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iOS 26.1 lets users control Liquid Glass transparency
- rcarmo 1y agoNow all we need is a "disable kindergarten mode" button to remove the superfluous whitespace in macOS.
- montroser 1y agoSo, so, much money, time, and resources poured into this update that only made things worse; and now again to roll it back...
- GenerocUsername 1y agoI don't see it said enough, but liquid glass slowed my M3 noticably. Odd I got the update 2 weeks before M5 launch. Software as a means to obsolete hardware. Trillion dollar company
- frizlab 1y agoI have an M3 max and see literally no difference in performance. YMMV I guess! I do have performance issues on my iPhone 13 mini, but I expected it.
- jsheard 1y agoI mean your M3 Max has a 3-5x bigger GPU than OPs base M3, you'd certainly hope it could rip through those new shaders.
- jamesthurley 1y agoI haven’t noticed any performance issues on my M3 Air, other than the Ghostty / Zed scrolling lag issues that were fixed in a software update.
- frizlab 1y agoThe shaders are nothing. I’m kind of appalled by everybody telling “oh shaders, it’s expensive!” OP probably has been hit by the electron bug, which does indeed kill the performance of the whole OS…
- mroche 1y agoI migrated from a 13 Mini to a 17 Pro last week. Updated the Mini to 26 beforehand to mitigate any potential 18->26 issues with data transfers/backups. I'm still getting accustomed to the device size, the Mini was such a perfect device. If only app and web developers would actually preview their work on its dimensions, I probably would have just replaced the battery (76%). Reduced Transparency is a hard requirement for iOS 26.
- debian3 1y agoI just replaced the battery on my 13 mini (actually I got a brand new one since I still have Apple Care+ on mine and I did an express replacement). I’m good for an other 2 years.
- mroche 1y agoYeah, I'm keeping mine around and not trading it in. I might get the battery replaced at some point anyways and continue using it as a secondary device for some workloads.
- discordance 1y agoMissing my Mini too
- zamadatix 1y agoThe M3 can run modern 3D games at high frame rates, surely it was something else about the update than the glass effect in the UI causing slowness?? It's a more appreciable burden on older iPhones though.
- throwaway48476 1y agoThe glass transparency effect is just very computationally expensive.
- gambiting 1y agoI just don't understand how if Visa could render its transparency efects smoothly on Intel 920 grade GPUs with 128mb of ram.
- hombre_fatal 1y agoThat's not how I remember it. Back in the day the first thing you did was disable the Aero stuff to claw back some performance on Vista. That said, who knows how efficient the implementation is compared to other changes in iOS 26. I turned liquid glass off with "reduced transparency" because even 1% extra battery usage for it would be too much even though I kinda appreciated the new look.
- gambiting 1y ago>>That's not how I remember it. Back in the day the first thing you did was disable the Aero stuff to claw back some performance on Vista. I remember it being kinda like placebo - you did, you marvelled at how much faster it's working, but in reality nothing changed. I really liked the look, and it did run smooth unless you had something below the minimum spec(which a lot of people did at the time).
- throwaway48476 1y agoVista problems were largely nvidia driver crashes and low spec machines. Otherwise vista was fine.
- t1234s 1y agoI think LG made the finder windows buggy as they have issues focusing when I click on them. Didn't have this issue before Tahoe
- mikepurvis 1y agoWasn't Windows 7 doing this same stuff back in like 2009?
- AlexandrB 1y agoI think the liquid glass transparency is more complex than Aero - with curved glass objects distorting what's behind them significantly in some cases. Don't know how much more computationally intensive that is.
- Gigachad 1y agoNah liquid glass isn't just transparency and gaussion blur, it refracts/bends light around the rims as well as a kind of sub pixel colour splitting on some elements like when you have a water droplet magnifying your screen.
- bathtub365 1y agoThat sounds like maybe a few more multiplies and applying slightly different constants to different colour channels. There is no complex simulation happening.
- mikepurvis 1y agoSounds like some computationally expensive, unnecessary bullshit.
- dontlaugh 1y agoEven an iGPU from a decade ago could handle that easily. There is some other problem with the new UI’s performance.
- fujigawa 1y agoIf we follow the same pattern, iOS 27 and corresponding releases will be completely flat and look like Mac OS System 7. Chicago font wants to live another day. Windows 8 got some serious hate back in the day, it had some sound ideas that were implemented poorly, but no one could deny it was lightweight. It had the smallest memory footprint of all the modern Windowses IIRC.
- tiahura 1y agoFour trillion
- Gigachad 1y agoI don't think that's the UI, it's some other bug. My M1 is still running at full speed after Tahoe. Some people have said there is a broken version of Electron which causes slowdowns on Tahoe currently, most but not all apps have updated to a newer fixed version of Electron.
- Aaargh20318 1y agoYou may want to check if you have one of the app listed here[1] on your system. Electron based apps cause a huge system wide lag on macOS 26 due to the use of a private macOS API[2]. This bug has been fixed in Electron but not all Electron-based apps have been updated yet. [1] - https://avarayr.github.io/shamelectron/ https://avarayr.github.io/shamelectron/ [2] - https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/48311 https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/48311
- fidotron 1y agoApple product managers are falling into the trap Microsoft did in the run up to Windows 8: a belief that unifying across Mac, iOS, Apple TV and Vision Pro will make them all stickier. In truth it really does just make everything obnoxiously bad.
- etempleton 1y agoUnifying the look and feel to such a literal degree on desktop was a weird choice and I hate it a lot on my personal and work machine.
- hu3 1y agoDo you like the enormous round borders?
- etempleton 1y agoI do not.
- afavour 1y agoExactly what happened with iOS 7 as well. 7.0 make all the text incredibly thin and light and then 7.1 made it darker and bolder.
- makeitdouble 1y agoTBF - they made and are still making the headlines for how many months ? Any press is not always good press, but in this case it's not like their users were going to flock to android anyway. So same deal as the orange iPhone: they kept a pretty big place in the news cycle. - not doing any changes to the OS appareance for more decades would make it exponentially harder the more it goes on. Doing a shit job at it is still fine in that respect, they get leeway to fix it, and people will still praise Apple for having seen the light at the end. As a parallel we had the port situation and the keyboard on MacBooks. They did a shit job and reversed it, and during that time sales didn't specially tank. They could afford to do two or three cycles of "here we fixed it", to scrap it all at the end, and people still love their MacBooks the same.
- musicale 1y agoI immediately disabled transparency effects and liquid glass hasn't bothered me since.
- thatgerhard 1y agothat's why liquid glass is more resource intensive, apple's gotta sell new iphones next season
- seba_dos1 1y agoNot to roll it back, no - rather to give the user a choice between things being bad (the default) or a bit better ;)
- Someone1234 1y agoIf you cannot wait, you can already substantially reduce the transparency effect via Settings -> Accessibility -> Display & Text Size -> Reduce Transparency. This new setting and the existing "Reduce Transparency" look a little different but same idea overall.
- sehugg 1y agoThere were/are some horrible bugs with Reduce Transparency mode in iOS 26, let's hope this new mode gets added to the fully-tested set of configurations.
- adastra22 1y agoUnfortunately “Reduce Transparenxy” does a bunch of other stuff too, like remove your background/wallpaper.
- IneffablePigeon 1y agoI’ve found “Increase Contrast” to be a better setting. Still a little bit of transparency but most elements now have borders and much more readable text. Not too many rough edges.
- endymi0n 1y agoMeanwhile, core functionality like “Find My” is completely and utterly broken. Leaving behind my stuff at a new place gets me at least two different messages on my Apple Watch at different timing. One for my devices, one for my Apple tags. One only has a “dismiss” button, the other has a “trust location” button that when I click, it says “content unavailable”, and if it works (which is only! over Wi-Fi), then it only works for that one device. I always need to go through the find my app at every new place since it’s an absolute UX disaster. That’s what I get for carrying only Apple gear in the thousands of euros with me.
- toast0 1y agoYou should try it if you're only a step into their ecosystem. Kiddo got some airpods for use with his android phone. Registered them with 'find my' on an iPhone SE I have for work that sits on my desk, so that when they get lost, we have a chance of finding them. Now, we get to be alerted to potential trackers every time when travel with him... even he gets the alerts, because he travels with his airpods frequently. I've heard good things about Apple TV devices, but given what a pain Airpods are without the rest of the ecosystem, there's no way I'm going to try it.
- gambiting 1y agoI just don't understand how more people don't complain about this all the time. My wife has an apple tracker on her keys and I get a notification about an unknown tracker travelling with me on my phone every time we go anywhere. Why isn't there an "I know this tracker, leave me the fuck alone" option anywhere???
- toast0 1y agoYeah, seems like we should be able to acknowledge known trackers, or something. Or be able to enroll multiple phones or other devices (of multiple OSes) as owners, so if the keys move with your phone instead of hers, that counts as 'not being separated from the owner', rather than throwing another BS alert.
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- antinomicus 1y agoI just want to pile on, to any Apple engineers here that might have some say: PLEASE STOP with the Liquid Glass. My god, what an unbelievably stupid ‘feature’. Warren Buffett famously talked about how Apple is so valuable because their moat is so strong. That if you were to pay someone 10,000$ to switch from iPhones - they wouldn’t. No other brand is like this. I was the same way, couldn’t pay me 10k to switch from my iPhone. For 10 years. Then, liquid ass came along and made me consider ditching Apple more seriously than I ever have. This redesign is apple’s most colossal failure of the last decade and I desperately hope they keep moving in the direction of rolling back these changes. It’s not just that everything is blurry and tinted. They made the buttons across the UI far less space efficient, widening and making cartoonish random elements that worked fine before. They added animations that slow down my iPhone 15 Pro and have tanked its battery life (don’t tell me it’s indexing either it’s been weeks!). They completely broke my “dumb phone” layout for my home screen by adding these incredibly ugly borders to everything. Every day I curse myself for updating to this slop and for not quickly rolling back while they were still signing the old iOS. It is so unbelievably stupid that they decided to do this.
- jesterson 1y ago> I was the same way, couldn’t pay me 10k to switch from my iPhone. For 10 years. Then, liquid ass came along and made me consider ditching Apple more seriously than I ever have Same. First it was unnecessary tinkering with phone shape which was introduced in apple way in no less as "revolutionary". I laughed but still used the iphone. Now they started to break UX with their stupid "liquid glass" and I am contemplating switch to android. At least you can switch off unnecessary garbage there.
- scyzoryk_xyz 1y agoNot to be that guy but I switched to Android a few months back for the first time in my life. It took some getting used to here and there, but over all I've been happy with doing something new on this front. I suspect I'll be looking at hopping back over a couple summers from now when they figure out how to make this design language work. The Liquid Glass aesthetic isn't bad, it's just rough around the edges. It'll be a nice effect once reality reigns it all in. That's what happened around a year or two following iOS7.
- t1234s 1y agoOn Tahoe the only difference I notice with LG is the icons on the dock look worse and the corners of the windows look blurry.
- riversflow 1y agoI really want the original, highly translucent liquid glass back from beta 1. Pleeease? The original liquid glass was my favorite UI ever, and I love to customize my UI. Also, all the hate is really boring and lame.
- AlexandrB 1y agoAnd I really want the easy-to-understand, information-dense iOS 6 UI back. Too bad all the boring and lame hate for skeuomorphism led to "the great flattening" and "the great paddening".
- throwaway48476 1y agoIn big engineering programs engineers are paid bounties for every kg they remove from the design. We need software developer bounties for removing CPU cycles and memory.
- trenchpilgrim 1y agoI heard about this story when BMW was designing the 1300GS, they had a bag of 40 lbs of sand hanging in the engineers' office. Engineers who developed weight savings got to do a ceremony where they removed that amount of sand from the bag.
- rangestransform 1y agoThis reminds me of the “battery bucks” design philosophy at Tesla, where a part could be as expensive as an engineer wanted if it increased range by at least that much cost in batteries. This was responsible for, among other things, monobloc brake calipers on the model 3 because it retracted the pads faster than a sliding piston caliper.
- constantcrying 1y agoIn the car industry this is the case because there is a direct incentive for the company to make a vehicle lighter. A single kg is enormous likely saving tens of dollars per car, which sounds like nothing, but if a million of these cars are made the cost saving are in the tens of millions. What does a software company save by their software running 10% faster on user hardware. Exactly nothing. In the case of apple they even have some incentives to make their software worse to get people to buy new devices. The curse of software engineering has always been that there is very rarely a reward for your software being better. Software companies mostly make it on features and "good enough" stability.
- throwaway48476 1y agoIf it was marketed it would be successful. Users are keenly aware of the lag modern programs have, even with top spec new hardware.
- liuliu 1y agoIs this just https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uiglasseffect/style?changes=_9 https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uiglasseffec... ?
- pupppet 1y agoAll of this baloney they added to their OS they now need to support for who knows how many years across who knows how many devices. What a waste.
- lotsofpulp 1y agoPerhaps it was a move to ensure job security. As a user, I would have looked forward to a few years of simply fixing bugs and making the OS more efficient.
- cardanome 1y agoGive me proper theming support. Allow me to disable all animations, rounded corners, opacity, white space and whatever else I don't need. Imagine how snappy and productive it could be!
- electric_mayhem 1y agoThere are settings under the accessibility heading that let you adjust transparency and some other things. They’ve also gotten less effective over time. And they don’t get rid of rounded corners currently. But it still does have a positive impact on the busyness of the os
- busymom0 1y agoWhat I really need them to give me is a way to disable the border around the Home Screen icons. They look ugly whenever a black or dark background is applied. Probably because glass itself doesn't look good in darkness.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> give me proper theming support This is sort of like walking into an art gallery and demanding they hang different art. Apple has always been visually opinionated. That’s fine. Not everything needs to be customisable. The problem is their aesthetic historically varied between daringly great and daringly fucked. Nothing about Liquid Glass, on the other hand, screams daring, thought or even vision. It’s just a random new effect, completely unjustified, whose only genuine utility for me has been making app icons less engaging.
- cardanome 1y agoNo that is like my landlord telling me what kind of art I can hang in my own home. If I spend hours of my day using a device I should be able to theme it exactly to my taste. The customer is always right in matters of taste. You are supposed to serve your customers not the other way round. And don't give me oh that is not the apple way. I don't care. People don't buy apple for liquid glass or whatever but because they have arguably the best hardware so people put up with the software side of things.
- mycodendral 1y agoI switched from Android to iOS exclusively because of Liquid Glass. It's amazing. I'll just sit there and drag the glass back and forth over different things on my screen and stare in awe.
- throwaway48476 1y agoI dont mean to impugn, but that sounds like how someone would describe a toddler being given an ipad. I turn off animations and use apps with an OLED theme.
- monster_truck 1y agoThe first thing I do every time I install a new version of iOS or get a new iPhone is disable all of the animations and enable reduce visual motion in accessibility. Not only is it faster in the countless cases where overambitious UI designers subject us to >0.2s animations, but it dramatically extends battery life
- LoganDark 1y agoI would do this on macOS if it could make it faster to switch Spaces; unfortunately it does not (just makes the animation into an ugly fade that still takes just as long).
- citrin_ru 1y agoIn iOS <= 18 reduce motion works fine but in iOS 26 it just changes animation to be symmetrical and fast. It still an animation and being fast it looks almost like flicker. I don't like animations in UI but had to disable this option in iOS 26.
- BestHackerOnHN 1y ago[dead]
- gambiting 1y agoI mean I do remember the feeling of switching over to KDE from Windows around.....2005-2010 era and just being blown away by how pretty everything was. I yearn for that feeling again. But I have both android and iOS devices at home and the liquid glass is just......not that nice(imho). I hope I'll get that feeling of awe with computers at some point again.
- cloudfudge 1y agoDoes it let me read my fucking title bar while I'm using safari? I can't tell what time it is or what my battery level is anymore.
- dabinat 1y agoIt’s technically impressive that they’re simulating the way light travels through glass. But a lot of the time it’s so subtle that I wonder if they could have just used simple semi-opacity and it would have had 85% of the same effect at a fraction of the CPU cycles.
- monster_truck 1y agoI feel like this is a big miss for them. Am I really supposed to believe that the company making its flagship phones burn at 14W to simulate the travel of light through glass for a UI actually cares about the planet?
- mananaysiempre 1y agoI strongly suspect (as I’ve said elsewhere) that there’s no simulation going on, just a bunch of precomputed refraction maps. Two dependent texture fetches are not nothing (and neither of course is the sequentializing nature of rendering a transparent thing over another thing), but I wouldn’t lose sleep over them if there was a point. Thus far I’m not convinced that there is. Has noöne located and disassembled the thing yet? The speculation is getting tiresome. (I don’t own an up-to-date macOS device and have never owned an iOS one, so no help from my end, sorry.)
- monster_truck 1y agoAin't no way precomputed reflection maps are burning through the full TDP of the processor. Even the desktop experience is miserable perf-wise
- itopaloglu83 1y agoFor those who hasn’t seen it, just dropping down the control center consumes 14 watts of CPU/GPU power as demonstrated by various YouTube videos.
- arghwhat 1y agoI seriously doubt they're doing anything more than a boring shader with some decent approximation. We can stimulate light, but that's just a waste of ray tracing and introducing annoying complexities.
- m-hodges 1y agoI had to change my iOS wallpaper because of how bad the liquid glass distortions looked when swiping my home and lock screens. I get that Apple wants to control the experience, but ruining my own wallpaper ... a thing that is a very personal touch to many users ... felt beyond hostile.
- merelysounds 1y agoI wish settings like these would also increase UI performance in a way that would prolong battery life. UX is far more important to me than FX, I would run XFCE on iOS if I could.
- spankalee 1y agoHow did they not do enough user testing to know users wanted this before it even got to beta? Are they so paranoid about secrecy that they can't do event the most basic of UX design processes?
- isodev 1y agoI would’ve killed it even before user testing. It’s borderline malicious that this thing was shipped in the first place
- kridsdale3 1y agoApple does zero user testing and AB testing, and has always worked that way.
- Austin_Conlon 1y agoEven in services?
- ASalazarMX 1y agoMy experience with corporate Apple services (MDM): "We changed the terms of service. Accept them to keep using this service." Outside of that, not much in the way of communication. They change and you keep catching up to them.
- yreg 1y agoNo communication does not mean no user testing.
- hmartin 1y agoAnd the award for dumbest and wrongest comment of the day goes to...
- cudgy 1y ago… this one
- aylmao 1y agoIMO a big problem with Liquid Glass is that you're trying to recreate an effect that's highly reliant on the sense of depth we get from binocular vision in a 2D screen. When looking at glass in real life, your left eye and your right eye see slightly different refraction patterns since they're looking at the surface from slightly different angles. It might be minimal, but light refraction patterns can change a lot when looked at from slightly different distances. This is depth information our brains automatically interpret, and it makes easy to tell what is "the glass" vs what is "on the glass". On a 2D screen both eyes see the same refraction pattern— your eyes are receiving no depth information. It's just up to color contrast and semantics to figure out what's part of the glass vs laid on top of it, so things that might look legible or easy to tell apart on physical glass will look messy on the screen.
- wpm 1y agoThe other problem is that the effect is so subtle everywhere until it gets in your way. Even on a system with actual binocular screens, the Liquid Glass effect is barely noticeable and has been since visionOS 1.0. It's like a horrible compromise between the indulgences of early 10.2-era Aqua and the worst flat boring low contrast bullshit "mimimmumunlism" crap from iOS 7-18 and macOS from Big Sur onwards.
- jonhohle 1y agoI would gladly take the indulgences of the 10.2 era where clickable things looked like clickable things instead of hobs and gobs of indistinguishable text. What’s misunderstood about aqua was how most of the visual flair was for usability. Things looked like what they did. Windows XP famously ripped off how MS thought they looked without considering how they worked.
- wpm 1y agoTotally agree. I have 10.2 on a G4 Cube on my workbench and it's just so wonderful to boot it up. Especially on the Studio Display CRT at 1600x1200@75. Just gorgeous, friendly, enticing, with just a few rough spots where they maybe overcooked some transparency or flair.
- martini333 1y agoTANK YOU, better than nothing.
- oktwtf 1y agoI always wanted them to turn the traffic lights from Jaguar into a fully shader based orbs. Full @2x/Vector Aqua Liquid Glass in all it's glory...
- kridsdale3 1y agoIt's @3x these days.
- The_President 1y agoI'd like to see Apple pull a Jaguar with their marketing department. Might clean the sewer enough to get them toward a that sweet middle ground of "users like us" and "shareholder profits."
- BriggyDwiggs42 1y agoUpgrading randomly broke my ultrawide second monitor. Now macos can’t figure out what resolutions it supports and the only two options look awful and stretched. Can’t figure out the refresh rate either and defaults to less than half the correct value.
- nipperkinfeet 1y agoThis should have been in place from the beginning. The current state of large technology companies is really quite depressing. The intellectual capabilities of these companies have become completely stagnant.
- classified 1y agoNot when it comes to profit extraction. This is enshittification in full swing, done by professionals.
- ls-a 1y agoSo now I have to go to settings to get rid of it. That's worse. Even more work for me.
- mgarfias 1y agoNow can they fix all the other usability issues?
- aucisson_masque 1y agoMy mother iphone is still on iOS 18, I'm honestly afraid to make her update because I know she will be lost and I'll have to come to the rescue a thousand times. I can't understand how they decided to work on that, they must know that a significant part of their customer is boomers that want things simple and intuitive. Liquid glass make everything hard unintuitive, how are you going to know that this button is important if you can't use contrast because everything is transparent ?
- RandomBacon 1y agoSame (though a slightly newer version). I'm an Android person, but I got an iPhone 4S for her first cell phone because it was straightforward and hard to mess up. Now there are double-secret swipes, all other kinds of anti-user "features" that almost make her cry because she can't figure out her phone anymore. Now I am thinking about getting an Android and finding a home app ("launcher") that makes it impossible to screw things up and lock down everything else that I can. Edit: Crap. She does have an Apple Watch that she loves though. And Apple is not only a piece of shit company about their UI, they also don't allow their watch to play nice with Android. (Except that answering a call on the watch pipes the audio to her watch and not her hearing aids. Fuck Apple.)
- bombcar 1y agoThere is a “kids mode” that can lock down iPhone. It’s useful for kids, seniors, and those unfamiliar with the device.
- RandomBacon 1y agoThank you, I will look into it.
- aucisson_masque 1y agoMy father is way more tech illiterate and I got him a Samsung, I put the mod 'ultra power saving' where it locks down the phone to 8 preselected app, no app drawer only home screen with the 8 icons, and it's enough for him to make phone call, send SMS and take photo. Everything else he doesn't know how to use and didn't want to learn anyway. Bonus, the phone last for one to two week. Now I don't know if yours is as bad as my father, in that case I'd suggest Samsung, but my mother on the other hand she can actually use the phone for many things : Spotify, using wireless payment, Waze and so on... It's just that things got to be intuitive enough and she is going to fall every time there is dark pattern and she is going to call me every time something is convoluted. Because of that Android is even worst, Google UI is horrendous and they are master at dark pattern, at least as good as Microsoft. Apple is still better but that's a far cry from what it used to be a few years ago. We are evolving, just not in the right direction.
- Humphrey 1y agoAbout to switch from stable to beta - purely so I can get get rid of liquid glass and hopefully the other bugs in 26.0.
- robinsonrc 1y agoI’m doing the same - and also for the fact that I can finally turn off the lock screen’s swipe for camera that I seem to activate too often when my phone’s in my pocket
- rayiner 1y agoToday I discovered you can’t downgrade from iOS 26 to iOS 18. It’s that bad.
- GaryBluto 1y agoApple has stopped signing older versions of IOS shortly after releasing a new version since IOS 4 or so, this isn't anything new.
- swah 1y agoWaiting for color and squares to make a big comeback..
- righthand 1y agoLiquid Glass is Skeuomorphism’s inbred grandchild.
- tecoholic 1y agoI don’t have iOS 26, but a couple of apps like telegram have already adopted it and pushed it users. I thought not updating would be a solution. Apparently not. Also things started bouncing around a lot and had to turn off animations. Either I am getting too old for this and it’s all going downhill.
- nntwozz 1y agoYou know it's a sad state we're in when this passes for news these days. What's next? iOS 26.1 lets users control Liquid Glass color? Woweeeee, what's up with designers like Ive and Alan Dye going off the deep end in their late careers? I don't how much Craig Federighi has been involved but it's definitely tainted his reputation too I'm afraid.
- akerl_ 1y agoI think you may be missing the forest for the trees? I don’t think this was posted because folks are thrilled with the brilliance of Apple’s UI designers; it’s noteworthy because it shows they’re backpedaling on a pretty radical interface shift they made in iOS 26.
- jojobas 1y agoSo what?
- fingerlocks 1y agoIf you didn’t find it interesting, why did you come to the comment section and scroll past a hundred or so messages to leave this useless comment?
- jesterson 1y agoIt's gonna last as long as people will buy this crap. And it doesn't seem to be the end for this delusion of "progress".
- estimator7292 1y agoBelieve it or not, whether people care about something is completely unrelated to whether you personally care about it. What a wild concept!
- moomoo11 1y agoI thought ios 18 was perfect.. It was simple, just fucking worked. Leave it to some uninspired people to fuck things up.
- qyckudnefDi5 1y agoAgreed! No one asked for liquid ass!
- semireg 1y agoWe’ve spent hundreds of years perfecting crystal clear glass and now we want skeuomorphic imperfections? Two steps back, indeed.
- The_President 1y agoHow about Apple actually fix the iOS wifi hotspot? Disconnects when it wants to, selectively connects to clients only when it wants to. Broken on every iPhone I've used in the past three years. When it does work the hotspot drains 30% per hour. Can run a hotspot on an Android phone half the day without any issues. What an infuriatingly amatureish product.
- StopDisinfo910 1y agoIt works beautifully with MacBooks and horribly with anything else. I think Apple view that as a feature.
- mvkel 1y agoStill insane to me how broken the UX is. In safari, tapping the back button, disabled or not, makes it react in the same bubbly way. If the back/forward arrows are present, it again reacts identically, regardless of which button is tapped. Not to mention simple QoL regressions like taking 3+ taps to share a url instead of 1.
- mcswell 1y ago"Apple says that the new toggle was added because during the beta testing period over the summer, user feedback suggested that some people would prefer to have a more opaque option for Liquid Glass." I'd like to have a COMPLETELY OPAQUE option. No liquid glass whatsoever. That's why I'm still running iOS 18.
- WorldPeas 1y agoand yet it does not fix the true problem: that they have fundamentally changed the size and shape of fundamental components, rendering some uis broken, and others, like the imessage topbar still an annoyance even if "reduce transparency" is on
- pjmlp 1y agoSo basically the acknowledgement that Liquid Glass isn't that great after all.
- icar 1y agoOf course it's not a slider.
- yash1th 1y agothis is the first ios that i could remember where i wanted to go back 10 minutes after the update. by the time i updated it, they stopped signing older ios :\
- jacobgorm 1y agoNobody wants or needs transparent windows or widgets. Apple tried this twenty years ago with Aqua and nobody wanted or needed it back then either. As a programmer, this seems like such a cool thing to build (I have done it too) but it has very few real world uses.
- jiehong 1y agoI always wondered if they considered that each control on the UI should match WCAG AA contrast/readability in their design by default?
- constantcrying 1y agoTo be honest I think that the Liquid glass design is a really cool effect and creates a really nice atmosphere in the UI. Google's design is based around bright colors and large, simple shapes, together with large margins. No doubt this is the superior choice for accessibility. At the same time I really have to say that I appreciate the Liquid glass design more. It was the first time that moving a slider felt magical. Certainly it is a technical accomplishment, but besides the very reasonable concerns about accessibility, it feels like a great new choice in design.
- egorfine 1y agoSo we now have two independent and different ways to disable Liquid Glass: "reduce transparency" and "tinted". Nice.
- burnt-resistor 1y agoAll 26 OSes thus far fall into the same shit gambit Microsoft plays to constantly ruin hardware to later act as a Karma Drama Triangle "hero" either by some future promised software upgrade or payment for hardware. The root cause is unrestrained greed and a customer-unaligned, bureaucratic orgchart pyramid of having too many designers constantly trying to justify their existence instead of leaving things alone. The problem is they sometimes do their job too well and create Microsoft Vista instead.
- WorldMaker 1y agoAfter having used it, I've been joking for a bit that Liquid Glass is just a silly name for Soap Bubbles. I think that also explains how often I expect them to pop when I touch them. Some of them do, even.
- citrin_ru 1y agoIt looks like a step in the right direction but for me the main iOS 26 problem is not the transparency but the shape, size and placement of controls (buttons) - they waste too much space. It looks like designers has not tested iOS 26 well on small screens (iPhone SE) or they don't care about iPhone SE owners.