly windows too.

hulitu• 1 year ago

Apple introduces a universal design across platforms

Looks like shit.

blinding-streak2• 1 year ago

Touch bar 2.0.

seydor5• 1 year ago

Terawatts of green energy being wasted to make your screen unreadable

jama21112• 1 year ago

This is the most “old man shakes fist at cloud” comment I have read in a very very long time here. Could you get any more obtuse?

Hard_Space• 1 year ago

Oh please God let there be some way of turning this off or at least dialing it down. Maybe worse than the dreaded glass performance hit on CPU/GPU is the promise that elements 'get out of the way', for instance tabs disappearing while scrolling. As someone who thought Word 2003 was aok, I have hated this convergence upon an 'empty square' as a design goal. Show me all the settings, please, and don't hide them in an ellipsis either.

barrenko• 1 year ago

This is why Ive left.

joeguilmette• 1 year ago

I’m old enough to remember iOS7. It was dog ugly and universally reviled.

This is new update is dog ugly and universally reviled. They’ll fix the most egregious stuff in beta, and then in a year or two dial it in.

This is a big, bold move. I’m happy to see them do something that takes some courage and also ship it.

Most of the really bad/unreadable screenshots I see are people customizing things so they look terrible. All the defaults look great.

I think it’s great we have deep customization options coming. That’s good. To people that say you shouldn’t be able to make it look bad… No. My desktop OS is infinitely configurable and I can absolutely break it. I’m happy to see at least the most surface level guard rails coming off of iOS.

This is good.

jama21112• 1 year ago

Very well said, people here are lacking _serious_ perspective. People don’t understand this, they protest every change. I remember someone saying in 2008 that YouTube’s old design was perfect and they shouldn’t have ever changed it and they were going to fail because of their stupid design change. They weren’t alone in this opinion. Imagine if youtube still looked like it did in 2007? Hahaha

Sheesh.

blablabla123• 1 year ago

Wow, they've been really slowly moving towards this. I remember when I heard this for the first time, must have been more than half a decade ago, sounded like a logical step. I'm surprised they didn't want this to happen any faster though

3cats-in-a-coat• 1 year ago

It's the worst UI design I've seen from Apple, ever.

Makes everything harder to read, far more expensive on your battery. No benefits.

WTF.

That's the final nail in the coffin for me.

replete• 1 year ago

There are some horrific looking UI on the screenshots, e.g. Acorns floating toolbar with integrated traffic lights - it looks awful and with a bevel emboss - remember that? Yes, the ugly Photoshop effect option that only looked cool in the early 2000s. Some of this looks very cheap and amateur Photoshop like.

It''s not terrible, but I will avoid it for a while. My biggest issue is the system resources this will require. I just don't care for the pretty, as much as I care for fast UI. Thinks Windows 11 delayed right click context menu.

Unifying their operating system design language makes sense, but ugh do we really need yearly operating system revisions like this. It is obvious that the engineers struggle with the marketing led pace judging by how many issues there are every major release of macOS. I don't upgrade to a new major until a .3 usually because of this.

designerarvid• 1 year ago

As a user centered designer I naturally agree with most criticism shared here. Not the direction I would have wished for.

Trying to understand where this is coming from, I guess two sources:

1. It's a fashion update to give GenZ and younger something they haven't seen before. They are too young to remember Windows Vista, and are the most important future target group that spends 12+ hrs / day on their iPhone. Also it is an audience that heavily customizes their UI, and care more for visually communicating cool-ness, than to get work done with efficient UX. Similar to using rainmeter on a desktop PC. Unsurprising, this look a lot like a rainmeter skin.

2. This is a way to communicate unmatched quality. Similar to what AirBnB are doing. When everyone can use icon- and component libraries like material and shadcn to build UI:s, this is a visual language that communicates premium quality is through an interface and iconography that is different and too expensive for others to recreate. Many companies don't have the skill nor the time and money to do custom icons in 3D software, or create elaborate translucent effects. Let's see what multi-plattform apps will look like with this new UI, perhaps the goal is to make them stand out as "outdated"

throw28198• 1 year ago

I'll quickly correct you as a zoomer: Gen Z is too young to remember windows vista, but just old enough to have enough fuzzy memories of skeuomorphism to be nostalgic for it (think of it like millenials liking vaporwave despite being very young in the 80s).

This makes far more sense as #2 with a flavor of cashing in on zoomer nostalgia.

settsu3• 1 year ago

millenials liking vaporwave

From context, I'm assuming this is a misnomer and not a jab. XD (Although, admittedly, I'm not sure what the reference is actually to...)

jitl4• 1 year ago

Browser/webview have had iOS 7+ style blur for a while now, but won’t have an answer to emulating Liquid Glass shaders for a while.

EDIT: although perhaps this will allow emulation in webview if performance isn’t abysmal https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/SVG/Reference/E...

msephton2• 1 year ago

It's already been imitated in CSS https://twitter.com/bbssppllvv/status/1932325303273271727

dodo_is_dodo• 1 year ago

I'm curious about the 'new hardware has enabled us to' part. I know they have full control over software, hardware stacks(A,M chip, Metal, OS), so I can easily imagine they do their best to optimization.

Is it possible to do the same job with same performance on Android? or Windows or any general target OS and software stack?

Seems that shader itself does not costs too much(normal map? lookup table?). What really matters is their UI/Shader job scheduling in realtime constraints on any CPU/GPU load state.

scdnc• 1 year ago

I like the idea of using a more glass-like UI, but the implementation is horrible. It looks like a school project rather than work from the biggest company in the world. I generally don't understand the idea of making every UI look more like a children's toy.

minhoryang• 1 year ago

Curious how much the work environment would deteriorate if an expert program with a large amount of information were redesigned with Liquid Glass. It's a bit perplexing that I have to look for a way to turn off this type of UI change under the accessibility menu.

markpapadakis• 1 year ago

This looks like a disaster. It is like it was fast-tracked based on the oomph factor because seriously, how come you didn't notice how hard it is to read text or even notice overlapping objects/controls? Maybe once we use it for some time, we will all get it - it is possible - but as it now stands, I hope there will be an option to turn all that off, _especially_ on MacOS which is what I use to get work done.

Woodi• 1 year ago

Transparent glass UI will be good for UI in glasses :)

sirwhinesalot4• 1 year ago

As someone who loved aero glass and aqua, this looks like absolute dogshit.

There was a reason nobody layered barely readable icons directly onto the glass surface in aero. Even the text in the title bar had a glow to increase the contrast at least!

Fire all the design team. Should have done it back when iOS7 came out but clearly it wasn't a one off.

gchokov• 1 year ago

This design is terrible. Also... no hope in Apple changing their mind. First time in 15 years that I am not looking forward to such changes.

HenriTEL• 1 year ago

Apple already had serious contrast issues that have been adding up over the last few years, notably yellow text on white background or grey text on dark grey background. This liquid glass design will make the issue ubiquitous.

seydor5• 1 year ago

They are also apparently doing away with tabs. Now tabs will appear as buttons and pills. Just to make sure that you are entirely and unmistakably confused

rickdeckard• 1 year ago

Can I have all that, but without the gaudy blurs and dynamic reflections?

Without all that glassy thing. A neutral consistent flat design without too many shades.

You know..., like Material design?

smcleod• 1 year ago

One of the first things I do on app with transparent interfaces is disable transparency as it usually impacts battery life / performance and results in very low contrast UI hinting.

earthnail• 1 year ago

As an indie app developer, this design update discourages me massively. The previous, minimal design gave the impression of being a platform, even though it was always mostly Apple stuff in Apple land.

The new design is so visually overwhelming that I think the only way for users to deal with it is to reduce complexity. I read a statistic that said the average user had 21 apps on their phone. I think that will reduce to 15 now, or less.

As for my app, this basically throws my whole design system out the window. I don't want to add glass to all my UI elements. Remember the visual noise that translucent window borders introduced in Vista? Why would I do that to my UI?

I like the fact that the new design introduces a sense of hierarchy, and that it has more animations. I also like that transition animations are now interruptible by default (watch the "What's new in UIKit" video for that). But that could've happened without the glass nonsense.

It was hard to feel excited in previous WWDCs, but I just took it as a sign of platform maturity. This year, on the other hand, is outright discouraging.

gherard5555• 1 year ago

Aero 2.0

StopDisinfo9102• 1 year ago

So, it's official: I'm now old. I have seen the new that became old become new again.

This reminds me a lot on the visual we were saying for Windows Longhorn before Vista was released, peak Apple being their usual trailblazing self.

nashashmi• 1 year ago

My thoughts exactly. On windows we turned off most of this in exchange for speed. And then when I went to turn it back on, it did not look good anymore.

StopDisinfo9102• 1 year ago

I don’t know. I think Aero was quite far from what was envisioned due to technical limitations and I’m quite sure it will look better now.

I’m just amused we have somehow circled back.

bilekas• 1 year ago

This is such a nothing burger and what happens when you let UI take control of your whole business model.

"Look at our presentation, UI updates"

What happened to actually innovating?

They really are promoting "set your alarm without closing your streaming video"

... I mean. Great. My life is gonna be so much easier.

Users love widgets

MMmm Apple. Time to stop with the mushrooms

vijucat3• 1 year ago

I got a minor amount of hate for it, but to repeat what I wrote here [1]:

"Slowly, I'm coming to the conclusion that designers should never be employed, only consulted on a per-project basis. If they sit around 8 hours a day, they end up changing something or the other to justify their existence. But human beings are not used to change at such a rapid cadence. Humans take time to settle into a design and establish patterns of usage."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44103131#44105292

fastasucan• 1 year ago

I don't understand how you can both appreciate the importance of good design, but at the same time claim that making good design is not a full time job.

sirwhinesalot4• 1 year ago

Because good design turns into bad design when the designers have nothing better to do.

vijucat3• 1 year ago

Is changing the design even though users are perfectly happy "good design"? No, that is the "full time job" part kicking in.

dragochat2• 1 year ago

this++

We need more UX that people can "settle into" instead of the constant assault of superficial change that drains energy from everyone's ongoing effort to adapt to exponentially increasing fundamental change!

lobsterthief• 1 year ago

This is why UX teams should be data-driven. Do user research and A/B testing to hone your UI.

kreco2• 1 year ago

I don't fully disagree but this is not the root of the cause.

If I'm being employed to create bad product (bad UI) then I'm bad at my job.

Everything single decision should have a rational about it. You should fix what is broken, improve what can be improved and certainly not doing feng shui changes.

TL;DR: It's a management issue.

wseqyrku2• 1 year ago

I think this is rather intentional. A sparkly design to distract from Siri failure. Oh look at that glass. It's almost real.

pzo4• 1 year ago

Could be also another side-benedits for apple:

- on older iphones this design probably wont render so well or fast (I guess require modern iphone with raytracing functionality) -> people need to buy new iphones

- put wrench into those cross-platform apps like flutter, capacitor to make their apps feel off.

EZ-E• 1 year ago

If they sit around 8 hours a day, they end up changing something or the other to justify their existence

I've seen this - it's not limited to designers, I've also business stakeholders with limited scope pushing for meaningless changes and revamps. The incentives to absolutely find something to do are too great. No one in higher management ever wants to hear that everything is fine and that we should do nothing. You'll be instantly booted saying that for lacking ambition and vision even if you're right. There should always be the next thing. As part of the tech industry earning a salary you always need to sell "something" internally.

tootie2• 1 year ago

Bad designers are like bad engineers. Seeking interesting things to do rather than serving the audience. Honestly, can't blame them either. They want to enjoy life not make profits.

Really good designers exist and are about as rare as good engineers.

tropicalfruit• 1 year ago

Apple OS marketing updates exist for 2 reasons:

1. new wallpaper to differentiate yearly identical hardware increments

2. CPU bloat to hog resources, slow your device and push people to update their HW

these tick both boxes.

xg15• 1 year ago

The time display on the lockscreen is hilarious. Who doesn't want a towering, gargantuan "9:41" implanted into their photos?

wseqyrku2• 1 year ago

With this glassy schmlassy design everyone should forget about Siri right?

sneak2• 1 year ago

I’m very sad that Apple lost their main “no” guy.

It doesn’t seem like they have anyone who can say “we’re not shipping/announcing that” with ultimate authority.

The AVP never should have shipped in its current state. Then there was/is the Siri 2/AI debacle. Now macOS, too.

This is to say nothing of the butterfly keyboard.

DrScientist• 1 year ago

From the way they present it it looks like a 'looks' led, rather than usability led interface design.

Grrr...

Hard to tell for sure until you have hands on though.

zac23or• 1 year ago

For those who complain that the old interfaces were better and the current ones are horrible, including this one (I tried using some glass interfaces, transparencies, etc. in the past. It's horrible to use) you're right, and that's not going to change. It's a question of the market.

When nobody used computers, it was necessary to attract people. How? With the bestter interfaces, usability. A graphical operating system running on a CPU of 20 MHz or less was something. It's not fast, but it's the best possible for the time!

And after 2000, everyone is using computers. The market is not expanding as companies expected. It's no longer important to attract people, everything can be done without worrying about the user, he's no longer important. Now, the Android keyboard is bigger than the Windows 95 installation, and my computer crashes from time to time with CPUs operating at GHz.

No, the interfaces of the past were not perfect, but they were made to try to fool people.

Remember Netflix? It used to recommend sharing passwords, now it tries to charge for each different IP. Is the same thing, the stream market is stable now...

The good UI is lost, it's a thing of the past.

tootie2• 1 year ago

Can anyone convince me of why I should care about OS U8 design? Don't people spend 98% of their time inside an app that doesn't follow the system UI?

botanical• 1 year ago

This translucent 3D look doesn't feel like they took usability into consideration. They just wanted to force a glass-look. At least the Aero look was frosted, this makes it so you have to strain to differentiate buttons and text on it.

karel-3d2• 1 year ago

If this ships in the current iteration, I will seriously consider jumping ship to Galaxy.

AirTags are still holding me in Apple ecosystem but now Androids have their own tracking thingies, maybe it's time.

bandoti2• 1 year ago

It’s going to be really interesting to see how this UI paradigm pans out. I think this captures a shift toward the extreme in responsive, fluid, convergent, whatever-you-want-to-call-it, design.

We’ve had books/scrolls for thousands of years, laid out in beautiful proportion, and now it has all melted in the oven!

CivBase• 1 year ago

I have a hard time reading the text in a lot of their examples.

The artist name "Nao" on the music player. The zoom level "1x" on the camera. The tab "Library" on the gallery. And even the URL "floralarrangem..." in the browser.

Seems to be a consequence of low-contrast, busy backgrounds, and overly aggressive use of transparency. Maybe a "tinted glass" approach and more considerate color/contrast choices would help.

voidUpdate• 1 year ago

It combines the optical qualities of glass with a fluidity only Apple can achieve, as it transforms depending on your content or context

Is there a reason only Apple can achieve this look, or is it just marketing crap?

wraptile2• 1 year ago

looking at the official examples[1] seems like it's the latter one.

1 - https://i.ibb.co/FbrSjXfF/image.png

cwizou• 1 year ago

Installed iOS, iPad and macOS yesterday, some things are quickly obvious :

- In general, it always looks worse on dark mode

- The glass transparency effect is too local. It looks only at what's exactly below, so if you have two icons side by side in Control center on iPhone, one may show dark and the next one light, making you think one is active and the other one is inactive. It's pretty clear they wrestled with icons being too transparent so they blurred them a bunch, but it just makes it worse in those cases.

- It does have sensible defaults for (most) 3rd party icons that are flat, by adding some reticule on the flat logo to make it pop and look less out of place.

- The textfield contrasts can be horrendous. If you try to add a sky background to macOS messages (the first choice), the textfield is white text on lightly colored background. In Safari, if you have one of the default desktop background, you can get grey text on blue grayish background. There's absolutely no contrast and it's clear that they will have to address it.

- Safari for macOS takes the contrast issue above and pushes it to 11. It tries to reintroduce the universally hated concept of "the webpage takes over your browser window" but makes it worse. It's horrible enough to have your tabs and icons change color from white to black if you tab from say hacker news to github, but they've added a very slow (and buggy) animation for the UI on top. So while the tab switches immediately, the UI on top slowly morphs from white to black. Absolutely infuriating (and can't be disabled in beta 1). You also can't really see the selected tab in dark mode on a webpage with a black background.

In summary, some things look ok but in general it's really rough. The finder icon sums it best, they had a concept (transparent layers), and tried hard to shove everything through it, never stopping to question if maybe the concept needs adjusting when it clearly didn't work. I expect a bunch of changes, as is it's really rough.

richardlblair• 1 year ago

Someone at apple spent too much time on r/unixporn

stackedinserter• 1 year ago

Please make that iphone doesn't start playback when I sit in my car I'm dying.

tencentshill• 1 year ago

It's like one of those terrible Winterboard skins I used on iOS 6.

dayvid• 1 year ago

They're betting big on AR. This is for their glasses, but they'll have to split the design from AR/VR and non AR/VR

Traubenfuchs• 1 year ago

Change for the sake of change. Because otherwise, there would be no news and we would stay at: "things are pretty good, besides the bad ui and ux in some parts".

Absolutely nothing interesting or innovative on the horizon, besides AI snake oil that they apparently just can't get right...

End stage big tech.

sjs382• 1 year ago

This could be a GREAT design if it implemented head/eye tracking to create a true layered/3d feeling with depth.

That's something that would have been VERY doable for them on the iPhone/iPad, too.

bobbylarrybobby2• 1 year ago

Probably not possible without a major hit to battery life to keep Face ID/front camera on persistently. I agree it would be insanely cool though. Someone actually put together a demo (in 2019!) where the UI chrome correctly reflects the device’s orientation relative to the ambient light here: https://youtu.be/TIUMgiQ7rQs

idle_zealot• 1 year ago

I'm generally not a fan of the new design. I prefer my interface to be functional, consistent, and get out of my way rather than be flashy or attention-grabbing.

That said, I do greatly appreciate how the new guidelines and redesigned UIs make interactive buttons actually look like buttons. Each tappable element is visually distinct and represented in a consistent way. I just wish that Apple didn't insist on moving/hiding buttons in response to unrelated actions (ie WHY do I lose my action buttons when I scroll down, and why do they poof into existence when I scroll up? Why can I search on the root page of Settings but not on any subpage? Why does tapping a button that reveals a submenu hide that button?) Just stop moving things around, please.

joduplessis• 1 year ago

Aside from the (glaring) accessibility issues, the aesthethic doesn't look great.

tangomama• 1 year ago

Alright, I'm officially turning off iOS automatic updates.

dev1ycan• 1 year ago

Transluscency has always been a beautiful effect I don't care what brainwashed "UI/UX"designers post ~2013 think, they are literally conditioned to just repeat mantras.

The original reason for dropping transluscency was that "old people can't tell apart things", well we're way past the era of "no phone" generations, are we forever going to have things stay ugly?

Vista was the best looking OS ever with Aero on.

waffletower• 1 year ago

I wonder if 'Liquid Glass' would have been less crass looking to me if Jonny Ive was still at the company and somehow approved it. It almost has the consistency of gummy candy, which isn't something I like to touch either.

settsu3• 1 year ago

I would've loved to have been a fly on the wall throughout the various discussions as this idea made its way across the Apple org.

That this was the dominant topic during the keynote of their annual developer event doesn't seem to bode well for the state of the ecosystem. Especially combined with how cutting the sarcasm was for the new version numbering and new macOS name announcement(s).

butlike3• 1 year ago

It's nice to see the Mac getting some love

neya• 1 year ago

Did Apple just do

   *{
      opacity: 0.36
   }

And call it revolutionary?

pardner• 1 year ago

Yet more glossy 'form over function' nonsense from Apple in my opinion. Was hoping '26 would be the release that tackled their massive technical debt around broken/reduced functionality. I did see a Reddit post that summarized it nicely, a screenshot of a Youtube video where the play button overlaps the name so it reads Liquid*ass

0xCE0• 1 year ago

So, the design language of 2025+ is wobbly "organic" 3D'ishly morphing UI elements, either translucent or not. Surely it was hard work after engineering round-cornered windows and centered taskbars. Can't wait to see the future innovations of these $1T+ companies.

- https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/06/apple-introduces-a-de...

- https://m3.material.io/blog/building-with-m3-expressive

- https://fluent2.microsoft.design/design-principles

hbn4• 1 year ago

I don't see anything 3D-ish in Material 3. I don't think Google will ever aim for a 3D design language (or at least not anything with complicated real-time rendering) in the current state of things cause they're so tied to the web it's just not as practical to design/render there.

And Microsoft always shows a lot of pretty images for their software design promo material and it never looks anything like that in reality. Oddly enough a lot of their desktop apps are just webapps at this point so they're basically in a similar situation to Google. And they have to make things run on low-end hardware (or at least they should...) so they aren't in Apple's position of being able to design knowing the hardware can handle calculating light's refraction through glass 60-120 times per second.

dexterlagan3• 1 year ago

This is one possible elegant and esthetically pleasing solution to keeping readability/visibility as high as possible while allowing dark/light modes AND complex backgrounds. It has the advantage of having the exact same visibility properties in both modes, no matter what you have as background. The downside... well everything is blurry and glassy.

thewileyone• 1 year ago

Windows Vista Aero: "What took you so long?"

dexterlagan3• 1 year ago

...funny how it coincides with the Android 16 release. now that Android has the same UI as Apple... the replication is complete and Apple has to differentiate itself again.

dexterlagan3• 1 year ago

I mean common https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog-publish-prod/ori...

piyush_soni• 1 year ago

Man. They way they market and sell 'average' stuff which won't even raise an eyebrow if it came from any other company is remarkable.

jama21112• 1 year ago

I’m going to go against the grain here (please don’t shoot!) and say I think it’s kinda pretty. They probably overstepped the mark here a bit, but likely they’ll dial it back over the betas and the actual release will be a little more tame.

I get there are accessibility concerns, but apple has the best track record of any os building company at making sure accessibility options exist and work well, so I hope that will address that. As for people here saying it’s ugly… how do I out this delicately. They do huge amounts of product research and market research as a company, it’s likely this will go down very well with the public even if it doesn’t go down well with the average HN reader… if you catch my drift.

It’ll be fine, IMO at worst it’ll be a bit ugly and they’ll be forced to walk it back a bit. The way people here talk about it it’s like this design kicked their dog or something.

Apple introduces a universal design across platforms

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