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Apple's Liquid Glass: When Aesthetics Beat Function

123 points by maxvij 1y ago

maxvij 1y ago
I've recently picked up writing again, and decided to share my thoughts about what most designers (developers, tech people) have been thinking about lately: Liquid Glass. It makes sense, consistency-wise, but I wonder if it's the right direction. Let's hope Apple fixes the readability issues soon. Is this the new Windows Vista?
- sksrbWgbfK 1y ago
  > Apple is prioritizing visual consistency over readability It's a bit like someone saying "To view this website, enable JavaScript in your browser settings and reload the page" to read a simple piece of text ;)
  - imcotton 1y ago
    I did this in console: $('#container').style = 'display: unset'
  - maxvij 1y ago
    Ah, yeah, the irony. I've used Figma Sites to renew my website. Quite buggy. Any chance you could tell me what browser/configuration you were using? Perhaps I can fix this.
Popeyes 1y ago
It's nice to have frivilous things in our life where form overtakes function. But with a GUI, it's a tool and they work best when there are no frills. Nobody makes a fancy looking hammer (looking forward to the fancy hammer replies).
- patrickmay 1y ago
  Here you go: https://tftools.com/en-us/collections/martinez-hammers https://tftools.com/en-us/collections/martinez-hammers (I'm not a customer or an owner.)
  - AlanYx 1y ago
    Martinez hammers are fancy, but they're not a case where form overtakes function. They have a reputation for excellent weighting and every part is replaceable. The colors are functional too in the sense that they make it easy to tell your hammer from someone else's on a job site.
    - adastra22 1y ago
      I was just a few hours ago at the National Museum of Denmark, and they had a whole exhibit on ceremonial hammers in their prehistory floor. So there's that, I guess.
- appreciatorBus 1y ago
  My fear is that we are in a world were there can only be a couple of unique device types, and thus only a couple of unique operating systems and UIs. So that even for professional (metaphorical) “hammer” users, the function will end up performed by the same device/os/ui that is also handing more consumer oriented functions. There will be tension in the UI needs of different functions, but the market for consumer functions is just so large, that the hammer function will lose and be forced to adopt an unsuitable ui. “Your colleague Joe just hammered an 8d nail!” <Like> <comment>
- os2warpman 1y ago
  >But with a GUI, it's a tool and they work best when there are no frills. That must be why everyone is using CDE...
zero0529 1y ago
Liquid glass makes so much sense in an AR/VR context but it seems horrible in pretty much every other context
- bee_rider 1y ago
  It kind of makes sense… Although, I suspect if AR really becomes a thing, it will be in a form-factor with actually physical transparency. Nreal is the design to beat, not the gaming headsets. If the display is already transparent, adding a layer of pseudo-transparency to the interface seems kinda pointless.
  - PaulHoule 1y ago
    The thing is that passthrough and optical AR compete and might always compete as each one has advantages. The optical AR system is always going to be transparent to the outside world so perhaps a vendor that expects to sell both kinds of device will add transparency to the passthrough device so it looks "the same" as the optical device.
    - bee_rider 1y ago
      In that case the UI should have all-over transparency, rather than some limited transparent elements, right? And none of the complicated optical effects.
evrimoztamur 1y ago
All the friggin' shaders we have to run to waste GPU cycles, just to get those blobs pretending to refract light. Don't even get me started about the ever-increasing border radii!?
- abujazar 1y ago
  Those huge rounded corners do waste a lot of screen estate.
- notfried 1y ago
  This rounded corner change feels very off. Since Apple has that same radius across all its products (software and hardware), it could be signaling a broader upcoming shift in their hardware, perhaps driven by industrial design needs for future AR/VR/MR glasses.
- terhechte 1y ago
  What I find comical is that the same people praising this on various networks are often the same that hate on cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin or AI because of the energy usage. Apple has 1bio devices out there, if each of them consumes 10% more energy due to this change, that's a massive energy consumption increase - and this change offers no functional benefit at all.
  - crinkly 1y ago
    I’d just like to state my hatred of all those things is logically consistent on that basis.
  - furyofantares 1y ago
    This doesn't check out. Bitcoin uses 100-150 TWh per year. Charging 1 billion phones 365 times uses 3-4 TWh, so a 10% change here would be .3-.4 TWh. The idea that this change would consume 10% more energy seems completely unrealistic too.
  - filoeleven 1y ago
    Big if.
AlexandrB 1y ago
This will be the second Apple UI redesign where aesthetics trumps function. We've strayed so far from the intuitive interfaces in iOS <7.
daebersold 1y ago
A waste of compute. Locks up. Glitches. Sluggish and as author said, difficult to read.
abujazar 1y ago
Liquid Glass seems like a big step backwards. It's new for newness' sake and hardly brings any UI improvements.
- lagniappe 1y ago
  I suspect it was UI work done to coincide with the assumed (at the time) forthcoming dominance of the Apple Vision, if you consider the timeline. Cant waste that work even if Vision flopped. If you cant get society to embrace Vision, integrate it into their 2d UI as a trojan horse to make it more familiar and try again with the next generation when AR comes back after the AI fervor dies down. This same strategy is what brought coffee and starbucks to Japan using a ten year plan, first they had to start with coffee flavored candy to get the kids used to it, then 10 years later only then you can begin bringing in more coffee flavors, soon you have a Starbucks here and there.
  - abujazar 1y ago
    Maybe, but I don't think visionOS can fully explain the move towards more transparency. Older macOS versions (in the Mac OS X days) used a lot more transparency, and the first iterations of Aqua around 2001-2005 actually had a lot in common with Liquid Glass. Transparency everywhere was abandoned for obvious usability/accessibility reasons as well as changing standards for aesthetics. iOS 6 -> iOS 7 was a huge improvement, moving towards simplicity and minimalism. Liquid Glass feels more like bloat and a lot of wasted screen estate.
    - AlexandrB 1y ago
      > iOS 6 -> iOS 7 was a huge improvement It was not. Probably one of the biggest UI regressions of my lifetime on par with Windows 7 -> Windows 8. The iOS 7 design is so limiting in what it can communicate that it took Apple several major releases to make the iOS shift key's state legible to users. Arguably, they still haven't nailed it. I also find the idea that's iOS 7 is minimalistic comical, since information density dropped in most applications after the transition in favor of white space padding (necessary because the boundaries between UI and content were no longer obvious).
thom 1y ago
The transparency, blur and contrast issues are stupid but so obviously stupid that I assume they’ll be fixed. What worries me more about iOS 26 is the continuing trend of platforms being so ashamed of any visible UI that they feel the need to hide it. More ‘…’ menus everywhere, some of them only appearing after certain scroll gestures, which means tools that used to be ever-present and immediately tappable now require three gestures to activate. This desire to squash every UI down into one barely visible drop of glass isn’t ridiculous because of the glass, it’s ridiculous because UI is important. These devices have big screens and tons of pixels (not to mention hardware buttons) but somehow we only have room for the main content pane in any app. I agree with the article that skeuomorphism has gone too far, beyond mere analogy and now into the realm of completely impenetrable metaphor. Give me a brutalist UI that isn’t embarrassed to show itself. Gimme things that both explain and enable the app’s features. By all means make them shiny and lickable but please stop trying to take them away.
- glimshe 1y ago
  I hear you, but for most applications I don't want a lot of UI because it wastes screen space. It really depends on what I'm doing, but I feel the opposite that you do - most applications I use are full of widgets, separator bars, dots, mini buttons while I just want an empty canvas for work. When I add everything, I lose 1/3 of my workplace to UI alone and I don't like it. That's one thing I miss from menu+hotkey UIs - the menu bar is all you have to worry about.
  - Scarblac 1y ago
    I'm the opposite, screens are huge these days, there's enough space for both a decent amount UI and the work. (Not so much UI that it's distracting, of course)
  - queenkjuul 1y ago
    I got by just fine with a 5" screen and old cluttered Android. If the manufacturers have decided I'm no longer allowed to have a phone smaller than 6.5", least the developers can do is use that space to give me controls
  - 1y ago
anton-c 1y ago
As a typeface and legibility enthusiast I obviously have my problems with it. I've found that in the creative work I do, lots of things moved away from skeuomorphism too far. Yes it's easier to read the text on a flat black background with all the controls in a grid. but you lose some intuition compared to when it actually resembled a hardware unit that has logical places for things. I'm in the market for a new vehicle so I'm particular interested in that last line: which companies are bringing back physical controls in cars?
- bovermyer 1y ago
  I would adore a new car that has no digital displays or touch screens. I have a feeling I will need to settle for finding and restoring a car from before 1990.
  - thfuran 1y ago
    That can't happen now that backup cameras (and a display for it) are mandatory. And they're never going to leave a big screen in the dash unused except for when driving in reverse.
    - bovermyer 1y ago
      I bet I could add that to an old car. That's tempting.
      - hobs 1y ago
        Yes you can definitely add a backup camera after the fact.
    - JohnFen 1y ago
      > And they're never going to leave a big screen in the dash unused They could, at the very least, only use the touch screen for things that you don't want to adjust while driving.
      - 1y ago
deleted 1y ago
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a012 1y ago
I’m glad that I hesitated and didn’t buy a Mac just before this new design. It’s really a blocker to me now because I freaking hate it and I know I can’t stand using it for every day
pookieinc 1y ago
My question is: Given Apple is one of the most valuable companies on the planet, they can (and surely have) hired some of the best designers in the world. Articles like this one and many others are virtually sharing what we all think and every time a new beta comes out, it's strange to see some of the decisions that are made. The first beta came out and it was _very hard_ to see the lock screen if you had notifications. How was that missed? Or keep liquid glass, but don't make the text bright blue, so it's so hard to see. Or trigger frosted glass if dependent on whatever the background is? I sincerely do find designers to be in a hard position (especially having worked with so many of them in the past directly), but a lot of these things seem like novice mistakes. Maybe it's not even in the designing, it's on the QA front? I'm not even sure here. I'm by no means a designer, but I have to believe that they are testing this as much as we are internally and have been for a long time now... I'd like to believe they aren't just changing UI elements on the fly based on what X / Twitter feels is good or bad.
- TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
  Two theories are that Apple had to put something together quickly as a headliner because Apple Intelligence was clearly going to be a dud. So this is basically a hacked-together panic project. Or someone high up has a Vision™, and they're so set on that Vision™ they're not listening to what underlings and users are saying. Consider a parallel reality in which Apple did the next round of updates as a maintenance release and added some minor new features and UI tweaks. Would that have been a more positive outcome for the company? My guess is there would have been some grumbling about not having anything new to offer, but also relief that bugs were being fixed. It would have been a bit of a non-event. This seems more like a seismic negative event, with a lot of criticism from all quarters. (And some stanning, but less than usual.)
  - Fluorescence 1y ago
    > someone high up Has to be. It has that Musky smell of banning yellow safety paint i.e. too stupid to be a team effort. Legibility issues with translucency is such a basic thing and I expect Apple designers have gone deep on the topic e.g. mathematical models using human colour perception to determine hard limits for different type weights. I don't think the heavy frosting in past versions was an accident.
askl 1y ago
Apple: When Aesthetics Beat Function
- pjmlp 1y ago
  Like Stockholm syndrome with dongles hanging out of the laptop, because having too many ports like PCs is bad for aesthetics, having a dongle hanging out of the laptop is much better. I only use Macs on project basis, otherwise I am on PC, and is quite fun to see almost everyone on Apple side around the office carrying such dongles.
grishka 1y ago
This problem is endemic to the industry. All mainstream operating systems have been done products for quite a while. But because full-time designers need to be designing something even when nothing in the company needs designed any more, they start redesigning existing products. And the more radical and courageous the redesign, the better for their performance review.
- mlinhares 1y ago
  Performance review driven development is the bane of the whole industry. People inventing bullshit work for absolutely no reason other than to pad their yearly reviews. I've been through two large useless rewrites at my current job just so a bunch of folks could get promoted.
  - FirmwareBurner 1y ago
    Well, if the big tech mass layoffs go as planned, the problem should work itself out naturally. You can't have designers messing with the UI every performance review cycle, if you have no designers. Win-win for the shareholders who want to save money and for the consumers who want the UI to stay the same as they got used to.
- tokioyoyo 1y ago
  Not introducing any changes can lead to becoming “uncool” among the younger generation, which can be detrimental to the longevity of the business. Generally I agree with you, but it’s not that simple as our (HN crowd’s?) attitude of “function over form” is not that common out in the wild. People will spend money on stuff that makes them feel or look better. However, designers can screw that up too, and make the new”thing” uncool.
  - the_snooze 1y ago
    At least when it comes to smartphones, they're basically commodities these days. Everyone has them. It's hard to see what "wow" factor a mere UI redesign has when everyone and their mother (quite literally) will get it. If Apple wants to make iPhones cool again, my suggestion would be to loosen their iron grip on it and let people customize and build wacky new experiences around it with no corporate oversight. People on the ground know what's cool better than some trillion dollar company. Similar to the Windows theming and shareware scene of the 90s. But that would kill Apple's golden goose, and they'll have none of that.
mintone 1y ago
The lede is buried at the end of this article. > Later iOS 26 beta releases show Apple reducing transparency and adding blur effects for better readability. This is a beta release. It is a work in progress. When iOS 7’s betas came out the reaction was similarly negative. I would suggest we wait and see what the system evolves into; by the time we get to iOS 27 I am quite sure that Apple will have found the right balance.
- deadbabe 1y ago
  Cool, so I will wait for iOS 27.
- pjmlp 1y ago
  iOS 7 remains to this day a common meme among Apple developer community regarding design going too far, so naturally finding the right balance is kind of questionable.
- vsl 1y ago
  Beta 3 walked it back and added frosting. Beta 4 went back again. As for being "sure" Apple will find the right balance, they never fixed usability regressions in macOS introduced in the last redesign. And they have ~10 weeks to fix all this.
  - crinkly 1y ago
    It’s going to be another apple intelligence aka “how the fuck do I make it go away?”
- Someone1234 1y ago
  I've observed that some people like to gatekeep others from being allowed to criticize the beta, but then when the final version releases they gatekeep criticizing that too because "you should have given feedback during the beta!" It is just a way people try to shutdown being critical of Apple's stuff in general. It is tiresome.
  - deleted 1y ago
klabb3 1y ago
It doesn’t even look particularly good? And I’m not even a design-Luddite – generally a fan of a lot of Apple visual design and I hate old windows 98-style buttons. I’m the type of person who should enjoy it. (Only speaking about the visuals here) The only wow feeling I get is the refraction effect. Like, it’s a ”novel” effect in GUIs. But when elements are still it looks the same as regular glassomorphism which we already had years ago. Buttons look totally different depending on what’s underneath, and in 90% of cases it’s messy and blurs together. The wow feeling will fade quickly, but the clutter will remain… The only thing I like is that it makes layering a bit clearer (groupings, buttons vs indicators) compared to ultra-flat design of the last years. But that could have been achieved with subtle 3d/parallax effects, eg based on gyro. My theory is that Apple specifically wanted an effect that can’t be replicated in webviews, to drive more devs towards native, out of FOMO for looking ”cheap”.
- thewebguyd 1y ago
  > It doesn’t even look particularly good? And I’m not even a design-Luddite – generally a fan of a lot of Apple visual design and I hate old windows 98-style buttons. I’m the type of person who should enjoy it. (Only speaking about the visuals here) Same, and liquid glass so far is just...bad, in a way. I don't mind it nearly as much on the iPhone but it's particularly bad on macOS. Excessive padding, lack of clean information density. The transparent menu bar doesn't adjust text for the wallpaper, so if you set a white background you still get (now unreadable) white text, but everywhere else the text changes colors based on the background. There's not even a glass effect in the menu bar, it's just transparent. Honestly macOS 26, still as of Beta 4, looks like a bad GNOME/GTK theme. I'm incredibly disappointed in Apple here - a company that said they would never converge their interfaces together have basically morphed macOS into iPad OS. Meanwhile on the mobile side of things, Material 3 expressive is actually looking really nice, aesthetically and I'd prefer that but then I'm giving up all of Apple's other conveniences. Hurray for no competition. > My theory is that Apple specifically wanted an effect that can’t be replicated in webviews, to drive more devs towards native, out of FOMO for looking ”cheap”. I get this vibe too - they want something that can only be made using their toolkits, drive more to the app store and that sweet sweet 30% commission.
2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago
Yesterday I dusted off my iPhone 4 that was on iOS 5 (skeuomorphic) and it was lovely to use. Like a bonehead I wiped it and let iTunes update to 7.1.2 and now it has the flat design similar to what we have today and it sucks!
oldpersonintx2 1y ago
[dead]
righthand 1y ago
Two things happen with an iOS release: - they add a new menu view - the menu views design get updated When you run out of menus to add you’re left with design updates for the sake of design updates.
thenaturalist 1y ago
> Instead, it introduces readability problems without any of the spatial computing benefits. > Apple's Liquid Glass may win design accolades, but history suggests it will join the long list of beautiful solutions that made computing harder, not easier, for the people who actually have to use it every day. Unless they get it right. > Early signs suggest they're already realizing this. Succinctly written. How can the third most valuable company on the planet with computing being the core of their DNA not realize this pre launch? I have no experience with either SF/ SV or culture in large US enterprises. Does someone has a hypothesis?
- Aurornis 1y ago
  > How can the third most valuable company on the planet with computing being the core of their DNA not realize this pre launch? They haven’t launched it. The version with the exaggerated effects was an early beta. The more recent betas are already far more refined. Everyone is raging over some early pre-release screenshots and videos because they’re unfamiliar with how Apple works: The early betas of a new UI are always refined and adjusted significantly before launch.
  - bathtub365 1y ago
    If Apple wants the benefit of building buzz by having splashy pre-release presentations they also have to deal with the times those initial reactions are negative. WWDC is as much a marketing event as a developer event.
  - thenaturalist 1y ago
    Um, I am on iOS Beta 4 and stunned at the sometimes decreased legibility. This effect has markedly worsened from Beta 3, where using Freeze, the glaring and lack of contrast around icons and letters was decreased.
- starky 1y ago
  >How can the third most valuable company on the planet with computing being the core of their DNA not realize this pre launch? Large companies have lots of mediocre people making decisions and the larger a company is the further away those decision makers are from the experts that can guide them towards making the correct decision.
karel-3d 1y ago
The recent big new initiatives by Apple has been all kind of failure? Apple Intelligence, Apple Vision, now this? I don't know. I don't want to be doomsdayer because even during its heyday Apple made lot of mistakes - remember Ping? - but they never felt like this.
FollowingTheDao 1y ago
….all this to try to get us to buy their stoopid goggles….what a travesty. I mean, are they trying to make the phone UI so bad that people finally give up and say “well I might as well get the goggles cause the phone sucks”?
JohnCClarke 1y ago
For Apple aesthetics is function. Apple generates enormous value from branding as a premium product.
fauigerzigerk 1y ago
It seems that many people criticising transparency also think that it does make sense in AR. I never understood why. AR is old. We have things like street signs, road markings, advertising and all sorts of other signage. Almost none of it is transparent, and why would it be? No one can focus on a thing and what's behind it at the same time. There is no correct level of blur to fix this (but I'm sure they are going to spend years trying to find it anyway). What I would like to be able to do sometimes is to make something transparent when it's blocking my view. It shouldn't be semi-transparent or blurred. It should be a faint wireframe outline so I know that something is there.
- queenkjuul 1y ago
  YouTube recently made this change too where fullscreen controls are blurry-transparent and i said out loud yesterday "omg YouTube if it's blurry enough to read the foreground text it's too blurry to read the background text, what is the point"
queenkjuul 1y ago
I gotta say, ever since i first saw screenshots of this, I've been even more glad to be an android user. It looks awful imo
- npteljes 1y ago
  I'm pretty sure it will come to Android as well. But I wouldn't be surprised if the transparency could be turned off for example.
  - thewebguyd 1y ago
    > I'm pretty sure it will come to Android as well. With material 3 expressive, Android seems to be going in the total opposite direction and it's a breath of fresh air and I'm even considering switching over if I can ever get over the loss of some Apple conveniences and an inferior smart watch. The two OSes have largely followed each other over the years but no we are actually starting to see a divergence, at least in look and feel.
    - npteljes 1y ago
      I think this totally depends on the reception of the glassy ui Apple is doing. If it proves to uphold Apple's aspirational goods status, I'm sure the other brands will follow suit - even mainline Android.
lapcat 1y ago
> Early signs suggest they're already realizing this. Later iOS 26 beta releases show Apple reducing transparency and adding blur effects for better readability. That statement on July 20 didn't age well, because beta 4 released yesterday, July 22, doubled down on transparency, undoing some of the minor improvements in beta 3.
5350-uiop-1130 1y ago
> "Unified design languages across platforms" apple is an inverted pyramid: from legal and finance there is a call for streamlining (cost cutting) marketing comes up with the liquid ass strategy by "research" technicians slap it together on tight deadline
Simulacra 1y ago
Great article. It cannot be said enough that sometimes physical interaction is just better than digital. Airline pilots, when they reach for certain levers, that lever has a certain feeling. So they don't have to think about it. Making too many things Digital is just way too confusing for the human mind.
chaostheory 1y ago
To me, this signals that Apple is invested in Vision which is a great sign
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
suralind 1y ago
This may be the first time I will stay on an older iOS version. I can’t understand how they figured it would be an improvement over what we had lol.
- andrekandre 1y ago
  > This may be the first time I will stay on an older iOS version. i actually tried this last time but they found a way to sneak a reboot after pooping up a dialog randomly and me accidentally pressing ok... so, good luck with that...

123 points by maxvij 1y ago

I've recently picked up writing again, and decided to share my thoughts about what most designers (developers, tech people) have been thinking about lately: Liquid Glass. It makes sense, consistency-wise, but I wonder if it's the right direction. Let's hope Apple fixes the readability issues soon. Is this the new Windows Vista?

sksrbWgbfK 1y ago
> Apple is prioritizing visual consistency over readability It's a bit like someone saying "To view this website, enable JavaScript in your browser settings and reload the page" to read a simple piece of text ;)
- imcotton 1y ago
  I did this in console: $('#container').style = 'display: unset'
- maxvij 1y ago
  Ah, yeah, the irony. I've used Figma Sites to renew my website. Quite buggy. Any chance you could tell me what browser/configuration you were using? Perhaps I can fix this.

Popeyes 1y ago

It's nice to have frivilous things in our life where form overtakes function. But with a GUI, it's a tool and they work best when there are no frills. Nobody makes a fancy looking hammer (looking forward to the fancy hammer replies).

patrickmay 1y ago
Here you go: https://tftools.com/en-us/collections/martinez-hammers https://tftools.com/en-us/collections/martinez-hammers (I'm not a customer or an owner.)
- AlanYx 1y ago
  Martinez hammers are fancy, but they're not a case where form overtakes function. They have a reputation for excellent weighting and every part is replaceable. The colors are functional too in the sense that they make it easy to tell your hammer from someone else's on a job site.
  - adastra22 1y ago
    I was just a few hours ago at the National Museum of Denmark, and they had a whole exhibit on ceremonial hammers in their prehistory floor. So there's that, I guess.
appreciatorBus 1y ago
My fear is that we are in a world were there can only be a couple of unique device types, and thus only a couple of unique operating systems and UIs. So that even for professional (metaphorical) “hammer” users, the function will end up performed by the same device/os/ui that is also handing more consumer oriented functions. There will be tension in the UI needs of different functions, but the market for consumer functions is just so large, that the hammer function will lose and be forced to adopt an unsuitable ui. “Your colleague Joe just hammered an 8d nail!” <Like> <comment>
os2warpman 1y ago
>But with a GUI, it's a tool and they work best when there are no frills. That must be why everyone is using CDE...

zero0529 1y ago

Liquid glass makes so much sense in an AR/VR context but it seems horrible in pretty much every other context

bee_rider 1y ago
It kind of makes sense… Although, I suspect if AR really becomes a thing, it will be in a form-factor with actually physical transparency. Nreal is the design to beat, not the gaming headsets. If the display is already transparent, adding a layer of pseudo-transparency to the interface seems kinda pointless.
- PaulHoule 1y ago
  The thing is that passthrough and optical AR compete and might always compete as each one has advantages. The optical AR system is always going to be transparent to the outside world so perhaps a vendor that expects to sell both kinds of device will add transparency to the passthrough device so it looks "the same" as the optical device.
  - bee_rider 1y ago
    In that case the UI should have all-over transparency, rather than some limited transparent elements, right? And none of the complicated optical effects.

evrimoztamur 1y ago

All the friggin' shaders we have to run to waste GPU cycles, just to get those blobs pretending to refract light. Don't even get me started about the ever-increasing border radii!?

abujazar 1y ago
Those huge rounded corners do waste a lot of screen estate.
notfried 1y ago
This rounded corner change feels very off. Since Apple has that same radius across all its products (software and hardware), it could be signaling a broader upcoming shift in their hardware, perhaps driven by industrial design needs for future AR/VR/MR glasses.
terhechte 1y ago
What I find comical is that the same people praising this on various networks are often the same that hate on cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin or AI because of the energy usage. Apple has 1bio devices out there, if each of them consumes 10% more energy due to this change, that's a massive energy consumption increase - and this change offers no functional benefit at all.
- crinkly 1y ago
  I’d just like to state my hatred of all those things is logically consistent on that basis.
- furyofantares 1y ago
  This doesn't check out. Bitcoin uses 100-150 TWh per year. Charging 1 billion phones 365 times uses 3-4 TWh, so a 10% change here would be .3-.4 TWh. The idea that this change would consume 10% more energy seems completely unrealistic too.
- filoeleven 1y ago
  Big if.

AlexandrB 1y ago

This will be the second Apple UI redesign where aesthetics trumps function. We've strayed so far from the intuitive interfaces in iOS <7.

daebersold 1y ago

A waste of compute. Locks up. Glitches. Sluggish and as author said, difficult to read.

abujazar 1y ago

Liquid Glass seems like a big step backwards. It's new for newness' sake and hardly brings any UI improvements.

lagniappe 1y ago
I suspect it was UI work done to coincide with the assumed (at the time) forthcoming dominance of the Apple Vision, if you consider the timeline. Cant waste that work even if Vision flopped. If you cant get society to embrace Vision, integrate it into their 2d UI as a trojan horse to make it more familiar and try again with the next generation when AR comes back after the AI fervor dies down. This same strategy is what brought coffee and starbucks to Japan using a ten year plan, first they had to start with coffee flavored candy to get the kids used to it, then 10 years later only then you can begin bringing in more coffee flavors, soon you have a Starbucks here and there.
- abujazar 1y ago
  Maybe, but I don't think visionOS can fully explain the move towards more transparency. Older macOS versions (in the Mac OS X days) used a lot more transparency, and the first iterations of Aqua around 2001-2005 actually had a lot in common with Liquid Glass. Transparency everywhere was abandoned for obvious usability/accessibility reasons as well as changing standards for aesthetics. iOS 6 -> iOS 7 was a huge improvement, moving towards simplicity and minimalism. Liquid Glass feels more like bloat and a lot of wasted screen estate.
  - AlexandrB 1y ago
    > iOS 6 -> iOS 7 was a huge improvement It was not. Probably one of the biggest UI regressions of my lifetime on par with Windows 7 -> Windows 8. The iOS 7 design is so limiting in what it can communicate that it took Apple several major releases to make the iOS shift key's state legible to users. Arguably, they still haven't nailed it. I also find the idea that's iOS 7 is minimalistic comical, since information density dropped in most applications after the transition in favor of white space padding (necessary because the boundaries between UI and content were no longer obvious).

thom 1y ago

The transparency, blur and contrast issues are stupid but so obviously stupid that I assume they’ll be fixed. What worries me more about iOS 26 is the continuing trend of platforms being so ashamed of any visible UI that they feel the need to hide it. More ‘…’ menus everywhere, some of them only appearing after certain scroll gestures, which means tools that used to be ever-present and immediately tappable now require three gestures to activate. This desire to squash every UI down into one barely visible drop of glass isn’t ridiculous because of the glass, it’s ridiculous because UI is important. These devices have big screens and tons of pixels (not to mention hardware buttons) but somehow we only have room for the main content pane in any app. I agree with the article that skeuomorphism has gone too far, beyond mere analogy and now into the realm of completely impenetrable metaphor. Give me a brutalist UI that isn’t embarrassed to show itself. Gimme things that both explain and enable the app’s features. By all means make them shiny and lickable but please stop trying to take them away.

glimshe 1y ago
I hear you, but for most applications I don't want a lot of UI because it wastes screen space. It really depends on what I'm doing, but I feel the opposite that you do - most applications I use are full of widgets, separator bars, dots, mini buttons while I just want an empty canvas for work. When I add everything, I lose 1/3 of my workplace to UI alone and I don't like it. That's one thing I miss from menu+hotkey UIs - the menu bar is all you have to worry about.
- Scarblac 1y ago
  I'm the opposite, screens are huge these days, there's enough space for both a decent amount UI and the work. (Not so much UI that it's distracting, of course)
- queenkjuul 1y ago
  I got by just fine with a 5" screen and old cluttered Android. If the manufacturers have decided I'm no longer allowed to have a phone smaller than 6.5", least the developers can do is use that space to give me controls
- 1y ago

anton-c 1y ago

As a typeface and legibility enthusiast I obviously have my problems with it. I've found that in the creative work I do, lots of things moved away from skeuomorphism too far. Yes it's easier to read the text on a flat black background with all the controls in a grid. but you lose some intuition compared to when it actually resembled a hardware unit that has logical places for things. I'm in the market for a new vehicle so I'm particular interested in that last line: which companies are bringing back physical controls in cars?

bovermyer 1y ago
I would adore a new car that has no digital displays or touch screens. I have a feeling I will need to settle for finding and restoring a car from before 1990.
- thfuran 1y ago
  That can't happen now that backup cameras (and a display for it) are mandatory. And they're never going to leave a big screen in the dash unused except for when driving in reverse.
  - bovermyer 1y ago
    I bet I could add that to an old car. That's tempting.
    - hobs 1y ago
      Yes you can definitely add a backup camera after the fact.
  - JohnFen 1y ago
    > And they're never going to leave a big screen in the dash unused They could, at the very least, only use the touch screen for things that you don't want to adjust while driving.
    - 1y ago

deleted 1y ago

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a012 1y ago

I’m glad that I hesitated and didn’t buy a Mac just before this new design. It’s really a blocker to me now because I freaking hate it and I know I can’t stand using it for every day

pookieinc 1y ago

My question is: Given Apple is one of the most valuable companies on the planet, they can (and surely have) hired some of the best designers in the world. Articles like this one and many others are virtually sharing what we all think and every time a new beta comes out, it's strange to see some of the decisions that are made. The first beta came out and it was _very hard_ to see the lock screen if you had notifications. How was that missed? Or keep liquid glass, but don't make the text bright blue, so it's so hard to see. Or trigger frosted glass if dependent on whatever the background is? I sincerely do find designers to be in a hard position (especially having worked with so many of them in the past directly), but a lot of these things seem like novice mistakes. Maybe it's not even in the designing, it's on the QA front? I'm not even sure here. I'm by no means a designer, but I have to believe that they are testing this as much as we are internally and have been for a long time now... I'd like to believe they aren't just changing UI elements on the fly based on what X / Twitter feels is good or bad.

TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
Two theories are that Apple had to put something together quickly as a headliner because Apple Intelligence was clearly going to be a dud. So this is basically a hacked-together panic project. Or someone high up has a Vision™, and they're so set on that Vision™ they're not listening to what underlings and users are saying. Consider a parallel reality in which Apple did the next round of updates as a maintenance release and added some minor new features and UI tweaks. Would that have been a more positive outcome for the company? My guess is there would have been some grumbling about not having anything new to offer, but also relief that bugs were being fixed. It would have been a bit of a non-event. This seems more like a seismic negative event, with a lot of criticism from all quarters. (And some stanning, but less than usual.)
- Fluorescence 1y ago
  > someone high up Has to be. It has that Musky smell of banning yellow safety paint i.e. too stupid to be a team effort. Legibility issues with translucency is such a basic thing and I expect Apple designers have gone deep on the topic e.g. mathematical models using human colour perception to determine hard limits for different type weights. I don't think the heavy frosting in past versions was an accident.

askl 1y ago

Apple: When Aesthetics Beat Function

pjmlp 1y ago
Like Stockholm syndrome with dongles hanging out of the laptop, because having too many ports like PCs is bad for aesthetics, having a dongle hanging out of the laptop is much better. I only use Macs on project basis, otherwise I am on PC, and is quite fun to see almost everyone on Apple side around the office carrying such dongles.

grishka 1y ago

This problem is endemic to the industry. All mainstream operating systems have been done products for quite a while. But because full-time designers need to be designing something even when nothing in the company needs designed any more, they start redesigning existing products. And the more radical and courageous the redesign, the better for their performance review.

mlinhares 1y ago
Performance review driven development is the bane of the whole industry. People inventing bullshit work for absolutely no reason other than to pad their yearly reviews. I've been through two large useless rewrites at my current job just so a bunch of folks could get promoted.
- FirmwareBurner 1y ago
  Well, if the big tech mass layoffs go as planned, the problem should work itself out naturally. You can't have designers messing with the UI every performance review cycle, if you have no designers. Win-win for the shareholders who want to save money and for the consumers who want the UI to stay the same as they got used to.
tokioyoyo 1y ago
Not introducing any changes can lead to becoming “uncool” among the younger generation, which can be detrimental to the longevity of the business. Generally I agree with you, but it’s not that simple as our (HN crowd’s?) attitude of “function over form” is not that common out in the wild. People will spend money on stuff that makes them feel or look better. However, designers can screw that up too, and make the new”thing” uncool.
- the_snooze 1y ago
  At least when it comes to smartphones, they're basically commodities these days. Everyone has them. It's hard to see what "wow" factor a mere UI redesign has when everyone and their mother (quite literally) will get it. If Apple wants to make iPhones cool again, my suggestion would be to loosen their iron grip on it and let people customize and build wacky new experiences around it with no corporate oversight. People on the ground know what's cool better than some trillion dollar company. Similar to the Windows theming and shareware scene of the 90s. But that would kill Apple's golden goose, and they'll have none of that.

mintone 1y ago

The lede is buried at the end of this article. > Later iOS 26 beta releases show Apple reducing transparency and adding blur effects for better readability. This is a beta release. It is a work in progress. When iOS 7’s betas came out the reaction was similarly negative. I would suggest we wait and see what the system evolves into; by the time we get to iOS 27 I am quite sure that Apple will have found the right balance.

deadbabe 1y ago
Cool, so I will wait for iOS 27.
pjmlp 1y ago
iOS 7 remains to this day a common meme among Apple developer community regarding design going too far, so naturally finding the right balance is kind of questionable.
vsl 1y ago
Beta 3 walked it back and added frosting. Beta 4 went back again. As for being "sure" Apple will find the right balance, they never fixed usability regressions in macOS introduced in the last redesign. And they have ~10 weeks to fix all this.
- crinkly 1y ago
  It’s going to be another apple intelligence aka “how the fuck do I make it go away?”
Someone1234 1y ago
I've observed that some people like to gatekeep others from being allowed to criticize the beta, but then when the final version releases they gatekeep criticizing that too because "you should have given feedback during the beta!" It is just a way people try to shutdown being critical of Apple's stuff in general. It is tiresome.
- deleted 1y ago

klabb3 1y ago

It doesn’t even look particularly good? And I’m not even a design-Luddite – generally a fan of a lot of Apple visual design and I hate old windows 98-style buttons. I’m the type of person who should enjoy it. (Only speaking about the visuals here) The only wow feeling I get is the refraction effect. Like, it’s a ”novel” effect in GUIs. But when elements are still it looks the same as regular glassomorphism which we already had years ago. Buttons look totally different depending on what’s underneath, and in 90% of cases it’s messy and blurs together. The wow feeling will fade quickly, but the clutter will remain… The only thing I like is that it makes layering a bit clearer (groupings, buttons vs indicators) compared to ultra-flat design of the last years. But that could have been achieved with subtle 3d/parallax effects, eg based on gyro. My theory is that Apple specifically wanted an effect that can’t be replicated in webviews, to drive more devs towards native, out of FOMO for looking ”cheap”.

thewebguyd 1y ago
> It doesn’t even look particularly good? And I’m not even a design-Luddite – generally a fan of a lot of Apple visual design and I hate old windows 98-style buttons. I’m the type of person who should enjoy it. (Only speaking about the visuals here) Same, and liquid glass so far is just...bad, in a way. I don't mind it nearly as much on the iPhone but it's particularly bad on macOS. Excessive padding, lack of clean information density. The transparent menu bar doesn't adjust text for the wallpaper, so if you set a white background you still get (now unreadable) white text, but everywhere else the text changes colors based on the background. There's not even a glass effect in the menu bar, it's just transparent. Honestly macOS 26, still as of Beta 4, looks like a bad GNOME/GTK theme. I'm incredibly disappointed in Apple here - a company that said they would never converge their interfaces together have basically morphed macOS into iPad OS. Meanwhile on the mobile side of things, Material 3 expressive is actually looking really nice, aesthetically and I'd prefer that but then I'm giving up all of Apple's other conveniences. Hurray for no competition. > My theory is that Apple specifically wanted an effect that can’t be replicated in webviews, to drive more devs towards native, out of FOMO for looking ”cheap”. I get this vibe too - they want something that can only be made using their toolkits, drive more to the app store and that sweet sweet 30% commission.

2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago

Yesterday I dusted off my iPhone 4 that was on iOS 5 (skeuomorphic) and it was lovely to use. Like a bonehead I wiped it and let iTunes update to 7.1.2 and now it has the flat design similar to what we have today and it sucks!

oldpersonintx2 1y ago

[dead]

righthand 1y ago

Two things happen with an iOS release: - they add a new menu view - the menu views design get updated When you run out of menus to add you’re left with design updates for the sake of design updates.

thenaturalist 1y ago

> Instead, it introduces readability problems without any of the spatial computing benefits. > Apple's Liquid Glass may win design accolades, but history suggests it will join the long list of beautiful solutions that made computing harder, not easier, for the people who actually have to use it every day. Unless they get it right. > Early signs suggest they're already realizing this. Succinctly written. How can the third most valuable company on the planet with computing being the core of their DNA not realize this pre launch? I have no experience with either SF/ SV or culture in large US enterprises. Does someone has a hypothesis?

Aurornis 1y ago
> How can the third most valuable company on the planet with computing being the core of their DNA not realize this pre launch? They haven’t launched it. The version with the exaggerated effects was an early beta. The more recent betas are already far more refined. Everyone is raging over some early pre-release screenshots and videos because they’re unfamiliar with how Apple works: The early betas of a new UI are always refined and adjusted significantly before launch.
- bathtub365 1y ago
  If Apple wants the benefit of building buzz by having splashy pre-release presentations they also have to deal with the times those initial reactions are negative. WWDC is as much a marketing event as a developer event.
- thenaturalist 1y ago
  Um, I am on iOS Beta 4 and stunned at the sometimes decreased legibility. This effect has markedly worsened from Beta 3, where using Freeze, the glaring and lack of contrast around icons and letters was decreased.
starky 1y ago
>How can the third most valuable company on the planet with computing being the core of their DNA not realize this pre launch? Large companies have lots of mediocre people making decisions and the larger a company is the further away those decision makers are from the experts that can guide them towards making the correct decision.

karel-3d 1y ago

The recent big new initiatives by Apple has been all kind of failure? Apple Intelligence, Apple Vision, now this? I don't know. I don't want to be doomsdayer because even during its heyday Apple made lot of mistakes - remember Ping? - but they never felt like this.

FollowingTheDao 1y ago

….all this to try to get us to buy their stoopid goggles….what a travesty. I mean, are they trying to make the phone UI so bad that people finally give up and say “well I might as well get the goggles cause the phone sucks”?

JohnCClarke 1y ago

For Apple aesthetics is function. Apple generates enormous value from branding as a premium product.

fauigerzigerk 1y ago

It seems that many people criticising transparency also think that it does make sense in AR. I never understood why. AR is old. We have things like street signs, road markings, advertising and all sorts of other signage. Almost none of it is transparent, and why would it be? No one can focus on a thing and what's behind it at the same time. There is no correct level of blur to fix this (but I'm sure they are going to spend years trying to find it anyway). What I would like to be able to do sometimes is to make something transparent when it's blocking my view. It shouldn't be semi-transparent or blurred. It should be a faint wireframe outline so I know that something is there.

queenkjuul 1y ago
YouTube recently made this change too where fullscreen controls are blurry-transparent and i said out loud yesterday "omg YouTube if it's blurry enough to read the foreground text it's too blurry to read the background text, what is the point"

queenkjuul 1y ago

I gotta say, ever since i first saw screenshots of this, I've been even more glad to be an android user. It looks awful imo

npteljes 1y ago
I'm pretty sure it will come to Android as well. But I wouldn't be surprised if the transparency could be turned off for example.
- thewebguyd 1y ago
  > I'm pretty sure it will come to Android as well. With material 3 expressive, Android seems to be going in the total opposite direction and it's a breath of fresh air and I'm even considering switching over if I can ever get over the loss of some Apple conveniences and an inferior smart watch. The two OSes have largely followed each other over the years but no we are actually starting to see a divergence, at least in look and feel.
  - npteljes 1y ago
    I think this totally depends on the reception of the glassy ui Apple is doing. If it proves to uphold Apple's aspirational goods status, I'm sure the other brands will follow suit - even mainline Android.

lapcat 1y ago

> Early signs suggest they're already realizing this. Later iOS 26 beta releases show Apple reducing transparency and adding blur effects for better readability. That statement on July 20 didn't age well, because beta 4 released yesterday, July 22, doubled down on transparency, undoing some of the minor improvements in beta 3.

5350-uiop-1130 1y ago

> "Unified design languages across platforms" apple is an inverted pyramid: from legal and finance there is a call for streamlining (cost cutting) marketing comes up with the liquid ass strategy by "research" technicians slap it together on tight deadline

Simulacra 1y ago

Great article. It cannot be said enough that sometimes physical interaction is just better than digital. Airline pilots, when they reach for certain levers, that lever has a certain feeling. So they don't have to think about it. Making too many things Digital is just way too confusing for the human mind.

chaostheory 1y ago

To me, this signals that Apple is invested in Vision which is a great sign

deleted 1y ago

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suralind 1y ago

This may be the first time I will stay on an older iOS version. I can’t understand how they figured it would be an improvement over what we had lol.

andrekandre 1y ago
> This may be the first time I will stay on an older iOS version. i actually tried this last time but they found a way to sneak a reboot after pooping up a dialog randomly and me accidentally pressing ok... so, good luck with that...