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100% this. I recall watching their launch video about Liquid Glass. It was filled with ego-driven "we're changing the world here" nonsense. They were designing

• Rumudiez 9mo ago
  marketers are not designers and vice versa. of course the press release is going to be melodramatic no matter what the designers thought, or were told
  • gyomu 9mo ago
    “Marketers are not designers” is fine, except it was the designers themselves pushing the marketing drivel in those videos.
    • acdha 9mo ago
      Who was driving that, though? If the project has high-level management buy-in, the people in the scripted videos are going to be on message if they want to stay employed.
• cyberge99 9mo ago
  You’re not looking far enough ahead. Liquid glass isn’t about Mac. It’s about VisionPro and wearables. This is a strategic play by Apple.
  • psunavy03 9mo ago
    . . . so other devices are required to have the same interface? No, they're not. Just because you want to share enough design cues to make people understand they're dealing with the same brand doesn't mean you have to hammer square pegs into round holes. Not to mention the fact that first, you have to get to a point where AR wearables are commercially viable, and we don't seem to have hit that point yet.
  • dehrmann 9mo ago
    Apple just reduced Vision Pro production, but Liquid Glass was in motion well before that. What leaves me scratching my head is I never got the impression Apple believed in Vision Pro. It launched because after years of research, management wanted to see if the effort was worth continuing to invest in, but that wasn't a vote of confidence.
    • a022311 9mo ago
      I'll have to second this. It's not even on Apple's homepage! I hadn't heard it mentioned for months before today. It had its niche share of users who actually found it useful, but apart from them it seems that the world is not ready for spatial computing (or maybe current spatial computing isn't ready for people, who knows?).
      • wlesieutre 9mo ago
        If it weren’t $3500+ I’d love one. The world isn’t ready for that price point.
        • BurningFrog 9mo ago
          Apple can afford to improve and cheapify this thing for a decade.
          • ChrisMarshallNY 9mo ago
            That’s sort of what they did with the Watch. It has incrementally improved, and gotten cheaper, to the point that I now see them everywhere. When they first came out, they were pretty expensive. Remember the $17,000 gold Watch (which is now obsolete)? The ceramic ones were over a couple of grand. But the dream of selling Watch apps seems to have died. I think most folks just use the built-in apps.
            • yakkers 9mo ago
              The $17,000 Apple Watch was a (rather silly) attempt to compete in the high end watch space. However, they also launched the base "Sport" model at US$349.
  • treymalikcruz 9mo ago
    I think this is the right read in terms of intent but I also feel it offers a lens into the silliness of Apple's current strategy around all this. VisionPro appears to be currently floundering, and no matter how much they try to make it unintrusive and airy and transparent in its interface, it's presently an unwieldy device not designed to leave the home or office. Predicating company-wide design systems on this line being the future feels aspirational at best and delusional at worst. And what good is liquid glass on a Mac? To show me an obscured glimpse of my desktop background and add visual clutter? (Apologies to @cyberge99 if my tone comes off intense, this is not to come at you but rather is just me venting my frustrations with Apple. I think you are correct in your assessment of the idea here.)
    • eastbound 9mo ago
      What’s frustrating about the VisionPro is their absolute refusal to address it as a giant screen. All people I know describe this usecase first: “Will be awesome when it replaces my 2x34" screens”. I described it to the salesman when he asked me why I wanted to try it. He never showed it. Gave him 0/5, he complained, I explained this is specifically what I asked. You can emulate one screen in VisionPro but it’s absolutely obnoxious about making it about apps and iPhotos 3D whatever. Users desire it. Apple is hell-bent in not addressing that usecase, and addressing family usecases first. Imagine they find a proper UI to visualize an infinite Typescript file. Something like flinch and you find yourself in a method, look elsewhere and you immediately see the other method. Make it viral by making it possible to write files in a way that is not practical to normal-screen users, like the old “max 1 screen height” limit. View your team in the corners of your vision. THE tool for remote working. Workplaces would look futuristic. Your experience at the workplace would be renewed thanks to Apple. And then, reuse the desktop’s UI on VisionPro instead of the desktop using VP’s concepts. But no, Apple prefers killing off VisionPro and imposing LiquidGlass to everyone. (In waiting for my threat letter from Steve Jobs for suggesting ideas now).
      • justinclift 9mo ago
        > In waiting for my threat letter from Steve Jobs ... Ummm, you know he died yeah?
  • realusername 9mo ago
    Sounds like Windows 8 designing their touch-first interface for a desktop, with about the same success.
  • herval 9mo ago
    It doesnt really introduce anything that makes Vision Pro in any way better, though
  • CameronBanga 9mo ago
    Eh, I would disagree as there's nothing in it where you go "Oh wow, that's why they did it" in the context of Vision Pro or wearables. It seems much more likely that the driver here was to produce a UI that was resource intensive and hard to replicate unless you control the processors that go into your devices as well as the entire graphics processing stack that sits above that as well. It seems created to flaunt the concept of "go ahead and try to copy this" to Google and Microsoft.
  • wolvoleo 9mo ago
    Microsoft totally screwed up the windows interface with windows 8 to suit tablets which they viewed as the future of computing. Not only were they wrong, they also really broke the UX for the users they did have for a new product that hardly sold and still doesn't (windows tablets). Eventually they had to cave in but Apple is more stubborn than Microsoft. Even if Apple is right, why shoehorn the future into the present on devices unsuitable for its new paradigms? The iOSification also only worsened the macOS UX. It's one of the reasons I moved to Linux with KDE which I can configure as I like. If they want make the AR OS of the future then make it on the vision pro where it belongs.
    • matthewkayin 9mo ago
      Microsoft may have "caved", but we're still stuck with two different settings menus and a start menu that prioritizes ads and search results over your own programs.
      • inquirerGeneral 9mo ago
        [dead]
      • lossyalgo 9mo ago
        2 settings menus? We have every version of Windows from 3.1 all the way to 11 styled settings menus, sometimes multiple styles depending on which settings you want to look at. It's a total shitshow.
        • prmoustache 9mo ago
          Yeah, windows make linux desktop using 3 versions of GTK, QT +motif an gnustep look homogenous in comparison.
        • hn_acc1 9mo ago
          Windows is borderline unusable to me without Open Shell / Win 7 settings. I refuse to learn yet another icon idiom, just to have it change 2 years later. Thinking of trying Bazzite for my new upcoming 2nd gaming machine (for daughter) build because I'm tired of Windows. If it goes well, may convert multiple Win 10 HTPC/gaming machines.
  • schmuckonwheels 9mo ago
    >This is a strategic play by Apple No, this is the fault of a company and industry with way too much money and not knowing what to do with it. So they hired a bunch of artists who would otherwise be carving wood in a decrepit loft somewhere after taking half a mushroom cap. These people now decide how computers should operate. I remember watching a documentary from the 80s where Susan Kare explained how every pixel in the Macintosh UI was deliberately put there to help the user in some way. One lady did the whole thing, the whole OS. Now we have entire teams of people trying to turn your computer into an avant-garde art piece.
    • yxhuvud 9mo ago
      Not only that, we have teams of people that very obviously (based on OP) dont talk to each other.
    • roughly 9mo ago
      > a bunch of artists who would otherwise be carving wood in a decrepit loft somewhere after taking half a mushroom cap. These people now decide how computers should operate. …brother, you’ve just described the history of the personal computer and the Internet. It’s not the hippie artists causing this problem, I promise you that.
      • DonHopkins 9mo ago
        Bill Atkinson designed HyperCard on LSD. https://www.mondo2000.com/the-inspiration-for-hypercard/ https://www.mondo2000.com/the-inspiration-for-hypercard/ The last decade or so of Apple designers have been as out of their minds on ego and cocaine as Donald Trump Jr.
  • Bluestrike2 9mo ago
    If it's a strategic play, it's a terrible one that douses usability in gasoline and sacrifices it at the altar of visual novelty for no real gain. Apple has spent literal decades working on and refining their Human Interface Guidelines for different devices. Between Tahoe and Liquid Glass, they seem to have just tossed them on the bonfire for no justifiable reason. VisionPro was meant to literally overlay its interface over your field of vision. That's a very different context and interaction paradigm. Trying to shoehorn the adaptations they made for it into their other, far more popular interfaces for the sake of consistency? It's absurd.
    • gyomu 9mo ago
      > Apple has spent literal decades working on and refining their Human Interface Guidelines for different devices Things like “human interface guidelines” get written by nerds who dive deep into user studies to make graphs about how target size correlates to error rate when clicking an item on screen. Things like Liquid Glass get designed by people who salivate over a button rendering a shader backed gradient while muttering to themselves “did I cook bro???” They’re just two very orthogonal cultures. The latter is what passes for interface design in software these days.
      • hn_acc1 9mo ago
        It's like the KDE developer who reluctantly gave out the script to set "border offset" from a window back to 0 (i.e. how close you could snap/drag the window to the border of the screen). He had defaulted it to something like -5 (i.e. at minimum, 5 pixels between the edge of the screen and the window, no matter WHERE you tried to place it), because "otherwise, how would you use the negative space, bro?". I.e. left-clicking JUST outside the window brought up a context menu for the window. WTF? I've been doing GUIs since 1987. Don't make "clicking outside the window" a way to interact WITH the window. I very nearly threw KDE out before he gave the fix.
• btown 9mo ago
  My hot take on this is that there is a business goal to Liquid Glass that extends beyond ego - but it's about the restoration of Apple UI as an exclusive status symbol, not as a usable experience. Apple looked at innovations in hardware form factor and, rather than trying to out-innovate in that sphere, said, instead: how do we make something in software that nobody would ever try to imitate, and thus position ourselves as the innovators once again? And the monkey's paw curled and said: Liquid Glass is a set of translucency interactions that are technically near-impossible to imitate, sure, but the real reason nobody will try to imitate is because they are user-hostile to a brand-breaking extent. And Apple had nobody willing to see this trainwreck happening and press the brakes.
  • deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  • gedy 9mo ago
    I honestly think they could have done that and still had some taste and considered usability much more than they did.
  • ibero 9mo ago
    we saw this exact playbook with ios 7. i don't think you need to attribute malice or read into it much. ios 7 relied heavily on blurring effects-- a flex at the time due to the efficient graphic pipeline vs android they had. this was coming off the heels of Samsung xerox'ing and they wanted a design that would be too expensive for competitors to emulate without expensive battery hit. liquid glass is following in this tradition. and similarly to ios 7, the move to flat design was predicated on the introduction of new form factors and screen. flat design lent itself well to new incoming screen sizes and ratios. prior there was really one or two sizes and that was it, easy to target pixel perfect designs against. as apple moves to foldables and more, this design flexibility is once again required. as for no one trying to emulate it, i'm not so sure, OriginOS 6 ripped it off back in October.
  • dbtc 9mo ago
    That's interesting and plausible. It also contributes to obsolescing older hardware.
• dwd 9mo ago
  A design system I am required to use made a recent "major" update announcement: "Styles have been converted to variables. Styles are out and Figma variables are in". Where what we really needed was a stable release version (now a year late from the original promised date) so we can build out UI components for the content editors to use that don't require constant design tweaks. You know the designers are: a) Just fucking around having fun b) Making busy work to drag it out as long as possible As it's now 4 years since they began working on the "design system", there's a good chance it will get canned as there's some more modern design they will want to use.
  • hit8run 9mo ago
    Material Design?
  • jpfromlondon 9mo ago
    There is a product I have to use that updated its ui design some years ago, only the functionality is partially implemented and the new design has some functional elements that weren't present in the old configuration. This has been solved with a button that switches the layout between the two designs, when I'm making changes it is sometimes necessary to flip back and forth between the two mid-change.
• Perepiska 9mo ago
  I used to work for one big company. Every newly hired design director desperately wanted to create a new design for the corporate portal because it would add a new line to his resume.