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Apple introduces a universal design across platforms
- julienfr112 1y agosomething 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.
- hulitu 1y ago> Apple introduces a universal design across platforms Looks like shit.
- raspasov 1y agoI like it, I think it will be great after ironing out a few obvious issues.
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- nharada 1y agoI 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.
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- 9283409232 1y agoThis is 100% for that reason.
- detourdog 1y agoI 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.
- chakintosh 1y agoRight 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 1y agogood god. this never ends well.
- al_borland 1y agoIt could be worse, at least they didn’t rename the company over their VR headset.
- makeitdouble 1y agoTBF it is a less prejudiced name than the one they used before. I think they really wanted to change their image, and the metaverse thing happened to also be a decent candidate for that.
- crooked-v 1y agoThe 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.
- layer8 1y agoIt’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_ 1y agoAlso 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 1y agoThis 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.
- al_borland 1y agoWe had operating systems with transparent windows 20 years ago. I have a hard time believing this UI will stress any device released in the last 5 years. One of the more common “problems” people have is that their devices are so much more powerful than they will ever use.
- _aavaa_ 1y agoGo look at videos of the current UI. It's not just doing an alpha blend between two static images. It's doing real time effects to mimic refraction and color separation the way you except to see through glass. Also, 20 years ago you're talking about desktops connected to the wall, or laptops with no expectations of battery life. The name of the game for phones is use the hardware as little as possible a down clock asap. The fancier the UI, the longer older hardware need to stay upclocked and the more they have to work to hit 60fps (or more) smoothly.
- basisword 1y agoIt seems to be largely based on the visionOS stuff.
- r00fus 1y agoBingo. 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?
- bombcar 1y agoBecause 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.
- monkeyelite 1y agoI think asserting that there is no consumer product to be had in the realm of AR/spatial computing is shortsighted. And if so, then why not work on it? The research in AR has already improved the phones as well.
- lurking_swe 1y agobut they can work on it without ruining ios. no?
- monkeyelite 1y agoThis idea is not in the comment I am replying to.
- addandsubtract 1y agoThey can't even work on iOS without ruining macOS, so, no.
- bombcar 1y agoI don’t be grudge I’m trying. I do be grudge them, forcing every other workable component that they make to pretend that it’s a really good idea. Same thing Microsoft did with their tablet UI forced on all of their operating systems.
- mulmen 1y ago> Since you literally cannot have fully opaque elements with AR glasses Why not?
- tsimionescu 1y agoBecause 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.
- mulmen 1y agoBut why does the interface have to be transparent? Why can't it just be opaque then disappear when not needed and/or be placed in the periphery?
- tsimionescu 1y agoIf we're still speaking about AR glasses, no current technology can make the images more opaque than the screen itself. So if the screen itself is transparent, whatever you draw on it with light will be at best as opaque as the screen - so, still transparent.
- montag 1y agoI 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...
- tsimionescu 1y agoWouldn'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?
- sneak 1y agoYou 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.
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- leakycap 1y agoApple's new video presentation style is so cloying, it really didn't help with the letdown this software is.
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- paxys 1y agoSome 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.
- timeon 1y agoMy nostalgia with glass goes bit further to KDE 2 or 3.
- Apocryphon 1y agoSomeone at Apple shared a video about Frutiger Aero
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- bitwize 1y agoThat'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.
- detourdog 1y agoWas 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.
- bitwize 1y agoAero wasn't trying to look like Aqua. Steve Jobs would have launched a devastating hypercombo of legal action if it were. But it was clearly a response to Aqua: use 3D acceleration to provide fancy effects and shiny widgets. The previous release, Windows XP, still did everything with lines, solid-fill rects, and blitted bitmaps and was starting to look long in the tooth compared to Mac OS X.
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- jvreeland 1y agoAwesome I wasn't having enough trouble figuring out what I could tap and not now everything has this crappy distorted look.
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- ypeterholmes 1y agoLiquid 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
- reissbaker 1y agoWhy 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 1y 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-tv-boxes-do-and-mostly-dont-track-you/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/06/all-the-ways-apple-t...
- redczar 1y agoApple TV certainly has ads. It’s just that it’s ads for Apple products.
- reissbaker 1y agoNo, it doesn't. I have one. There aren't ads.
- redczar 1y agoThere are pre-installed apps like Apple Fitness+. When you scroll over that app the top part - maybe 1/4 of the screen - is a picture of a workout. This is an ad for Apple Fitness+. Similarly if you use the Apple TV app you’ll see an ad for Apple TV+ shows.
- reissbaker 1y ago
- arnaudsm 1y agoOn top of wasting GPU cycles, such low-contrast graphics are terrible for older users. The Apple Music navbar is hilariously unreadable and distracting.
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- pat2man 1y agoAccessibility -> Display -> Reduce Transparency?
- drdaeman 1y agoThe 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.
- fidotron 1y agoThis looks tailor made to be hard to recreate easily in CSS. Which is just going to make people try even harder.
- graypegg 1y agoRaytracing and lighting effects in CSS 3D transforms! ;)
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- diiiimaaaa 1y agoSimilar 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.
- fidotron 1y agoRefraction 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflection_mapping
- nikeee 1y agoThe 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.
- detourdog 1y agoIsn’t it better to not limit GUIs to what can be achieved in CSS?
- Insanity 1y agoBased 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.
- behnamoh 1y 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.
- wmeredith 1y agoTurn them off in accessibility
- ThatMedicIsASpy 1y agoI wonder if there will be a big difference between a 60Hz and 120Hz Display. Blur is distracting if the content is dynamic.
- qgin 1y agoLike the flashlight. There’s no reason to have that much pageantry behind turning on a flashlight.
- School-Cotton 1y agoI’m not sure what you mean. I turn on the flashlight with two touches: drag from the top right corner to bring up the control center, then click on the flashlight icon.
- bitwize 1y agoOh 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 1y agoApple 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
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- captainmuon 1y agoIt'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 1y agoHere's hoping that they'll keep the options to disable unnecessary transparencies and animations.
- Klonoar 1y agoWhat makes you think they’d remove accessibility options like that? They’re generally pretty considerate in that realm.
- ProfessorLayton 1y agoApple Music on Mac ignores the 'Reduce Motion' accessibility setting for their very distracting animated playlist covers, while apps like Weather respect it.
- detourdog 1y agoWhat do expect from an animated playlist?
- ProfessorLayton 1y agoI expect them to behave the same way they do on my phone and not have a bunch of animated tiles on the home page?
- detourdog 1y agoMaybe this upgrade will help.
- Klonoar 1y agoThank you for the bug report in a thread about whether Apple would remove a checkbox from the settings panel.
- ProfessorLayton 1y ago
- SebastianKra 1y agoEh, 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 1y agoSeems overly distracting, and not a lot of contrast.
- lordfrito 1y agoYeah I hope this doesn't last long
- 9d 1y ago> "... and a fluidity that only Apple can achieve ..." (from the promo video on https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/06/apple-introduces-a-delightful-and-elegant-new-software-design/ 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.
- 9d 1y agoDon'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 1y agoThis gives Windows Aero vibes, but somehow even worse.
- bigyabai 1y agoHonestly? 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.
- timw4mail 1y ago[flagged]
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- bamboozled 1y agoLooks great, looking forward to trying it...
- gherkinnn 1y agohttps://www.lux.camera/physicality-the-new-age-of-ui/ 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.
- dmix 1y agoI figured out why I don't like the icons https://www.lux.camera/content/images/size/w2400/2025/05/Mail-Sheets.jpg 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.
- wmeredith 1y agoI 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.
- JadeNB 1y agoI think your parent said that they look good at some sizes and bad at others, and pointed out that this could be explained by their only being tested at the larger sizes, but didn't say that they necessarily believed that's what happened. The alternative, "tested but don't care," may be worse. (Or maybe you're disagreeing with the aesthetic judgment?)
- dmix 1y agoFair enough. I should wait to test it on iphone. Although sometimes concept ideas get mandated from above and the designers are left to figure it out the best they can.
- marcelroed 1y agoAfter trying this out on my iphone, I can say your conclusion is exactly correct. The icons look subtly out of focus in a way that's quite unsettling.
- kej 1y agoThis 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.
- wmf 1y agoDo you mean Aero Glass from Windows 7? Metro is a flat design that looks nothing like this.
- basisword 1y agoDo you mean Aero Glass from Windows Vista?
- anonymars 1y agoWindows Mojave strikes again. Vista really got the short end of the stick
- llm_nerd 1y agoI 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.
- llm_nerd 1y agoAs a followup on this, it's notable that Apple has changed the title of the linked post to "Apple introduces a delightful and elegant new software design", making the subtitle "A universal design across platforms brings more focus to content and a new level of vitality while maintaining the familiarity of Apple’s software" Everyone was keying on the universal design thing, and the seeming importance of "introduces" as if this is a first, and it was such an odd thing for Apple to denote given that they have been using a universal design for a long, long time.
- Bondi_Blue 1y agoIt 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 1y agoSo Apple goes Windows Aero?
- Klonoar 1y agoEvery 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.
- afavour 1y agoI 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.
- Klonoar 1y agoYeah, for sure. That solves part of it.
- 1718627440 1y agoCan't you access rendered elements from JS? Then this will be a massive security issue, because anybody can read all the content from behind.
- robertoandred 1y agoElements have supported transparency for a couple decades now.
- 1718627440 1y agoBut not across OS windows?
- kylehotchkiss 1y agoI 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?
- eviks 1y agoThe 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.
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- dmix 1y agoThe 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 1y agoWould 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 1y agoAm 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.
- Bluestein 1y agoWhy can't we leave good enough alone? Heck, we hit "peak-UI" with Win 2K, AFAAIC.-
- unsupp0rted 1y agopeak-UI was Visual Basic 3. Any component that wasn't in VB3 was post-peak UI.
- Bluestein 1y agoThat indeed tracks.-
- surgical_fire 1y agoI looked it up to double check if it is what I remember. And yes, you are correct.
- mmastrac 1y ago[flagged]
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- j45 1y agoThis 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 1y agoIt 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 1y agoYeah, struggling with reading things
- athriren 1y agoyes, legibility—at least during the presentation—was really bad. hope it’s better on device.
- asciimov 1y agoCan’t wait to be told, “You’re viewing it wrong.” /s But yes, terrible visual usability. Otherwise it looks nice, better than flat.
- seanalltogether 1y agoI 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 https://imgur.com/a/AEEj5w1
- jrmg 1y agoThere are definitely compression artifacts in there that are making it look significantly less crisp than it would in reality.
- leakycap 1y agoAnd zero smudges, environmental reflections, and glare than in reality while still being impossible to read. It will be even harder to see in anything but a dark room than these perfect press videos show.
- ncr100 1y ago
- RedShift1 1y agoAnything that moves away from flat colorless rectangles is a good thing, I welcome this change.
- wmeredith 1y agoI 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.
- Animats 1y ago[flagged]
- bigyabai 1y ago> conflict provoking comment > irrelevant time-wasting demand It simply doesn't feel like an HN thread until someone gets insecure enough to berate non-sequitur Open Source projects, does it? When I browse the rest of the web, I always end up missing HN's iconic Jungian groupthink. You lot tend to shoot yourself in the foot before anyone even notices you're drawing a gun.
- bowsamic 1y agoIt 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 1y agoThe children yearn for ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶m̶i̶n̶e̶s̶ Frutiger Aero (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frutiger_Aero https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frutiger_Aero)
- isoprophlex 1y agoI was going to comment something similar; this is just Aero with higher DPI and more GPU-intensive gimmicks, right?!
- carlosjobim 1y ago15 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-Windows-7-172671190 https://www.deviantart.com/zainadeel/art/Shine-2-0-for-Windo...
- russelg 1y agoWow 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!
- sirwhinesalot 1y agoTake me back... All downhill from there.
- chakintosh 1y agoInteresting 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.
- adrianmsmith 1y agoThen 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.
- chakintosh 1y agoYes, because in 99% of the marketing material from launch, you see it being used by some rando in their living room.
- jama211 1y agoIt was very very clearly not aimed at or designed for the average consumer, it’s just that it turns out the people who are not average consumers still have living rooms.
- jama211 1y agoThey 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 1y agoWhy, why, why, do all the Apple announcements have the exact same ASIMO stiff hand gestures? Hostage videos have more fluidity.
- ejpir 1y agothought the same, how on earth did they think this looks like a smooth presentation. Almost like he doesn't believe what he's saying
- yborg 1y agoPatiently awaiting the Teams AI filter to automatically apply Apple Keynote Hands in video conferences.
- ahartmetz 1y agoMight 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.
- thinkingemote 1y agoThey 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.
- kylehotchkiss 1y agoI 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.
- tiltowait 1y agoI'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.
- microtonal 1y agoIt'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_cheese 1y agoMD3 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.
- testfrequency 1y agoTame is what Apple should have shipped instead of this liquid glass disaster.
- lazharichir 1y agoto be fair, i'd take tame over horrendous and unparseable screen any day.
- cmdtab 1y agoThere is no contrast. Wow! Why?
- captainmuon 1y agoWe 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.
- kylehotchkiss 1y agoso what you're saying is that we need to resurrect skeuomorphism?
- lukebuehler 1y agoyes, I think this is exactly what's happening.
- gaze 1y agoI 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!
- mrweasel 1y ago> I get the sense that the Scandinavian minimalism thing has worn too heavy on everyone As a Scandinavian: I don't feel like we tried that since Braun. Apple has tried to mimic a Scandinavian sort of minimalism, but only in appearance. The iPhone UI is way to busy and is to hard to navigate for me to classify it as minimalism.
- wartijn_ 1y agoI 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.
- meindnoch 1y agoLooks awful to be honest.
- w-hn 1y agoHuh, 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 1y 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.
- adrianmsmith 1y agoI liked it too with Windows 95, Windows 98 etc. Not sure why Microsoft dropped it tbh!
- m3kw9 1y agoFirst 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
- socalgal2 1y agoAs 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
- paradite 1y agoI 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.
- cheema33 1y ago> I hate things that are translucent. Same here. I do not understand the fascination with making things harder to read and see.
- xnx 1y agoThis 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.
- leakycap 1y agoI 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 1y agoI 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.
- whytaka 1y agoI 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 1y agoI think iOS safari already breaks bottom bars by having phone controls show up when a user taps near the bottom.
- whytaka 1y agoThis 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-v 1y agoThanks, 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.
- leakycap 1y agoWith Save, Submit, Next, Continue, and other similar navigation at the bottom of the viewport, this is going to be very annoying for iPhone users
- saratogacx 1y agoFloating 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 1y agoWhen 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.
- metadat 1y 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..
- asciimov 1y agoI’m all for a new design esthetic, even if they have to iterate it a few times to improve usability.
- kevin_thibedeau 1y ago> Apple introduced the whole skeuomorphic analogy IBM was doing it 10 years earlier.
- glkindlmann 1y agoIt 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.
- Someone1234 1y 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.
- nottorp 1y agoCan 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.
- moralestapia 1y agoCook added 2 trillion (more?) in market cap. Cook stays.
- mjburgess 1y agoHe collected 2tr in rent
- dymk 1y agoRenting out... iPhones?
- mjburgess 1y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_rent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_rent
- moralestapia 1y agoSo ... what's your point? I don't get it. That some company is making money?
- mjburgess 1y agoThat tim cook is reaping the rewards of their earlier innovation. The opposite of economic rent is economic value creation.
- moralestapia 1y agoI still don't get your point. "Reaping the rewards of their earlier innovation" is literally his job.
- Someone1234 1y agoI'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.
- whiteboardr 1y agoAttack 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.
- mrweasel 1y 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.
- 1y ago
- pier25 1y agoI like it a priori. Let's see how it holds up in practice.
- dimal 1y agoOh 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.
- basisword 1y agoApple 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 1y agoI 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…
- landl0rd 1y agoLet's also not ignore that, whether apple has actually achieved this or not, the highly-accessible version of something necessarily excludes many design idioms and either looks worse or relegates one to a limited range of creative expression. As such, most designers will not want to design for that by default.
- bigyabai 1y agoSince when did we care about what designers want? It's called User Experience, not Designer Experience. The target audience is not people who are intimately familiar with digital idioms, that's why skeuomorphism is remembered more fondly than the iOS 7 design.
- charamis 1y agoReally wish that this sets a trend like iOS 7 did and move forward from this bland flat design that exists everywhere
- ksec 1y agoIt 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 1y agoI 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 1y agoWhat 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.
- satvikpendem 1y agoThis 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 https://www.youtube.com/@microsoftdesign/videos
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- koiueo 1y agoYou 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 1y 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.
- hotmeals 1y agoOnly Apple could call an Aero-esque water based design "Liquid Glass".
- quyleanh 1y agoMore distractions, making the text difficult to read, and increased resource consumption from rendering these unnecessary animations.
- clueless 1y agoso let's use up those extra CPU cycles and update the UI to slow everything down again.
- plainOldText 1y agoThis 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.
- JKCalhoun 1y agoI agree that it seems to be a move toward lower contrast. I prefer higher contrast.
- vFunct 1y agoI 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.
- yuehhangalt 1y agoApple learned a lot of lessons with Aqua and eventually dialed back the translucency. Unfortunately, they seem to have forgotten those lessons.
- kergonath 1y 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.
- 1y ago
- shayway 1y agoVisually 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.
- ksec 1y agoThe 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 1y agoIt’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 1y agomaterial design ... spsh, we call it substence design.
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- rweichler 1y agoWhen 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 1y agoWow hard to believe it’s been that long but really puts this era at Apple in perspective
- solardev 1y agoI guess Windows Vista gets the last laugh, after all.
- 9d 1y agoIt'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?
- thewebguyd 1y agoWhat'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 1y agoFunnily 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.
- alberth 1y agoAqua, 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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_(user_interface)
- JKCalhoun 1y agoLooks 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.
- jauntywundrkind 1y agoThe 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?
- whiteboardr 1y agoHow does liquid glass unbox and unframe the content?
- jauntywundrkind 1y agoInstead 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.
- bigyabai 1y ago
- beached_whale 1y agoI hope I can disable the transparency, nothing makes it harder and slower to read than that for me. Distracting too.
- antoniuschan99 1y agoIn 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.
- alberth 1y agoUnpopular 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.
- thewebguyd 1y 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 1y agoIt's got some KDE 4 vibe https://news.softpedia.com/news/How-to-Install-KDE-SC-4-4-on-Ubuntu-9-10-134546.shtml 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-details-bekannt-1300333.html https://www.computerworld.ch/software/windows/microsoft-deta...
- normie3000 1y agoHow much battery life could you save by disabling these effects?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- realcul 1y agolooks like windows vista aero feature. wow.. we have come a full circle indeed!
- willio58 1y agoI 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 1y agoI 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 1y agoAt what point do we reach this attitude, where we do not rage against everything that's new?
- amegahed 1y agoI 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 https://www.specularcss.org/#materials/glass
- throwaway2562 1y agoThis is what a company running out of ideas looks like
- jama211 1y agoI 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.
- amegahed 1y agoI 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 https://www.specularcss.org/#materials/glass
- vitaflo 1y agoIt 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 1y agoI 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 1y agoIt's weird the amount of not asked/not needed things we do.
- andersa 1y agoIt's... awful? Why would I want all this distracting shimmering as I scroll? Apple really isn't what it once was, this is embarrassing.
- gausswho 1y agoSame response I had for iOS 7: Clown vomit.
- pentagrama 1y agoI 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.
- agumonkey 1y agoEven the antialiasing is bad.. this is below Apple usual slickness.
- oofbaroomf 1y agoa "clear" opinion... :)
- __MatrixMan__ 1y agoEvery 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 1y agoI may be mistaken but I believe the hotkey is "display my desktop, uncluttered" for those that still store files on their desktops.
- __MatrixMan__ 1y agoAh of course, I had forgotten that you could put stuff there. My home directory is a terrible mess, but my desktop is pristine.
- bombcar 1y agoI somehow continually hit that key stroke or did the mouse movement, so I went and disabled both
- microflash 1y agoI'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.
- Lammy 1y agoThe 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 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.
- BirAdam 1y agoThe quality of their presentations has just gone down. No one at Apple has the stage presence of Jobs.
- lyu07282 1y agoI 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 1y agoWell that looks awful
- Bengalilol 1y agoFrom 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 1y agoLooks like Apple (re)discovered Sun's Project Looking Glass from 2003. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Looking_Glass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Looking_Glass Liquid Glass looks a lot like coming up with changes for the sake of them.
- robertoandred 1y agoI think they (re)discovered Mac OS X from 2001.
- ch_sm 1y agoOh 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 1y agoGood 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.
- seydor 1y agoLiquid glass , like windows vista before it, looks plasticky. It's tupperware and it looks cheap and almost smells of garlic.
- mwkaufma 1y agomy kingdom for usable bevel-gray toolbars and controls
- boars_tiffs 1y agoim having flashbacks from when apple introduced flat design in ios 7. i refused to upgrade for 2 years...
- IAmGraydon 1y agoOh right - I almost forgot we’re in the timeline where the “experts” always make the worst choice available to them.
- basisword 1y agoAfter 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 1y agoSo, windows Aero?
- gastonmorixe 1y agoWindows Vista vibes gone wrong. What happened to Apple's design lead and taste? jeez
- sitzkrieg 1y agothis ui is cosmically horrible. power users are seeing the end of the tunnel
- poisonborz 1y agoWhat'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.
- bix6 1y agoFeels 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 1y agoSo I guess 19 years is the ideal time to wait before copying Windows Vista.
- username223 1y agoThey 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 1y agoAwful everything
- sarreph 1y agoPerhaps 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 1y agoI'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.
- pseudalopex 1y 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.
- jama211 1y agoAt 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.
- WhyNotHugo 1y agoLast 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 1y agoI thought this was an April 1st joke.
- stalco 1y agoI 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 https://imgur.com/a/6ZTCStC
- replwoacause 1y agoMy eyes don’t know where to focus. Everything runs together.
- GenerocUsername 1y agoHoly cow that's bad. 2 slightly different grids overlaid with transparency feels like a joke but here t is
- Axsuul 1y agoThat could be fixed I feel by decreasing the background opacity.
- FinnKuhn 1y agoThis kinda looks like a fake "iOS" skin for Android from 2018... nasty
- Vegenoid 1y agoWow. 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.
- hbn 1y agoRemember this is the first developer beta. I’m pretty sure a lot of iOS 7 was dialed back between announcement and release
- 1y ago
- t1234s 1y agoDid they introduce an easy way to remove the bloatware from MacOS?
- 827a 1y agoRunning 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.
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- stevenhubertron 1y agoI 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.
- wraptile 1y agotruly 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 1y agoThey 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 1y agoIt'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.
- oidar 1y ago>It's button camouflage. Exactly. It's like they are trying to make it harder to use.
- replwoacause 1y agoTbh I’ll be doing the same thing when my devices get this update. It’s inscrutable. Tap tap tap….taptaptaptaptapTAPTAP!!!
- pndy 1y agoGuess 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 1y agoTransparency 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 1y agoDid any user or developer ask for this? This looks absolutely awful and I’m a huge Apple fan. I can’t get behind it. :/
- 65 1y agoDesigners 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 1y agoGod 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 1y agoDude in that one video needs to go ahead back home and put on the sweater and slacks he deserves.
- squidsoup 1y agoThis is going to be awful for the large proportion of greybeards reading HN, but the kids are going to love it.
- pcurve 1y agoI'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.
- LightBug1 1y agoAll 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.
- valleyjo 1y agoThere’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 1y agoThat video. This is why I can't take Apple, and, sorry, many of their fans, seriously.
- oidar 1y agoFrom 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 1y agoOh god this looks like a horrible, visually indistinct mess.
- OhNoNotAgain_99 1y ago[dead]
- prmoustache 1y agoSo this is MacOs Vista?
- jamsterion 1y agoAfter 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.
- 65 1y agoI'll take ugly Liquid Glass over Windows any day.
- amelius 1y agoMost of these effects are happening under your finger. But maybe on the desktop you can see them if you use a mouse.
- SwiftyBug 1y agoAll I wanted was an option in settings that allows me to turn off all animations on macOS. How hard can that be?
- jordansmithnz 1y agoHaving 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 1y agoI 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
- jonplackett 1y agoThe whole event should have been titled: We completely ignored all the things you actually wanted and did this instead.
- danielvaughn 1y agoI 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.
- thenaturalist 1y agoThey 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 1y agoeverything 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.
- pndy 1y agoCan'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_vs_zoomin.jpg https://www.thepcmanwebsite.com/themes/images/themes/bounce_...
- ch_sm 1y agoHaha, nice screenshot. It even has Bryce 5 in the start menu!
- unethical_ban 1y agoI 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.
- tyleo 1y agoGlass 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-issue 1y agoLooks 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
- nsonha 1y agoThis 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.
- hajile 1y agoI want another Snow Leopard update with less glamor and a lot more bugfixes.
- laweijfmvo 1y agothe 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.
- laweijfmvo 1y agofor 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.
- Groxx 1y agoDisabling 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.
- Groxx 1y agoGoogle 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.
- montag 1y agoIt's really beautiful, but I don't want it on my device.
- sakesun 1y agoThe 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 1y 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.
- sakesun 1y agoPerhaps, use more affordable hardware instead, and reserve resources for those who are less fortunate. Plus your battery will thank you for this.
- protocolture 1y agoApple has invented Windows Vista
- nipperkinfeet 1y agoIt looks cheap and tacky. Apple really lost its way. Who thought this was a good idea?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- jwilliams 1y agoThis 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.
- bombcar 1y agoBecause it looks really good in a five minute demonstration to the C-level execs.
- Group_B 1y agoThe 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.
- mrcwinn 1y agoMy 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 1y agoWindows 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 1y agoEvery time Apple reinvents the wheel, they release it like it's the very first time it happened.
- vlark 1y agoIt's just clear Aqua.
- BonoboIO 1y agoI'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 1y agoMaybe 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?
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- rifty 1y agoI 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 1y agoWindows 7 Aero
- gigatexal 1y agoThe 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.
- cyberax 1y agoCan we get universal APIs then? E.g. no restrictions on JITs on iOS?
- absurdo 1y agoThe death and return of Aero.
- nake13 1y agoI’ve noticed something no one has mentioned yet: Liquid Glass is natively HDR.
- wizee 1y agoThe 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.
- replwoacause 1y agoThat’s it. I’m finally switching to Linux and Android.
- Groxx 1y agoGot bad news for ya on Android... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43975352 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-possum 1y agoYeah I tell myself that every time too
- mock-possum 1y 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??
- cubefox 1y agoFun activity: count how often they use the word "delight".
- dankwizard 1y agoApple have done it again - This is further proof that they are miles ahead of the competition. Kudos Apple. Stunningly beautiful.
- nprateem 1y agoThey should call the next macOS "KDE" and give credit where credit's due. Apple designers: Please copy wobbly windows too.
- blinding-streak 1y agoTouch bar 2.0.
- seydor 1y agoTerawatts of green energy being wasted to make your screen unreadable
- jama211 1y agoThis 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 1y agoOh 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 1y agoThis is why Ive left.
- joeguilmette 1y agoI’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.
- jama211 1y agoVery 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 1y agoWow, 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 1y agoIt'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 1y agoThere 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 1y agoAs 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 1y agoI'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.
- settsu 1y 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...)
- apetresc 1y agoI'm not sure what you mean; vaporwave is neither a misnomer nor a jab. Did you think they meant vaporware? The vaporwave aesthetic is that neon, retro-futuristic, laser-beam-y type look.
- dodo_is_dodo 1y agoI'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 1y agoI 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 1y agoCurious 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 1y agoThis 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 1y agoTransparent glass UI will be good for UI in glasses :)
- sirwhinesalot 1y agoAs 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 1y agoThis 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 1y agoApple 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.
- seydor 1y agoThey 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
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- rickdeckard 1y agoCan 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 1y agoOne 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 1y agoAs 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 1y agoAero 2.0
- StopDisinfo910 1y agoSo, 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 1y agoMy 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.
- StopDisinfo910 1y agoI 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 1y agoThis 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
- vijucat 1y agoI 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44103131#44105292
- fastasucan 1y agoI 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.
- sirwhinesalot 1y agoBecause good design turns into bad design when the designers have nothing better to do.
- agos 1y agothat's also true of engineering, but suggesting never hiring engineers would not go as well on this website
- sirwhinesalot 1y agoIt is not true, software needs constant maintenance as the environment keeps changing (which is a sad state of affairs as digital objects don't decay, but pretending this isn't the case is ridiculous). While you need new designs for new features, you don't need to redesign old features every few years. It's change for the sake of change.
- vijucat 1y agoIs changing the design even though users are perfectly happy "good design"? No, that is the "full time job" part kicking in.
- 5350-uiop-1130 1y agoApple 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 1y agoThe time display on the lockscreen is hilarious. Who doesn't want a towering, gargantuan "9:41" implanted into their photos?
- wseqyrku 1y agoWith this glassy schmlassy design everyone should forget about Siri right?
- sneak 1y agoI’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 1y agoFrom 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 1y agoFor 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.
- tootie 1y agoCan 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 1y agoThis 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-3d 1y agoIf 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.
- bandoti 1y agoIt’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 1y agoI 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 1y 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?
- wraptile 1y agolooking at the official examples[1] seems like it's the latter one. 1 - https://i.ibb.co/FbrSjXfF/image.png https://i.ibb.co/FbrSjXfF/image.png
- cwizou 1y agoInstalled 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 1y agoSomeone at apple spent too much time on r/unixporn
- stackedinserter 1y agoPlease make that iphone doesn't start playback when I sit in my car I'm dying.
- tencentshill 1y agoIt's like one of those terrible Winterboard skins I used on iOS 6.
- dayvid 1y agoThey'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 1y agoChange 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 1y agoThis 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.
- bobbylarrybobby 1y agoProbably 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 https://youtu.be/TIUMgiQ7rQs
- idle_zealot 1y agoI'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 1y agoAside from the (glaring) accessibility issues, the aesthethic doesn't look great.
- tangomama 1y agoAlright, I'm officially turning off iOS automatic updates.
- dev1ycan 1y agoTransluscency 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 1y agoI 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.
- settsu 1y agoI 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).
- butlike 1y agoIt's nice to see the Mac getting some love
- neya 1y agoDid Apple just do *{ opacity: 0.36 } And call it revolutionary?
- pardner 1y agoYet 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 1y agoSo, 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-delightful-and-elegant-new-software-design/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/06/apple-introduces-a-de... - https://m3.material.io/blog/building-with-m3-expressive https://m3.material.io/blog/building-with-m3-expressive - https://fluent2.microsoft.design/design-principles https://fluent2.microsoft.design/design-principles
- hbn 1y agoI 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.
- dexterlagan 1y agoThis 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 1y agoWindows Vista Aero: "What took you so long?"
- dexterlagan 1y 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.
- dexterlagan 1y agoI mean common https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog-publish-prod/original_videos/Live_updates.mp4 https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog-publish-prod/ori...
- piyush_soni 1y agoMan. They way they market and sell 'average' stuff which won't even raise an eyebrow if it came from any other company is remarkable.
- jama211 1y agoI’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.