Oh no. It looks like every button and menu is now a translucent layer, so that any noise from the background shows through and muddles the text. This seems like an accessibility nightmare.
Translucent layers generally make software unusable for me. In the video, I saw several instances that would be really really bad for me, where I’d be straining to understand the text. Looks really cool and futuristic though. Just like a movie. Big whoop.
I’m autistic, but this won’t only affect autistic people. A lot of people are going to have problems with this. I hope there’s a very prominent way to turn it off.
austinl · 47m ago
This is also likely a performance nightmare. Funny that they mention that "new hardware has enabled us to..." which means that this will perform poorly on old devices.
At a previous company, we were forbidden from using translucency (with a few exceptions) because of the performance cost of blending. There are debugging tools we'd use fairly often to confirm that all layers were opaque.
jmrm · 1m ago
I think brand most recent iPhones are ridiculously powerful for their average use, so I don't think this would be an issue.
For older models, on the other hand, it would be an issue, and will put pressure to people to buy a new one.
nikeee · 18m ago
> Wirth's law is an adage on computer performance which states that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster.
these performance hungry "improvements" are forcefully introduced to legitimately slow down older devices and force the device refresh across the user base.
I have been using 8 year old iPhone just fine, but features like these over time will make the experience slower and slower and slower, until I am forced to refresh my iphone
mikestew · 35m ago
And you base this statement on…? Surely not the ol’ “my phone slows down when my battery is failing so that I’ll buy a new phone” canard?
To be clear, these are new features that will likely have a setting to turn off. There’s no conspiracy, nothing “forcefully” added for the purpose of driving upgrades. (Ah, ninja edit): There’s not even a guarantee these features will be supported on an eight year old phone.
hshdhdhj4444 · 21m ago
What’s the exact canard here?
It’s a legitimate concern even assuming good intent.
But Apple has had to publicly admit bad intent specifically with their batteries and had to offer people money etc.
Strange to criticize people for something Apple publicly admitted they did wrong.
sanswork · 10m ago
They didn't admit bad intent. They admitted to doing something with good intent(the slowing was to stop crashes with near EOL batteries) but that they weren't transparent about it.
I'd much rather us have progress and people with 8 year old phones suffer than ensure that everything continues to run smoothly on any old device for eternity.
mikestew · 13m ago
Apple publicly admitted they did wrong.
When is the last time a company has admitted wrong-doing? No, Apple admitted to slowing down phones when the battery was shot so it wouldn’t just suddenly shut down.
These transparency effects have been in macOS, ipadOS, iOS, and tvOS for years though?
landl0rd · 33m ago
There's a difference between something like a transparent background (you can run i3/picom on a potato) and having to composite many little UI elements to render a frame.
Synaesthesia · 33m ago
Modern iOS and Mac devices have plenty of GPU power for a shader effect. They already do one with the translucent blue.
Macha · 27m ago
Meh, Vista laptops could run lots of translucency fine (well as long as they were actualy Vista era laptops and not just XP era laptops with Vista installed)
dylan604 · 22m ago
It's almost like they said the same thing: Funny that they mention that "new hardware has enabled us to..."
oh wait. it's not like they did. they did say it.
coastalpuma · 1h ago
I agree, I think it extends to anybody who wants a calmer experience or has vision trouble or strain. I guess you can turn those options off but if the aesthetic appeal of the design is based on them then I assume we'll be getting a second-class version of it. I was already leaning towards switching to Linux for other reasons but I think this is the thing that finally pushes me there. I think optimizing for VisionOS is quite a bad idea from a UX POV, since they're two entirely different usecases. With augmented reality you need and want to see things in the background, whereas on other devices you don't. It's a fairly fundamental difference, and it's sad that they chose to go this way in my opinion.
jorvi · 17m ago
To me it looks plain ugly, especially with all the bounces and transforms. Look at those sliders and toggles..
It's straight from the 2000s, with Linux users using Compiz and... Amethyst(?), stuffing their entire desktop full with gaudy transparency, transforms, jiggles and bounces.
More of a nit, but "The new design extends across iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS Tahoe 26, watchOS 26, and tvOS 26 to establish even more harmony" is so ironic and funny. No one noticed how talking about "platform consistency" whilst having one platform use codenames next to version names just screams inattention to detail?
coastalpuma · 57m ago
This is an existing and somewhat nitpicky issue, but it's also annoying how they specifically insist on rounded corners "because that matches all modern devices" in the announcement. Pretty much all third party external monitors don't, and even their latest top line laptops only have them at the top of the screen. So we're stuck with these dumb little triangles of background peeking out. It's kind of the "charging port on the bottom of the magic mouse" of MacOS.
armchairhacker · 50m ago
"Turning off" could just put solid light/dark under the glass. That would be decent-looking (not much different than before), accessible, and easy to implement.
fitsumbelay · 52m ago
if you're switching to linux what device are you considering getting?
thenaturalist · 47m ago
Not autistic, but this is just so weird.
Why would you design readability and visibility to depend on chaotic, highly varied and probably sometimes bad underlying backgrounds?
I fail to see any systematic approach/ consistent design language at play here.
Let's hope this does not survive for long.
ultrarunner · 22m ago
I’ve noticed a recurring theme on iOS where interactions intended for an app get trapped by the OS (especially multi-window interactions on iPad). The OS is less and less a foundation to support what you actually want, and more the product itself. If the actual content of the phones matters less than the fact that iOS itself is “the latest” then this makes perfect sense and is in line with the general momentum over the past several years.
georgebcrawford · 39m ago
What does autism have to do with it?
thenaturalist · 38m ago
Check the parent comment.
cosmic_cheese · 1h ago
I’d bet there’s a toggle that dramatically increases opacity or eliminates transparency entirely while keeping the shading and gloss. If it exists I’m sure it’ll be popular.
burntalmonds · 51m ago
I'm hoping that's true and there's still an option for a flat, minimal look.
dylan604 · 20m ago
so all they had to do to get people to quit bitching about the flat look was to introduce the translucent look!
updating ticket to closed
rollcat · 53m ago
macOS (I'm still on Sonoma tho): System Settings -> Accessibility -> Display -> Reduce Transparency. (I also recommend Reduce Motion, but YMMV - some animations are really helpful.)
Yeah I'm pretty sure that setting has been there since Yosemite. That was the version that first prominently featured blurred translucency. (The transparency in earlier versions like Mavericks was really subtle.)
matja · 51m ago
Going from the ratio of adjectives on the page, it is 2.5 times less functional than beautiful.
thesuitonym · 14m ago
I'd argue that it doesn't even look that cool or futuristic. Kind of looks like Windows 7.
That said, Windows 7 had an option to turn off all the translucency, so hopefully Apple ripped that idea, too.
iaaan · 5m ago
Completely agree, takes me back to the days of Compiz Fusion, wavy windows and fire trails.
andrepd · 54m ago
It is, once again, designing interfaces based on "vibes" instead of science or principles or used feedback, optimising for looking good on screenshots and marketing materials and not for actual usability or user friendly was. With "vibes" here standing for whatever some SV asshole thinks it's cool and modern.
Alegria, flat design, pastel colors, or unholy amounts of whitespace. It's been the story of the last 15 years of UI design at least.
surgical_fire · 42m ago
> , designing interfaces based on "vibes" instead of science or principles or used feedback
Well, this is what Apple does, and the reason I hate their devices with a passion. It always was style over substance.
yuehhangalt · 11m ago
You must be too young to remember because a lot of the early user interface design principles, based on actual research, were pioneered by Bruce Tognazzini and Jef Raskin at Apple. Tog on Interface and Tog on Software Design were THE bibles back in the day and Apple's Human Interface Guidelines showed how a company could and should adopt consistent user experience across all of their products.
It honestly saddens me how far Apple has fallen.
nlarew · 45m ago
Do you really think that Apple, of all companies, did a cross-platform UI refresh based entirely on vibes without considering user taste, usability, accessibility, etc?
You've already judged the system as only good for "looking good on screenshots and marketing materials" when you haven't even seen anything other than the announcement.
candiddevmike · 25m ago
I think you're holding it wrong
ben_w · 13m ago
> Do you really think that Apple, of all companies, did a cross-platform UI refresh based entirely on vibes without considering user taste, usability, accessibility, etc?
Yes, I think they would do that.
Lots of historical examples of Apple making weird design choices for decades now. I'm old enough to remember the hockey-puck mouse on the original iMac.
3.3 trillion dollar market cap, and the *clipboard* is no longer reliable. The mail badge is an unreliable count. The wallpaper sometimes disappears. The alarms don't play out of whatever speaker or headphones you're using for all your other audio.
surgical_fire · 40m ago
> Do you really think that Apple, of all companies, did a cross-platform UI refresh based entirely on vibes without considering user taste, usability, accessibility, etc?
We are talking about the same company that to make a the MCP a little bit thinner released that crap with only two USBC ports, forcing everyone to carry fucking dongles everywhere.
And let's not forget that awful butterfly keyboard.
So much usability, so much accessibility. No vibes, no sir.
nlarew · 37m ago
Perhaps they learned something from that? Look at modern MBP models which have MagSafe, HDMI, and SD card slots.
surgical_fire · 30m ago
Are you telling me that the trillion dollar company had to actually release a laptop with only two USBC ports to "learn" that people need more ports on a laptop? And you do that on a straight face on a sequence where it was claimed that they carefully consider usability and accessibility?
And yes, I am aware those silly toy computers have a couple more ports nowadays, I have to use that on a daily basis for work.
skyyler · 31m ago
I think the implication was that if they went on anything but vibes, they would have never removed MagSafe, HDMI, or SD card slots.
reaperducer · 2m ago
Mr. Vibe works for OpenAI now.
moralestapia · 1h ago
I'm not autistic and I don't like this upgrade, at all.
It looks so tacky.
vFunct · 1h ago
They say the text color adapts to the background based on contrast.
I'm just wondering if Apple is going to make matching CSS updates in Safari so web app developers have matching visuals.
basisword · 1h ago
Apple takes accessibility more seriously than most. I would be shocked if there isn't a setting to instantly remedy this for people with any sort of vision issue.
rpgbr · 1h ago
I bet there will be, but let not dismiss that good accessibility is when the UI is readable/accessible by default.
Anyway, I also bet they will tone this transparency stuff down a lot in the betas leading to the stable version in September. iOS 7 all over again…
landl0rd · 32m ago
Let's also not ignore that, whether apple has actually achieved this or not, the highly-accessible version of something necessarily excludes many design idioms and either looks worse or relegates one to a limited range of creative expression. As such, most designers will not want to design for that by default.
Someone1234 · 1h ago
I'm really showing off my age here, but it has been all down hill since skeuomorphic design; because the focus was primarily on usability and teachability as first-class concepts. Heck, companies were spending millions on usability research at the time, much of which was used.
I taught people to use computers in the 90s and early 2000s, and having those concepts matching to real world objects helped immensely. Recently I had to teach my kids to use a PC (they no longer teach that in "computers" at school, by the way, iPads only), and everything was arbitrarily designed without even internal rules/consistency let alone building on real-world metaphors.
You've also had this ongoing trend of content density getting consistency worse, and now Apple is accelerating a trend to make UI elements difficult to see/harm discoverability further. Liquid Glass is going to be a painful period, and all the clones that do it even worse are going to be pure hell.
jandrese · 14m ago
IMHO skeuomorphic design had a few wins, but also plenty of losses. Sometimes the real world interface is just not as intuitive as it should have been.
But I'm 100% behind you on "make buttons look like buttons" and "don't hide functionality behind arbitrary gestures that you never tell the user". UI designers may hate menus these days, but they were so good for letting a user browse through looking for the thing they want. Search boxes are a good speed improvement, but should never be the only interface object because many times the user doesn't know exactly what they're looking for.
This is also why most voice assistants don't get used very much, there's no easily accessible list of phrases they know and they aren't smart enough to really understand what the person wants, so people end up using the one or two phrases they know the assistant can handle and forget about it otherwise.
ben_w · 8m ago
> This is also why most voice assistants don't get used very much, there's no easily accessible list of phrases they know and they aren't smart enough to really understand what the person wants, so people end up using the one or two phrases they know the assistant can handle and forget about it otherwise.
Thank you for saying this, you've just made me realise they share all the problems of text adventures while having none of the excitement.
mrweasel · 1h ago
> having those concepts matching to real world objects helped immensely
A lot of those real world objects no longer exists, or are less frequently used than their counterparts, so I sort of see why moving away from that design language makes sense.
I'll hold of judgement of "Liquid Glass" until I've seen and used, but I don't feel like it's necessary. It's certainly not "the biggest" design update ever. System 9 to MacOSX was still greater.
This isn't really Apples fault, but I also expect others to start implementing something similar, but badly. Apple do have a point that this is something that only Apple can do well, because you do need to ensure that hardware can keep up. We're going to see other attempt something similar, but it won't been nearly as polished.
Overall I still feel that Apple is trying to force to much functionality into the phone platform. It would be really lovely to have an iOS light, that does less and with a simpler UI/UX.
rollcat · 29m ago
> [...] this is something that only Apple can do well, because you do need to ensure that hardware can keep up.
Yeah, about that.
When iPhone SE2 was first released (April 2020), it featured the A13 Bionic, which was the most powerful SoC Apple has had at the time (to be succeeded by A14 in iPhone 12 couple months later), and ran iOS 13.
Every succeeding iOS release, the phone felt a little more sluggish. Right now, by iOS 18: it sometimes takes half a minute to open the share sheet; misbehaving apps can make the phone almost too hot to touch, and can freeze the app switcher UI for 10+s; Safari takes 4s to "cold start" into about:blank; and so on. None of these are signs of CPU throttling, it's all just software. I almost can't wait for Apple to drop support for major releases - even if the current release is crap, the next one will be worse.
I pretty much expect last year's devices to start struggling with this new design after 2 releases.
wavemode · 1h ago
> A lot of those real world objects no longer exists, or are less frequently used than their counterparts, so I sort of see why moving away from that design language makes sense
This reasoning never made a ton of sense to me. Gen Z don't use devices with knobs and buttons anymore, therefore we should all design our interface elements to look like nothing in particular?
If you give someone young and tech savvy a digital UI, they will figure out how to use it. It's precisely the oldest and least tech savvy users for whom interface design is most important, as they are more like to get frustrated and quit your app. Why optimize for the young, then?
(I mean, it's a rhetorical question, as I already know the answer - the designers creating the interfaces are themselves young and tech savvy gen-Z'ers.)
mrweasel · 59m ago
> Gen Z don't use devices with knobs and buttons anymore, therefore we should all design our interface elements to look like nothing in particular?
We have volume sliders rather than knobs, because that's easier on a touch interface. I get your point, but does the button need to look like the button on the radio in our grandfathers car from 1960? Probably not. I was thinking more in terms of filling cabinets, floppies as save icons or even the phone as the receiver on a rotary phone. Would it be easier to set a timer on your phone if the UI looked like a kitchen egg timer? Having the email icon be a letter doesn't even make sense anymore. My kid has sent one letter ever and all the mailboxes will be removed next year. How does having a letter as an icon going to provide any meaningful frame of reference when we daily receive more email than we do actual letters in a year, or two, or three?
wavemode · 35m ago
I understand the concept that objects like letters are no longer used very much. My question is, what icon do you use instead of a letter icon, and what tangible benefit does it bring, given that people are already used to letter icons, and aren't going to be used to your new icon. Tangible benefit meaning "users will be able to use this interface more easily".
Usually the reasoning just stops at "but nobody sends letters anymore!" without going a step further and justifying why that even matters.
mrweasel · 24m ago
> My question is, what icon do you use instead of a letter icon
That is a good question. The "share" icon e.g. is something that has no real world equivalent, and I'd argue that it almost doesn't work. Technically it could be anything and we'd over time agree that "This thing means share".
We're still at a point where many still understand the references, but over time something like the letter in email icons, just becomes cargo cult. Perhaps you're right, it doesn't matter, as long as we agree what the icons mean.
al_borland · 43m ago
The classic example is the save icon being a floppy disk. Older people understand the history, and young people figure it out, even if they don’t know the history.
Computers are full of these things though. The Shift key is a reference back to how typewriters worked. We didn’t change the name of the key, because nothing physically shifts anymore. Most don’t know what it means historically, but they still know what it does on their computer.
I’ll all for bringing skeuomorphism back.
overfeed · 1h ago
> A lot of those real world objects no longer exists
Yep. What would the modern equivalent of the save icon - a cloud or an generic IC representing the soldered-on SDD? Hard drives, floppies, or any other user-controlled storage devices are now out of fashion.
rollcat · 20m ago
I find it comical that macOS displays an HDD icon for internal storage. It's even using the "old", skeuomorphic art style, from before the flat design.
(It also displays a CRT with a Windows 95 BSOD for Samba network shares, but that's 100% on purpose.)
OTOH Apple's own apps haven't had a "save" button for a really long time now. Everything autosaves (and syncs to iCloud) automatically - use Undo if you need to. More complex apps, like Numbers, also automatically maintain a version history.
timschmidt · 25m ago
USB flash drives are still quite universally used and a direct replacement for the floppy's functionality. I've seen a USB stick shaped icon used as a metaphor for saving in some places. But I agree with the sibling post that the text "save" probably has more staying power.
mrweasel · 56m ago
Personally I'd just make it a button that says "Save", but I doubt that's going to be popular.
TheOtherHobbes · 30m ago
Especially not in non-English countries.
Icons make localisation much easier. In fact flat web design has evolved a fairly standard set of icons for basic operations. Most people know what a burger menu and x in the top corner of a window do. Same for copy, share, and so on.
The problem with Liquid Glass is that it's making the background style more important than the foreground content. No one cares if buttons ripple if they can't see what they do, because icons themselves are less clear and harder to read.
So I don't know what the point of this is.
Unifying the look with Apple's least successful, least popular, most niche product seems like a bizarre decision. I'm guessing the plan is to start adding VisionPro features in other products, but without 3D displays the difference between 3D and 2D metaphors is too huge to bridge.
I really liked Aqua. It was attractive and it was very usable.
This is... I don't know. It seems like style over substance for the sake of it, with significant damage to both.
ProfessorLayton · 34m ago
"Save" is 4 characters in English, but it's over twice as long in German (9 Characters), and even longer in French (11). The variable length means the UX for word-based buttons would need to be designed for the longest case, which is why we mainly see them in title bars for navigation, or in very sparse UI.
pndy · 15m ago
This whole flat style fever which doesn't distinguish between active elements and informative text allowed to spread darkpattern tactics which lead to deploying adverse or even harmful changes for users. It also contributed to nullifying customisation under linux - looking exactly at you adwaita.
My age shows here as well and I'm not in any way excited about this design change at all. Suddenly Apple decided that this fancy acrylic glass animation for widgets, interface that says "look we aren't stagnant - we did something" will be enough to diverge attention from other problems. I sincerely doubt that it's gonna be.
This release feels like a return to transparency trend which we had somewhere around Vista and initial KDE Plasma releases.
acheron · 54m ago
> Recently I had to teach my kids to use a PC (they no longer teach that in "computers" at school, by the way, iPads only)
The middle school here has a "computer applications" class that covers all that kind of thing. Definitely not iPads only.
whiteboardr · 1h ago
Attack of the clones, yes.
Just as visual design across the majority of digital touchpoints seems to have arrived at a mature level, this will unleash a giant wave of noise including gradients on text.
Brrr.
zilti · 1h ago
> (they no longer teach that in "computers" at school, by the way, iPads only)
I swear, some decisionmakers deserve a brutal punch in their face. I don't even care anymore about being civil in such matters.
plainOldText · 1h ago
This looks horrible to be honest.
This new liquid glass will lead to liquid brain, because my brain will be melting trying to process all that visual mess daily.
Now of course, I'll have to experience this new design in practice to be sure, but judging from the screenshots it looks really hard on the eyes. Hopefully they'll allow the translucency to be customized.
Apple had a good run, I've genuinely enjoyed using their platforms daily, but I'm afraid they're dropping the ball now.
I guess on a long enough timeline, every company is bound to disappoint. It's hard to get it right, consistently.
pzo · 57m ago
Same. I was kind of slowly preparing myself that I might be switching to android and it seems this might be the final straw. Will wait until Sept to see how new iphone and google pixels will look like but most likely I will do the transition (even though been developing for iOS for more than 10 years.
leakycap · 9m ago
I've tried to escape the walled garden to Android before, and I've given up. No matter which company's phone or what version of Android, it didn't work well as a phone, alarm, and reliable device that I use for stuff like my home security. Things broke on Android like clockwork, and the clock didn't work.
The latest Google pixel devices are specifically blocked from using Wyze devices right now due to a typo in the pixel's configuration files, for example. Stuff like that happens constantly with any phone in the super fragmented Android ecosystem.
plainOldText · 28m ago
Sure, it's reasonable to consider a switch. But while Android devices have come a long way in terms of physical design, capabilities, UI/UX, etc, out of the box Apple still offers a more comprehensive, user friendly and privacy focused security solution: lockdown, tighter controls of hardware/software integration, etc. So there's that.
leakycap · 8m ago
Agreed; I will probably be staying with iOS no matter how garish it becomes - Apple has the foundations right.
I can't say I feel the same about macOS before; as a user since the early 1990s, I'm likely moving to Linux rather than Liquid Glass for my personal computer.
yuehhangalt · 5m ago
Agreed. I've used Macs since 1986 and at one point worked for Apple. I used to make the same jokes about Linux on the desktop as everyone and yet I see myself seriously considering it more every day.
rollcat · 17m ago
I think it's time for me to look back at Linux.
(*Looks at Gnome.*)
Hm, they're getting worse faster than Apple does. Never mind.
lyu07282 · 3m ago
The damage Gnome does to the reputation of Linux is surreal
JKCalhoun · 1h ago
I agree that it seems to be a move toward lower contrast. I prefer higher contrast.
vFunct · 58m ago
I like it a lot. Reminds me of the OG Mac OS X Aqua theme, except a more reactive/dynamic version of it to account for accessibility.
Refreshing counter to the brutalist styles that were trending. The problem with brutalist styles is that they tend to be busy, which becomes confusing and unintuitive to new users.
This seems like it would help separate elements for easier focus, to make things more obvious.
yuehhangalt · 3m ago
Apple learned a lot of lessons with Aqua and eventually dialed back the translucency. Unfortunately, they seem to have forgotten those lessons.
ksec · 1h ago
The whole thing is Windows Vista Aero Glass and iOS 7 all over again. Repeating all the SAME mistakes with 3D translucent design.
Right now I really want skeuomorphism back.
Much like iOS 7 they will have to spend another 2 - 3 years "tweaking" or basically walking back some of these design decisions.
I believe the problem is when Tim Cook decided to merge "Design" under one umbrella. So the Design team now takes over both Hardware and Software Design when they kicked Scott Forstall out. A lot of Apple's UX went down hill from there.
rweichler · 19m ago
When Cook became CEO, all of this was inevitable. I used to blame Jobs for not picking Forstall as his successor, but it recently dawned on me that it was never his choice to begin with. The board probably crowded him out again, just like the Sculley situation.
In a month Apple will have been on autopilot for longer than Jobs was at the company during the 1997-2011 heyday. Jobs became iCEO in September 1997. After 167 months passed, he left in August 2011. It has been 166 months since then.
laserbeam · 30m ago
It’s not “mistakes”, it’s fashion. The cool thing about fashion is you can never run out of innovation. If something has been out of fashion for 15 years you can bring it back! It makes it seem like everything is forever changing and new. I’ll bet your ass that material design will be all the rave in 10-15 years or so.
captainmuon · 1h ago
We have these brilliant high resolution displays, and these powerful, energy efficient GPUs that are always running and compositing frames like a game engine 120 times a second.
It's about time we start seeing more physicality in our user interfaces!
We can make things look convincingly like glass, or metal, or even materials that don't exist in reality. One reason for flat design is because it was the lowest common denominator and easy for devs to implement. If Apple makes it easy to implement this liquid glass stuff - Rectangle().background(.glass) or something - then it's going to be really successful.
cosmotic · 1h ago
Just because we can doesn't mean we should. Using this new design language as an example, things are now harder to read, identify, and understand. That's a huge loss to productivity and ease of use.
nlarew · 41m ago
> things are now harder to read, identify, and understand
What makes you think that? Do you have a specific example from the keynote in mind?
There must be something since you've never actually used this design system yourself. Or is this just your pre-judgement?
yuehhangalt · 1m ago
In the keynote, they showed an app, I think it was Messages, where the UI at the bottom was illegible because it was translucent and the background image and text were showing through too much. There are other examples that I was able to find were legibility was negatively impacted.
zerocrates · 18m ago
Even in their animations on this page there are things where the user scrolls the interface and the part under one of these glass buttons looks more exaggerated and draws the eye in an unpleasant way, and depending on where they land with it, the text on the button isn't particularly readable.
selimnairb · 1h ago
Reminds me of when they added more transparency to the UI around Mac OS X 10.9 where they argued that it "helps you focus on what's important". Huh? By showing me what's behind what I'm trying to look at? The first thing I do when I setup a new machine is to go to accessibility settings and turn on "reduce transparency". Hoping there is a way to do something similar with this.
keyringlight · 1h ago
Similar with how MS brought 'glass' into their Aero theme for vista or win7. There was exactly no benefit to being able to see some blurry version of the background window if I'm trying to read the foreground. I don't think a version that lets background detail through clearly will do any better outside of flashy demos.
paulcole · 8m ago
> That's a huge loss to productivity and ease of use
Have you used it yet?
dwayne_dibley · 1h ago
Agreed. That should be the focus of any user interface.
beAbU · 1h ago
Microsoft did glass with windows 7, maybe even vista. Can't remember.
Kinda old hat at this point tbh.
And just because we have all this powerful hardware, does not mean we need to waste it on physically accurate glass surfaces on UIs.
If this rolls out to all iDevices, how much energy (in other words CO2) will be expended worldwide on rendering things like this?
nottorp · 1h ago
> that are always running and compositing frames like a game engine 120 times a second
Which is complete idiocy if you ask me. Why update a static screen at 120 fps? Are our batteries too large?
satvikpendem · 1h ago
> Why update a static screen at 120 fps?
Good thing it doesn't do that then, variable refresh rate displays that go down to 1 Hz are fairly standard now on phones as well as other displays.
Pulcinella · 59m ago
Even before that, mobile UI frameworks are retained mode GUIs, not immediate. They aren't drawing to a blank framebuffer 120 times a second if they don't have to. Redraws only happen when something changes (e.g. "Dirty" rects).
pzo · 1h ago
only if each iOS app experience wasn't worse with each release. SwiftUI apps feels much slower than UIKit. My iPhone 13 experience with latest iOS overall feels very sluggish to old iPhones. This design feels not bringing much benefits but only drawbacks - more energy wasted, slower performance on older iPhones (apple want you buy new phone) and IMHO is just worse UX.
noosphr · 19m ago
>It's about time we start seeing more physicality in our user interfaces!
Then we got rid of it because it looked too 2010 now we are bringing it back because flat looks too 2020.
WillieCubed · 28m ago
This is the Jevons paradox [1] in full display here. It's much easier to take advantage of hardware to run software at 120 FPS, so why not?
And I agree about liquid glass being successful iff they make the developer tooling for this as easy as additional modifiers to components, or even the default for SwiftUI.
> It's about time we start seeing more physicality in our user interfaces!
It's actually quite resource intensive to have translucency, in many implementations across the web and mobile.
pzo · 1h ago
apple need to persuade people somehow to buy new iphone.
snarf21 · 55m ago
Highly dynamic frames makes sense for an immersive game. It doesn't make sense when I'm trying to read my email or what the name of the song that is currently playing is.
kylehotchkiss · 1h ago
so what you're saying is that we need to resurrect skeuomorphism?
gaze · 1h ago
I get the sense that the Scandinavian minimalism thing has worn too heavy on everyone and now we're taking a collective step back to explore things that are a bit more fun and maximalist. So yeah, maybe a little more skeuomorphism but done differently? That was a fun era!
mrweasel · 1h ago
> I get the sense that the Scandinavian minimalism thing has worn too heavy on everyone
As a Scandinavian: I don't feel like we tried that since Braun. Apple has tried to mimic a Scandinavian sort of minimalism, but only in appearance. The iPhone UI is way to busy and is to hard to navigate for me to classify it as minimalism.
wartijn_ · 1h ago
I would be happy with that. After years of using iOS with the current design it still takes me a few moments before I’ve found the Photos app with its meaningless icon that looks way too much like some other icons.
LoganDark · 1h ago
Skeuomorphism in the sense of exactly mimicking existing physical interfaces probably mostly not, but skeuomorphism in the sense of using physically-inspired visual effects to add depth to a virtual interface I think so for sure. Liquid glass is so damn pretty.
keyringlight · 1h ago
I think modern skeuomorphism must be in a weird spot compared to a few decades ago. Right now our real world devices designers would be inspired are less likely to have physical controls, so the virtual versions are pulling from a more distant original source that's already been through a few degrees of separation. If the original industrial design that computer interface graphics was pulling from was the rise of industrial and consumer electronics through the 20th century (the various switches, dials, indicators, tuning knobs, etc), what new physical design is there to inspire that isn't feeding on itself.
Findecanor · 1h ago
From one point of view, this design language is a type of skeuomorphism, by it mimicking pieces of rounded glass laid on top of one-other.
The problem with skeuomorphism in iOS' first design language was that resemblance to real-world objects was taken too far — at the expense of legibility. Users attributed affordances to virtual objects that they didn't have.
The problem with iOS 7's flatter interface was that the anti-skeumorphism went too far in the other direction, again at the expense of legibility. Users couldn't see what controls were supposed to do.
... And now the pendulum has swung back in the other direction, again too far, and missed the goal.
lukebuehler · 1h ago
yes, I think this is exactly what's happening.
submeta · 8m ago
Good Lord, this concept of „liquid glass“ is ugly. Not visibly distinct, looks blurry, not clear and sharp. And then they overlap with the content. I never liked the overlapping menus in Notability app either.
This is a flop like the flat keyboard design. Making worse by trying to make it better. Verschlimmbessert.
And this from a company with unlimited financial resources.
kej · 2h ago
This feels suspiciously like the goals of Microsoft's "Metro" design from the Windows 8 era. It will be interesting to see if Apple can do a better job of keeping the same design without damaging the desktop experience than Microsoft did.
whiteboardr · 1h ago
It’s terrible and an unsolvable “problem” that many have tried before and there’s no way of getting this right.
Transparent UI components always add noise by nature, especially glass that is intended to be realistic - see all the refractions shown in the keynote.
Aqua was also playful and suggested the same feel but never got in the way of clarity and was beautifully implemented almost feeling revolutionary at the time.
What is on point for VR use cases where this is taken from, unfortunately ruins a desktop or handheld experience.
A massive loss of precision, focus and a big step backwards.
out-of-ideas · 1h ago
> It’s terrible and an unsolvable “problem” that many have tried before and there’s no way of getting this right.
except apple dictates to its fans whats right. i feel apple has already begun a slow process of making them similar;
what im more curious about is how they will improve the settings app (it seems the desktop settings is the worst its been design and flow wise - ive never liked the ios settings design - i do hope they change both of these for the better)
edit: more newlines
grishka · 2h ago
They've already started ruining the desktop experience with the macOS 11 redesign and there's no sign of them stopping. For example, the recent settings app redesign that no one asked for broke the fundamental desktop UI design rule that controls never scroll, only content does.
n42 · 1h ago
one of my favorite examples of how bad the System Settings app is: find where the Default Browser setting is, without using search.
grishka · 1h ago
Oh wow. Took me several minutes of aimlessly poking around.
Actually, even without that, the grouping and the hierarchy don't make sense. Why are some things top-level items and other under "general"? Same for "privacy and security" (I assume that's what it's called in English), for some reason "passwords", "lock screen" and "touch ID and password" are separate top-level items even though they do very much belong to "privacy and security".
The more you look at it, the less sense it makes.
BoorishBears · 1h ago
Your smoking gun is to not use the app in the most intuitive and obvious way?
thewebguyd · 16m ago
> Your smoking gun is to not use the app in the most intuitive and obvious way?
Search isn't the most intuitive and obvious way to everyone. Just adding a search function also isn't an excuse to just totally ignore good UX design and information hierarchy.
I've been a sysadmin my entire career, and still do end-user support occasionally. You'd be surprised how few people use the search function, for anything, on their computers. Just opening the windows start menu and showing them they can search there is like black magic to a frighteningly large amount of people.
I've met fellow Mac users that don't even know spotlight exists, and navigate through the OS and every app via mouse and clicking around.
So yeah, just throwing a search box in your app as an excuse for ignoring the experience of navigating it any other way is bad UX design.
grishka · 1h ago
Different people may approach the same UI differently. A good practice in UX design is to put things where people expect to find them — and duplicate them if different people go looking in different places. So a working search function doesn't absolve you of having to make the structure of your screens/menus/whatever make sense.
gherkinnn · 2h ago
Metro on phones worked so well but MS failed to translate it to desktops.
As for the second part, Apple does a remarkable job at updating all of the OS to a new design language. Unlike Windows, which last time I used it, had three different settings panels and UI controls resembling archaeological layers going back to pre XP.
kevin_thibedeau · 1h ago
You can still get the Windows 3/NT 3.5 directory picker if you dig around enough.
cosmic_cheese · 1h ago
The biggest problem with Metro is how little effort was put into properly adapting it to desktops. It tried to handle everything from smartphones to tablets to non-touch PCs with 27” monitors with the same UI. It’s an understatement to say that it was awkward to use with a keyboard and mouse, because it almost acted like those forms of input ceased to exist.
If Apple makes the right platform-specific affordances (which they have a much better chance of doing) I think it can work.
max51 · 1h ago
> It tried to handle everything from smartphones to tablets to non-touch PCs with 27” monitors with the same UI
That was a big part of the problem, but the issues with the UI/UX went far beyond that.
For exemple, if you used the search bar in the "start menu" to get something from the control pannel, it would ONLY show the new W8 Metro dialog box that barelly has 1/5th the features and would refuse to show you the real one. It also took multiple years before the metro apps inlcuded in the OS (eg. pdf viewer) could be used in windowed mode (they were fullscreen mode like a video game, without taskbar), even the ipad at the time had better multitasking than the W8 Metro apps.
cosmic_cheese · 1h ago
And as I understand it, much of that sort of problem comes down to the “warring factions” model found at Microsoft internally where the whole company is never on the same page, a problem that Apple doesn’t suffer from as badly.
saratogacx · 1h ago
It isn't quite as simple as that. The guy that ran the windows org during that time thought himself the Steve Jobs of Microsoft and didn't hear anything different (to the point of having multi-page public blog posts about how much the launched windows 8 US was the best thing ever and if you didn't agree, you were just wrong).
During that time they also instituted "anti-leak" measures so teams would develop and commit features internally and keep them behind hidden flags that required special permissions from the org to change (via an app they called "red pill"). That means that by the time many teams saw what was happening with the UX in various places in the OS, it was too late to come to consensus.
The entire cycle for the OS was empire building and emperor has no clothing from start to finish. It wasn't until he was ousted that they started to try and pull things back with 8.1 and eventually 10.
max51 · 1h ago
Apple is a lot better at eating their own dogfood than microsoft. They had UI designers working on macbooks at the Microsoft office, that alone probably explains a lot of issues with the OS
wmf · 1h ago
Do you mean Aero Glass from Windows 7? Metro is a flat design that looks nothing like this.
kej · 24m ago
I was referring to the idea of having a universal design across mobile and desktop, which was one of the goals of Metro, rather than the specific visual style.
llm_nerd · 1h ago
I assume they might be talking more to the "universal design" aspect.
Though Apple has long had a universal design across platforms. Not always in lockstep, but visual traits and behaviours and traits and appearances end up in all of their platforms, which even if it wasn't logical from a design perspective, there is loads of shared code so it's inevitable.
But really a lot of what they showed today reminded me most of Aqua from 25 years ago.
basisword · 1h ago
Do you mean Aero Glass from Windows Vista?
jmkni · 2h ago
Definitely in the minority here but I liked Metro, I always felt it was just a decade ahead of it's time (as was Windows 8 generally)
max51 · 1h ago
The esthetic wasn't bad, the problem is that it was a massive reduction in functionality. For example, the fact that Metro apps included on windows could only be use in fullscreen mode and only one copy of it could be used at the same time. The new Metro settings they included to replace the ones from the control panel had only like 10% of the functionality of the old one and they actively tried to prevent you from finding the old one. The content density was significantly lower and dialogbox/dropdownmenus couldn't be resized to display more items (eg. list of keyboard layouts that can only display 3 items at the same time)
jhickok · 2h ago
The issue with Metro, imo, is that it was dizzying to use as you were swept away into new interfaces and for many tasks we lost a lot of usability.
herbturbo · 1h ago
Yes especially given that XP was the most useable version of Windows ever. They just threw it all away and expected people to relearn the basics of interacting with their PC.
cosmic_cheese · 1h ago
XP was good but I’m partial to 7. It was like a refined Vista that brought proper alpha blending support and a number of QoL improvements without setting the core experience on fire.
bowsamic · 2h ago
I really liked metro on windows phone but I did not understand it on desktop. It didn’t help that they took away the usual UI
jmkni · 1h ago
Right but go a decade ahead when many more people use their phones as their primary computer, much less of a problem
bowsamic · 1h ago
Then they should have waited for a decade? Literally what does that have to do with anything. No shit, design decisions are very different when teleported literally a decade later
moralestapia · 1h ago
Metro was, and is, my favorite UI ever.
bluSCALE4 · 2h ago
Window's problem has always been their legacy systems. I believe to this day you can bring up windows 95 era dialogs somehow in Windows 11?
whatever1 · 1h ago
It’s also a much deeper and broader ui. In the past 20 years of using windows I don’t recall one time that I needed to bring up the command line to do something. Linux on the other hand is a constant battle with random commands with close to zero discoverability. macOS sits somewhere in between, but definitely a way more ui friendly system compared to the various Linux desktop distros
jcranmer · 15m ago
That would be a surprise, since Windows XP and newer are based on Windows NT, not the Windows 9x family (Windows 95, 98, and Me).
satvikpendem · 1h ago
Not Metro, which was flat, but their newer Fluent UI, shown in their design videos [0].
I wonder how much of this transparent/glass design language is setting Apple up for AR interfaces where UI is overlaid on what you're looking at. Since you literally cannot have fully opaque elements with AR glasses this would be a smart way to ensure overall design is unified across platforms.
_aavaa_ · 1h ago
Also a great way to speed up hardware upgrades. Each new os update can add more computationally expensive frills to make the older phones slow down.
diggan · 1h ago
This was also my first thought, "imagine how many who think their device is too old after installing this "everything transparent" OS update". I bet shareholders will love it though.
chakintosh · 2h ago
Right before the unveiling, Craig specifically said visionOS was the driver for these changes. So the new UI is literally because Apple is still betting on visionOS.
crooked-v · 1h ago
The thing I find really weird there is that visionOS panes and windows are more opaque than this. They have some transparency, but it's a heavily tinted frosted glass effect with entirely readable contrast. This may be "inspired" by visionOS, but this looks like somebody really just threw out that design and the usability with it.
copperx · 1h ago
good god. this never ends well.
9283409232 · 2h ago
This is 100% for that reason.
detourdog · 2h ago
I had the same thought as soon as they announced quartz. I'm really happy with the new GUI. I think it really demonstrated the flaws of the previous design.
basisword · 1h ago
It seems to be largely based on the visionOS stuff.
kylehotchkiss · 1h ago
I really dig apple's work. It's so refreshing to get a tech event in 2025 where design is a huge focus and not just duck taping another LLM to everything. Design is expensive and it's clear they've invested a massive amount of resources into liquid glass. It's not perfect, but I think they'll iron out some of the contrast bugs.
Agreed with other commenters that crappy electron apps will look increasingly out of place (... slack ...). Too bad LLM's coding efficiencies haven't been used to try to get us back to native UIs from electron yet. Companies would rather pocket the savings.
danieldk · 1h ago
It's so refreshing to get a tech event in 2025 where design is a huge focus and not just duck taping another LLM to everything.
I don't want to make this an Apple vs. Google comment (Mac user since 2007, iPhone user since 2009), but Google spend a good chunk of time on their Material Design 3 Expressive redesign at the Android event a few weeks ago.
cosmic_cheese · 1h ago
MD3 feels pretty tame in comparison, though. Mostly still the same flat look but with more roundness and louder colors. I think it’s going to end up dated looking much, much more quickly than MD1/MD2 did.
testfrequency · 23m ago
Tame is what Apple should have shipped instead of this liquid glass disaster.
leakycap · 1h ago
Apple didn't talk about AI or Siri because they're currently flailing and so behind it's concerning.
This was design-focused because skin-deep was all they accomplished.
Manfred · 1h ago
A company with thousands of developers can focus on multiple things at once. I'm happy they are trying to improve all parts of the operating system and not just AI features I personally will never use.
rebasedoctopus · 44m ago
only concerning if you have major investments in apple, and rely on ai hype to drive the stock up. I don't know if it's because I watch so much sports but to see someone fall behind doesn't really make me believe they lack the ability to catch up
leakycap · 25m ago
I don't want the AI features, either -- but I do want a company that can deliver on what they promise.
Apple has fallen behind before; I don't doubt they can recover I just hope it's a good Apple that we get to live with on the other side of what they're going through.
Apple of the last few years hasn't been consumer or developer friendly; their privacy promise being one of the big standouts in their favor.
nicoburns · 1h ago
> Apple didn't talk about AI or Siri because they're currently flailing and so behind it's concerning.
Either concerning or reassuring depending on your perspective. I for one will be glad if there's a platform left that hasn't been invaded by AI.
leakycap · 56m ago
I wouldn't find the company's inability to deliver on their own top priorities something to take a sigh of relief about.
What internal issues is a company like this also failing to deliver? A problem like this doesn't come about in isolation.
ricokatayama · 1h ago
When Apple introduced the whole skeuomorphic analogy, they did it because they needed to make a new way of interacting with touch-based apps feel tangible. That seemed totally fair.
When Apple brought a spatial analogy to the Vision Pro, it also felt fair they were thinking in terms of volume and dimensions, after all, they were teaching people how to interact with a new reality.
I can even understand Apple wanting to unify their design approaches, but bringing the “liquid glass” look to everything feels like a massive step backward. The interface looks messy, clunky.
It feels like Apple is entering a design hell, and I don’t know how they’ll get out of it.
glkindlmann · 1h ago
It does indeed feel like a step backward - I was also weirdly reminded of the Forstall skeuomorphism era of UIs.
The video says: "It beautifully refracts light, and dynamically reacts to your movement, with specular highlights"; ugh, why? Why add dynamic==distracting high-frequency details that supply zero information?
The recent super flat UI aesthetic bugged me for awhile for its apparent lack of affordances, but when used consistently it made sense. Now it seems we still get zero affordances, but also visual noise.
Someone1234 · 1h ago
> When Apple introduced the whole skeuomorphic analogy, they did it because they needed to make a new way of interacting with touch-based apps feel tangible.
Skeuomorphism was on the Apple Lisa in 1983, and they didn't invent it. Apple's first touch device wasn't until ten years later in 1993 in the Newton MessagePad. The MessagePad didn't really have "apps," that wasn't until like 2008 when it was added to the iPhone, but now we're twenty-five years after Apple's first usage of Skeuomorphism. The Xerox Star was in 1981 and had Skeuomorphic elements.
So I'm not really following what you're trying to say in that sentance.
beAbU · 1h ago
You are right, I believe skeuomorphism was basically the first approach for graphical user interfaces when they came out. The "save" icon being a floppy disk has been around for literal decades.
I can be argued that the Xerox Alto (1973) had skeuomorphic elements to it's GUI.
asciimov · 1h ago
I’m all for a new design esthetic, even if they have to iterate it a few times to improve usability.
kevin_thibedeau · 1h ago
> Apple introduced the whole skeuomorphic analogy
IBM was doing it 10 years earlier.
socalgal2 · 1h ago
As someone who's getting old and whose eyesight is getting worse, this makes things strictly harder to read with lower contrast.
The 4th image on the page showing "All Of Me, Nao" is really hard for my eyes to read. I can't read "Nao" at all if I view that page on my iPhone. I can only read it on my Macbook Pro on a large external monitor.
I suppose there will be an accessibility setting to turn it off
dougbrochill · 2h ago
It looks cool, but I'm worried about readability on the phone. The text in some of those menu bars and notifications really blended in with the wallpaper in a few of those screenshots.
seanalltogether · 1h ago
I noticed the same thing while watching their youtube promo video. I grabbed this screenshot that shows exactly how problematic this design is.
There are definitely compression artifacts in there that are making it look significantly less crisp than it would in reality.
leakycap · 1h ago
And zero smudges, environmental reflections, and glare than in reality while still being impossible to read.
It will be even harder to see in anything but a dark room than these perfect press videos show.
athriren · 1h ago
yes, legibility—at least during the presentation—was really bad. hope it’s better on device.
wdb · 1h ago
Yeah, struggling with reading things
asciimov · 1h ago
Can’t wait to be told, “You’re viewing it wrong.” /s
But yes, terrible visual usability. Otherwise it looks nice, better than flat.
pentagrama · 25m ago
I need to experience it more to have a clear opinion, but looking at those videos, these types of translucent UI layers with a magnifying glass effect feel so annoying when they move; it's distracting.
Knowing that people will be spending hours of the day with these animations, it could be overwhelming. I'm not someone who suffers from videos or video games with photosensitive content warnings, but for many people, this might feel similar, like a friend of mine who can’t play Quake 3 Arena because it gives him nausea. I’m sure there will be an option to turn it off.
I also suspect that Apple, for marketing reasons, felt the need to present something visibly new and eye-catching. They probably turned to flashy design resources meant to impress rather than serve real usability needs. It feels more like a UI concept made for a sci-fi movie than something designed with accessibility and productivity in mind.
agumonkey · 23m ago
Even the antialiasing is bad.. this is below Apple usual slickness.
zoomed out they look blurry and unrefined, but when viewed zoomed in and large (like how a designer probably created them) they look kinda nice. Too bad they will all be small on iphone.
wmeredith · 1h ago
I find the assumption that these icons were designed huge and never tested at smaller sizes kind of baffling. There may be a difference in taste, but to think that Apple wouldn't look at their icons at different sizes is really, uh, something.
JadeNB · 1h ago
I think your parent said that they look good at some sizes and bad at others, and pointed out that this could be explained by their only being tested at the larger sizes, but didn't say that they necessarily believed that's what happened. The alternative, "tested but don't care," may be worse. (Or maybe you're disagreeing with the aesthetic judgment?)
Jordan-117 · 1h ago
I hate it. The distortions and refractions of every page element in the UI as you scroll (including moving in the opposite direction) would be maddening. I really hope there will be an option to turn this off, or at least tone it down.
Insanity · 2h ago
Based on the demo and screenshots I don’t quite like this. It seems more distracting and gimmicky than actually nice to use in a day to day setting..
But I’ll probably get used to it.
behnamoh · 2h ago
> more distracting and gimmicky
This. The animations on iOS are already a bit too much—now they've taken it to the next level.
qgin · 1h ago
Like the flashlight. There’s no reason to have that much pageantry behind turning on a flashlight.
umanwizard · 29m ago
I’m not sure what you mean. I turn on the flashlight with two touches: drag from the top right corner to bring up the control center, then click on the flashlight icon.
ThatMedicIsASpy · 1h ago
I wonder if there will be a big difference between a 60Hz and 120Hz Display. Blur is distracting if the content is dynamic.
wmeredith · 1h ago
Turn them off in accessibility
unsupp0rted · 1h ago
Also it looks bad.
epanchin · 25s ago
So, windows Aero?
Lammy · 16m ago
The marketing text feels like it's trying way too hard, to the point that it makes me second-guess my positive first impression. I do think the UI looks cool, and I did like Aero Glass too, but having the headline straight-up tell me that the UI is “delightful and elegant” and having the first-sentence-of-first paragraph “beautiful new software design” hyperlink cheapens the whole thing IMHO.
Liquid Glass looks a lot like coming up with changes for the sake of them.
Klonoar · 2h ago
Every Electron app is going to feel incredibly out of place.
And for the few that aren’t okay with feeling out of place, the devs of those apps will now have to contend with shipping more macOS specific styles and workarounds.
I’m not looking to discuss Electron performance/etc so please ditch that discussion before it starts. I just find it interesting how comparatively tricky this particular UI styling might end up being for cross-platform developers.
irskep · 1h ago
Electron apps are already out of place. In the space of Mac-apps-for-SaaS-products such as Linear, Slack, Notion, Asana, Figma, GitHub, and Spotify, they inflict the company's own design system on Apple's OS rather than try to ship Apple's design system applied to their product. Even the most popular IDE, VSCode, is just a wrapper around a web page.
And they're rational to do it this way. These companies shipping apps to millions of people all came to the conclusion that investing in native Mac software is not worthwhile to their business. Users don't avoid Electron-based products, and building native Mac apps slows you down. It's easier both technologically and organizationally to ship your web site as an Electron app. It costs less and you don't lose any users.
So I would be surprised to see _any_ popular Electron app get design updates to accommodate these changes.
As a user it makes me sad, but I find myself blaming Apple for losing this fight, not the hundreds of successful companies that all somehow make the same choice. If building native were an advantage, people would take it.
Klonoar · 2m ago
> Electron apps are already out of place.
You're taking the boring argument track here. Yes, they use their own design system language, but they still roughly fit in with an OS that's not random transparency/glass effects everywhere.
They clearly will not fit in with the new UI styling without significant thought and work.
rdsnsca · 1h ago
I certainly avoid Electron apps on macOS and konw I am not the only one who does.
irskep · 1h ago
Which apps do you avoid in particular which are associated with a service you are required by your job to use? Or, what purchasing decisions have you made on behalf of your company that took Electron-ness into account?
danieldk · 1h ago
Every Electron app is going to feel incredibly out of place.
It's not going to matter, most Electron apps look out of place on the Mac already. The developers are not going to care and probably most users are not going to care either (I used to be staunchly against Electron for this reason, but gave up, and now I choose just enjoy apps looking the same between platforms).
Apple neglected the desktop from ~2016-2020 and made two frameworks that are unpopular among developers (Catalyst and SwiftUI) after that. Outside some indie devs, the native Mac app ship has sailed. Even developers that had their roots in macOS (e.g. AgileBits) have given up and switched to Electron.
GloriousKoji · 1h ago
Ever since the death of WinForms and Cocoa we've moved away from apps having a unified visual experience on an OS to apps pushing their own consistent theme across platforms. A big contrast between app and OS theme in recent times was when apps offered Dark Mode before it became an OS wide setting.
socalgal2 · 1h ago
> Every Electron app is going to feel incredibly out of place.
AFAIK, most people do most things on the Web. So, no, Electron Apps will feel like what most people use most of the time. It's native apps that will feel out of place.
mattgreenrocks · 4m ago
Nah, native apps end up feeling nice and cozy by comparison. :)
The design language of native controls is usually much quieter and more subdued than the garishness that is allowed in the name of branding.
afavour · 2h ago
I won't be surprised if we see a CSS filter that attempts to model this in Safari. Then it'll just be a question of whether Chromium (and thus Electron) get it.
1718627440 · 24m ago
Can't you access rendered elements from JS? Then this will be a massive security issue, because anybody can read all the content from behind.
Klonoar · 1h ago
Yeah, for sure. That solves part of it.
cosmic_cheese · 1h ago
I think differing app styles can work under this new macOS design, they’ll just need to have more physicality, dynamism, and overall more involvement from the design department. Devs just won't be able to drop a dumptruck of flat roundrects on the screen and call it a day if they don’t want their app looking bad.
kylehotchkiss · 1h ago
I mentioned this elsewhere, but if LLMs are improving developer performance so drastically, why are none of these gains being used to get back towards native app development?
afavour · 1h ago
> if LLMs are improving developer performance so drastically
IMO the jury is out on how much they are.
> why are none of these gains being used to get back towards native app development?
because the different platforms are still radically different in a way an LLM can't easily and simply paper over. How do I specify a UI in a way that an LLM can competently implement it in HTML, SwiftUI and whatever Windows is using these days?
Bengalilol · 10m ago
From Aqua to Liquid Glass (AKA it will change over time and at some point ... disappear).
I am just sad that it's the first feature announcement for Apple OSs 26. I understand Apple's point of view to communicate on that, but I have a big hollow feeling this is not enough.
alberth · 1h ago
Aqua, reminds me of OS X (Aqua theme) from 20+ years ago.
And while it was very pretty, the movement away from translucency was due in large part because of accessibility (for all users).
It's actually quite difficult to see controls (and read text) when not on a flat/solid background.
This clearly wasn't in dogfooded long enough or the designers would've gotten sick of it themselves.
This is the kind of design that does great in a 15 minute user test, but is annoying 2 months on.
leakycap · 1h ago
I agree. Apple's been down this path before... From Mac OS 10.0 to 10.9, the march was steadily toward trimming back the excessive Aqua-ness.
Then we went totally flat in 10.10, and it was pretty awful then too. I'll stay on Sequoia until Apple irons this out in 2-3 future macOS versions, or maybe it's finally the year of the linux desktop... at least in my world.
jcalx · 2h ago
The children yearn for ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶m̶i̶n̶e̶s̶ Frutiger Aero
Every now and then my macbook will hide all of my windows so that I'm just looking at my wallpaper. It is a pretty wallpaper, but I don't really understand why I need a hotkey or gesture or whatever is happening just to allow me to gaze at it.
I guess this is more of the same? Some pretty picture can shine through at you because... pretty?
paradite · 1h ago
I hate things that are translucent. I find them very distracting, and hurt my eyes.
I hope Apple gives the option to turn this whole thing off.
I notice the borders now also have shadows / gradients due to reflection, that's also something I'd like to remove personally.
nottorp · 1h ago
Can they fire all their designers and Cook?
And go back to Mac OS the most easily usable GUI?
I don't want to watch Avatar XXXVI when I pick up my phone to check my messages.
moralestapia · 1h ago
Cook added 2 trillion (more?) in market cap.
Cook stays.
mjburgess · 41m ago
He collected 2tr in rent
willio58 · 46m ago
I agree with those saying this feels like a step back toward skeuomorphic design for Apple. I personally think it looks nice visually, but I do have some concerns:
- Accessibility. I don't see good examples in their promotional videos about how contrast of text is ensured to be in an acceptable range. Even for those without visual impairments, this is important for UX.
- Performance. I'm usually the guy in the room saying "Apple is not making devices slower over time on purpose", but this sort of graphical intensity is basically needless and I hope they have something in the plans around automatically disabling more complex visual animations if the phone is showing signs of slow-down.
microflash · 23m ago
I'm all for great design but I hope that reduce transparency and motion settings just tone this thing down. I want my devices to be boring and subtle. I want to get them do what I want quickly, fade away and disappear. This redesign does the exact opposite.
jauntywundrkind · 1h ago
The style here suggests a split between tools and content, which is something I'd love love love to see emerge. Having one and only one app be both viewer and toolkit feels like a convenience trap, one that NeXT tried to fight (as did OLE) and that feels unlikely to ever be turned back from, but I want to dream. This UI doesn't materially move us towards a more aggregative/accreted system of systems model, but it visually suggests some of the absurdity of there being such heavily coupling, if the UI is really incidental that floats atop. I'd love to see this pushed further, to emerge into a multilayered information world, where Rainbow's End discourse piles up and forms trees out and up.
I hear folks on contrast concerns. I have hope though. I really like the de-emphasis on compute. On tools being less the thing, on the content first, on getting computing out of the way, making it ambient. Unboxing the content, unframing it.
The glass refraction seems like a an amazing leap forward. Material has been around forever and there's all these developer docs showing the stack up of layers, implying the depth of the system, but in the 2d user world everything is flat, composited into indistinction. The visual sepration, allowing semi transparent motion, but using refractive style to clearly separate the layers, adds such clarity that it feels obvious in retrospect immediately to me.
I still lack hope that XR is going to be a huge huge thing, that it will be comfortable over time, but it makes such sense to me that XR would inspire & lead this shift, to depriotizing the UI & emphasizing the content.
I'm stressed a bit trying to imagine the transforms required to make this refraction happen. I don't think CSS is going to be enough. The new CSS Painting API ("Houdini") also seems more generative than able to modify & script what is?
whiteboardr · 59m ago
How does liquid glass unbox and unframe the content?
jauntywundrkind · 51m ago
Instead of the content having controls and a slide up drawer at the bottom of the screen, those are now overlayed onto the content. The content extends across much more of the screen's vertical space.
andersa · 30m ago
It's... awful? Why would I want all this distracting shimmering as I scroll?
Apple really isn't what it once was, this is embarrassing.
amegahed · 36m ago
I wonder how long this will take to trickle down into webdev, automotive dashboards, embedded systems, and basically every other thing with a GUI. It's probably already happening.
This looks tailor made to be hard to recreate easily in CSS.
Which is just going to make people try even harder.
unsupp0rted · 1h ago
That's like saying this is hard recreate easily in playdough.
It's not at all a concern for Apple, nor should it be.
diiiimaaaa · 2h ago
Similar thing happened in iOS7(?) where they released glassy panels. Not far from that `-webkit-backdrop-filter` was added that allowed similar effect, I expect similar will happen. For new glassy effect it seems you need a separate filter for border, or maybe it's just gradient + blend mode.
fidotron · 2h ago
Refraction effects like that require a surface normal, even inferred from something like a bump map, or the result of a blur filter used as a bump map. I'm not aware of any CSS filter that could take a normal and do the appropriate ray redirection.
The lighting is depending on the devices' orientation to which a web site running in safari on iOS has no access to due to fingerprinting protection. Maybe you need to request permissions to the gyroscope, but doing that for a reflection in the UI is a bit overkill.
detourdog · 1h ago
Isn’t it better to not limit GUIs to what can be achieved in CSS?
graypegg · 2h ago
Raytracing and lighting effects in CSS 3D transforms! ;)
No comments yet
brailsafe · 44m ago
I don't use iOS in any capacity, but I'm sure anything they do will only improve what has always felt like a clumsy OS.
On the Macos side, I'm open to the new aesthetic, but I just hope to god they've been actually investing in performance improvements when it comes to SwiftUI, which has only barely been viable in some cases thus far. If MacOS gets a full UI update, but the Settings screen still lags when navigating between sections, someone's doing something wrong.
amegahed · 41m ago
I wonder how long this will take to trickle down into webdev, automotive dashboards, embedded systems, and every other thing with a GUI? It's probably already happening.
The icons look pretty bad and the glass reflection/blurring during scrolling looks distracting. But I do like the focus on fluid animations, transparent bgs by default for overlaid controls, and smaller contextual control areas.
deergomoo · 32m ago
I am incredibly annoyed that they’ve hidden all the camera controls behind an overflow button. Hiding functions is not the same as simplicity any more than shoving all the dirty laundry under your bed is cleaning.
boars_tiffs · 4m ago
im having flashbacks from when apple introduced flat design in ios 7. i refused to upgrade for 2 years...
basisword · 3m ago
After installing the betas I'm very surprised at how much a departure this is on the Mac. Feels like using an iPad all of a sudden. There are some nice bits but they're going to have to tweak it significantly over the next couple of months. Safari tabs are an abomination. On other hand Spotlight has some great improvements and Launchpad is gone.
rogerthis · 32m ago
It's weird the amount of not asked/not needed things we do.
IAmGraydon · 3m ago
Oh right - I almost forgot we’re in the timeline where the “experts” always make the worst choice available to them.
mwkaufma · 6m ago
my kingdom for usable bevel-gray toolbars and controls
y42 · 43m ago
At what point do we reach this attitude, where we do not rage against everything that's new?
fxtentacle · 2h ago
Am I the only one that hates the concept?
I want a good UI to fade into the background. But this one is like a UI designer's promotion fever dream: The UI is at the center, no matter the content. The promotional video says "This material brings a new level of vitality to every experience" and then they show a video player where now the control overlay has more contrast, more movements, and more bright lights than the actual movie. And then the other features are just bull*: "It responds in real-time to your actions". Gosh I hope other UI frameworks would respond to my actions, what a novel idea! And yeah, ever played a video game? Things reacting to user input in real-time isn't exactly groundbreaking. And then they top it off with "a fluidity only Apple can achieve", which is just delusional. Desktop Linux box + RTX 5090 + current video game + 240 Hz screen => a fluidity that exceeds everything that Apple can achieve on a phone.
I mean I like SwiftUI and I like how apps look on the current iOS. But I think it's already borderline intense just to use the OS. It certainly should not have any more additional glitter, blinking, movement, or animations. It might be the direction that GTK could benefit from, but not SwiftUI.
In short, this feels like a step in the wrong direction for Apple to me.
Bluestein · 1h ago
Why can't we leave good enough alone?
Heck, we hit "peak-UI" with Win 2K, AFAAIC.-
unsupp0rted · 1h ago
peak-UI was Visual Basic 3. Any component that wasn't in VB3 was post-peak UI.
surgical_fire · 10m ago
I looked it up to double check if it is what I remember. And yes, you are correct.
Bluestein · 1h ago
That indeed tracks.-
detourdog · 1h ago
From what I saw they were making more available screen space for content.
anotherhue · 1h ago
Why, why, why, do all the Apple announcements have the exact same ASIMO stiff hand gestures? Hostage videos have more fluidity.
yborg · 1h ago
Patiently awaiting the Teams AI filter to automatically apply Apple Keynote Hands in video conferences.
ejpir · 1h ago
thought the same, how on earth did they think this looks like a smooth presentation. Almost like he doesn't believe what he's saying
jq-r · 39m ago
It is so fake and scripted it makes generated videos look extremely realistic and natural.
leakycap · 1h ago
At least they didn't use 3d-generated hands holding fake phones this time. The uncanny valley in prior presentations was jarring when they'd go to a 3d "human hand"
antoniuschan99 · 53m ago
In order for any of that glass design to look like glass there needs to be a background with a mix of at least 3 colors. I implemented the glass design in an app last year and afterwards thought it was ok. It makes some text difficult to read depending on the background.
solardev · 1h ago
I guess Windows Vista gets the last laugh, after all.
chakintosh · 1h ago
Interesting how it seems now Apple's realized they should have marketed visionOS for Enterprise from the beginning. Nobody was gonna be a $3k AR headset to edit text. The Enterprise is where the use cases are. And now seems Apple has pivoted towards that.
adrianmsmith · 1h ago
Then again in the keynote today Apple proudly said Vision Pro was used by "thousands" of companies. So it sounds like it isn't such a success (yet?) in the enterprise either.
Bondi_Blue · 2h ago
It is weird that they acted as through the design system hasn't changed much since iOS 7. They've overhauled and tweaked it every year since 2011- increasing font weights, using slower floaty/bubble animations, increasing corner radiuses and adding more negative space, adding depth and shadows to icons, etc. Control Center, for example, looks nothing like it did in iOS 7. iOS 7 was much more minimal, the least skeuomorphic, and a bit more geometric than the "neumorphic" changes they've made since then.
This updated design language seems to have similarities to Microsoft's Material/Fluent design system that brought more of that same glass material to Windows 11, with the more 3d-looking edge outlines on ui elements. So the glass metaphor seems to be a trending metaphor in these UIs, for better or for worse.
padjo · 10m ago
Well that looks awful
quyleanh · 1h ago
More distractions, making the text difficult to read, and increased resource consumption from rendering these unnecessary animations.
whytaka · 1h ago
I only caught a glimpse but what I saw for iOS Safari concerns me.
The browser navigation overlaps the viewport. I wonder if this'll break websites/apps that anchor a menu to the bottom.
CleverLikeAnOx · 1h ago
I think iOS safari already breaks bottom bars by having phone controls show up when a user taps near the bottom.
whytaka · 1h ago
This is mitigated by wrapping the main scrollable content in a container that has height: 100dvh and overflow: auto. It means that phone controls are always showing but it made a bottom anchored menu reliably static.
satvikpendem · 1h ago
This is essentially Microsoft's Fluent UI [0], right down to the translucent glass rectangular prisms (not to say that there haven't been glassmorphic UI systems since forever, including Apple's own Aqua).
Funnily enough, a lot in Liquid Glass is inspired by older design systems from Microsoft : Fluent Design (Win 11) and Windows Aero (Win 7). It shows how real tough it is now to come with something really new these days in design.
charamis · 1h ago
Really wish that this sets a trend like iOS 7 did and move forward from this bland flat design that exists everywhere
shayway · 1h ago
Visually very reminiscent of Win7 Aero, yet the 'unified' approach plus low information density is much more Win8 Metro (with some modern/Apple tweaks). A charming era of design but not one that deserves revisiting in such a big way.
JKCalhoun · 1h ago
Looks like something you could do with a clever displacement map — or several mappings that would include a specular highlight map, etc. The tech is clever.
ksec · 1h ago
It seems the "Universal Design" across platforms was the only thing new in this WWDC. There are lots of little Apple Intelligence features sprinkled everywhere, but most of them dont interest me.
I guess we will have to wait for State of Union.
beached_whale · 58m ago
I hope I can disable the transparency, nothing makes it harder and slower to read than that for me. Distracting too.
alberth · 52m ago
Unpopular opinion: considering that last year’s WWDC was all about Apple’s vision for deep AI integration (still not yet released), and this year’s event mostly focused on a fresh coat of paint for iOS/macOS, it raises a fair question: "What has Apple actually been working on for the past two years if the AI still isn’t here and the main update is just new paint"?
Note: not being a hater and appreciate the complexities of working on huge platforms as Apple ecosystem. Just genuinely wondering, since it feels like maybe 2 years of start/stops/changing priorities.
crooked-v · 1h ago
Thanks, I hate it.
Floating menu bars over the content at the bottom is a great way to make it impossible to actually use the bottom of web pages.
The "liquid glass" stuff, even in their handpicked promo screenshots, has functionally unreadable text and illegible controls.
The vanishing buttons are going to make app UIs even more obtuse and undiscoverable.
leakycap · 1h ago
With Save, Submit, Next, Continue, and other similar navigation at the bottom of the viewport, this is going to be very annoying for iPhone users
saratogacx · 57m ago
Floating widgets are endemic across all the platforms now. I see it on Google, MSFT, and now Apple applications. Content used to be king, now it is a wallpaper for the UI/UX team to dress as they please.
9d · 1h ago
It's the candy look from the early 2000s, from Mac OS X 10.1, turned up to 11.
Did Apple learn nothing from Windwos Vista and Compiz?
nytesky · 1h ago
I like the clear transparent apps and widgets. I feel like that’s less stimulating like running my phone on grayscale. Mostly just a pretty picture with tools if I seek them out.
throwaway2562 · 41m ago
This is what a company running out of ideas looks like
pier25 · 1h ago
I like it a priori. Let's see how it holds up in practice.
RedShift1 · 2h ago
Anything that moves away from flat colorless rectangles is a good thing, I welcome this change.
wmeredith · 1h ago
I also welcome the return of buttons. The en masse replacement of buttons with what looks like text links had driven me crazy for a long time.
lyu07282 · 12m ago
I think years ago I made a joke that the reason we need compute shader support in WebGL was so we could do fluid dynamic simulations for our button hover effects. Nobody is laughing now..
normie3000 · 50m ago
How much battery life could you save by disabling these effects?
drooopy · 2h ago
Here's hoping that they'll keep the options to disable unnecessary transparencies and animations.
megaman821 · 1h ago
I have had both of those disabled for the last five years but I am really wondering what it is going to look like now with so much transparency everywhere.
Klonoar · 2h ago
What makes you think they’d remove accessibility options like that? They’re generally pretty considerate in that realm.
ProfessorLayton · 1h ago
Apple Music on Mac ignores the 'Reduce Motion' accessibility setting for their very distracting animated playlist covers, while apps like Weather respect it.
detourdog · 1h ago
What do expect from an animated playlist?
ProfessorLayton · 1h ago
I expect them to behave the same way they do on my phone and not have a bunch of animated tiles on the home page?
detourdog · 1h ago
Maybe this upgrade will help.
pfortuny · 1h ago
What is the purpose of the windshield in a car?
What is the purpose of text in a screen?
Does something really help that purpose? Anything that does not is WRONG.
Bumping from iOS 18 / macOS 15 etc. towards year-based naming, nice. I wish more projects followed this.
adrianmsmith · 1h ago
I liked it too with Windows 95, Windows 98 etc. Not sure why Microsoft dropped it tbh!
ambyra · 2h ago
Would be cool if they started using displays with multiple layers, kinda like the looking glass 3D display, to get actual 3d layering of UI. Would look amazing with this new UI design.
clueless · 1h ago
so let's use up those extra CPU cycles and update the UI to slow everything down again.
hotmeals · 1h ago
Only Apple could call an Aero-esque water based design "Liquid Glass".
w-hn · 1h ago
Huh, this reminds me of the Photos app. Apple completely broke iOS Photos in the last update.
I really hope apps like Ente can step up and get better and native, offer desktop backup + sync both as well. But then there's always the chance that Apple will just find a way to shut them down. or reject their updates, just like they did in the past.
Anyway, I guess we'll have to wait and see what else they manage to screw up with this "move."
realcul · 48m ago
looks like windows vista aero feature. wow.. we have come a full circle indeed!
mosdl · 2h ago
Seems overly distracting, and not a lot of contrast.
lordfrito · 2h ago
Yeah I hope this doesn't last long
bitwize · 2h ago
Oh God, it's as I feared.
Apple UI designer #1: Well, the flat design has been largely a success so far, but those darn users -- they can still easily pick out widgets from the background, and with a few tries still reasonably guess what they're for and how they'll respond!
Apple UI designer #2: I know! Let's make the widgets semitransparent. That way they'll be harder to pick out from the background, and Macs and iPhones will become delightfully fun puzzle boxes users will love trying to figure out, much like my dog loves his snuffle mat!
cmdtab · 1h ago
There is no contrast. Wow! Why?
bowsamic · 2h ago
It seems over the top to me, fatiguing even. Like I might have to take breaks from being so overwhelmed from using these interfaces. I have been mac exclusive for a long time now but I recently installed xubuntu for an intern and it made me quite jealous
SebastianKra · 2h ago
Eh, it could be worse. It looks like the over-the-top effects are limited to a few top-level elements such as the Navigation View, Homescreen, and Control Center. I wouldn't be surprised if these get dialed back in the future - especially the elements that break all contrast guidelines.
Many elements are still completely flat or more subtle. So, to me, it feels more like a new tool to convey hierarchy, rather than a complete new design: Secondary < Primary < Glass.
Also, the Safari-Redesign is back for round 2? It'd be funny if it runs into the exact same backlash again.
Animats · 2h ago
Now if the Gnome people could just make their icons do something when clicked on. The long delays for program launching plus no icon activity are a pain.
bigyabai · 53m ago
> conflict provoking comment
> irrelevant time-wasting demand
It simply doesn't feel like an HN thread until someone gets insecure enough to berate non-sequitur Open Source projects, does it? When I browse the rest of the web, I always end up missing HN's iconic Jungian groupthink. You lot tend to shoot yourself in the foot before anyone even notices you're drawing a gun.
I'm excited to see this effect turned into a WebGL library in literally a week by some smart devs out there, and then adapted by Material Design in another month. Really? Only apple? This kind of rhetoric might have worked on me 20 years ago, but today it's just sad how obviously false it is.
9d · 2h ago
Don't get me wrong. I'm all for people sharing what they created with joy. And I'll even rejoice with you if it's genuinely cool. But to say "only we can do this" is like saying "we're the best, all of you are beneath us, and you always will be" and is just really off putting. I get that it's a marketing tone, but you could have just omitted those words "only apple can achieve" and just showed off the really cool thing you had and got us excited about that, rather than putting focus on the company itself. It's like how in movies they say show don't tell. Just show us the product, don't tell us how great you are.
bamboozled · 2h ago
Looks great, looking forward to trying it...
m3kw9 · 1h ago
First thing i thought is that they will have a setting to turn down the behind the last see through, the legibility is worse if you have a lot of graphics morphing wildly behind texts
j45 · 2h ago
This looks nice, but I can’t say it’s clear how a touch interface can be sent to macOS when MacBooks continue to not have touchscreens.
Maybe this is the start of replacing macOS with some form of iPadOS experience in the medium to long term.
julienfr112 · 1h ago
something funny would be a kind of Erotic sake cups, when a safe image reveal something completely different when transformed by the the glass upon it.
bigyabai · 2h ago
Honestly? It lacks the visual contrast that made skeuomorphism so popular. Material You gets this right by using accent colors to break up the uniform interface. It feels cohesive and well-made without feeling clinical or hard-to-read.
It's also, somewhat curiously, not neumorphism. All the interface layers appear distinct, which makes me worry if things like Dynamic Island and Control Center will be mistaken for app controls and not distinct phone controls.
cynicalsecurity · 2h ago
This gives Windows Aero vibes, but somehow even worse.
eviks · 2h ago
The form over function school of design continues its grim march towards decreasing usability.
Look at the most basic UI interaction - text cursor movement - and note how this new liquid glass adds more confusing visual noise by adding text reflection for no good reason, which makes, for example, an empty line appear as a line with some text due to this reflection, thus making it harder to see that your cursor is located at the top line.
> more focus to content
it's the opposite, you dilute focus on content by manufacturing non-existent noise.
And the claim to being "natural" in the video falls flat - compare to the actual physical movements a few frames before - the lens doesn't change in width or height! So the digital animation noise is unnatural!
Similarly with the menu sheet adding new rubberband effect in the corner- what underlying natural interaction does it reflect? What signal does that jiggly noise send?
But yeah, if you live in a "lively delight" fantasy of design, nothing would stop you.
No comments yet
paxys · 3h ago
Some Windows Vista designer is shedding a tear right now. Got such a huge nostalgia hit watching the "liquid glass" demos during the keynote. Installing a leaked "Longhorn" OS on a PC back in 2005 and seeing all the translucent refractive glass really felt magical and futuristic. 20 years later, everything old is new again.
My nostalgia with glass goes bit further to KDE 2 or 3.
Apocryphon · 2h ago
Someone at Apple shared a video about Frutiger Aero
bitwize · 2h ago
That's exactly what I thought. Look, they invented Windows Aero. Bet the John Gruber types who laughed at Aero and called it an Aqua ripoff are going full "two soyjaks pointing meme" over this.
detourdog · 2h ago
Was Aero trying to look like Quartz? The big improvement I see is that the plumbing has better integration and with Continuity it's really impressive. Even if it looks like Aero the functionality the OS is providing is the real feature.
arnaudsm · 2h ago
On top of wasting GPU cycles, such low-contrast graphics are terrible for older users. The Apple Music navbar is hilariously unreadable and distracting.
pat2man · 2h ago
Accessibility -> Display -> Reduce Transparency?
detourdog · 2h ago
Also it looks entirely customizable which will be really helpful for creating the correct text contrast for each individual.
drdaeman · 1h ago
The URL bar at 02:11 in the video looks awful, with all the background shining through making the text hard to read from a distance. This is sort of hidden by the video having 3x zoom, making the text thicker, but unless they tweak the transparency it's gonna be a real visual mess on a real device.
jvreeland · 2h ago
Awesome I wasn't having enough trouble figuring out what I could tap and not now everything has this crappy distorted look.
No comments yet
leakycap · 3h ago
Apple's new video presentation style is so cloying, it really didn't help with the letdown this software is.
No comments yet
mikeortman · 2h ago
Apple claiming that Liquid Glass is a technique only Apple can achieve, will be replicated, or at least indistinguishably replicated, in pure CSS... within 48 hours of today, out of spite
captainmuon · 2h ago
It's just a shader, so maybe not in pure CSS, but you could probably achive something like that in WebGL.
About "only Apple can achive that": It would be pretty simple for MS to do something like this in Windows. DirectComposition (or whatever it is called nowadays) could set the appropriate shader when drawing windows. You cannot do it as a normal user, because you can only pick from a select set of backdrop shaders (but if some hacker wants a challenge, you could inject the code into dwm.exe to do so :-)).
ypeterholmes · 2h ago
Liquid glass is gorgeous. But it's hard to reconcile next level design like this with complete disasters like Apple TV. Maybe spend some time on getting the fundamentals right too, before inventing the future
reissbaker · 2h ago
Why do you view Apple TV as a disaster? I don't own any Apple devices other than an Apple TV, since IMO it's better than basically all of the alternatives: it has no ads and it's extremely fast.
throw0101d · 2h ago
* […] it has no ads and it's extremely fast.
See recent "Breaking down why Apple TVs are privacy advocates’ go-to streaming device":
I always find this take amusing, because there are ads. They're just for Apple services and they do a better job of blending in.
Case in point, the largest screen in the lead image in the linked article does nothing to showcase this new UI, but it does promote Fountain of Youth, a show on Apple TV.
KerrAvon · 2h ago
That's awfully pedantic, though. In practice the answer to "does it have ads" for what most people mean by that question is "no."
redczar · 2h ago
These are ads. How much money would Paramount+ pay to have such a “preview” shown to Apple TV users? Whatever this number is it is certainly much larger than $0. Therefore it is an ad.
dlivingston · 1h ago
No, not quite. "Content previews", not "ads". A distinction with a difference.
When you 'hover' over an app on an Apple's tvOS, the app populates that preview section with whatever content it wants. In the linked article's screenshot, the Apple TV app is being hovered over, so the 'preview' section is populated with content from Apple TV.
If the user swiped right, to hover over the Arcade app, that preview would change to show some Arcade game. Hover over Netflix, Max, Hulu, Spotify apps, and you'll get content previews from them.
So yes, they are "ads", in a hyper-literal sense, but not strictly, not facilitated by the operating system, and not in any way that matters.
redczar · 1h ago
Product placement in movies and tv shows are ads. Product placement on Apple TV are ads. Previews for new movies at a movie theater are ads. We live in a society where filling up your car with gas subjects you to ads. They are everywhere. We are so inundated with ads that people think what Apple does are not ads.
reissbaker · 1h ago
Okay, to fit this definition of content previews for an app when hovering on that specific app as an ad: I like that my Apple TV does not show ads for apps I don't explicitly select in the UI, unlike almost every competing device which shows intrusive ads for unrelated stuff that I haven't selected in the UI, and may not even have installed or subscribed to. (I also like that it's the lowest latency streaming box.)
Apple TV is AFAIK the best device in its category.
I also think your definition is overly broad and doesn't reflect what an "ad" is. For example, if Apple cut the feature from iOS that allowed you to control your music from your lock screen, Spotify would also be willing to pay Apple to be able to control specifically Spotify from your lock screen. Does that mean "being able to control music from your lock screen" is an ad for Spotify? No. Does iOS allowing app-specific widgets on the homescreen count as ads, since if it didn't exist, companies would be willing to pay to be on people's homescreens? No, widgets are not by definition ads (even if some widgets may be ads!). Similarly, the Apple TV OS providing the ability for installed apps to show interactive app-specific UI on hover (i.e. the user has chosen to interact with this app, or has chosen it as their primary app in the OS), does not mean the OS itself has ads.
dlivingston · 41m ago
No, dude. What Apple is doing is providing an API [0] that app developers can do whatever the hell they want with. Apple is delivering ads in the same way that your web browser is (giving other people a blank canvas to draw on).
Nobody is claiming otherwise. They’re just pointing out that this isn’t what people are asking about when they ask if it has ads. You, like GGP, are being pedantic.
redczar · 1h ago
I’m not being pedantic. It’s not pedantic to call product placement an ad whether it occurs in a movie or on Apple TV.
wmeredith · 1h ago
I've used them all and Apple TV, while not without faults, is by far the best.
redczar · 2h ago
Apple TV certainly has ads. It’s just that it’s ads for Apple products.
reissbaker · 2h ago
No, it doesn't. I have one. There aren't ads.
redczar · 2h ago
There are pre-installed apps like Apple Fitness+. When you scroll over that app the top part - maybe 1/4 of the screen - is a picture of a workout. This is an ad for Apple Fitness+. Similarly if you use the Apple TV app you’ll see an ad for Apple TV+ shows.
reissbaker · 1h ago
I don't think a preview of the app, that displays only when you select that app in the UI, really qualifies as an "ad."
If you do, I suppose what I would amend my statement to is: it doesn't show ads for apps I don't explicitly select in the UI. Either way, that's much better than most competing products... And it's incredibly fast, with the lowest latency of any streaming device.
I don't like Apple's locked ecosystem, and avoid most of their products. But the Apple TV is just head and shoulders above anything else on the market, so I own one and am quite satisfied with it.
redczar · 1h ago
You didn’t select to have Apple Fitness+ pre installed on the Apple TV and have placed in such a way that you will scroll over it occasionally.
They made it so almost everyone uses the Apple TV app for at least some viewing and there you get ads for Apple TV+ shows and their suggestions include shows that require a subscription to a service you may not already have. Or the suggestion will sometimes require a rental or purchase through the iTunes Store. These are ads.
reissbaker · 46m ago
I can place the Apple Fitness+ app wherever I want, and can place it last in the list such that I never scroll over it. In fact, this is exactly what I do, since I don't use it. Thus, I never see any app-specific UI from it. I don't think hovering on an app, and seeing app-specific UI from that app, is an ad; it's just app-specific UI. Some apps may use that to show ads, but that doesn't mean the OS has ads, and you are free to not use apps that do that.
I have no idea what you mean by "they made it so almost everyone uses the Apple TV app." You mean, they made an app that many people like, and that app has ads in it (but not the OS)? That doesn't mean the OS has ads.
Personally, I never use the Apple TV app: I use Netflix, Crunchyroll, HBO Max, and the Criterion Collection apps. And I never see what I would consider to be ads in the OS, and I never see content previews for apps I don't use.
masom · 2h ago
There's ads for new shows and movies when you start a new Apple TV+ one, and there's ads for channels and subscriptions. You just didn't notice them?
reissbaker · 1h ago
If you mean "some apps have ads in them," that is true. What I mean is the OS doesn't have ads, unlike Google and Amazon's competing products... And unfortunately even Roku now.
You are free to never open apps that have ads in them on the Apple TV.
(If you mean: installed apps are allowed to show content previews when you hover on them in the UI — I think that's pretty different from an ad, and it's a feature I personally like, since it means I can easily resume a show I was previously watching without even having to open the app-specific UI. That's quite different from my perspective than showing ads for services and apps that I've never used, that I can't remove.)
redczar · 2h ago
Can you share what you don’t like about Apple TV? I have one and really like it. I very much prefer using an Apple TV over using apps built into the tv.
AlanYx · 2h ago
It's an excellent device overall, but getting content onto the device to view is frustrating. Apps like VLC can have local storage, but the OS periodically purges locally stored content inside app storage.
ErneX · 1h ago
It’s really meant for streaming though, I play movies directly from my NAS/Jellyfin with Infuse on the ATV.
rconti · 45m ago
+1 for Infuse. I tried to make Plex work for me, many times over the years, and it's always been so frustrating. From needing a server that can do transcoding, to demanding that I name my files in the way it wants them to be named, it just feels so incredibly constraining.
Infuse just lets you... play a file. How novel!
AlanYx · 1h ago
It's definitely better for streaming, but the scenario you describe requires two other components (network attached storage and an Infuse subscription). It would be nice if you could just airdrop to device storage and play with an on-device Quicktime app.
graypegg · 2h ago
Genuine question, what happened to Apple TV to make it a complete disaster? I feel like I probably missed something. (There's no good way to ask that without sounding like a fanboy, sorry haha. I just genuinely don't know.)
rconti · 2h ago
I'm not sure what you call it, but the "unified view" thing where you're supposed to be able to view content across providers is a complete nightmare. I'm not actually sure how I end up there -- I think it happens after I finish watching a program on AppleTV+ (oh, yeah, the naming is a disaster too). I'm not sure how I'd launch it if, for some reason, I _wanted_ to use it, and the navigation is just incredible strange.
Figuring out which elements are selected in the UI is often hard.
The trackpad on the remote is not good -- I've tried setting it to disable trackpad and click on, but then I'll inevitably find an app that needs a trackpad.
Overall I'm quite happy with the AppleTV as a device, but the UI could use quite a bit of help.
koiueo · 1h ago
You people are funny, trying to reason about readability and distractions. Go drink your americanos in your skinny jeans (or whatever is the most recent thing falling out of fashion in favor of the next big thing).
Apple products are gonna be perceived as the icon of the beauty and usability regardless of the actual qualities. Be sure, Xiaomi and Huawei (and probably even Samsung) will try mimicking the newest Apple design language. Like it was before with crippled keyboards, enormous touchpads, glossy reflective screens, notches, etc..
dogleash · 9m ago
> Apple products are gonna be perceived as the icon of the beauty and usability regardless of the actual qualities.
ofc. but people don't like it when you say the quiet part out loud.
Translucent layers generally make software unusable for me. In the video, I saw several instances that would be really really bad for me, where I’d be straining to understand the text. Looks really cool and futuristic though. Just like a movie. Big whoop.
I’m autistic, but this won’t only affect autistic people. A lot of people are going to have problems with this. I hope there’s a very prominent way to turn it off.
At a previous company, we were forbidden from using translucency (with a few exceptions) because of the performance cost of blending. There are debugging tools we'd use fairly often to confirm that all layers were opaque.
For older models, on the other hand, it would be an issue, and will put pressure to people to buy a new one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law
I have been using 8 year old iPhone just fine, but features like these over time will make the experience slower and slower and slower, until I am forced to refresh my iphone
To be clear, these are new features that will likely have a setting to turn off. There’s no conspiracy, nothing “forcefully” added for the purpose of driving upgrades. (Ah, ninja edit): There’s not even a guarantee these features will be supported on an eight year old phone.
It’s a legitimate concern even assuming good intent.
But Apple has had to publicly admit bad intent specifically with their batteries and had to offer people money etc.
Strange to criticize people for something Apple publicly admitted they did wrong.
I'd much rather us have progress and people with 8 year old phones suffer than ensure that everything continues to run smoothly on any old device for eternity.
When is the last time a company has admitted wrong-doing? No, Apple admitted to slowing down phones when the battery was shot so it wouldn’t just suddenly shut down.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batterygate
oh wait. it's not like they did. they did say it.
It's straight from the 2000s, with Linux users using Compiz and... Amethyst(?), stuffing their entire desktop full with gaudy transparency, transforms, jiggles and bounces.
More of a nit, but "The new design extends across iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS Tahoe 26, watchOS 26, and tvOS 26 to establish even more harmony" is so ironic and funny. No one noticed how talking about "platform consistency" whilst having one platform use codenames next to version names just screams inattention to detail?
Why would you design readability and visibility to depend on chaotic, highly varied and probably sometimes bad underlying backgrounds?
I fail to see any systematic approach/ consistent design language at play here.
Let's hope this does not survive for long.
updating ticket to closed
iOS: Settings -> Accessibility -> Display & Text Size -> Reduce Transparency.
You're welcome.
That said, Windows 7 had an option to turn off all the translucency, so hopefully Apple ripped that idea, too.
Alegria, flat design, pastel colors, or unholy amounts of whitespace. It's been the story of the last 15 years of UI design at least.
Well, this is what Apple does, and the reason I hate their devices with a passion. It always was style over substance.
It honestly saddens me how far Apple has fallen.
You've already judged the system as only good for "looking good on screenshots and marketing materials" when you haven't even seen anything other than the announcement.
Yes, I think they would do that.
Lots of historical examples of Apple making weird design choices for decades now. I'm old enough to remember the hockey-puck mouse on the original iMac.
Also, here's a list of bugs I've personally observed over just the last two months: https://gist.github.com/BenWheatley/29a3c22203d90ae80465cdb1...
3.3 trillion dollar market cap, and the *clipboard* is no longer reliable. The mail badge is an unreliable count. The wallpaper sometimes disappears. The alarms don't play out of whatever speaker or headphones you're using for all your other audio.
We are talking about the same company that to make a the MCP a little bit thinner released that crap with only two USBC ports, forcing everyone to carry fucking dongles everywhere.
And let's not forget that awful butterfly keyboard.
So much usability, so much accessibility. No vibes, no sir.
And yes, I am aware those silly toy computers have a couple more ports nowadays, I have to use that on a daily basis for work.
It looks so tacky.
I'm just wondering if Apple is going to make matching CSS updates in Safari so web app developers have matching visuals.
Anyway, I also bet they will tone this transparency stuff down a lot in the betas leading to the stable version in September. iOS 7 all over again…
I taught people to use computers in the 90s and early 2000s, and having those concepts matching to real world objects helped immensely. Recently I had to teach my kids to use a PC (they no longer teach that in "computers" at school, by the way, iPads only), and everything was arbitrarily designed without even internal rules/consistency let alone building on real-world metaphors.
You've also had this ongoing trend of content density getting consistency worse, and now Apple is accelerating a trend to make UI elements difficult to see/harm discoverability further. Liquid Glass is going to be a painful period, and all the clones that do it even worse are going to be pure hell.
But I'm 100% behind you on "make buttons look like buttons" and "don't hide functionality behind arbitrary gestures that you never tell the user". UI designers may hate menus these days, but they were so good for letting a user browse through looking for the thing they want. Search boxes are a good speed improvement, but should never be the only interface object because many times the user doesn't know exactly what they're looking for.
This is also why most voice assistants don't get used very much, there's no easily accessible list of phrases they know and they aren't smart enough to really understand what the person wants, so people end up using the one or two phrases they know the assistant can handle and forget about it otherwise.
Thank you for saying this, you've just made me realise they share all the problems of text adventures while having none of the excitement.
A lot of those real world objects no longer exists, or are less frequently used than their counterparts, so I sort of see why moving away from that design language makes sense.
I'll hold of judgement of "Liquid Glass" until I've seen and used, but I don't feel like it's necessary. It's certainly not "the biggest" design update ever. System 9 to MacOSX was still greater.
This isn't really Apples fault, but I also expect others to start implementing something similar, but badly. Apple do have a point that this is something that only Apple can do well, because you do need to ensure that hardware can keep up. We're going to see other attempt something similar, but it won't been nearly as polished.
Overall I still feel that Apple is trying to force to much functionality into the phone platform. It would be really lovely to have an iOS light, that does less and with a simpler UI/UX.
Yeah, about that.
When iPhone SE2 was first released (April 2020), it featured the A13 Bionic, which was the most powerful SoC Apple has had at the time (to be succeeded by A14 in iPhone 12 couple months later), and ran iOS 13.
Every succeeding iOS release, the phone felt a little more sluggish. Right now, by iOS 18: it sometimes takes half a minute to open the share sheet; misbehaving apps can make the phone almost too hot to touch, and can freeze the app switcher UI for 10+s; Safari takes 4s to "cold start" into about:blank; and so on. None of these are signs of CPU throttling, it's all just software. I almost can't wait for Apple to drop support for major releases - even if the current release is crap, the next one will be worse.
I pretty much expect last year's devices to start struggling with this new design after 2 releases.
This reasoning never made a ton of sense to me. Gen Z don't use devices with knobs and buttons anymore, therefore we should all design our interface elements to look like nothing in particular?
If you give someone young and tech savvy a digital UI, they will figure out how to use it. It's precisely the oldest and least tech savvy users for whom interface design is most important, as they are more like to get frustrated and quit your app. Why optimize for the young, then?
(I mean, it's a rhetorical question, as I already know the answer - the designers creating the interfaces are themselves young and tech savvy gen-Z'ers.)
We have volume sliders rather than knobs, because that's easier on a touch interface. I get your point, but does the button need to look like the button on the radio in our grandfathers car from 1960? Probably not. I was thinking more in terms of filling cabinets, floppies as save icons or even the phone as the receiver on a rotary phone. Would it be easier to set a timer on your phone if the UI looked like a kitchen egg timer? Having the email icon be a letter doesn't even make sense anymore. My kid has sent one letter ever and all the mailboxes will be removed next year. How does having a letter as an icon going to provide any meaningful frame of reference when we daily receive more email than we do actual letters in a year, or two, or three?
Usually the reasoning just stops at "but nobody sends letters anymore!" without going a step further and justifying why that even matters.
That is a good question. The "share" icon e.g. is something that has no real world equivalent, and I'd argue that it almost doesn't work. Technically it could be anything and we'd over time agree that "This thing means share".
We're still at a point where many still understand the references, but over time something like the letter in email icons, just becomes cargo cult. Perhaps you're right, it doesn't matter, as long as we agree what the icons mean.
Computers are full of these things though. The Shift key is a reference back to how typewriters worked. We didn’t change the name of the key, because nothing physically shifts anymore. Most don’t know what it means historically, but they still know what it does on their computer.
I’ll all for bringing skeuomorphism back.
Yep. What would the modern equivalent of the save icon - a cloud or an generic IC representing the soldered-on SDD? Hard drives, floppies, or any other user-controlled storage devices are now out of fashion.
(It also displays a CRT with a Windows 95 BSOD for Samba network shares, but that's 100% on purpose.)
OTOH Apple's own apps haven't had a "save" button for a really long time now. Everything autosaves (and syncs to iCloud) automatically - use Undo if you need to. More complex apps, like Numbers, also automatically maintain a version history.
Icons make localisation much easier. In fact flat web design has evolved a fairly standard set of icons for basic operations. Most people know what a burger menu and x in the top corner of a window do. Same for copy, share, and so on.
The problem with Liquid Glass is that it's making the background style more important than the foreground content. No one cares if buttons ripple if they can't see what they do, because icons themselves are less clear and harder to read.
So I don't know what the point of this is.
Unifying the look with Apple's least successful, least popular, most niche product seems like a bizarre decision. I'm guessing the plan is to start adding VisionPro features in other products, but without 3D displays the difference between 3D and 2D metaphors is too huge to bridge.
I really liked Aqua. It was attractive and it was very usable.
This is... I don't know. It seems like style over substance for the sake of it, with significant damage to both.
My age shows here as well and I'm not in any way excited about this design change at all. Suddenly Apple decided that this fancy acrylic glass animation for widgets, interface that says "look we aren't stagnant - we did something" will be enough to diverge attention from other problems. I sincerely doubt that it's gonna be.
This release feels like a return to transparency trend which we had somewhere around Vista and initial KDE Plasma releases.
The middle school here has a "computer applications" class that covers all that kind of thing. Definitely not iPads only.
Just as visual design across the majority of digital touchpoints seems to have arrived at a mature level, this will unleash a giant wave of noise including gradients on text.
Brrr.
I swear, some decisionmakers deserve a brutal punch in their face. I don't even care anymore about being civil in such matters.
This new liquid glass will lead to liquid brain, because my brain will be melting trying to process all that visual mess daily.
Now of course, I'll have to experience this new design in practice to be sure, but judging from the screenshots it looks really hard on the eyes. Hopefully they'll allow the translucency to be customized.
Apple had a good run, I've genuinely enjoyed using their platforms daily, but I'm afraid they're dropping the ball now.
I guess on a long enough timeline, every company is bound to disappoint. It's hard to get it right, consistently.
The latest Google pixel devices are specifically blocked from using Wyze devices right now due to a typo in the pixel's configuration files, for example. Stuff like that happens constantly with any phone in the super fragmented Android ecosystem.
I can't say I feel the same about macOS before; as a user since the early 1990s, I'm likely moving to Linux rather than Liquid Glass for my personal computer.
(*Looks at Gnome.*)
Hm, they're getting worse faster than Apple does. Never mind.
Refreshing counter to the brutalist styles that were trending. The problem with brutalist styles is that they tend to be busy, which becomes confusing and unintuitive to new users.
This seems like it would help separate elements for easier focus, to make things more obvious.
Right now I really want skeuomorphism back.
Much like iOS 7 they will have to spend another 2 - 3 years "tweaking" or basically walking back some of these design decisions.
I believe the problem is when Tim Cook decided to merge "Design" under one umbrella. So the Design team now takes over both Hardware and Software Design when they kicked Scott Forstall out. A lot of Apple's UX went down hill from there.
In a month Apple will have been on autopilot for longer than Jobs was at the company during the 1997-2011 heyday. Jobs became iCEO in September 1997. After 167 months passed, he left in August 2011. It has been 166 months since then.
It's about time we start seeing more physicality in our user interfaces!
We can make things look convincingly like glass, or metal, or even materials that don't exist in reality. One reason for flat design is because it was the lowest common denominator and easy for devs to implement. If Apple makes it easy to implement this liquid glass stuff - Rectangle().background(.glass) or something - then it's going to be really successful.
What makes you think that? Do you have a specific example from the keynote in mind?
There must be something since you've never actually used this design system yourself. Or is this just your pre-judgement?
Have you used it yet?
Kinda old hat at this point tbh.
And just because we have all this powerful hardware, does not mean we need to waste it on physically accurate glass surfaces on UIs.
If this rolls out to all iDevices, how much energy (in other words CO2) will be expended worldwide on rendering things like this?
Which is complete idiocy if you ask me. Why update a static screen at 120 fps? Are our batteries too large?
Good thing it doesn't do that then, variable refresh rate displays that go down to 1 Hz are fairly standard now on phones as well as other displays.
I'm not sure if this is a joke or not.
We had that, it was called skeuomorphism: https://miro.medium.com/v2/da:true/resize:fit:1200/0*6DRkHp3...
Then we got rid of it because it looked too 2010 now we are bringing it back because flat looks too 2020.
And I agree about liquid glass being successful iff they make the developer tooling for this as easy as additional modifiers to components, or even the default for SwiftUI.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
It's actually quite resource intensive to have translucency, in many implementations across the web and mobile.
As a Scandinavian: I don't feel like we tried that since Braun. Apple has tried to mimic a Scandinavian sort of minimalism, but only in appearance. The iPhone UI is way to busy and is to hard to navigate for me to classify it as minimalism.
The problem with skeuomorphism in iOS' first design language was that resemblance to real-world objects was taken too far — at the expense of legibility. Users attributed affordances to virtual objects that they didn't have.
The problem with iOS 7's flatter interface was that the anti-skeumorphism went too far in the other direction, again at the expense of legibility. Users couldn't see what controls were supposed to do.
... And now the pendulum has swung back in the other direction, again too far, and missed the goal.
This is a flop like the flat keyboard design. Making worse by trying to make it better. Verschlimmbessert.
And this from a company with unlimited financial resources.
Transparent UI components always add noise by nature, especially glass that is intended to be realistic - see all the refractions shown in the keynote.
Aqua was also playful and suggested the same feel but never got in the way of clarity and was beautifully implemented almost feeling revolutionary at the time.
What is on point for VR use cases where this is taken from, unfortunately ruins a desktop or handheld experience.
A massive loss of precision, focus and a big step backwards.
except apple dictates to its fans whats right. i feel apple has already begun a slow process of making them similar;
what im more curious about is how they will improve the settings app (it seems the desktop settings is the worst its been design and flow wise - ive never liked the ios settings design - i do hope they change both of these for the better)
edit: more newlines
Actually, even without that, the grouping and the hierarchy don't make sense. Why are some things top-level items and other under "general"? Same for "privacy and security" (I assume that's what it's called in English), for some reason "passwords", "lock screen" and "touch ID and password" are separate top-level items even though they do very much belong to "privacy and security".
The more you look at it, the less sense it makes.
Search isn't the most intuitive and obvious way to everyone. Just adding a search function also isn't an excuse to just totally ignore good UX design and information hierarchy.
I've been a sysadmin my entire career, and still do end-user support occasionally. You'd be surprised how few people use the search function, for anything, on their computers. Just opening the windows start menu and showing them they can search there is like black magic to a frighteningly large amount of people.
I've met fellow Mac users that don't even know spotlight exists, and navigate through the OS and every app via mouse and clicking around.
So yeah, just throwing a search box in your app as an excuse for ignoring the experience of navigating it any other way is bad UX design.
As for the second part, Apple does a remarkable job at updating all of the OS to a new design language. Unlike Windows, which last time I used it, had three different settings panels and UI controls resembling archaeological layers going back to pre XP.
If Apple makes the right platform-specific affordances (which they have a much better chance of doing) I think it can work.
That was a big part of the problem, but the issues with the UI/UX went far beyond that.
For exemple, if you used the search bar in the "start menu" to get something from the control pannel, it would ONLY show the new W8 Metro dialog box that barelly has 1/5th the features and would refuse to show you the real one. It also took multiple years before the metro apps inlcuded in the OS (eg. pdf viewer) could be used in windowed mode (they were fullscreen mode like a video game, without taskbar), even the ipad at the time had better multitasking than the W8 Metro apps.
During that time they also instituted "anti-leak" measures so teams would develop and commit features internally and keep them behind hidden flags that required special permissions from the org to change (via an app they called "red pill"). That means that by the time many teams saw what was happening with the UX in various places in the OS, it was too late to come to consensus.
The entire cycle for the OS was empire building and emperor has no clothing from start to finish. It wasn't until he was ousted that they started to try and pull things back with 8.1 and eventually 10.
Though Apple has long had a universal design across platforms. Not always in lockstep, but visual traits and behaviours and traits and appearances end up in all of their platforms, which even if it wasn't logical from a design perspective, there is loads of shared code so it's inevitable.
But really a lot of what they showed today reminded me most of Aqua from 25 years ago.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/@microsoftdesign/videos
Agreed with other commenters that crappy electron apps will look increasingly out of place (... slack ...). Too bad LLM's coding efficiencies haven't been used to try to get us back to native UIs from electron yet. Companies would rather pocket the savings.
I don't want to make this an Apple vs. Google comment (Mac user since 2007, iPhone user since 2009), but Google spend a good chunk of time on their Material Design 3 Expressive redesign at the Android event a few weeks ago.
This was design-focused because skin-deep was all they accomplished.
Apple has fallen behind before; I don't doubt they can recover I just hope it's a good Apple that we get to live with on the other side of what they're going through.
Apple of the last few years hasn't been consumer or developer friendly; their privacy promise being one of the big standouts in their favor.
Either concerning or reassuring depending on your perspective. I for one will be glad if there's a platform left that hasn't been invaded by AI.
What internal issues is a company like this also failing to deliver? A problem like this doesn't come about in isolation.
When Apple brought a spatial analogy to the Vision Pro, it also felt fair they were thinking in terms of volume and dimensions, after all, they were teaching people how to interact with a new reality.
I can even understand Apple wanting to unify their design approaches, but bringing the “liquid glass” look to everything feels like a massive step backward. The interface looks messy, clunky.
It feels like Apple is entering a design hell, and I don’t know how they’ll get out of it.
The video says: "It beautifully refracts light, and dynamically reacts to your movement, with specular highlights"; ugh, why? Why add dynamic==distracting high-frequency details that supply zero information?
The recent super flat UI aesthetic bugged me for awhile for its apparent lack of affordances, but when used consistently it made sense. Now it seems we still get zero affordances, but also visual noise.
Skeuomorphism was on the Apple Lisa in 1983, and they didn't invent it. Apple's first touch device wasn't until ten years later in 1993 in the Newton MessagePad. The MessagePad didn't really have "apps," that wasn't until like 2008 when it was added to the iPhone, but now we're twenty-five years after Apple's first usage of Skeuomorphism. The Xerox Star was in 1981 and had Skeuomorphic elements.
So I'm not really following what you're trying to say in that sentance.
I can be argued that the Xerox Alto (1973) had skeuomorphic elements to it's GUI.
IBM was doing it 10 years earlier.
The 4th image on the page showing "All Of Me, Nao" is really hard for my eyes to read. I can't read "Nao" at all if I view that page on my iPhone. I can only read it on my Macbook Pro on a large external monitor.
I suppose there will be an accessibility setting to turn it off
https://imgur.com/a/AEEj5w1
It will be even harder to see in anything but a dark room than these perfect press videos show.
But yes, terrible visual usability. Otherwise it looks nice, better than flat.
Knowing that people will be spending hours of the day with these animations, it could be overwhelming. I'm not someone who suffers from videos or video games with photosensitive content warnings, but for many people, this might feel similar, like a friend of mine who can’t play Quake 3 Arena because it gives him nausea. I’m sure there will be an option to turn it off.
I also suspect that Apple, for marketing reasons, felt the need to present something visibly new and eye-catching. They probably turned to flashy design resources meant to impress rather than serve real usability needs. It feels more like a UI concept made for a sci-fi movie than something designed with accessibility and productivity in mind.
This blog's prediction got remarkably close. I've been a sucker for glass UI since the first Longhorn (later Vista) screenshots.
https://www.lux.camera/content/images/size/w2400/2025/05/Mai...
zoomed out they look blurry and unrefined, but when viewed zoomed in and large (like how a designer probably created them) they look kinda nice. Too bad they will all be small on iphone.
But I’ll probably get used to it.
This. The animations on iOS are already a bit too much—now they've taken it to the next level.
Yes I know Apple have always been like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nx7v815bYUw (BOOM)
But at least the Stebe Jovs keynotes gave me the chance to be impressed for a moment in my head before laying in to the superlatives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Looking_Glass
Liquid Glass looks a lot like coming up with changes for the sake of them.
And for the few that aren’t okay with feeling out of place, the devs of those apps will now have to contend with shipping more macOS specific styles and workarounds.
I’m not looking to discuss Electron performance/etc so please ditch that discussion before it starts. I just find it interesting how comparatively tricky this particular UI styling might end up being for cross-platform developers.
And they're rational to do it this way. These companies shipping apps to millions of people all came to the conclusion that investing in native Mac software is not worthwhile to their business. Users don't avoid Electron-based products, and building native Mac apps slows you down. It's easier both technologically and organizationally to ship your web site as an Electron app. It costs less and you don't lose any users.
So I would be surprised to see _any_ popular Electron app get design updates to accommodate these changes.
As a user it makes me sad, but I find myself blaming Apple for losing this fight, not the hundreds of successful companies that all somehow make the same choice. If building native were an advantage, people would take it.
You're taking the boring argument track here. Yes, they use their own design system language, but they still roughly fit in with an OS that's not random transparency/glass effects everywhere.
They clearly will not fit in with the new UI styling without significant thought and work.
It's not going to matter, most Electron apps look out of place on the Mac already. The developers are not going to care and probably most users are not going to care either (I used to be staunchly against Electron for this reason, but gave up, and now I choose just enjoy apps looking the same between platforms).
Apple neglected the desktop from ~2016-2020 and made two frameworks that are unpopular among developers (Catalyst and SwiftUI) after that. Outside some indie devs, the native Mac app ship has sailed. Even developers that had their roots in macOS (e.g. AgileBits) have given up and switched to Electron.
AFAIK, most people do most things on the Web. So, no, Electron Apps will feel like what most people use most of the time. It's native apps that will feel out of place.
The design language of native controls is usually much quieter and more subdued than the garishness that is allowed in the name of branding.
IMO the jury is out on how much they are.
> why are none of these gains being used to get back towards native app development?
because the different platforms are still radically different in a way an LLM can't easily and simply paper over. How do I specify a UI in a way that an LLM can competently implement it in HTML, SwiftUI and whatever Windows is using these days?
And while it was very pretty, the movement away from translucency was due in large part because of accessibility (for all users).
It's actually quite difficult to see controls (and read text) when not on a flat/solid background.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_(user_interface)
This is the kind of design that does great in a 15 minute user test, but is annoying 2 months on.
Then we went totally flat in 10.10, and it was pretty awful then too. I'll stay on Sequoia until Apple irons this out in 2-3 future macOS versions, or maybe it's finally the year of the linux desktop... at least in my world.
(https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frutiger_Aero)
https://www.deviantart.com/zainadeel/art/Shine-2-0-for-Windo...
I guess this is more of the same? Some pretty picture can shine through at you because... pretty?
I hope Apple gives the option to turn this whole thing off.
I notice the borders now also have shadows / gradients due to reflection, that's also something I'd like to remove personally.
And go back to Mac OS the most easily usable GUI?
I don't want to watch Avatar XXXVI when I pick up my phone to check my messages.
Cook stays.
I hear folks on contrast concerns. I have hope though. I really like the de-emphasis on compute. On tools being less the thing, on the content first, on getting computing out of the way, making it ambient. Unboxing the content, unframing it.
The glass refraction seems like a an amazing leap forward. Material has been around forever and there's all these developer docs showing the stack up of layers, implying the depth of the system, but in the 2d user world everything is flat, composited into indistinction. The visual sepration, allowing semi transparent motion, but using refractive style to clearly separate the layers, adds such clarity that it feels obvious in retrospect immediately to me.
I still lack hope that XR is going to be a huge huge thing, that it will be comfortable over time, but it makes such sense to me that XR would inspire & lead this shift, to depriotizing the UI & emphasizing the content.
I'm stressed a bit trying to imagine the transforms required to make this refraction happen. I don't think CSS is going to be enough. The new CSS Painting API ("Houdini") also seems more generative than able to modify & script what is?
Apple really isn't what it once was, this is embarrassing.
p.s. If you like Aqua, you might like this open source glass rendering CSS library: https://www.specularcss.org/#materials/glass
Which is just going to make people try even harder.
It's not at all a concern for Apple, nor should it be.
In raw shader code it's verging on trivial, like old school environment mapping. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflection_mapping
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On the Macos side, I'm open to the new aesthetic, but I just hope to god they've been actually investing in performance improvements when it comes to SwiftUI, which has only barely been viable in some cases thus far. If MacOS gets a full UI update, but the Settings screen still lags when navigating between sections, someone's doing something wrong.
p.s. If you like Aqua, you might enjoy playing around this open source glass rendering CSS library: https://www.specularcss.org/#materials/glass
I want a good UI to fade into the background. But this one is like a UI designer's promotion fever dream: The UI is at the center, no matter the content. The promotional video says "This material brings a new level of vitality to every experience" and then they show a video player where now the control overlay has more contrast, more movements, and more bright lights than the actual movie. And then the other features are just bull*: "It responds in real-time to your actions". Gosh I hope other UI frameworks would respond to my actions, what a novel idea! And yeah, ever played a video game? Things reacting to user input in real-time isn't exactly groundbreaking. And then they top it off with "a fluidity only Apple can achieve", which is just delusional. Desktop Linux box + RTX 5090 + current video game + 240 Hz screen => a fluidity that exceeds everything that Apple can achieve on a phone.
I mean I like SwiftUI and I like how apps look on the current iOS. But I think it's already borderline intense just to use the OS. It certainly should not have any more additional glitter, blinking, movement, or animations. It might be the direction that GTK could benefit from, but not SwiftUI.
In short, this feels like a step in the wrong direction for Apple to me.
Heck, we hit "peak-UI" with Win 2K, AFAAIC.-
This updated design language seems to have similarities to Microsoft's Material/Fluent design system that brought more of that same glass material to Windows 11, with the more 3d-looking edge outlines on ui elements. So the glass metaphor seems to be a trending metaphor in these UIs, for better or for worse.
The browser navigation overlaps the viewport. I wonder if this'll break websites/apps that anchor a menu to the bottom.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/@microsoftdesign/videos
I guess we will have to wait for State of Union.
Note: not being a hater and appreciate the complexities of working on huge platforms as Apple ecosystem. Just genuinely wondering, since it feels like maybe 2 years of start/stops/changing priorities.
Floating menu bars over the content at the bottom is a great way to make it impossible to actually use the bottom of web pages.
The "liquid glass" stuff, even in their handpicked promo screenshots, has functionally unreadable text and illegible controls.
The vanishing buttons are going to make app UIs even more obtuse and undiscoverable.
Did Apple learn nothing from Windwos Vista and Compiz?
What is the purpose of text in a screen?
Does something really help that purpose? Anything that does not is WRONG.
Bumping from iOS 18 / macOS 15 etc. towards year-based naming, nice. I wish more projects followed this.
I really hope apps like Ente can step up and get better and native, offer desktop backup + sync both as well. But then there's always the chance that Apple will just find a way to shut them down. or reject their updates, just like they did in the past.
Anyway, I guess we'll have to wait and see what else they manage to screw up with this "move."
Apple UI designer #1: Well, the flat design has been largely a success so far, but those darn users -- they can still easily pick out widgets from the background, and with a few tries still reasonably guess what they're for and how they'll respond!
Apple UI designer #2: I know! Let's make the widgets semitransparent. That way they'll be harder to pick out from the background, and Macs and iPhones will become delightfully fun puzzle boxes users will love trying to figure out, much like my dog loves his snuffle mat!
Many elements are still completely flat or more subtle. So, to me, it feels more like a new tool to convey hierarchy, rather than a complete new design: Secondary < Primary < Glass.
Also, the Safari-Redesign is back for round 2? It'd be funny if it runs into the exact same backlash again.
> irrelevant time-wasting demand
It simply doesn't feel like an HN thread until someone gets insecure enough to berate non-sequitur Open Source projects, does it? When I browse the rest of the web, I always end up missing HN's iconic Jungian groupthink. You lot tend to shoot yourself in the foot before anyone even notices you're drawing a gun.
I'm excited to see this effect turned into a WebGL library in literally a week by some smart devs out there, and then adapted by Material Design in another month. Really? Only apple? This kind of rhetoric might have worked on me 20 years ago, but today it's just sad how obviously false it is.
Maybe this is the start of replacing macOS with some form of iPadOS experience in the medium to long term.
It's also, somewhat curiously, not neumorphism. All the interface layers appear distinct, which makes me worry if things like Dynamic Island and Control Center will be mistaken for app controls and not distinct phone controls.
Look at the most basic UI interaction - text cursor movement - and note how this new liquid glass adds more confusing visual noise by adding text reflection for no good reason, which makes, for example, an empty line appear as a line with some text due to this reflection, thus making it harder to see that your cursor is located at the top line.
> more focus to content
it's the opposite, you dilute focus on content by manufacturing non-existent noise.
And the claim to being "natural" in the video falls flat - compare to the actual physical movements a few frames before - the lens doesn't change in width or height! So the digital animation noise is unnatural!
Similarly with the menu sheet adding new rubberband effect in the corner- what underlying natural interaction does it reflect? What signal does that jiggly noise send?
But yeah, if you live in a "lively delight" fantasy of design, nothing would stop you.
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https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/winmsg/windo...
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About "only Apple can achive that": It would be pretty simple for MS to do something like this in Windows. DirectComposition (or whatever it is called nowadays) could set the appropriate shader when drawing windows. You cannot do it as a normal user, because you can only pick from a select set of backdrop shaders (but if some hacker wants a challenge, you could inject the code into dwm.exe to do so :-)).
See recent "Breaking down why Apple TVs are privacy advocates’ go-to streaming device":
* https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/06/all-the-ways-apple-t...
Case in point, the largest screen in the lead image in the linked article does nothing to showcase this new UI, but it does promote Fountain of Youth, a show on Apple TV.
When you 'hover' over an app on an Apple's tvOS, the app populates that preview section with whatever content it wants. In the linked article's screenshot, the Apple TV app is being hovered over, so the 'preview' section is populated with content from Apple TV.
If the user swiped right, to hover over the Arcade app, that preview would change to show some Arcade game. Hover over Netflix, Max, Hulu, Spotify apps, and you'll get content previews from them.
So yes, they are "ads", in a hyper-literal sense, but not strictly, not facilitated by the operating system, and not in any way that matters.
Apple TV is AFAIK the best device in its category.
I also think your definition is overly broad and doesn't reflect what an "ad" is. For example, if Apple cut the feature from iOS that allowed you to control your music from your lock screen, Spotify would also be willing to pay Apple to be able to control specifically Spotify from your lock screen. Does that mean "being able to control music from your lock screen" is an ad for Spotify? No. Does iOS allowing app-specific widgets on the homescreen count as ads, since if it didn't exist, companies would be willing to pay to be on people's homescreens? No, widgets are not by definition ads (even if some widgets may be ads!). Similarly, the Apple TV OS providing the ability for installed apps to show interactive app-specific UI on hover (i.e. the user has chosen to interact with this app, or has chosen it as their primary app in the OS), does not mean the OS itself has ads.
[0]: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
If you do, I suppose what I would amend my statement to is: it doesn't show ads for apps I don't explicitly select in the UI. Either way, that's much better than most competing products... And it's incredibly fast, with the lowest latency of any streaming device.
I don't like Apple's locked ecosystem, and avoid most of their products. But the Apple TV is just head and shoulders above anything else on the market, so I own one and am quite satisfied with it.
They made it so almost everyone uses the Apple TV app for at least some viewing and there you get ads for Apple TV+ shows and their suggestions include shows that require a subscription to a service you may not already have. Or the suggestion will sometimes require a rental or purchase through the iTunes Store. These are ads.
I have no idea what you mean by "they made it so almost everyone uses the Apple TV app." You mean, they made an app that many people like, and that app has ads in it (but not the OS)? That doesn't mean the OS has ads.
Personally, I never use the Apple TV app: I use Netflix, Crunchyroll, HBO Max, and the Criterion Collection apps. And I never see what I would consider to be ads in the OS, and I never see content previews for apps I don't use.
You are free to never open apps that have ads in them on the Apple TV.
(If you mean: installed apps are allowed to show content previews when you hover on them in the UI — I think that's pretty different from an ad, and it's a feature I personally like, since it means I can easily resume a show I was previously watching without even having to open the app-specific UI. That's quite different from my perspective than showing ads for services and apps that I've never used, that I can't remove.)
Infuse just lets you... play a file. How novel!
Figuring out which elements are selected in the UI is often hard.
The trackpad on the remote is not good -- I've tried setting it to disable trackpad and click on, but then I'll inevitably find an app that needs a trackpad.
Overall I'm quite happy with the AppleTV as a device, but the UI could use quite a bit of help.
Apple products are gonna be perceived as the icon of the beauty and usability regardless of the actual qualities. Be sure, Xiaomi and Huawei (and probably even Samsung) will try mimicking the newest Apple design language. Like it was before with crippled keyboards, enormous touchpads, glossy reflective screens, notches, etc..
ofc. but people don't like it when you say the quiet part out loud.