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The space allocated for "Apple has lost their way" has been maxed out for decades, so it bears stressing that this time is different. This Liquid Glass debacle

• gilrain 7mo ago
  > threw their hard-won reputational gains off a cliff for _nothing_ I imagine some executive’s ego was spared by not telling them their idea was bad. Priceless.
• Pay08 7mo ago
  You're far overstating the effect it has had.
  • AdamN 7mo ago
    Also most of the stuff people complain about is easily changed in settings (transparency, etc...).
    • lynndotpy 7mo ago
      There are many things which are worse which cannot be configured. I can't get my battery life back, I can't get a version of Apple Maps which doesn't crash on launch back, I can't get my framerate back. I can't even get a refund for this $1200 phone.
  • williamdclt 7mo ago
    Yeah. The vast majority of people simply don't give a flying shit, and many haven't really even noticed.
  • shermantanktop 7mo ago
    The Apple universe seems to be a place where sentiment is driven by tastemakers and small-group consensus, not the mass of actual customers. So it doesn’t need to be a dominant complaint to have a big effect. The griping I read about Liquid Glass is from the unhip nerds on HN (like me). I don’t actually know what the industrial designers and graphic artists in their Soho lofts think. I asked an exec designer that I know IRL and got a shrug.
  • hedora 7mo ago
    I think people are using "liquid glass" as a blanket term that includes other changes in iOS 26, like completely breaking message delivery with the world's dumbest spam filter, aggressively waking some people up in the middle of the night, siri somehow getting even worse, breaking the incoming call state machine (again), bluetooth regressions, regressions to their (already poor) UI accessibility, and so on. Those other things add up and are definitely noticed by non-tech users that don't care that things like the alarm UI are massively regressed.
  • dandellion 7mo ago
    Are you from the future? Because on the current timeline it's much too early to tell if it's overstated or understated.
  • lynndotpy 7mo ago
    That's fair, by "everyone" it's probably only several million people. Other than that, I stand by my statement exactly. This is very bad.
• joshgachnang 7mo ago
  My non-techie friends either barely notice Liquid Glass or go "ooo this is nice!". It has annoyed me on occasion, but I barely notice it any more. Much ado about nothing.
  • threethirtytwo 7mo ago
    Yeah I couldn't care less for liquid glass but it's not as horrible as people make it out to be. The amount of hate is irrational. New Coke vibes if you heard of new coke.
  • izacus 7mo ago
    [flagged]
  • lynndotpy 7mo ago
    My personal experiences are the opposite of this. I have people in my life who are gen Z, millenials, and gen X who are befuddled by it. We also have data to show people dislike this. Google Trends shows the largest spikes ever for "how to switch to android", "iphone revert update", "iphone fix battery", and "iphone slow", all only after the release of Liquid Glass (and particularly the increased tactics to get people to update starting in September).
  • neutronicus 7mo ago
    Yes, the thing people notice is the keyboard not working.
    • kstrauser 7mo ago
      Supposedly iOS 26.4 out yesterday fixes that. I certainly hope so.
  • barrell 7mo ago
    My non techie friends all hate it. I don’t think there is a single Apple user I talk to regularly that hasn’t complained about it, or ask me why it is that way (being the resident tech person for some). And besides a few odd posts on x, I haven’t heard anyone techy speak positively about it. Maybe I’m the one in a bubble, but I’m seriously considering switching from Apple as a lifelong Apple user, largely because of the UI changes (Liquid Glass et al), so I don’t think the complaints about it are overblown.
• tclancy 7mo ago
  I think this sums up the disconnect between the devotees (I’ve been on Mac since 2005 or so, just long enough to buy the last PowerPC after a decade of Windows) and any corporation. I am not a devotee of any particular OS’ church but Apple’s market cap suggests there was a whole lotta nothing they got in return. I am a firm believer in the way European football fans see their clubs as belonging to them, but the reality with any brand is their loyalty is to money, not you.
• techterrier 7mo ago
  I've heard this every UI update for the past 20 years.
  • lynndotpy 7mo ago
    That's why I emphasized this is different. Apple fans bemoaned the Settings menu changing from a grid to a list, or the battery getting a skeumorphic icon, but that doesn't really matter. The Liquid Glass stuff was forced on users in ways their other OS updates weren't, and it has caused serious performance, stability, and usability problems throughout the entire OS.
    • outime 7mo ago
      I'm happy with it. My non-techie partner is happy (or more like "I don't care") with it. All my non-techie friends and family don't give a flying f*. I just think this site has recurrent issues with all redesigns and no, this time is no different.
• InUrNetz 7mo ago
  Apple has gone from 68k to ppc to intel to arm. The look of their desktop has changed so much over the years that showing a screen shot instantly tells you roughly the date it was taken. A graphical change at this point isn't moving the needle significantly. The reality is that Windows 11 continues to get worse. I was an embedded Linux dev for 15 years, and even I don't really want Linux on my desktop. Apple has better build quality, long support periods, simplified updates, and for the most part just works. My personal computer is just an appliance and a means to an ends, Apple still is the best of many bad choices.
• criddell 7mo ago
  The liquid glass debacle seems minor compared to the crappy keyboard debacle five or ten years ago and that didn't really hurt them in the long run. I don't have a Mac but my tablet and phone are both running liquid glass and it's... fine. I lost my favorite Sudoku app (Enjoy Sudoku) when they updated and for me that's the worst thing about it. I think on forums like this that tend to have a lot of Apple fans and haters, the impact of UI changes is overblown. Normies mostly don't care. They notice the change when it happens and then two days later they have already forgotten what the UI used to be.
• irusensei 7mo ago
  As someone who was inspired to buy their first Apple laptop by the "send all other UNIX boxes to /dev/null" ad I feel like Apple is already done and we are just catching the last remaining tail of that legacy. Seems underlying features such as kerberos, NFS, auto mount and others are just bit rotting by now and its a matter of time before MacOS becomes Windows 8.
  • commandersaki 7mo ago
    Those features also have a shrinking user base over time, so they get less resources and attention.
• deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
• commakozzi 7mo ago
  I've been using Apple since 1995 on System 7.5 then through OSX to MacOS & iOS. MacOS/iOS/iPadOS 26 and Liquid Glass do not bother me one bit. I rather still enjoy using my devices running these operating systems and think that the interface is great. I also know i am not the only one.
  • karlitooo 7mo ago
    Likewise, on macs since OS7, don't care at all. People might as well be comparing the tread on their car's tyres
• caconym_ 7mo ago
  I don't understand the fuss around liquid glass. I've been using Apple stuff since before OS X and this just feels like another redesign; I understand that there are some accessibility issues (that I thought Apple had at least partially addressed) but I don't have any problems using it. In fact, I kinda like it. It feels like many people latched onto an extremely negative narrative early on, and can't let go of it. I have much more of a problem with the terrible window management on the mac and ipad OSs. Not being able to snap and resize windows to the edges of the screen, like every other standard window manager that exists, is insane (I know they added some version of this recently, but unsurprisingly it sucks). And the entire mac OS is starting to feel slow, bloated, and janky. They completely ruined the cmd-space search in their most recent major release. They need to get their house in order.
  • lynndotpy 7mo ago
    > And the entire mac OS is starting to feel slow, bloated, and janky. It appears you do indeed understand the fuss around Liquid Glass :) The way I see it, "Liquid Glass" is used as a catch-all term to refer to all the UI changes across Apple's 2026 slate of user interfaces. For one example, the annoying Apple Watch fitness app changes are "Liquid Glass" in my book because it exists only to show off the new wobbling refracting buttons,. The loss of performance and battery life is reasonably assumed to be tied to new Liquid Glass shaders Apple aspires to run 120 times a second on the phone.
    • caconym_ 7mo ago
      I generally felt this way about macOS before "liquid glass" launched, so no, I don't think so.
  • vehemenz 7mo ago
    If you're going to say Apple's reputational hit from Tahoe, and Tahoe's many problems, are merely narrative-driven, you need to at least provide support for that. For example: - why the added transparency effects don't present accessibility/usability issues, despite what users report - why the corner radius change (among other UI changes), including its absurd size and broken handle detection actually aren't a big deal (even though every other window toolkit NOT swiftui has to be updated for it) - why it's okay that they added useless icons to menus that add visual clutter and violate of their own design standards - why Rosetta is going away, even though so many things still depend on it The bigger issue is that Tahoe was a frivolous cosmetic update with only a few actual improvements, despite all of macOS's bugs that haven't been fixed over the years. That's a long list, from broken keyboard shortcuts in most their newer apps (and System Settings) to persistent Airplay compatibility problems. Why is Apple's hardware getting objective better over the years while the possible software gains are squandered year after year?
• shepherdjerred 7mo ago
  Liquid Glass is fine now. I mean I don’t like it but I’m used to it. It was very very bad during the beta though