We have 'instinctive visual cues' for depth and light coming from above, hence why button gradients are so immediately effective,because our visual system recognizes it in milliseconds. we don't have "instictive visual cues" for refraction and lensing , that's why we are confused about underwater distances . That's why magnifying glasses make us dizzy. I just can't believe this is coming from apple.
Plus, to be truly realistic it also would need to take into account ambient lighting scenarios surrounding the device displaying it.
Like this it’s really just another try in recreating glass which never made sense to be used in UI.
It is beyond me, how this got chosen as a way forward - taking visual design which makes sense in a VR/AR environment, to ruin their rectangular display UI.
It will make implementation way more complex than it is already and worse it will set off an avalanche of badly done imitations creating a mess throughout all touchpoints across companies taking years to clean up again - just as I thought that UI design finally reached an acceptable level of maturity.
Sad, really sad for a company like Apple to throw out precision, clarity and contrast for “effect”.
It's not actually glass, instead the apple engineers and designers are basically simulating effect of surface tension of drops of liquid. Unfortunately the refraction at the edges of a droplet is not informative about whether the droplet is inward or outward facing (i.e. if it it toggled on or off). Hence why they use additional highlights and shadow to indicate the 3D structure. The liquid effect is a total gimmick . And they added insult to injury by adding color-changes and movement which is totally distracting when you re scrolling that diffucult paper.
I know most people couldn’t care less about this, but those gimmicky animations probably consume more computing power than the entire Apollo project, which strikes me as unnecessary and wasteful. Given the choice, I’d much rather have a clean, efficient interface.
I tend to like Material Design in comparison. It’s clean, efficient, and usable. I just hope Google won’t try to "improve" it with annoying gimmicks and end up making things worse, like Apple did here.
"Flat" design is equally offensive by not demarcating controls as controls, or their state in an intuitive way.
Just as we were finally seeing UI step away from that BS, Apple jumps all the way back into much-scorned, cheesily-excessive skeuomorphism... adding a raft of failed ideas from 20 years ago.
Since this is in contrast to "wildly not flat and full of visual gimmicks": the modern "flat" style has severe (and very stupid) issues, yea. But "flat" has been around for a very long time in touch UI with clear control boundaries - just draw a box around it, maybe give it a background color.
That's better than plain text that just happens to be a hidden control, but text with a background color might just be... text with a background color, for emphasis. Or it's text with a background color, to distinguish it from editable text. A background color does not tell the user that it's a control.
A box around it? Slightly better, but still doesn't convey state. Sure, you can fill it in when it's "on," but that's still guesswork on the part of the user if he arrives to find it filled in already.
Historically, design as a priority worsened UI for average and new users, and Apple has prioritized a feeling of elegance over ease of use.
Liquid glass puts UI second (feature cues) in favor of UX (interesting experience), harkening back to skeuomorphism but misprioritizing UI. I appreciated in Jobs's time how skeuomorphism was used to reveal more features, and give new users simple cues.
Now there is this idea that there is a higher percentage of advanced users, but since now there are MORE users (anyone with a screen), and continual change, I think there is still a large percentage of less advanced users "harmed" by prioritizing UX over UI.
You know the dominant apps used on phones have large full screen user-generated video and imagery, right?
These are UI elements designed to work great over scrolling content feeds, full screen product images, album artwork, and thirty second videos of people doing meme dances. There is no room for ‘a gray background’.
This doesn’t justify applying a less than suboptimal design for everything else.
UI on content is a special case just like AR and here it might be ok, but why add “glass” as a background on icons or panels for text that are served much better by using a single colored transparent background without the noise that glass is bringing to the table - if there’s a background needed at all.
The visual signal to noise ratio is being cranked up to 11 for novelty’s sake.
I think you’re watching a way different video about this than me.
In the design guidance they’re explicitly saying liquid glass is for selective elements in the navigation layer. When those elements pop up modals those use a very subdued and opaque glass that loses the adaptive contrast, but still physically embeds them in that same floating navigation layer.
They’re not saying everything needs to be made of glass. They’re explicitly saying don’t make everything from glass.
> These are UI elements designed to work great over scrolling content feeds, full screen product images, album artwork, and thirty second videos of people doing meme dances
Liquid glass also seems terrible for this type of application. TikTok's overlays are much less intrusive and distracting.
the liquid glass ends up being vital for windows in AR. the vision pro has this, and it really helps you see behind the windows you've placed. while a shit experience on a phone, i do think liquid glass is a useful choice in the AR world
Back in my day (as far back as a month ago), we just called that effect “transparency” or “translucency”.
Hell, there are types of AppKit popup windows that have the effect on by default, that have existed untouched since the early days of Mac OS X.
Don’t give Apple more credit than they deserve here.
That’s an interesting point, never thought about it.
These complicated lenses distorting light from all directions look fancy in a designer portfolio, having them almost everywhere… I’m not sure how it will work out.
In contrast, the original material design was quite intuitive, iirc they based their design on paper sheets, much simpler, and much more common in our day to day life.
I still have some hope it will work out great, if Apple can take the accessibility visibility issues seriously, and developers using it in moderation, it can be great.
I see no way around all that optics physics not sucking up computation and battery. Perhaps Apple will add liquid glass silicon to the mix to do that physics in hardware. Using glass to compute glass, LOL
I'm not sure I'd want that on my daily devices, however I would like this on my car heads-up unit where tactile feedback with actual buttons is preferred to keep the eyes on the road. At least that would be better than nothing.
Liquid glass can't possibly be that much more expensive than vibrancy (if it even is). The refraction effects are effectively just a displacement map (probably calculated realtime, but still).
Paper sheets do not have controls on them. That's why "Material Design" sucks too, as all does the rest of the "flat" design fad.
Minimal visual cues, analogous (not photo-faithful) to real-world physical objects made GUIs a revolutionary advance in computer use. Both flat design and this new Apple junk (which, let's face it, is a return to hated and nonsensical skeuomorphism) ignore the very concepts that made GUIs so usable.
Apple has prioritized style over usability for decades now. Remember the godawful hockey puck mouse and how stubbornly they clung to it? It shouldn't be a surprise when Apple picks a solution that looks cool but is worse to use; that's who they are.
I agree that their keyboards and mice are the worst. Even the cheapest no-name peripherals do not invoke the same kind of anxiety that Apple's stuff does. I don't have any issue with their UIs however. I think they are generally very good. Things are not perhaps as discoverable as they could be but the alternative would probably be worse as it would lead to more clutter.
> I agree that their keyboards and mice are the worst.
They are now. A couple of weeks ago I bought an Apple keyboard from the late 80s on EBay (M0116 model). After a quick solder job wiring half an S-Video cable to a ProMicro, it now talks USB, works perfectly and is one of the best feeling keyboards you could hope to use. (One of the later iterations with saner cursor key placement would be better still, though...)
The accessibility angle is what concerns me. The demos of the Music app, for example, seemed much less clear. You’re gonna have to mess around with whatever settings they provide to turn it off if you have impaired visibility.
It gives off a weird 2.5D HUD effect that works well enough in first-person games (which is basically simulating AR), but is just harder to read and kind of unmoored from the main UX on a flat screen.
Their accessibility settings actually seem decent. You can turn off the animation, increase contrast, go nearly opaque… I still don’t think I’ll love this new paradigm, but it looks like I can mostly mitigate my concerns.
I have a feeling it's a bit of cart driving the horse. Look at all this GFX power we have, how could we harness it for UI instead of boring old compositing and alpha?
At the same time remember how much of a struggle it was in the 90s to show transparent layers? Good times
> we don't have "instictive visual cues" for refraction and lensing
Do you have anything to back this up? Seems a lot of your argument is hinging on this point. I’m skeptical that 1. this is true, and 2. Apple wouldn’t have considered it if it were true
The sample interfaces and usecases seem highly legible and match my instinctive visual understanding for transparent materials. They look attractive and well separated from their surroundings. Not sure what this objection is coming from - have you looked at the results?
Our visual system is optimized, rather extremely, for understanding 3d scenes under the simple perspective model that our eyes are based on: x' = (x * f) / z
Outside of that 99.999% experience norm, that are brains are so used to, is disconnect and discomfort. If you've ever put on a new pair of glasses, with a different prescription, you'll understand exactly what he's talking about: depth offset and dizziness.
The disconnect is why refraction and lensing is interesting to look at: the model your eyes are used to seeing, for the world behind the thing, is not normal.
I wonder if this is linked to the reason that so many people become nauseous with 3D glasses.
When we see 3d movements that don't correlate with what our inner ears, the response is that our body assumes something is wrong, we have ingested a toxin, and a nausea / vomit response is created.
There is something visually jarring about this Liquid Glass UI, and it's possible it's related to movements not correlating with an internal frame of reference.
I get car sick quite easily, same with VR, but I actually like the design language of Liquid Glass over the first iteration of Material (I like the new updates to Material too). I think people should watch from minute 13 onward if they're short on time and want the gist of it.
the fact that it's surprising does not make it a visual cue. A cue to what? I am not aware of any psychophysics study that says we have perception of droplets or lens transformations (in contrast to shadows , gradients etc that are well studied). There also doesn't seem to be an evolutionary reason for it because the natural world does not have lenses and glass. And UIs are usually based on intuitive features.
Not saying this makes the ui good but it should go without saying that the natural world has water which acts as a lens.
Also, of course we have perception of droplets. What we don’t have is an intuitive understanding of how light interacts with droplets.
I suspect that Apple are trying to leverage this lack of intuition to make their ui interesting to look at in an evergreen way. New backgrounds mean new interesting interactions. I’m not confident that they’ve succeeded or that that’s actually a good goal to have though. I have it on my iPhone 13 and personally I find it annoying to parse, and I feel relief when I go back to traditional apps untouched by the update like Google Maps
droplets of water are not lenses without a glass behind it, and we couldn't see substantial effects behind them before we had glass windows. There was little evolutionary reason to develop any perception of refraction in droplets of water. in contrast, shadows are instant indicators of distance and gradients instantly distinguish concave from convex surfaces for light coming from above.
I get that your point is that we don’t have a strong intuition for lenses and that’s tied to a lack of evolutionary reason to have them. I agree and suspect that might be the point of why Apple are using a the lens effects. We don’t need to go so far as to say the natural world is completely devoid of such phenomena. Of course they’re there but they’re largely not relevant to survival throughout human history
Is there any study saying that user interfaces should use visual effects for which our brains have hardware acceleration? It seems a reasonable premise, but is there data?
I don’t entirely disagree, but that is still an intuition, not a proof that our interfaces should always work that way.
We used to ride animals with legs, which worked a lot like our legs do. Does that mean the wheel is wrong? We don’t have wheels, and they don’t occur in nature.
I don’t think Apple has invented the wheel, and I’m inclined to agree that leveraging our hardware acceleration makes sense. But I haven’t seen anything beyond blind assertion that of course it has to work that way.
Apple's vaunted UI has always been crippled by some stupid decisions and practices. But exhuming the idiotic "transparent" UI fad that died 20 years ago must rank among the worst.
What Apple just rolled out is embarrassing and depressing. You know it's bad when a thread like this is full of well-written, incontrovertible takedowns and nearly devoid of apologist drivel.
Holding Apple to a high standard this long after the the death of the industry’s one and only true UI/UX purist is folly.
It’s regular “you”s and “me”s there now.
US corporate structure absolutely kills the spirit in the kind of people who could make a difference. And when it doesn’t, it kills the ability of those people to be promoted to a position of influence.
I am not a huge fan of Steve Jobs, but he did understand UI and UX better than just about anyone, and he stuck to his guns.
“I can’t believe this is coming from Apple” is something I said when I saw iPhones with a camera bump. Camera bumps are a fucking abomination.
I think I'm convinced with liquid glass design, the issues highlighted by the users in the beta release IMHO are a result of rushing it out for WWDC. It appears that they didn't have enough time to polish the UI to comply with the principles described in this video.
For example the designer in this video says no glass over glass but the control center and the lock screen are glass over glass. It looks cluttered and the legibility is horrible, as predicted by the designers here.
They probably just compiled the old UI with the new liquid glass framework without going through the design considerations that are required by the new system.
By the time of the release, it will look great if Apple doesn't shy away from letting their developers re-work everything.
What I wonder now is, why hadn't that happen already? Don't the internal developers have access to the new design and the people behind it until the last moment? If the designers of Liquid Glass and the designers of the locks screen and the control center have talked, they would have known the principles described in the WWDC video and avoid all that.
I was a student taking an android dev course when the first iteration of material design came out. My classmates and I had the running joke of “this is an amazing design guide, someone should send it to google”.
You’d see even the most specific principles being broken, the left menu in gmail for example interacted with the header exactly the opposite way the guide said it should.
The main issue I feel is that Apple's internal threshold for what quality of software is acceptable to be launched to the public has dropped a lot in the years since the last major redesign.
Yes, they iterate through versions and drop things that don't work with their design philosophy (parallax effects on iOS 7) but the first major version they released always seemed well thought out and solid from a design perspective.
I don't get that feeling from this redesign. I'm sure that this Liquid Glass redesign would look and work great next year or the year after that or even by the public launch of iOS 26. They'll fix the issues with readability, control center etc. But the fact that the first version of Liquid Glass doesn't look good is what's problematic.
iOS 7's first beta design was worse than this. They walked back some pretty distinctive parts of the design - mainly the ultra thin fonts - during the betas and following releases.
This hasn’t been “launched to the public”. It’s a developer beta so that developers can start working on testing and updating their apps for the new OS.
You're right that this isn't "launched to the public" and is just a developer beta. However, I meant it in a more "outside of Apple" kind of way. I guess that should have been clearer.
Everyone at Apple knows WWDC is in June, and WWDC is the event where Apple show off the new stuff and deliver a public beta. Some of the terrible designs were shown in the pre-recorded demos, and if anyone had used the new beta for more than five minutes, they would have ended up in the broken control center.
It’s also the biggest software event in the Apple world. The implementation may improve, but the pre-recorded demo videos show off the bad parts pretty clearly, almost as if the terrible readability is intentional.
Tbh, I get strong flat-earther vibes from that video ;) E.g. trying to justify a stupid base assumptiom with pseudo-science.
I predict that in 2..5 years Apple will go back to regular opaque UI elements with a slight 3D hint to separate items that can be interacted with from non-interactive items.
Windows users might be lucky when Microsoft skips that fashion cycle by saying "been there, done that".
> Windows users might be lucky when Microsoft skips that fashion cycle by saying "been there, done that".
Given Microsoft’s track record, I’d expect worse, not better. Metro might’ve looked good on phones, but the desktop incarnation was pretty ugly (it was basically Windows 1.0 with antialiasing) compared to Aero. It would be completely on brand for them to do something like ditch their current reasonably nice looking Fluent in favor of something hideous and then stubbornly try to make it work without changes for the next decade before finally relenting.
If you're right, maybe the reason they rushed it is because people accuse Apple of copying others if they take time to do something right
However, it is also true that Apple's QA gets bad lately. They let features creep but lose attention to detail so there are more small glitches recently. Along with just bad design, like surely the old Apple would not allow mouse cursor to be "lost" in the notch on the new MBPs. Maybe it's the trend. They become less and less about getting it right and more about getting it out and then reacting when users complain.
> because people accuse Apple of copying others if they take time to do something right
Windows Vista had a translucent UI nearly two decades ago, that should be enough time for Apple to figure out if it's a good or bad idea to copy ;)
There's also plenty of computer games which experiment with translucency in their UIs.
If the Apple UI designers would look out of their ivory tower from time to time they could have realized that translucent UIs are an exceptionally stupid idea after the very shortlived "oooooh fancy shaders" novelty effect is over.
What remains is a sea of Gen Z designers who weren't yet alive when the foggy glass of Windows Vista seemed like a good idea.
Meanwhile, the talent wars are raging, with every AI company offering 7-figure salaries to the best of Apple's prodigies.
Apple is now the old guard. They're no longer cool, and as a public company, cost controls are too stringent; they can't pay as much. What is Apple to do?
They can give the designers a sense of ownership. It's not a question of how (un)qualified the team is; it's a retention play.
Is the design good? The A and B squads would say no. But this is the best Apple can do these days to keep critical talent engaged.
They'll burn a cycle re-learning fundamental lessons in accessibility, retain talent, and cling to the hope that next year they'll have a midwit Siri than can book a flight with a decent looking UI.
Alan Dye is the interface design lead at Apple, he's been there since 2006.
One of the lead designers on Liquid Glass is Chan Karunamuni, who's been at Apple since the early 2010s. If you search for more of the names of the design presenters at this WWDC, you'll find a lot of people with similarly long tenure.
So the theory that it's all Gen Z designers with no experience or talent seems pretty weak.
Yeah, sure. But it's more fun to talk in hypotheticals and point fingers at straw people and those young kids that make a fetish of old Nokia phones and dumb tech.
So I'm sure there's 3 Gen Z folks in a trench coat approving the work of those other Gen Z designers.
All this is just delegating to flavor of the domain "higher powers" instead of trying to grapple with the complexity of reality.
We just have to wait for Gen Alpha to bring back flat design 10 or so years from today.
And to think this is the same field that has an issue with ageism as indicated by this post yesterday. I take serious issue with people over 40 being protected while discrimination against young people "just doesn't exist". It's a clear case of the law being constructed to advantage the already advantaged. It's politically expedient because old people have wealth and influence and young people don't. Could you hire someone who can't demonstrate competence in an interview to do the job? Why does it matter if they're 20 or 100? Yet the two cases are treated very differently. You can say you won't hire a 20 year old because they don't know what they're doing, but can you not hire the 100 year old because their mental faculties have deteriorated?
Edit: this appears to be a hot take, so I challenge others to take a step back and consider other protected classes and anti-discrimination laws. They don't call out one race or sex, they say they're all protected and the very act of discriminating is not allowed during hiring. They don't say "you can't discriminate against white people or men but others are fine". That's what the ADEA does.
A lot of "old and senior people" also fumble with big mistakes a lot of the time. They're not all-perfect gods. In reality, most successful people are one trick ponies. They caught lightning in a bottle once early on that boosted their careers but that doesn't mean they're still relevant and correct with their decision making today.
Look at John Romero, he knocked it out of the park with Doom 1, 2 and some of Quake, but all his projects after have been flops of catastrophic proportions. Look at Jonny Ive's last design mistakes at Apple compared to the early successes that were perfection from all aspects.
Most people can't pull success after success forever, they always bottom out at some point then decline, some sooner than others, especially in a fast changing field like tech. So it's a high chance those senior higher ups at Apple are now dated and out of touch, but still have the high egos and influence from the bygone era. Happens at virtually 100% of the companies.
> They're not all-perfect gods. In reality, most successful people are one trick ponies. They caught lightning in a bottle once early on that boosted their careers but that doesn't mean they're still relevant and correct with their decision making today.
I don't think that characterization is quite right either. I'm a big fan of Brian Eno's "scenius" phrasing:
> A few years ago I came up with a new word. I was fed up with the old art-history idea of genius - the notion that gifted individuals turn up out of nowhere and light the way for all the rest of us dummies to follow. I became (and still am) more and more convinced that the important changes in cultural history were actually the product of very large numbers of people and circumstances conspiring to make something new. I call this ‘scenius’ - it means ‘the intelligence and intuition of a whole cultural scene’.
Extremely successful people benefit from the scenius within which they get to operate. But as that context changes and evolves over time, they fail to recreate their earlier wild successes - not because they lost any of their skills (although that can also happen), but because the skills aren't sufficient, and the deep, layered conditions that enabled those wild successes just aren't there anymore.
I think there is something in that. Certainly the world of work does seem to pivot between rewarding people that “do the work” and those that “do the work around the work” but separate themselves from actual execution. 2021-2 was peak middle manager froth, and were on a swing toward more operator led now. Usually middle management “present the work upwards” types dominate though.
I could believe that this happens at Apple if it wasn't for the executive veto that pushed stuff like the Touch Bar and Butterfly Keyboard to consumers. It sounds less like "very large numbers of people" conspiring, and more like a select few conspirators hand-picking the contributions they think would sell well.
> Look at John Romero, he knocked it out of the park with Doom 1, 2 and some of Quake, but all his projects after have been flops of catastrophic proportions.
And the other guys from id haven't exactly recaptured the same magic either. It's a shame they broke up, it turns out that the team was way stronger together than any of them has been on their own.
I like to observe how organization affects how a company operates. As soon as you create a department, that department will start to generate reasons why it should remain being a department, as a sort of self preservation instinct. If you establish a design department, they will start planning complete redesigns sooner or later -- they need to have something going on to justify their existence. When I see this type of redesign, I can't help but wonder whether it is something that was cooked so that the design department can have a place at the table.
As a tangent, HR departments are very often affected by this as well. As soon as you have large enough HR, they will start generating ideas about how to waste other teams time. They have to justify their existence by organizing some events, trainings, activities, even if they actively harm the bottom line.
“Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:
First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.”
In large companies, each project is approved at each stage by a steering committee. And then as appropriate more senior committes, senior leaders and eventually the CEO and the board.
The poster above is right in that if you create a design team they will want to justify their existence but it's the controls above and around it that is responsible for keeping them in check.
I see this daily in our banking megacorp. We have IT security team(s), which permeates all other IT activities like ink on paper. On its own its a good approach obviously, we weren't for example hacked or scammed in any high profile case, ever.
But there is no limit to how much additional security you can bring, so they do bring all of it. Recently had to get new Tomcat distribution deployed via Chef tool, of course our own package of it. Now it runs under 2 unix users, each owns various parts of Tomcat. Main startup config (options.sh) is owned by root, to which we will never ever get access, one has to do all changes in a complex approval and build process via Chef. Servers disconnect you after 2-3 mins of inactivity, if you deal with a small cluster you need literally ie 16 putty sessions open which constantly try to logout. And similar stuff everywhere, in all apps, laptops, network etc.
All this means that previously simple debugging now becomes a small circus and fight with ecosystem. Deliveries take longer, everything takes longer. Nobody relevant dares to speak up (or even understands the situation), to not be branded a fool who doesn't want the most security for the bank.
I would be mad if this would be my company, but I go there to collect paychecks and sponsor actual life for me and my family so can handle this. For now at least.
Alternative approach, also from a financial services world: VMs are created with a DSL on top of qemu/firecracker, containers with Dockerfiles. Cyber are part of an image review group alongside other engineers that validates the base images.
But: no interactive access to any of these VMs at all. There’s hypervisors running on bare metal, but SRE teams have that scripted pretty well to the point a physical server can be added in a day or so. It does mean you’ve to be serious about logging, monitoring and health.
This is one instance where we got it right (I think). We do have some legacy servers we’re trying to get rid of. But we’ve learnt we can run even complex vendor apps this way.
Conway’s Law comes to bite us in other ways though! Like I said, it’s a bear.
This view is very „hackernewsy“ and reveals a lot more about the mindset around here than the what is going on with apple. Firstly i don‘t think there is much fluctuation with the apple design team except when Ive left but i guess that was mainly due to the ceo change.
I remember a time when microsoft came around the corner with flat design on their phones and the iphone all of a sudden looked outdated. They adopted a flat look shortly after. They did that pretty well.
Thirdly and most important: noone does gaussian blurs, macro and micro transitions better than apple and it‘s a key part of their success. They are taking it one step further now. Even if it doesn‘t improve the experience for users it could help distinguish themselves visually. And there is nothing wrong with that.
Aero Glass in Windows Vista and 7 worked quite well. Virtually no applications had the glass everywhere. Many stayed with the default of only having a glass title bar and window border. Some apps extended it a little to cover a toolbar or two. Also, the glass effect was simpler, and had enough contrast by default (and the colour and transparency were customizable), whereas Apple has the glass everywhere and often with unreadable text.
What Apple demonstrated in their first OS demo is not yet finished, and I'm sure they'll add some more frosted glass efects for legibility and such. What they show off in the video looks fine to me, and the explanation that comes with the visuals show that at least from a designer point of view, all of the weird stuff that jumps out in the macOS demo was violating the design principles.
I loved Aero and I bet once Apple adds the diffuse glass to the places it need to for legibility, I'm sure this will look great too.
Siri to book a flight? I just want it to reliably tell me what time a specific meeting is tomorrow, know that when I ask for where Mount Etna is, I don’t mean a city in the USA, and stop just ignoring me randomly when I talk to it.
Apple are much further behind with Siri than they realise.
> Apple are much further behind with Siri than they realise.
I think Apple realises it way better than you’re giving them credit for. They simply weren’t able to do anything about it yet, even though they’re clearly trying.
It seems like they are trying to unify the UX for vision OS and other devices and have them finally morph with the AR interfaces that are to come. There is probably a bigger vision behind this than just shiny visuals.
Im not an Apple fan boy but Apple has been at the forefront of alot of design decisions that other companies later follow. So whilst I don’t agree with the liquid design. I suspect there’s more to it than meets the eye.
I get the impression that most (myself included) think there is nothing more than meets the eye - which is why some say that Steve Jobs is rolling in his grave.
They have been doing this slowly over the past several years. I decided to move from macOS to Linux the day settings turned into a scrolling iOS-style list rather than an actual settings menu.
I think this too. Microsoft thought something similar when they tried to unify Windows, Xbox, Windows Phone, and Windows RT in one design language.
With how badly Apple's VR headset actually sold, I don't think they're going to for a unified AR-first approach just yet. Then again, Apple did think their VR headset was a good idea, so maybe they're just high on their own supply.
Does the A-squad include Johnny Ive, who gave us butterfly keyboards and the Touch Bar (where (IIRC) the initial revision of which did not have a separate physical key for ESC)? Though Ive did get rid of skeuomorphism.
What's wrong with skeuomorphism? It is wrong if it is done wrong, like everything, but done right, it looks good and feels familiar. It is pretty much the standard in music production software and people don't seem to complain about it.
By replacing skeuomorphism with minimalism, Ive's anti-skeu was a cure nearly as worse as the disease. They were right to move away from skeuomorphism, but they did so recklessly, giving us a UX where almost all cues for an element being "clickable" were stripped away.
Ive hasn't done a single impressive thing after Jobs' departure. To the extent that Ive did anything noteworthy, it was with Jobs as visionary, product director and tastemaker. Outside of that relationship, his work has been derivative of prior Apple design success, or embarrassingly wrong-footed. Factoring in the lag time of product cycles, it's astonishing how rapidly Apple improved after Ive's departure.
Perhaps people can argue with me: I claim skeuomorphism jumped the shark with the pseudo reel-to-reel playback UI in ... was it the Podcasts app? Or maybe people think it was Notes with the torn edge along the top margin.
Regardless, skeuomorphism seems to have gone too far at some point. Perhaps became overly cute, overly precious, pretty-pretty.
Skeuomorphism was said to have been the thing in early GUI computers, as metaphor or real objects, that helped early users to those interfaces understand them. Dragging a file icon that looked like a dog-eared piece of paper to a trash can icon on the screen (to delete the file) — the most obvious example.
I suspect by the time the Web came around, users had to become more comfortable with being bombarded with all manner of wild UI paradigms and they learned to more or less cope. Skeuomorphism, like training wheels, were perhaps not really needed as much as they had been a decade earlier.
I think more accurately, Apple’s, while imperfect, A-tier editor passed away in 2011, and no one replaced him.
It has been a downward slope since then after the momentum dissipated after his death.
Turns out, I didn’t like the operating system Apple made. I liked the OS Apple made while being curated and directed by Steve Jobs. His taste matched mine in a lot of important ways.
That’s BS take. iOS design is one of the most coveted roles if not the most important role you can get as a designer. It reaches billions and influences everything else. Just because we are not impressed with Apple’s direction, doesn’t mean these roles at Apple are not highly sought after. People would work for free to have that on their cv. Not everyone is motivated by pay and this is especially true among people with actual talent.
Aero is leaps and bounds more aesthetically pleasing and easier to work with than flat crap. Sooo glad we don't have to suffer more of that after a decade+.
I don’t really believe the narrative that this is the C-team running things now. A complete redesign like this would require approval from numerous executive stakeholders. My guess is that it’s connected to the Apple Vision project - possibly they’re working on a new device at a more consumer-friendly price point.
Liquid Glass looks really good, so not sure what you're talking about their A team being gone. All these other companies wish they had Apple's design team.
I’ve been using it for 2 days now, and the first thing I noticed is that readability took a hit.
My background is a mid tone warm photo, not dark or light, icons got a white foreground that’s very hard to read against their translucent background.
The second thing I noticed, is that when I’m scrolling a webpage, icons now switch color randomly (according to the bg dominant color) and that’s distracting.
The last thing, is that my phone is getting warmer and scrolling has become less fluid, choppy. And that’s on the 16 Pro Max.
What I like the most about this design though, is that it become invisible and let you focus on what you are reading, watching.
Perfect to focus on content, but the user interface has become sometimes unreadable and when you need to interact with it, put the flashlight in a hurry, you are scanning through instead of instantly recognizing stuff. But maybe that’s just new habits to make.
The rise of dynamism in UI design is not only a waste of compute cycles, but also distracting and a trigger for people like me who can be easily distracted.
What I want are UIs built more like E readers or newspapers, with screen updates taken seriously.
> The last thing, is that my phone is getting warmer and scrolling has become less fluid, choppy. And that’s on the 16 Pro Max.
Happens with almost every beta, particularly on first install. The later betas typically improve, and even the current ones often get better if there was some new indexing that had to happen.
I’ve been running since the keynote and my phone was initially warm but has calmed down now.
Battery seems to be taking a hit (maybe anecdotal). And scrolling is sluggish at times for sure. And also getting warm device (15 pro max). The sluggishness might not be due to the hour/transparency. There seems to be some kind of lazy loading that’s going on with icons. I’m not sure if that’s new.
The transparency is a mess. I can’t believe how far backwards this is. Trying to visually pick out icons is harder. Icons without transparency have this weird edge enhancement effect going on like a bad photoshop filter.
I seem to be having a bunch of new web issues. Popups aren’t handled as well. And there are weird refresh issues when zooming on web pages.
I agree with everything you said here. Most of it transfers to macOS as well. Readability took less of a hit, thankfully.
Some of the work appears so shoddy that I wonder if it was done by code mods or something. The Passwords app on macOS looks bizarrely cluttered and cramped, with all kinds of bad artifacts when you resize the window. I know it's a beta, but it's so bad that I really wonder if a human looked at it for more than a minute before they shipped it out.
It was mentioned in one of their WWDC videos. IIRC “Reduce Transparency” now would affect the amount of blur. It was similar to the amount of blur in VisionOS.
But this was a few days ago and I can’t remember exactly which video it was mentioned in.
Yes, thankfully there is. You can reduce the transparency in the Accessibility settings.
I’d wish that the computation load / battery drain would also be reduced by reducing the transparency. However, I think that the computation will still take place.
This has been Alan Dye's modus operandi since he took the helm on software design and the problem is it does not scale to larger devices. On a phone and mostly on an iPad, where you're far more likely to be consuming content anyway, it's not the worst thing to shoot for.
On a Mac it's infuriating. I'm working on anywhere from a 14" to a 27" display, both have a wealth of pixels to work with: why are you hiding controls? You're not making anything simpler, I need those buttons to perform the tasks I'm trying to do. All you've done is make it less intuitive, less discoverable, and added extra clicks.
To be honest it has some problems even on the smaller devices too, mainly in the form of lack of visual affordances. So much functionality you would never discover unless you'd seen someone else do it or triggered it by accident (and even then might not realise what you've done—just yesterday I had to help my mother get out of private browsing in Safari because she'd swiped across to it and didn't know how to get back).
iPhone 16 here - my phone was laggy and warm for the first day of having the update. Everything is completely back to normal now, perfect performance even when interacting with liquid glass stuff, exactly as it was on 18.
Vista had a black taskbar with some transparency, 7 made it glass.
If you maximised a window on Vista, the maximised window's border became dark (black/with an accent colour tint) and opaque, the taskbar and sidebar went opaque as well. 7 got rid of that.
"And that’s on the 16 Pro Max.", haha omg. well, that's the apple experience, never update beyond the OS that came with the device. Painful lesson from being an apple user since 2006
What are you talking about? My iPhone 13 Pro works perfectly on the newest OS. It’s actually hard to justify upgrading. I know lots of people who simply don’t upgrade anymore.
After using it for 2 days I'm liking it, as in really liking it. People complain that controls are harder to find. I say controls were _always_ hard to find. They blended into the content somehow. Now I can find them easier while also _not_ finding them.
I always found controls in previous versions of iOS to be lacking. I hope the negativity doesn't make them backtrack because this is a _huge_ improvement.
Somehow I've always considered controls that float over your content to be a bit of a UI design cop-out.
They often get slapped on top willy-nilly, and wind up blocking something below - either from view, or from interaction with another tool.
While I recognize Apple's approach here tries to mitigate that complaint... I still appreciate when designers craft a distinct space for my buttons/menus/controls to live, treat those non-content pixels as precious screen real estate, keep them tight, and make clever use of layout within it across different tasks.
This is my biggest problem with UI designs like this. There are lots of rules to follow, or the design looks like a cluttered mess.
Having seen what UI atrocities Material Design has allowed amateur app developers to bring to market, I hope Apple makes these new UI elements difficult to mess up, because unless they're making the UI libraries good by default, apps are going to get messy for a few years.
I'm not seeing controls moved around much. So this argument really applies to older versions of iOS as well. Maybe that was the point? Either way, I sort of agree. It's less than ideal, but if you're going to be doing it at least do it in a way that looks good.
And boy do I think this looks good. After a few days I can only say that complaining is so wrong. Previous versions of iOS were hard to use. I am finding this cleaner and easier to use. I very much don't want to go back.
UIs should be function first. That doesn't mean it can't be beautiful, but usability (and readability) should be the focus, with design being a way to turn a useful one into a beautiful one. It seems like they have started at the wrong end, trying to make their design language functional.
Neat eye candy, granted. I'm glad so much emphasis went into legibility, and that accessibility variants are baked in.
But I'd still love a modern device with very basic UI. Palm had it nailed, and I had no beef with the basic shapes of Windows 3.11 or colored squares of the NT/XP eras. Buttons, window edges and other controls you can readily distinguish that simply stay out of your way when you don't need them. No need for every pixel to scream out "look at me" when you trail your finger over it.
It's pretty clear one of the goals is for content to be first, not the function. OS controls are secondary to what is being displayed. They want them to go away.
And I am all for it. After a few days of this new OS, I really like it. It takes a day to train your eyes, but that happens with literally every version of the operating system. But once you do it is so nice for all of the function to just get out of the way.
7:44 "These liquid glass elements form a distinct functional layer for controls and navigation..."
Hala fricking luah. I think. This sums up--without under bus throwing--what I have loathed about the last 10ish years of "flat design" hell.
I wonder if there will be some issues with what happens when elements are not clearly differentiable from from "controls and navigation" and "everything else"? But just recognizing that flat design is a lossy compression of useful information, has me on board, at least to hope this works well.
I mean the idea itself isn't terrible; maybe the glass just needs to have some colour to provide background. Maybe "live glass" instead that knows the context in which it is and applies the right amount of tint of the most appropriate colour based on what's underneath it.
> Maybe "live glass" instead that knows the context in which it is and applies the right amount of tint of the most appropriate colour based on what's underneath it.
Incredible - difficult to see by design. What an age we live in where a design showcase video frame Apple proudly shows off UX worst-practices. I'll have some of whatever they're smoking, must be good shit. This whole thing is almost indistinguishable from satire.
17:03 - what I thought was finally something sensible turned out to be their example of something bad!
Hopefully I'll be able to find the settings to turn this off - if it's not too invisible.
As an app developer, I think the more frosted look without the toy wiggle interactions in the “accessibility” demos were the best. I don’t have KPI’s, but I wonder how a “checkout” button that can be almost half clicked / played with but not triggered will tank flow-thru.
Seriously why does seemingly every presenter from Tim Cook right down to the engineers in the tech-specific sessions speak with the exact same uncanny delivery in these videos? It's incredibly off-putting and sends my brain immediately into "you are being marketed at" mode.
I was thinking the same thing. This communication style is outdated. All I see is an attempt of mimicking Steve Job's style in keynotes. But that looked natural on him somehow.
For all his faults, Jobs always sold the idea that he really thought the stuff he was showing was the coolest thing ever. There was at the very least an illusion of pride and excitement, even if it wasn't always genuine. He'd crack jokes, make off-hand remarks, and wasn't afraid to mention competitor's products.
Modern Apple presentations are just like being read some marketing materials. It's very disingenuous.
I always think of the first Power Mac G5 introduction when after 5 slides of CPU block diagrams, talking all kinds of technical details, he gets to “And it has Massive Branch Prediction Logic…which I dunno…it predicts branches!” with a sly shrug.
> For all his faults, Jobs always sold the idea that he really thought the stuff he was showing was the coolest thing ever.
I am generally of the opinion that Jobs was vastly overrated, but one thing I will always give him credit for is that he was a brilliant salesman. One of the greatest the world has ever seen. I believe that the man could quite literally sell someone the shirt off their own back.
I think this looks neat and I think it is a set of sensible design rules for AR and transparent (i.e. just-a-pane-of-glass) devices.
The contrast issues are an issue for discovery, but by now, maybe design norms for standard apps mean we've reduced ourselves to controls with only symbols, and sometimes even just color, without text. Meaning, perhaps location, shape, and tactility will be more important than legibility.
However, this probably only works in extreme cases; where the ubiquity of the interface means users already know what to expect. This does not work for innovative designs or new things. Think, the "send" button in chat, email, messaging apps. It's often blue/green and located near the text input. Maybe an oblong jelly bubble near a textbox is clear enough in most cases.
That said, that concept does remind me of eco-friendly toilets in Europe with two buttons for flushing: one is larger than the other, and one uses more water than the other , but I always forget which is which. A large button using more water makes sense, but so does a large button signaling the one you should use most often (i.e. the one that uses less water). There's something I use everyday, something with immediate feedback, something I've tried to learn, but something I haven't gotten quite right.
I fundamentally disagree with many of their reasonings. e.g. tinting the so-called "Content Layer" instead of all the buttons, or demanding "steady state" to be "visually quiet", which is highly subjective. They are optimizing for sheep content vacuums, I mean users, and obedient developers.
As a user, I want color back on my GD buttons!
Also, I don't trust anyone who would wear those outfits.
> ...floating forms that nest neatly in the rounded curves of modern devices. These clearly defined shapes feel easy to tap and are designed to relate to the natural geometry of our fingers...
This reminds me for some reason of my preferred answer to the Microsoft interview question "Why are manholes round?" A: Because the average cross-section of a human being is roughly circular.
From the perspective of "design the manhole cover first", the reason is that manhole covers aren't just round — they're (very subtle) domes.
A dome is:
1. the best shape for taking stress from very heavy trucks putting all their weight on them without the manhole itself gradually bowing, and
2. is best at transferring that stress equally into the manhole wall (cast concrete cylinder) itself. (A square manhole + manhole cover would disperse force unfairly, potentially gradually cracking the manhole walls / requiring stronger walls. A flat circular manhole would disperse force upon the center of the manhole equally onto the manhole walls, allowing for lower-material-cost manhole walls. A domed manhole cover additionally disperses force from most points on the dome equally into the manhole walls — important, as vehicles won't necessarily be driving over the exact center of the manhole!)
...but really, this is the wrong direction to work in. The original reason manhole covers are round, is simply that the walls of a manhole are best made round, for the same reason drink cans and barrels are best made round: a closed cylinder is great at taking compressive force from a lid above; passing it through as soft, equal tensile force through its walls without buckling strain; and then turning that force back into an equal compressive force on the floor / subsurface.
Most manholes are generally small closed cylinders acting as maintenance areas for nearby pipes, with the pipes coming in through the sides of the manhole walls, and the concrete bottom floor of the manhole resting upon compacted earth.
In this situation, any shape for the manhole other than a cylinder — if driven over for years/decades by cars — would gradually pound the uneven force acting upon the manhole's floor into the earth below, unevenly accelerating soil subsidence. Eventually, you've created a sinkhole below the road, right outside the manhole wall on one side.
As someone with a mechanical engineering background, all these clever answers to the question (e.g. "manhole covers are round to prevent the cover falling in") are strange. Covers are round because the hole is round, and the hole is round because a cylindrical shape is sturdy and prevents collapse. That's it.
That's not "it". A square cover would not be feasible, without a tether system to fish them out of the literal shit, after they fall in from a few inch misalignment.
The hole came first. They dig a hole, then they have a need to put a cover on it. Making a circular cover to fit over a circular hole is if anything cheaper and easier than making a square cover over an inscribed circular hole, at least when working with metal.
The hole drove the design of the cover, not the other way around.
In this hypothetical, presuming you're putting the manhole (subsurface conduit/plumbing maintenance access point) in after you've already paved the road: it's because the tool you'd use to cut a hole into pavement (i.e. a concrete saw) cuts straight lines — and it's easier to make a square/rectangle out of straight lines than a circle. And sure enough, whenever you see workers hacking up the road, they generally are cutting square holes.
At the end of this process, you have a square hole in the pavement, opening to a square excavation, bottoming out at a square concrete foundation, on which has been set a round concrete cylinder, which is then surrounded out to the edge of the square hole with packed earth.
Given this, you could equally-well finish this job either:
1. by placing a square of metal to fill the entire square packed-earth space you've constructed (as when bridging a pothole with a temporary steel surface plate);
2. or by first paving over the exposed packed-earth part, and then placing a circle of metal to cover only the manhole entrance itself.
...which is why people do justifiably ask why, in practice, we seem to always favor option 2 over option 1.
A manhole is a hole for men to go in, not a near-surface utility access. Those square cut quick access holes often do have square metal covers.
The manhole opens up into a vertical tube, often with a ladder built into the wall, big enough around for a man to descend into a subsurface structure. Hence, manhole.
Manhole covers are always round because the tube they connect to is round, and that tube is round for structural reasons.
If that was the reason a Reuleaux triangle would have the same property while using (I think) less material for a given size of shaft (as long as the shaft can be triangular). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reuleaux_triangle
To explain myself better now I am awake and have had coffee: What makes a cover that cannot fall down the hole that it is covering? The width[1] of the closed curve has to be larger than that of the hole. A circle is easy to understand because it is a closed curve of fixed width, but a Reuleaux triangle is also a closed curve of fixed width, meaning if that fixed width is greater than the widest part of the hole, then there is no orientation of the cover in 3D that will allow it to fall down the hole. It’s easy to see if you take an equilateral triangle, circumscribe it with the smallest circle and then (mentally) construct the Reuleaux triangle that the Reuleaux triangle sits inside the circle and so would use less material.
[1] This is defined as the minimum perpendicular distance between parallel lines bounding the shape.
That answer would be akin to someone asking “why is the sun round?” and answering with “it’s roughly the optimal shape for viewing the totality of the sun”.
I guess it varies by country which I should have acknowledged. I was talking UK and EU and Africa which I am most familiar with, although I have also been to the USA and Asia and seen manhole covers there. You certainly get round manhole covers, but there are far more rectangular ones. Eg this kind of thing https://www.drainageshop.co.uk/polydrain-inspection-chamber/...
They have the public betas (available to anyone) but this is a developer beta and requires a developer account (albeit you don't need to pay the $99 anymore). They should probably put it behind the $99 barrier again. It astounds me that people on a site like HN can install a developer beta and then act shocked that it's not 'buttery smooth'. Companies either need to educate people or make it difficult to access beta software again.
To add to what others said - almost every major iOS / macOS release will be slower and drain battery more on the first day after install. The reason for that is they do a lot of indexing of your data and other preprocessing things that enable new features after you install. Once these processes end your device will go back to normal.
I’m surprised Apple does not communicate this fact more clearly to people, as many seem to be totally unaware of it (I do remember seeing notifications on macOS about that though)
Their developer betas are always unfinished and unoptimized. Once you’ve been through a few of them you become able to evaluate the early versions based on the likely trajectory leading up to release.
>> I am trying it out and aside from being unpolished it’s also slower. My phone used to be buttery smooth. No longer.
IT'S A BETA! Seriously. Of course it's slower. Your phone will run hot. Your battery life will drop. And in three months when it's released it will run nicely - just like each of the last 18 years.
My first thought was: This seems like a very logical next step in order to prepare for future broader market adoption of AR applications and AR glasses.
Being a sceptic about the latter at first I must say, I wish the technology would finally allow having a "normal" pair of glasses with high resolution, no cable attached, AR overlay screens.
I often think that the quality of the product goes against employment incentives. Nobody gets promoted for preserving the good product. Employees get measured of how many changes they make.
Any time a new visual effect comes around people overuse it, then after a while it gets toned down and usability improves, then a new trend emerges and the cycle repeats.
I don't think it's a particularly hard concept to grasp what's happening here. UI elements above content stop you seeing it. Apple has tried to make them both see through so that you screen feels bigger and stand out so that you can actually interact with the UI effectively. Some images/demos look good. Some look horrible. Time will tell.
Shader-based refraction/blur/chromatic aberration seems to be generating a lot of hype, but it’s stuff that game developers have been doing for decades.
The bigger news is draggable, resizable windows in iPadOS 26. That’s quite an upgrade.
What I am curious about is that isn't there a team or group in Apple with a keen eye for UX that are independent of the designing teams, sort of dogfood these changes over a period and have the authority to initiate corrections/fixes? Sort of like UX QA but with actual powers?
The Tahoe beta implementation is incredibly rough.
Because it is trying to simulate diffused glass layers apps have a kind of low resolution look to them and certain UX elements just do not work at all with odd spacing and gaps because of different sized rounded corners. Where the UX works is where the implementations are the most minimal.
It will get better before launch, but I worry the concept is a bit half baked.
This style of simulating faux-realistic materials (such as glass or aluminum) on the screen looks dated and cheesy now -- (Windows engineering team 2012)
They really took that idea a little too far especially considering they never executed it even more than half way. We still have control panels that are using their pre-2012 look and feel.
I don't want to be a hater, I've been an Apple fan for a long time. I'm hopeful they can finish strong and get this redesign over the high quality bar by the time it leaves beta. But this video diminishes that hope for me.
Almost everything they describe as advantages (primarily the fluid motion features) can be done without making the controls see-through. Everything else seems to be a straight-up degradation in quality. It all feels totally over-engineered.
Also, if you'll allow me to old-man-yells-at-cloud for a moment:
> The motion of liquids is something we all have an intuitive feel for
Ignoring that they're highlighting literal bubbles at that point in the video (famously not liquid, except at the bottom of the ocean), liquid is also famously hard to simulate well. It's literally the least intuitive form of matter.
> Tinting helps legibility and contrast
I want my controls to be legible always! Tinting should draw my attention or trigger a mental pathway (e.g. "red for dangerous operation"), not be the core thing that makes a component legible against its background.
> Here is a button that is using a solid fill instead of tinting. As you can tell [sic] it is completely opaque and breaks the visual character of Liquid Glass [also sic, there's no liquid glass in the shot yet]. But notice when it starts using the new tinting. All of a sudden it feels more transparent and more grounded in its environment.
No it doesn't! It literally appears more detached from it which is why it looks better and THE WHOLE POINT OF TINTING that you just described. I love the look and feel of this tinting example, but you just made it seem like you got to a good place by total accident.
I really want to believe y'all know what you're doing this time around.
Given that Apple has really smart people, I assume this design was the right answer to whatever actual problem they were set. My guess - someone noticed a small cohort of potential new users that want this; and the company prioritized the marginal user over the core user base. Maybe there's a cohort of VR users not on iOS yet?
I see some "it's just Aero all over again" comments.
Isn't this a common Apple schtick though? Doing something that others have done already, but doing it more comprehensively, executing it better? I'm sure this isn't perfect yet. But watching the video, I certainly felt like a more holistic approach went into this than what Microsoft tried years ago. Time will tell whether the design teams goals will have the reach to actually matter in the wider breadth of Apple's execution of it.
Agreed. I initially thought "this is going to make everything look so messy" but after I watched this particular video, it's clear that they've put so much thought into every scenario imaginable, including giving developers a lot of advice on when to use it, and when not to use it.
All that is very old-school Apple actually. Way way way more thought put beneath the surface than just meets the eye, when it comes to UI interactions.
I remember the inertial scrolling, rubber banding stuff on iOS. During those early days, people analyzed things like the navigation push and pop animations, and there was a lot more going on there than just "go left, go right"
Yes, this. When I first heard about OS X all those years ago, I dismissed the ideas as eye-candy until I actually played with it. I quickly noticed how much thought had been put into what was conveyed by all the little animations and finesse touches.
The same thing applies here, I think - I watched the video expecting to see the exact opposite of what I want in a UI, but came away impressed by how much thought and consideration has been put into it.
They ran tons of a/b testing on user groups. I can tell you it feels fresh to me which is very necessary with aesthetics (fashion). Their main operating principle I believe is that they have acclimatized users to the position and flow of the UI for over a decade. At that point, you can embellish the UI.
If I skinned HN to anything you would still be totally intimate with where things are so long as I didn’t put yellow on light blue or something wild like that.
A/B testing doesn’t work if the actual answer is C
I don’t want my computer (which I use for work) to be a fashion statement. I stare at the UI all day, every day. My opinion matters just as much as any designer’s.
The need to emphasize each term. Talking heads might be boring, but lecterns and tables are useful because unless you are walking, modt of the time your hands should be still.
Subtext: If you’re not under 30, with great eyesight, fuck you. If you’re neurodivergent, fuck you. If you just want to use your technology to do useful things and don’t need to be “delighted” by every button press and interaction, fuck you.
I don’t see how this won’t disable a lot of people. It’s cruel.
The section where they talk about how it adapts to different situations so that it still shows the top layer information did not inspire hope. I’m autistic and I have a hard time picking out signal from a noisy background easily. In the demo, it’s as if the icons are constantly dancing (delightfully, no doubt) but the information is lost.
For those that say that Apple always has accessibility settings where you can lessen effects like this, that’s not enough. We’re techies. We know about fiddling with settings. A lot of people won’t know. A lot of people that will be affected by this won’t consider themselves disabled, so they don’t even know the word “accessibility”. It’ll just subtly make every interaction with their technology more difficult and more stressful.
As an Apple user myself, I still find it really hard to watch official Apple presentations because they’re so full of stupid adjectives that make their products sound like divine intervention when in reality they were just built to look “cool”.
I mean, I get the need to promote things in a favourable light. But Apples language sets off my “bullshit detectors” with every sentence they utter.
It’s no wonder they polarise people like a religious cult.
1. Browser navigation overlapping website viewport in iOS Safari. What is the real height of the viewport?
2. Floating side panel on macOS: necessitates needless extension the app body. Also, the App close button is in the side panel, which is floating IN the app body. This seems like a betrayal of their so called structure philosophy.
This year it's been 25 years since the introduction of OSX and its Aqua theme. I wonder if that was a driving factor here, to have the next generation aqua interface.
I'm not a designer but, while I like the glass effect, I don't think the icons (1:42) really look that good. They are overly black / white and have harsh looking edges. Not horrible, but not optimal either imo.
Liquid Glass takes too many brain cycles for the user. It takes too much cognitive attention to watch all its changes and wait until buttons are ready to click. I don't want to waste a lot of attention "appreciating" Apple's new UI. I just want to get stuff done.
This is the first time that I truly don't like what Apple has done with the UI.
Honestly there have been things where I had to give it some time, and maybe this design will grow on me too. Lord knows Apple puts a lot of resources into this.
I thought the glass effect on Windows Vista was pretty good 15-20 years ago but eventually disappeared. I'm sure this will be much better since Apple are far better than anyone else at design. Of course, I use Linux most of the time and crack open my MacBook once a week at most so I won't benefit from it much.
I doubt it would be as cohesive as what Apple would do - they are paying legions of top designers to think about every pixel. If it comes super well designed out of the box I appreciate it but I don't care enough to bother tweaking anything. I've tried various plug-ins in Gnome but all pretty amateur compared to what Apple is doing. Of course, I'll stick to Linux as I want to develop in the same environment that my code will be running in production. The other aspects matter far less to me.
The real question for me - what will my Qt-based Mac apps look like on macOS 26? Are existing controls going to be broken? Am I going to have to get every icon re-done? Apple are not exactly known for putting any effort into backward compatibility.
I was skeptical at first but like it a lot after trying out the betas. It's all very intuitive if you've used visionOS before and the potential readability problems aren't really an issue in practice.
I think the fact that it supports colored glass, and it has 2 variants, and it promotes dimming layer - says that current implementation is probably not the end of the story
One thing I haven’t heard yet about Liquid Glass: Glass is good for looking through it. So an OS based on this could be ideal for Extended Reality. Having iOS resemble visionOS more might be a step towards using iPhones as XR devices. Could we then potentially see a fancy Apple version of Google cardboard in the future, where you use your iPhone as an AR device as well…?
The most important thing about this new design is that it differentiates itself from Android. Not super important in the U.S. where iPhone lock-in is pretty endemic, but for the markets where there is competition, this bit of eye candy will make a big difference.
Usability is secondary. The directive from on high was probably about creating a more visually distinctive UI which takes advantage of Apple hardware, thus making it harder to emulate.
Think of the next YouTube review comparing devices. Liquid glass will stand out, regardless of its user experience.
I agree with your reasoning, but I would add that customers also want to be easily distinguished from using an Android or a different device. Apple has long recognised the importance of this sign value and is acting accordingly.
Apple and Androids relationship I would say is known and stable.
I suspect they are more worried about HarmonyOS phones in China and other markets as Huawei are fierce competition.
“Calculations based on data from the government-affiliated China Academy of Information and Communications Technology showed that April shipments of foreign-branded phones in China rose to 3.52 million units from 3.50 million a year earlier.
Apple has faced increased competition from domestic rivals in China and has resorted to price cuts to stay competitive.
Chinese e-commerce platforms were offering discounts of up to 2,530 yuan ($351) on Apple's latest iPhone 16 models in May.“
Eh I am still not convinced that this will be good UI. I wish they would have put a one 1px white border around the glass UI button elements or something small like this to enhance it just a little better. I will have to use it to really get a feeling... Also that switch toggle shown in the video looks weird its so satisfying turning on/off a switch UI element without anything else interfering with such a simple concept.
I have liked MacOS UI upgrades over the years though, I am glad we don't use the brushed metal anymore :)
It is funny, when they showed how easy to ignore all the Apple TV menus would be, all I could think was my consistent opines to various elderly TV users who I’ve complained to about smart TV/TV app menus.
“I just want the ugliest, highest-contrast menus possible, with everything labeled in large font“
I really can’t stand these augmented-voice videos. I get that they’re meant to sound polished or stylized, but to me it just comes off as creepy and distracting. Whatever processing or autotune effect they’re using strips the humanity out of the voice and gives it this artificial vibe — like a personified LinkedIn post. What could be an interesting technical walkthrough ends up feeling more like a spammy marketing pitch than a real person sharing insights.
Maybe there’s an audience for that kind of aesthetic — especially among people who grew up immersed in highly produced digital media — but I’d much rather hear someone’s actual voice, imperfections and all. That rawness is what makes content engaging and authentic. When everything is filtered and synthetic, it’s hard to connect with the speaker or take the message seriously. (Maybe that’s why Apple has had to change spokes models every two minutes since Jobs.)
Honestly, I wish people would stop overproducing everything. I wouldn’t be surprised if this guy was using a green screen too — for no good reason! It just adds to the weird, artificial feeling.
so this did all this transparency stuff without it being the run up to the launch of a new augmented-reality device? I don't understand what they are thinking.
Like many of us, my initial reaction is to criticize because it feels like they asked ChatGPT to create the script for this demo video with a lot of filler words. It's exhausting parsing all the "connecting to the physical world" phrases just to understand they added refraction between UI elements. I wish someone would just speak these new things to me straightly.
However, I can't pass over that Apple's Design team is top-notch. They absolutely take the little polishes to the highest degree they can. A lot of it doesn't look necessary. We clown on Apple but comparing the iPhone UI to Android, there are just many less visual glitches and jagged edges on iPhone. Apple is known for its polish. A lot of it looks like repeating the visual eye candy of the past that people quickly grew tired of.
To me this looks like they're bridging the gap to running the UI as a full 3-dimensional physics sandbox. They talk about how the new glass surfaces are broken into 4 layers that adapt to each other. I think this is cool how this works mechanically, but I know this will be hardly be legible to most users. I'll have to train myself to get used to it. I do prefer flatter, more minimal designs with less complexity.
I think the future is the UI going from 2d elements to 3d elements. I think scrollbars and buttons and such will be defined as full material objects in 3d space in the future with inherent weight and inertia, etc. I know as an outsider I'm probably naive that this is already so in some ways. Right now most UI elements are 2d materials emulating 3d ones. I do think we've moved up to the point where our less powerful devices like watches and phones can handle running a 3d physics sandbox all the time, and sipping power while they do.
This is the precursor to 3-dimentional physics-based UIs. It's sort of a joke but I do expect ray-traced shadows in the future/soon. Much less static assets, many more materials. MMW~
We have 'instinctive visual cues' for depth and light coming from above, hence why button gradients are so immediately effective,because our visual system recognizes it in milliseconds. we don't have "instictive visual cues" for refraction and lensing , that's why we are confused about underwater distances . That's why magnifying glasses make us dizzy. I just can't believe this is coming from apple.
Plus, to be truly realistic it also would need to take into account ambient lighting scenarios surrounding the device displaying it.
Like this it’s really just another try in recreating glass which never made sense to be used in UI.
It is beyond me, how this got chosen as a way forward - taking visual design which makes sense in a VR/AR environment, to ruin their rectangular display UI.
It will make implementation way more complex than it is already and worse it will set off an avalanche of badly done imitations creating a mess throughout all touchpoints across companies taking years to clean up again - just as I thought that UI design finally reached an acceptable level of maturity.
Sad, really sad for a company like Apple to throw out precision, clarity and contrast for “effect”.
Sad.
It's not actually glass, instead the apple engineers and designers are basically simulating effect of surface tension of drops of liquid. Unfortunately the refraction at the edges of a droplet is not informative about whether the droplet is inward or outward facing (i.e. if it it toggled on or off). Hence why they use additional highlights and shadow to indicate the 3D structure. The liquid effect is a total gimmick . And they added insult to injury by adding color-changes and movement which is totally distracting when you re scrolling that diffucult paper.
I know most people couldn’t care less about this, but those gimmicky animations probably consume more computing power than the entire Apollo project, which strikes me as unnecessary and wasteful. Given the choice, I’d much rather have a clean, efficient interface.
I tend to like Material Design in comparison. It’s clean, efficient, and usable. I just hope Google won’t try to "improve" it with annoying gimmicks and end up making things worse, like Apple did here.
"Flat" design is equally offensive by not demarcating controls as controls, or their state in an intuitive way.
Just as we were finally seeing UI step away from that BS, Apple jumps all the way back into much-scorned, cheesily-excessive skeuomorphism... adding a raft of failed ideas from 20 years ago.
Since this is in contrast to "wildly not flat and full of visual gimmicks": the modern "flat" style has severe (and very stupid) issues, yea. But "flat" has been around for a very long time in touch UI with clear control boundaries - just draw a box around it, maybe give it a background color.
That's better than plain text that just happens to be a hidden control, but text with a background color might just be... text with a background color, for emphasis. Or it's text with a background color, to distinguish it from editable text. A background color does not tell the user that it's a control.
A box around it? Slightly better, but still doesn't convey state. Sure, you can fill it in when it's "on," but that's still guesswork on the part of the user if he arrives to find it filled in already.
I'm pretty sure my Amiga 1000 had more computing power than the entire Apollo project. I mostly used it for games.
Historically, design as a priority worsened UI for average and new users, and Apple has prioritized a feeling of elegance over ease of use.
Liquid glass puts UI second (feature cues) in favor of UX (interesting experience), harkening back to skeuomorphism but misprioritizing UI. I appreciated in Jobs's time how skeuomorphism was used to reveal more features, and give new users simple cues.
Now there is this idea that there is a higher percentage of advanced users, but since now there are MORE users (anyone with a screen), and continual change, I think there is still a large percentage of less advanced users "harmed" by prioritizing UX over UI.
It's also ironic that so much effort has been spent on the "liquid" feel of the phone ... which is mostly lost when it's in a case.
I think they refuse to pick a shade of grey for their UI's background, so we're stuck with transparent elements.
You know the dominant apps used on phones have large full screen user-generated video and imagery, right?
These are UI elements designed to work great over scrolling content feeds, full screen product images, album artwork, and thirty second videos of people doing meme dances. There is no room for ‘a gray background’.
This doesn’t justify applying a less than suboptimal design for everything else.
UI on content is a special case just like AR and here it might be ok, but why add “glass” as a background on icons or panels for text that are served much better by using a single colored transparent background without the noise that glass is bringing to the table - if there’s a background needed at all.
The visual signal to noise ratio is being cranked up to 11 for novelty’s sake.
I think you’re watching a way different video about this than me.
In the design guidance they’re explicitly saying liquid glass is for selective elements in the navigation layer. When those elements pop up modals those use a very subdued and opaque glass that loses the adaptive contrast, but still physically embeds them in that same floating navigation layer.
They’re not saying everything needs to be made of glass. They’re explicitly saying don’t make everything from glass.
For highlighting text?
> These are UI elements designed to work great over scrolling content feeds, full screen product images, album artwork, and thirty second videos of people doing meme dances
Liquid glass also seems terrible for this type of application. TikTok's overlays are much less intrusive and distracting.
the liquid glass ends up being vital for windows in AR. the vision pro has this, and it really helps you see behind the windows you've placed. while a shit experience on a phone, i do think liquid glass is a useful choice in the AR world
Back in my day (as far back as a month ago), we just called that effect “transparency” or “translucency”. Hell, there are types of AppKit popup windows that have the effect on by default, that have existed untouched since the early days of Mac OS X. Don’t give Apple more credit than they deserve here.
No question about that - see above.
What works for augmented UI doesn’t in a desktop, mobile or 10ft experience.
It’s a terrible mistake porting something to an environment where transparency isn’t helping but brings about the opposite effect.
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That’s an interesting point, never thought about it.
These complicated lenses distorting light from all directions look fancy in a designer portfolio, having them almost everywhere… I’m not sure how it will work out.
In contrast, the original material design was quite intuitive, iirc they based their design on paper sheets, much simpler, and much more common in our day to day life.
I still have some hope it will work out great, if Apple can take the accessibility visibility issues seriously, and developers using it in moderation, it can be great.
I see no way around all that optics physics not sucking up computation and battery. Perhaps Apple will add liquid glass silicon to the mix to do that physics in hardware. Using glass to compute glass, LOL
my initial thought is that apple is preparing to launch physically deforming screens which will create bumps similar to this liquid.
Or using cameras to render what’s behind the phone as a background. That would help explain the continued focus on thinness.
The continued focus on thinness betrays a lack of useful ideas... a hallmark of the Jony Ive school of enshittification.
Physically tactile would change my opinion about Liquid Glass. And it would make screens more usable for the visually impaired.
Then it would make no sense to simulate them.
Unless you want the same look on your non-tactile and tactile surfaces.
But I think the theory is too far-fetched.
I remember finding this super cool when it first came out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JelhR2iPuw0
I'm not sure I'd want that on my daily devices, however I would like this on my car heads-up unit where tactile feedback with actual buttons is preferred to keep the eyes on the road. At least that would be better than nothing.
I wouldn't want it on my daily devices either, but mainly because I prefer my touchscreens to be perfectly flat and durable glass.
Liquid glass can't possibly be that much more expensive than vibrancy (if it even is). The refraction effects are effectively just a displacement map (probably calculated realtime, but still).
Paper sheets do not have controls on them. That's why "Material Design" sucks too, as all does the rest of the "flat" design fad.
Minimal visual cues, analogous (not photo-faithful) to real-world physical objects made GUIs a revolutionary advance in computer use. Both flat design and this new Apple junk (which, let's face it, is a return to hated and nonsensical skeuomorphism) ignore the very concepts that made GUIs so usable.
The linked video gives the explicit human interface guideline of don’t use it everywhere.
> I just can't believe this is coming from apple.
Apple has prioritized style over usability for decades now. Remember the godawful hockey puck mouse and how stubbornly they clung to it? It shouldn't be a surprise when Apple picks a solution that looks cool but is worse to use; that's who they are.
I agree that their keyboards and mice are the worst. Even the cheapest no-name peripherals do not invoke the same kind of anxiety that Apple's stuff does. I don't have any issue with their UIs however. I think they are generally very good. Things are not perhaps as discoverable as they could be but the alternative would probably be worse as it would lead to more clutter.
> I agree that their keyboards and mice are the worst.
They are now. A couple of weeks ago I bought an Apple keyboard from the late 80s on EBay (M0116 model). After a quick solder job wiring half an S-Video cable to a ProMicro, it now talks USB, works perfectly and is one of the best feeling keyboards you could hope to use. (One of the later iterations with saner cursor key placement would be better still, though...)
The accessibility angle is what concerns me. The demos of the Music app, for example, seemed much less clear. You’re gonna have to mess around with whatever settings they provide to turn it off if you have impaired visibility.
It gives off a weird 2.5D HUD effect that works well enough in first-person games (which is basically simulating AR), but is just harder to read and kind of unmoored from the main UX on a flat screen.
Their accessibility settings actually seem decent. You can turn off the animation, increase contrast, go nearly opaque… I still don’t think I’ll love this new paradigm, but it looks like I can mostly mitigate my concerns.
End of the linked video highlights the accessibility settings.
I have a feeling it's a bit of cart driving the horse. Look at all this GFX power we have, how could we harness it for UI instead of boring old compositing and alpha?
At the same time remember how much of a struggle it was in the 90s to show transparent layers? Good times
Apple is the company that makes laptops without power LEDs so you can't even tell if they're on.
“Think different”
Joking aside, “design” clearly supplanting ease of use
> we don't have "instictive visual cues" for refraction and lensing
Do you have anything to back this up? Seems a lot of your argument is hinging on this point. I’m skeptical that 1. this is true, and 2. Apple wouldn’t have considered it if it were true
The sample interfaces and usecases seem highly legible and match my instinctive visual understanding for transparent materials. They look attractive and well separated from their surroundings. Not sure what this objection is coming from - have you looked at the results?
How is this wrong?
Our visual system is optimized, rather extremely, for understanding 3d scenes under the simple perspective model that our eyes are based on: x' = (x * f) / z
Outside of that 99.999% experience norm, that are brains are so used to, is disconnect and discomfort. If you've ever put on a new pair of glasses, with a different prescription, you'll understand exactly what he's talking about: depth offset and dizziness.
The disconnect is why refraction and lensing is interesting to look at: the model your eyes are used to seeing, for the world behind the thing, is not normal.
I wonder if this is linked to the reason that so many people become nauseous with 3D glasses.
When we see 3d movements that don't correlate with what our inner ears, the response is that our body assumes something is wrong, we have ingested a toxin, and a nausea / vomit response is created.
There is something visually jarring about this Liquid Glass UI, and it's possible it's related to movements not correlating with an internal frame of reference.
I get car sick quite easily, same with VR, but I actually like the design language of Liquid Glass over the first iteration of Material (I like the new updates to Material too). I think people should watch from minute 13 onward if they're short on time and want the gist of it.
I guess I'm a weird outlier and that's fine.
I can't use 3d glasses because my eyes don't converge properly. Maybe one day I'll have surgery to correct that
the fact that it's surprising does not make it a visual cue. A cue to what? I am not aware of any psychophysics study that says we have perception of droplets or lens transformations (in contrast to shadows , gradients etc that are well studied). There also doesn't seem to be an evolutionary reason for it because the natural world does not have lenses and glass. And UIs are usually based on intuitive features.
Not saying this makes the ui good but it should go without saying that the natural world has water which acts as a lens.
Also, of course we have perception of droplets. What we don’t have is an intuitive understanding of how light interacts with droplets.
I suspect that Apple are trying to leverage this lack of intuition to make their ui interesting to look at in an evergreen way. New backgrounds mean new interesting interactions. I’m not confident that they’ve succeeded or that that’s actually a good goal to have though. I have it on my iPhone 13 and personally I find it annoying to parse, and I feel relief when I go back to traditional apps untouched by the update like Google Maps
droplets of water are not lenses without a glass behind it, and we couldn't see substantial effects behind them before we had glass windows. There was little evolutionary reason to develop any perception of refraction in droplets of water. in contrast, shadows are instant indicators of distance and gradients instantly distinguish concave from convex surfaces for light coming from above.
(water doesnt do lensing unless it s a droplet)
I get that your point is that we don’t have a strong intuition for lenses and that’s tied to a lack of evolutionary reason to have them. I agree and suspect that might be the point of why Apple are using a the lens effects. We don’t need to go so far as to say the natural world is completely devoid of such phenomena. Of course they’re there but they’re largely not relevant to survival throughout human history
Is there any study saying that user interfaces should use visual effects for which our brains have hardware acceleration? It seems a reasonable premise, but is there data?
Taking advantage of innate perceptual cues is smart and our interfaces have always taken advantages of them https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depth_perception
we shouldn't need a manual to interpret a UI
I don’t entirely disagree, but that is still an intuition, not a proof that our interfaces should always work that way.
We used to ride animals with legs, which worked a lot like our legs do. Does that mean the wheel is wrong? We don’t have wheels, and they don’t occur in nature.
I don’t think Apple has invented the wheel, and I’m inclined to agree that leveraging our hardware acceleration makes sense. But I haven’t seen anything beyond blind assertion that of course it has to work that way.
If our brain understands one thing, it's that glass is a wall between our body and what we see. You can't touch that, or you'll hurt yourself.
That's... an odd thing for your brain to believe about glass.
That --in case it wasn't clear, and I can see why it wouldn't be-- refers to the thing you're looking at, through glass.
Nailed it.
Apple's vaunted UI has always been crippled by some stupid decisions and practices. But exhuming the idiotic "transparent" UI fad that died 20 years ago must rank among the worst.
What Apple just rolled out is embarrassing and depressing. You know it's bad when a thread like this is full of well-written, incontrovertible takedowns and nearly devoid of apologist drivel.
Holding Apple to a high standard this long after the the death of the industry’s one and only true UI/UX purist is folly.
It’s regular “you”s and “me”s there now.
US corporate structure absolutely kills the spirit in the kind of people who could make a difference. And when it doesn’t, it kills the ability of those people to be promoted to a position of influence.
I am not a huge fan of Steve Jobs, but he did understand UI and UX better than just about anyone, and he stuck to his guns.
“I can’t believe this is coming from Apple” is something I said when I saw iPhones with a camera bump. Camera bumps are a fucking abomination.
Apple is only for morons and children at this point, "liquid glass" seems like a great little gimmick for that group!
I think I'm convinced with liquid glass design, the issues highlighted by the users in the beta release IMHO are a result of rushing it out for WWDC. It appears that they didn't have enough time to polish the UI to comply with the principles described in this video.
For example the designer in this video says no glass over glass but the control center and the lock screen are glass over glass. It looks cluttered and the legibility is horrible, as predicted by the designers here.
They probably just compiled the old UI with the new liquid glass framework without going through the design considerations that are required by the new system.
By the time of the release, it will look great if Apple doesn't shy away from letting their developers re-work everything.
What I wonder now is, why hadn't that happen already? Don't the internal developers have access to the new design and the people behind it until the last moment? If the designers of Liquid Glass and the designers of the locks screen and the control center have talked, they would have known the principles described in the WWDC video and avoid all that.
This is not surprising at all.
I was a student taking an android dev course when the first iteration of material design came out. My classmates and I had the running joke of “this is an amazing design guide, someone should send it to google”.
You’d see even the most specific principles being broken, the left menu in gmail for example interacted with the header exactly the opposite way the guide said it should.
Pros know all the rules, masters know when to break them.
The main issue I feel is that Apple's internal threshold for what quality of software is acceptable to be launched to the public has dropped a lot in the years since the last major redesign.
Yes, they iterate through versions and drop things that don't work with their design philosophy (parallax effects on iOS 7) but the first major version they released always seemed well thought out and solid from a design perspective.
I don't get that feeling from this redesign. I'm sure that this Liquid Glass redesign would look and work great next year or the year after that or even by the public launch of iOS 26. They'll fix the issues with readability, control center etc. But the fact that the first version of Liquid Glass doesn't look good is what's problematic.
iOS 7's first beta design was worse than this. They walked back some pretty distinctive parts of the design - mainly the ultra thin fonts - during the betas and following releases.
Agree to disagree I guess - iOS 7’s initial preview wasn’t perfect but not incoherent and illegible to this degree.
If anyone wants to refresh their memory: https://youtu.be/6jBK3Dggkwg
Not to mention way more functionality added to the OS that year than this.
This hasn’t been “launched to the public”. It’s a developer beta so that developers can start working on testing and updating their apps for the new OS.
You're right that this isn't "launched to the public" and is just a developer beta. However, I meant it in a more "outside of Apple" kind of way. I guess that should have been clearer.
Everyone at Apple knows WWDC is in June, and WWDC is the event where Apple show off the new stuff and deliver a public beta. Some of the terrible designs were shown in the pre-recorded demos, and if anyone had used the new beta for more than five minutes, they would have ended up in the broken control center.
It’s a beta though, plenty of time until this comes out to polish.
It’s also the biggest software event in the Apple world. The implementation may improve, but the pre-recorded demo videos show off the bad parts pretty clearly, almost as if the terrible readability is intentional.
And not even a public beta, a developer only beta.
Tbh, I get strong flat-earther vibes from that video ;) E.g. trying to justify a stupid base assumptiom with pseudo-science.
I predict that in 2..5 years Apple will go back to regular opaque UI elements with a slight 3D hint to separate items that can be interacted with from non-interactive items.
Windows users might be lucky when Microsoft skips that fashion cycle by saying "been there, done that".
> Windows users might be lucky when Microsoft skips that fashion cycle by saying "been there, done that".
Given Microsoft’s track record, I’d expect worse, not better. Metro might’ve looked good on phones, but the desktop incarnation was pretty ugly (it was basically Windows 1.0 with antialiasing) compared to Aero. It would be completely on brand for them to do something like ditch their current reasonably nice looking Fluent in favor of something hideous and then stubbornly try to make it work without changes for the next decade before finally relenting.
If you're right, maybe the reason they rushed it is because people accuse Apple of copying others if they take time to do something right
However, it is also true that Apple's QA gets bad lately. They let features creep but lose attention to detail so there are more small glitches recently. Along with just bad design, like surely the old Apple would not allow mouse cursor to be "lost" in the notch on the new MBPs. Maybe it's the trend. They become less and less about getting it right and more about getting it out and then reacting when users complain.
> because people accuse Apple of copying others if they take time to do something right
Windows Vista had a translucent UI nearly two decades ago, that should be enough time for Apple to figure out if it's a good or bad idea to copy ;)
There's also plenty of computer games which experiment with translucency in their UIs.
If the Apple UI designers would look out of their ivory tower from time to time they could have realized that translucent UIs are an exceptionally stupid idea after the very shortlived "oooooh fancy shaders" novelty effect is over.
I think I know what happened.
The A-squad design team left Apple 15 years ago.
The B-squad left 5 years ago.
What remains is a sea of Gen Z designers who weren't yet alive when the foggy glass of Windows Vista seemed like a good idea.
Meanwhile, the talent wars are raging, with every AI company offering 7-figure salaries to the best of Apple's prodigies.
Apple is now the old guard. They're no longer cool, and as a public company, cost controls are too stringent; they can't pay as much. What is Apple to do?
They can give the designers a sense of ownership. It's not a question of how (un)qualified the team is; it's a retention play.
Is the design good? The A and B squads would say no. But this is the best Apple can do these days to keep critical talent engaged.
They'll burn a cycle re-learning fundamental lessons in accessibility, retain talent, and cling to the hope that next year they'll have a midwit Siri than can book a flight with a decent looking UI.
Alan Dye is the interface design lead at Apple, he's been there since 2006.
One of the lead designers on Liquid Glass is Chan Karunamuni, who's been at Apple since the early 2010s. If you search for more of the names of the design presenters at this WWDC, you'll find a lot of people with similarly long tenure.
So the theory that it's all Gen Z designers with no experience or talent seems pretty weak.
Yeah, sure. But it's more fun to talk in hypotheticals and point fingers at straw people and those young kids that make a fetish of old Nokia phones and dumb tech.
So I'm sure there's 3 Gen Z folks in a trench coat approving the work of those other Gen Z designers.
All this is just delegating to flavor of the domain "higher powers" instead of trying to grapple with the complexity of reality.
We just have to wait for Gen Alpha to bring back flat design 10 or so years from today.
And to think this is the same field that has an issue with ageism as indicated by this post yesterday. I take serious issue with people over 40 being protected while discrimination against young people "just doesn't exist". It's a clear case of the law being constructed to advantage the already advantaged. It's politically expedient because old people have wealth and influence and young people don't. Could you hire someone who can't demonstrate competence in an interview to do the job? Why does it matter if they're 20 or 100? Yet the two cases are treated very differently. You can say you won't hire a 20 year old because they don't know what they're doing, but can you not hire the 100 year old because their mental faculties have deteriorated?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44269225
Edit: this appears to be a hot take, so I challenge others to take a step back and consider other protected classes and anti-discrimination laws. They don't call out one race or sex, they say they're all protected and the very act of discriminating is not allowed during hiring. They don't say "you can't discriminate against white people or men but others are fine". That's what the ADEA does.
Especially at Apple where it’s very well known that ultimate decision making is centralised around very few, very senior people.
A lot of "old and senior people" also fumble with big mistakes a lot of the time. They're not all-perfect gods. In reality, most successful people are one trick ponies. They caught lightning in a bottle once early on that boosted their careers but that doesn't mean they're still relevant and correct with their decision making today.
Look at John Romero, he knocked it out of the park with Doom 1, 2 and some of Quake, but all his projects after have been flops of catastrophic proportions. Look at Jonny Ive's last design mistakes at Apple compared to the early successes that were perfection from all aspects.
Most people can't pull success after success forever, they always bottom out at some point then decline, some sooner than others, especially in a fast changing field like tech. So it's a high chance those senior higher ups at Apple are now dated and out of touch, but still have the high egos and influence from the bygone era. Happens at virtually 100% of the companies.
> They're not all-perfect gods. In reality, most successful people are one trick ponies. They caught lightning in a bottle once early on that boosted their careers but that doesn't mean they're still relevant and correct with their decision making today.
I don't think that characterization is quite right either. I'm a big fan of Brian Eno's "scenius" phrasing:
> A few years ago I came up with a new word. I was fed up with the old art-history idea of genius - the notion that gifted individuals turn up out of nowhere and light the way for all the rest of us dummies to follow. I became (and still am) more and more convinced that the important changes in cultural history were actually the product of very large numbers of people and circumstances conspiring to make something new. I call this ‘scenius’ - it means ‘the intelligence and intuition of a whole cultural scene’.
Extremely successful people benefit from the scenius within which they get to operate. But as that context changes and evolves over time, they fail to recreate their earlier wild successes - not because they lost any of their skills (although that can also happen), but because the skills aren't sufficient, and the deep, layered conditions that enabled those wild successes just aren't there anymore.
I think there is something in that. Certainly the world of work does seem to pivot between rewarding people that “do the work” and those that “do the work around the work” but separate themselves from actual execution. 2021-2 was peak middle manager froth, and were on a swing toward more operator led now. Usually middle management “present the work upwards” types dominate though.
That a great idea, perhaps it is not just cultural.
Look at the Solvay Conference. That's a lot of lightning in a bottle all at once.
Though it's beyond me to articulate it, perhaps that was also cultural.
I could believe that this happens at Apple if it wasn't for the executive veto that pushed stuff like the Touch Bar and Butterfly Keyboard to consumers. It sounds less like "very large numbers of people" conspiring, and more like a select few conspirators hand-picking the contributions they think would sell well.
> Look at John Romero, he knocked it out of the park with Doom 1, 2 and some of Quake, but all his projects after have been flops of catastrophic proportions.
And the other guys from id haven't exactly recaptured the same magic either. It's a shame they broke up, it turns out that the team was way stronger together than any of them has been on their own.
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I like to observe how organization affects how a company operates. As soon as you create a department, that department will start to generate reasons why it should remain being a department, as a sort of self preservation instinct. If you establish a design department, they will start planning complete redesigns sooner or later -- they need to have something going on to justify their existence. When I see this type of redesign, I can't help but wonder whether it is something that was cooked so that the design department can have a place at the table.
As a tangent, HR departments are very often affected by this as well. As soon as you have large enough HR, they will start generating ideas about how to waste other teams time. They have to justify their existence by organizing some events, trainings, activities, even if they actively harm the bottom line.
“Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:
First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.”
— <https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html>
Agreed. But what is the alternative? No departments at all? Everybody belonging to one giant single team?
In large companies, each project is approved at each stage by a steering committee. And then as appropriate more senior committes, senior leaders and eventually the CEO and the board.
The poster above is right in that if you create a design team they will want to justify their existence but it's the controls above and around it that is responsible for keeping them in check.
In my experience that then leads to the politics game.
People will cling to those senior leaders and make themselves visible and important to be kept around and be validated and enabled.
I see this daily in our banking megacorp. We have IT security team(s), which permeates all other IT activities like ink on paper. On its own its a good approach obviously, we weren't for example hacked or scammed in any high profile case, ever.
But there is no limit to how much additional security you can bring, so they do bring all of it. Recently had to get new Tomcat distribution deployed via Chef tool, of course our own package of it. Now it runs under 2 unix users, each owns various parts of Tomcat. Main startup config (options.sh) is owned by root, to which we will never ever get access, one has to do all changes in a complex approval and build process via Chef. Servers disconnect you after 2-3 mins of inactivity, if you deal with a small cluster you need literally ie 16 putty sessions open which constantly try to logout. And similar stuff everywhere, in all apps, laptops, network etc.
All this means that previously simple debugging now becomes a small circus and fight with ecosystem. Deliveries take longer, everything takes longer. Nobody relevant dares to speak up (or even understands the situation), to not be branded a fool who doesn't want the most security for the bank.
I would be mad if this would be my company, but I go there to collect paychecks and sponsor actual life for me and my family so can handle this. For now at least.
Conway’s Law is a bear.
Alternative approach, also from a financial services world: VMs are created with a DSL on top of qemu/firecracker, containers with Dockerfiles. Cyber are part of an image review group alongside other engineers that validates the base images.
But: no interactive access to any of these VMs at all. There’s hypervisors running on bare metal, but SRE teams have that scripted pretty well to the point a physical server can be added in a day or so. It does mean you’ve to be serious about logging, monitoring and health.
This is one instance where we got it right (I think). We do have some legacy servers we’re trying to get rid of. But we’ve learnt we can run even complex vendor apps this way.
Conway’s Law comes to bite us in other ways though! Like I said, it’s a bear.
This view is very „hackernewsy“ and reveals a lot more about the mindset around here than the what is going on with apple. Firstly i don‘t think there is much fluctuation with the apple design team except when Ive left but i guess that was mainly due to the ceo change.
I remember a time when microsoft came around the corner with flat design on their phones and the iphone all of a sudden looked outdated. They adopted a flat look shortly after. They did that pretty well.
Thirdly and most important: noone does gaussian blurs, macro and micro transitions better than apple and it‘s a key part of their success. They are taking it one step further now. Even if it doesn‘t improve the experience for users it could help distinguish themselves visually. And there is nothing wrong with that.
> Even if it doesn‘t improve the experience for users it could help distinguish themselves visually. And there is nothing wrong with that.
I think a lot of folks here would say that there is something wrong with degrading the user experience to achieve a win for branding.
I think the above comment is implying that the glass effects are more or less neutral, not degrading.
Aero Glass in Windows Vista and 7 worked quite well. Virtually no applications had the glass everywhere. Many stayed with the default of only having a glass title bar and window border. Some apps extended it a little to cover a toolbar or two. Also, the glass effect was simpler, and had enough contrast by default (and the colour and transparency were customizable), whereas Apple has the glass everywhere and often with unreadable text.
In some Vista betas, where Aero wasn't finished yet, Aero's glass was a lot more transparent. This video shows some of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCDcekzU3cQ
There were parts of Vista that were mostly glass and they still looked fine. The widget picker comes to mind: https://istartedsomething.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/09/gad...
What Apple demonstrated in their first OS demo is not yet finished, and I'm sure they'll add some more frosted glass efects for legibility and such. What they show off in the video looks fine to me, and the explanation that comes with the visuals show that at least from a designer point of view, all of the weird stuff that jumps out in the macOS demo was violating the design principles.
I loved Aero and I bet once Apple adds the diffuse glass to the places it need to for legibility, I'm sure this will look great too.
Low quality comment that is provably untrue based on the team's leadership.
Can we stop blaming Gen Z for everything? This happens with every generation.
Siri to book a flight? I just want it to reliably tell me what time a specific meeting is tomorrow, know that when I ask for where Mount Etna is, I don’t mean a city in the USA, and stop just ignoring me randomly when I talk to it.
Apple are much further behind with Siri than they realise.
> Apple are much further behind with Siri than they realise.
I think Apple realises it way better than you’re giving them credit for. They simply weren’t able to do anything about it yet, even though they’re clearly trying.
It seems like they are trying to unify the UX for vision OS and other devices and have them finally morph with the AR interfaces that are to come. There is probably a bigger vision behind this than just shiny visuals.
Occam's razor.
Maybe they just made a bad UI/UX change.
My computer company would never do such a thing.
Im not an Apple fan boy but Apple has been at the forefront of alot of design decisions that other companies later follow. So whilst I don’t agree with the liquid design. I suspect there’s more to it than meets the eye.
I get the impression that most (myself included) think there is nothing more than meets the eye - which is why some say that Steve Jobs is rolling in his grave.
They have been doing this slowly over the past several years. I decided to move from macOS to Linux the day settings turned into a scrolling iOS-style list rather than an actual settings menu.
I think this too. Microsoft thought something similar when they tried to unify Windows, Xbox, Windows Phone, and Windows RT in one design language.
With how badly Apple's VR headset actually sold, I don't think they're going to for a unified AR-first approach just yet. Then again, Apple did think their VR headset was a good idea, so maybe they're just high on their own supply.
"... and as a public company, cost controls are too stringent;"
Is that because a public company or because Tim Cook is a bottom line finance guy?
"they can't pay as much."
Why not? Thought apple had enormous cash reserves.
> The A-squad design team left Apple 15 years ago.
Does the A-squad include Steve Jobs, who seemed to have been a fan of skeuomorphism:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeuomorph#Virtual_examples
Does the A-squad include Johnny Ive, who gave us butterfly keyboards and the Touch Bar (where (IIRC) the initial revision of which did not have a separate physical key for ESC)? Though Ive did get rid of skeuomorphism.
What's wrong with skeuomorphism? It is wrong if it is done wrong, like everything, but done right, it looks good and feels familiar. It is pretty much the standard in music production software and people don't seem to complain about it.
> Though Ive did get rid of skeuomorphism.
By replacing skeuomorphism with minimalism, Ive's anti-skeu was a cure nearly as worse as the disease. They were right to move away from skeuomorphism, but they did so recklessly, giving us a UX where almost all cues for an element being "clickable" were stripped away.
Ive hasn't done a single impressive thing after Jobs' departure. To the extent that Ive did anything noteworthy, it was with Jobs as visionary, product director and tastemaker. Outside of that relationship, his work has been derivative of prior Apple design success, or embarrassingly wrong-footed. Factoring in the lag time of product cycles, it's astonishing how rapidly Apple improved after Ive's departure.
I've been in agreement with you up until this point -
> it's astonishing how rapidly Apple improved after Ive's departure
Is there another Apple? What improvements are you talking about, leave alone astonishing ones?
The MBP went from few ports and thinner at all costs, back towards functionality.
Keyboard and touch bar reverted.
Not exactly improvements in the traditional sense. More likely cleaning up an intentional mess.
I guess I agree.
Perhaps people can argue with me: I claim skeuomorphism jumped the shark with the pseudo reel-to-reel playback UI in ... was it the Podcasts app? Or maybe people think it was Notes with the torn edge along the top margin.
Regardless, skeuomorphism seems to have gone too far at some point. Perhaps became overly cute, overly precious, pretty-pretty.
Skeuomorphism was said to have been the thing in early GUI computers, as metaphor or real objects, that helped early users to those interfaces understand them. Dragging a file icon that looked like a dog-eared piece of paper to a trash can icon on the screen (to delete the file) — the most obvious example.
I suspect by the time the Web came around, users had to become more comfortable with being bombarded with all manner of wild UI paradigms and they learned to more or less cope. Skeuomorphism, like training wheels, were perhaps not really needed as much as they had been a decade earlier.
I think more accurately, Apple’s, while imperfect, A-tier editor passed away in 2011, and no one replaced him.
It has been a downward slope since then after the momentum dissipated after his death.
Turns out, I didn’t like the operating system Apple made. I liked the OS Apple made while being curated and directed by Steve Jobs. His taste matched mine in a lot of important ways.
I have no tastes in common with Alan Dye.
That’s BS take. iOS design is one of the most coveted roles if not the most important role you can get as a designer. It reaches billions and influences everything else. Just because we are not impressed with Apple’s direction, doesn’t mean these roles at Apple are not highly sought after. People would work for free to have that on their cv. Not everyone is motivated by pay and this is especially true among people with actual talent.
That sounds more like a false good idea that should have been stopped at some point.
When I read "liquid glass" and saw a thumbnail of it I thought I was going to be impressed. Well, no.
Also that Finder screenshot is hilarious, I'm not even sure it's real.
Aero is leaps and bounds more aesthetically pleasing and easier to work with than flat crap. Sooo glad we don't have to suffer more of that after a decade+.
What? Nobody is retaining AI people by giving them UX work. These are very different skills.
I don’t really believe the narrative that this is the C-team running things now. A complete redesign like this would require approval from numerous executive stakeholders. My guess is that it’s connected to the Apple Vision project - possibly they’re working on a new device at a more consumer-friendly price point.
Who do you think is designing the UX for all the new AI products and services?
Liquid Glass looks really good, so not sure what you're talking about their A team being gone. All these other companies wish they had Apple's design team.
Exactly. You sums up very efficiently.
I’ve been using it for 2 days now, and the first thing I noticed is that readability took a hit.
My background is a mid tone warm photo, not dark or light, icons got a white foreground that’s very hard to read against their translucent background.
The second thing I noticed, is that when I’m scrolling a webpage, icons now switch color randomly (according to the bg dominant color) and that’s distracting.
The last thing, is that my phone is getting warmer and scrolling has become less fluid, choppy. And that’s on the 16 Pro Max.
What I like the most about this design though, is that it become invisible and let you focus on what you are reading, watching.
Perfect to focus on content, but the user interface has become sometimes unreadable and when you need to interact with it, put the flashlight in a hurry, you are scanning through instead of instantly recognizing stuff. But maybe that’s just new habits to make.
The rise of dynamism in UI design is not only a waste of compute cycles, but also distracting and a trigger for people like me who can be easily distracted.
What I want are UIs built more like E readers or newspapers, with screen updates taken seriously.
> The last thing, is that my phone is getting warmer and scrolling has become less fluid, choppy. And that’s on the 16 Pro Max.
Happens with almost every beta, particularly on first install. The later betas typically improve, and even the current ones often get better if there was some new indexing that had to happen.
I’ve been running since the keynote and my phone was initially warm but has calmed down now.
Battery seems to be taking a hit (maybe anecdotal). And scrolling is sluggish at times for sure. And also getting warm device (15 pro max). The sluggishness might not be due to the hour/transparency. There seems to be some kind of lazy loading that’s going on with icons. I’m not sure if that’s new.
The transparency is a mess. I can’t believe how far backwards this is. Trying to visually pick out icons is harder. Icons without transparency have this weird edge enhancement effect going on like a bad photoshop filter.
I seem to be having a bunch of new web issues. Popups aren’t handled as well. And there are weird refresh issues when zooming on web pages.
Dev beta 1 of any iOS release always has horrendous battery life and overheats the phone. Wouldn't be early pre-release software otherwise.
For what it’s worth, any beta I’ve tried out in the past slurped my battery and made my phone act like a hand warmer.
I agree with everything you said here. Most of it transfers to macOS as well. Readability took less of a hit, thankfully.
Some of the work appears so shoddy that I wonder if it was done by code mods or something. The Passwords app on macOS looks bizarrely cluttered and cramped, with all kinds of bad artifacts when you resize the window. I know it's a beta, but it's so bad that I really wonder if a human looked at it for more than a minute before they shipped it out.
I don’t think you can judge the final battery implications or whether it runs smoothly from the Developer Preview, they often have significant bugs.
Are there accessibility controls to disable it, e.g. reduce transparency?
I'd probably do that after the first day of using it.
It was mentioned in one of their WWDC videos. IIRC “Reduce Transparency” now would affect the amount of blur. It was similar to the amount of blur in VisionOS.
But this was a few days ago and I can’t remember exactly which video it was mentioned in.
Yes, thankfully there is. You can reduce the transparency in the Accessibility settings.
I’d wish that the computation load / battery drain would also be reduced by reducing the transparency. However, I think that the computation will still take place.
> focus on content
This has been Alan Dye's modus operandi since he took the helm on software design and the problem is it does not scale to larger devices. On a phone and mostly on an iPad, where you're far more likely to be consuming content anyway, it's not the worst thing to shoot for.
On a Mac it's infuriating. I'm working on anywhere from a 14" to a 27" display, both have a wealth of pixels to work with: why are you hiding controls? You're not making anything simpler, I need those buttons to perform the tasks I'm trying to do. All you've done is make it less intuitive, less discoverable, and added extra clicks.
To be honest it has some problems even on the smaller devices too, mainly in the form of lack of visual affordances. So much functionality you would never discover unless you'd seen someone else do it or triggered it by accident (and even then might not realise what you've done—just yesterday I had to help my mother get out of private browsing in Safari because she'd swiped across to it and didn't know how to get back).
iPhone 16 here - my phone was laggy and warm for the first day of having the update. Everything is completely back to normal now, perfect performance even when interacting with liquid glass stuff, exactly as it was on 18.
There's a reason why Win7 dialed transparency down from Vista.
[citation needed]
Vista had a black taskbar with some transparency, 7 made it glass.
If you maximised a window on Vista, the maximised window's border became dark (black/with an accent colour tint) and opaque, the taskbar and sidebar went opaque as well. 7 got rid of that.
"And that’s on the 16 Pro Max.", haha omg. well, that's the apple experience, never update beyond the OS that came with the device. Painful lesson from being an apple user since 2006
What are you talking about? My iPhone 13 Pro works perfectly on the newest OS. It’s actually hard to justify upgrading. I know lots of people who simply don’t upgrade anymore.
After using it for 2 days I'm liking it, as in really liking it. People complain that controls are harder to find. I say controls were _always_ hard to find. They blended into the content somehow. Now I can find them easier while also _not_ finding them.
I always found controls in previous versions of iOS to be lacking. I hope the negativity doesn't make them backtrack because this is a _huge_ improvement.
> "The last thing, is that my phone is getting warmer and scrolling has become less fluid, choppy. And that’s on the 16 Pro Max."
to understand the motivations, look at the outcomes.
Somehow I've always considered controls that float over your content to be a bit of a UI design cop-out.
They often get slapped on top willy-nilly, and wind up blocking something below - either from view, or from interaction with another tool.
While I recognize Apple's approach here tries to mitigate that complaint... I still appreciate when designers craft a distinct space for my buttons/menus/controls to live, treat those non-content pixels as precious screen real estate, keep them tight, and make clever use of layout within it across different tasks.
This is my biggest problem with UI designs like this. There are lots of rules to follow, or the design looks like a cluttered mess.
Having seen what UI atrocities Material Design has allowed amateur app developers to bring to market, I hope Apple makes these new UI elements difficult to mess up, because unless they're making the UI libraries good by default, apps are going to get messy for a few years.
I'm not seeing controls moved around much. So this argument really applies to older versions of iOS as well. Maybe that was the point? Either way, I sort of agree. It's less than ideal, but if you're going to be doing it at least do it in a way that looks good.
And boy do I think this looks good. After a few days I can only say that complaining is so wrong. Previous versions of iOS were hard to use. I am finding this cleaner and easier to use. I very much don't want to go back.
UIs should be function first. That doesn't mean it can't be beautiful, but usability (and readability) should be the focus, with design being a way to turn a useful one into a beautiful one. It seems like they have started at the wrong end, trying to make their design language functional.
This point is so salient. It's all just candy.
Neat eye candy, granted. I'm glad so much emphasis went into legibility, and that accessibility variants are baked in.
But I'd still love a modern device with very basic UI. Palm had it nailed, and I had no beef with the basic shapes of Windows 3.11 or colored squares of the NT/XP eras. Buttons, window edges and other controls you can readily distinguish that simply stay out of your way when you don't need them. No need for every pixel to scream out "look at me" when you trail your finger over it.
It's pretty clear one of the goals is for content to be first, not the function. OS controls are secondary to what is being displayed. They want them to go away.
And I am all for it. After a few days of this new OS, I really like it. It takes a day to train your eyes, but that happens with literally every version of the operating system. But once you do it is so nice for all of the function to just get out of the way.
7:44 "These liquid glass elements form a distinct functional layer for controls and navigation..."
Hala fricking luah. I think. This sums up--without under bus throwing--what I have loathed about the last 10ish years of "flat design" hell.
I wonder if there will be some issues with what happens when elements are not clearly differentiable from from "controls and navigation" and "everything else"? But just recognizing that flat design is a lossy compression of useful information, has me on board, at least to hope this works well.
I mean the idea itself isn't terrible; maybe the glass just needs to have some colour to provide background. Maybe "live glass" instead that knows the context in which it is and applies the right amount of tint of the most appropriate colour based on what's underneath it.
> Maybe "live glass" instead that knows the context in which it is and applies the right amount of tint of the most appropriate colour based on what's underneath it.
That’s precisely what it does, only in grayscale
What if they just picked a color? Maybe a light blue? Like the light blue of a pool or a tropical beach? Or a graphite grey?
Oh wait we had that already.
Incredible - difficult to see by design. What an age we live in where a design showcase video frame Apple proudly shows off UX worst-practices. I'll have some of whatever they're smoking, must be good shit. This whole thing is almost indistinguishable from satire.
17:03 - what I thought was finally something sensible turned out to be their example of something bad!
Hopefully I'll be able to find the settings to turn this off - if it's not too invisible.
As an app developer, I think the more frosted look without the toy wiggle interactions in the “accessibility” demos were the best. I don’t have KPI’s, but I wonder how a “checkout” button that can be almost half clicked / played with but not triggered will tank flow-thru.
If someone at Apple said I want communicate in a natural way on video and not really go into TED talk mode would they get in trouble?
Seriously why does seemingly every presenter from Tim Cook right down to the engineers in the tech-specific sessions speak with the exact same uncanny delivery in these videos? It's incredibly off-putting and sends my brain immediately into "you are being marketed at" mode.
They all sound like Christian Bale’s Patrick Bateman describing Huey Lewis and the News.
I was thinking the same thing. This communication style is outdated. All I see is an attempt of mimicking Steve Job's style in keynotes. But that looked natural on him somehow.
For all his faults, Jobs always sold the idea that he really thought the stuff he was showing was the coolest thing ever. There was at the very least an illusion of pride and excitement, even if it wasn't always genuine. He'd crack jokes, make off-hand remarks, and wasn't afraid to mention competitor's products.
Modern Apple presentations are just like being read some marketing materials. It's very disingenuous.
I always think of the first Power Mac G5 introduction when after 5 slides of CPU block diagrams, talking all kinds of technical details, he gets to “And it has Massive Branch Prediction Logic…which I dunno…it predicts branches!” with a sly shrug.
> For all his faults, Jobs always sold the idea that he really thought the stuff he was showing was the coolest thing ever.
I am generally of the opinion that Jobs was vastly overrated, but one thing I will always give him credit for is that he was a brilliant salesman. One of the greatest the world has ever seen. I believe that the man could quite literally sell someone the shirt off their own back.
I think this looks neat and I think it is a set of sensible design rules for AR and transparent (i.e. just-a-pane-of-glass) devices.
The contrast issues are an issue for discovery, but by now, maybe design norms for standard apps mean we've reduced ourselves to controls with only symbols, and sometimes even just color, without text. Meaning, perhaps location, shape, and tactility will be more important than legibility.
However, this probably only works in extreme cases; where the ubiquity of the interface means users already know what to expect. This does not work for innovative designs or new things. Think, the "send" button in chat, email, messaging apps. It's often blue/green and located near the text input. Maybe an oblong jelly bubble near a textbox is clear enough in most cases.
That said, that concept does remind me of eco-friendly toilets in Europe with two buttons for flushing: one is larger than the other, and one uses more water than the other , but I always forget which is which. A large button using more water makes sense, but so does a large button signaling the one you should use most often (i.e. the one that uses less water). There's something I use everyday, something with immediate feedback, something I've tried to learn, but something I haven't gotten quite right.
I fundamentally disagree with many of their reasonings. e.g. tinting the so-called "Content Layer" instead of all the buttons, or demanding "steady state" to be "visually quiet", which is highly subjective. They are optimizing for sheep content vacuums, I mean users, and obedient developers.
As a user, I want color back on my GD buttons!
Also, I don't trust anyone who would wear those outfits.
> ...floating forms that nest neatly in the rounded curves of modern devices. These clearly defined shapes feel easy to tap and are designed to relate to the natural geometry of our fingers...
This reminds me for some reason of my preferred answer to the Microsoft interview question "Why are manholes round?" A: Because the average cross-section of a human being is roughly circular.
Is that the real reason? I had always heard that a round hole prevents the cover from being able to fall back in the hole
It's cheap and easy to install a vertical pipe when you're already laying a ton of horizontal pipe.
From the perspective of "design the manhole cover first", the reason is that manhole covers aren't just round — they're (very subtle) domes.
A dome is:
1. the best shape for taking stress from very heavy trucks putting all their weight on them without the manhole itself gradually bowing, and
2. is best at transferring that stress equally into the manhole wall (cast concrete cylinder) itself. (A square manhole + manhole cover would disperse force unfairly, potentially gradually cracking the manhole walls / requiring stronger walls. A flat circular manhole would disperse force upon the center of the manhole equally onto the manhole walls, allowing for lower-material-cost manhole walls. A domed manhole cover additionally disperses force from most points on the dome equally into the manhole walls — important, as vehicles won't necessarily be driving over the exact center of the manhole!)
...but really, this is the wrong direction to work in. The original reason manhole covers are round, is simply that the walls of a manhole are best made round, for the same reason drink cans and barrels are best made round: a closed cylinder is great at taking compressive force from a lid above; passing it through as soft, equal tensile force through its walls without buckling strain; and then turning that force back into an equal compressive force on the floor / subsurface.
Most manholes are generally small closed cylinders acting as maintenance areas for nearby pipes, with the pipes coming in through the sides of the manhole walls, and the concrete bottom floor of the manhole resting upon compacted earth.
In this situation, any shape for the manhole other than a cylinder — if driven over for years/decades by cars — would gradually pound the uneven force acting upon the manhole's floor into the earth below, unevenly accelerating soil subsidence. Eventually, you've created a sinkhole below the road, right outside the manhole wall on one side.
As someone with a mechanical engineering background, all these clever answers to the question (e.g. "manhole covers are round to prevent the cover falling in") are strange. Covers are round because the hole is round, and the hole is round because a cylindrical shape is sturdy and prevents collapse. That's it.
That's not "it". A square cover would not be feasible, without a tether system to fish them out of the literal shit, after they fall in from a few inch misalignment.
Why would you put a square cover on a round hole?
The hole came first. They dig a hole, then they have a need to put a cover on it. Making a circular cover to fit over a circular hole is if anything cheaper and easier than making a square cover over an inscribed circular hole, at least when working with metal.
The hole drove the design of the cover, not the other way around.
In this hypothetical, presuming you're putting the manhole (subsurface conduit/plumbing maintenance access point) in after you've already paved the road: it's because the tool you'd use to cut a hole into pavement (i.e. a concrete saw) cuts straight lines — and it's easier to make a square/rectangle out of straight lines than a circle. And sure enough, whenever you see workers hacking up the road, they generally are cutting square holes.
Refer, after that, to the process of constructing a manhole (https://www.envirodesignproducts.com/blogs/news/how-are-manh...).
At the end of this process, you have a square hole in the pavement, opening to a square excavation, bottoming out at a square concrete foundation, on which has been set a round concrete cylinder, which is then surrounded out to the edge of the square hole with packed earth.
Given this, you could equally-well finish this job either:
1. by placing a square of metal to fill the entire square packed-earth space you've constructed (as when bridging a pothole with a temporary steel surface plate);
2. or by first paving over the exposed packed-earth part, and then placing a circle of metal to cover only the manhole entrance itself.
...which is why people do justifiably ask why, in practice, we seem to always favor option 2 over option 1.
A manhole is a hole for men to go in, not a near-surface utility access. Those square cut quick access holes often do have square metal covers.
The manhole opens up into a vertical tube, often with a ladder built into the wall, big enough around for a man to descend into a subsurface structure. Hence, manhole.
Manhole covers are always round because the tube they connect to is round, and that tube is round for structural reasons.
You seem very confident about all this.
In the UK manhole covers are generally square.
This piqued my interest, and it seems you're completely correct, but also the metal covers seem much more complex than what I was imagining.
https://www.randb-uk.com/product-category/ductile-iron-manho...
If that was the reason a Reuleaux triangle would have the same property while using (I think) less material for a given size of shaft (as long as the shaft can be triangular). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reuleaux_triangle
To explain myself better now I am awake and have had coffee: What makes a cover that cannot fall down the hole that it is covering? The width[1] of the closed curve has to be larger than that of the hole. A circle is easy to understand because it is a closed curve of fixed width, but a Reuleaux triangle is also a closed curve of fixed width, meaning if that fixed width is greater than the widest part of the hole, then there is no orientation of the cover in 3D that will allow it to fall down the hole. It’s easy to see if you take an equilateral triangle, circumscribe it with the smallest circle and then (mentally) construct the Reuleaux triangle that the Reuleaux triangle sits inside the circle and so would use less material.
[1] This is defined as the minimum perpendicular distance between parallel lines bounding the shape.
That answer would be akin to someone asking “why is the sun round?” and answering with “it’s roughly the optimal shape for viewing the totality of the sun”.
Most manhole covers aren’t round. If you actually go out and look at them, the vast majority of manhole covers are rectangular.
I don't think I've ever seen non-round manhole cover. In all exUSSR countries they are round.
Are you talking globally or just USA?
I guess it varies by country which I should have acknowledged. I was talking UK and EU and Africa which I am most familiar with, although I have also been to the USA and Asia and seen manhole covers there. You certainly get round manhole covers, but there are far more rectangular ones. Eg this kind of thing https://www.drainageshop.co.uk/polydrain-inspection-chamber/...
But the real answer is, that it prevents the cover from falling in... it's a safety feature :(
I prefer the Feynman approach to answering Why questions... until they throw me out.
I am trying it out and aside from being unpolished it’s also slower. My phone used to be buttery smooth. No longer.
Early iOS betas are always very slow. On top of things just being unoptimized, they have a lot of extra diagnostic logging enabled.
Apple probably made a mistake by making the developer betas public. So many morons installing them now and crying that it’s buggy.
They have the public betas (available to anyone) but this is a developer beta and requires a developer account (albeit you don't need to pay the $99 anymore). They should probably put it behind the $99 barrier again. It astounds me that people on a site like HN can install a developer beta and then act shocked that it's not 'buttery smooth'. Companies either need to educate people or make it difficult to access beta software again.
To add to what others said - almost every major iOS / macOS release will be slower and drain battery more on the first day after install. The reason for that is they do a lot of indexing of your data and other preprocessing things that enable new features after you install. Once these processes end your device will go back to normal.
I’m surprised Apple does not communicate this fact more clearly to people, as many seem to be totally unaware of it (I do remember seeing notifications on macOS about that though)
Their developer betas are always unfinished and unoptimized. Once you’ve been through a few of them you become able to evaluate the early versions based on the likely trajectory leading up to release.
I suspect you can disable it with the "reduce transparency" option in the accessibility menu, until it gets out of beta.
>> I am trying it out and aside from being unpolished it’s also slower. My phone used to be buttery smooth. No longer.
IT'S A BETA! Seriously. Of course it's slower. Your phone will run hot. Your battery life will drop. And in three months when it's released it will run nicely - just like each of the last 18 years.
My first thought was: This seems like a very logical next step in order to prepare for future broader market adoption of AR applications and AR glasses.
Being a sceptic about the latter at first I must say, I wish the technology would finally allow having a "normal" pair of glasses with high resolution, no cable attached, AR overlay screens.
Ditto. It seems Apple is preparing their users for the same UI that would be present on AR Glasses.
Rumor has it they ran an internal poll on whether their employees would purchase AI glasses which is their first step when developing a new product.
I often think that the quality of the product goes against employment incentives. Nobody gets promoted for preserving the good product. Employees get measured of how many changes they make.
It's interesting that they say in their own design guidelines to avoid glass-on-glass, then use it for the control center, to obvious detriment.
Any time a new visual effect comes around people overuse it, then after a while it gets toned down and usability improves, then a new trend emerges and the cycle repeats.
Since they are using Metal and not OpenGl they should take Gl out of the name.
Took me a second. Well done.
This should be the top comment.
I don't think it's a particularly hard concept to grasp what's happening here. UI elements above content stop you seeing it. Apple has tried to make them both see through so that you screen feels bigger and stand out so that you can actually interact with the UI effectively. Some images/demos look good. Some look horrible. Time will tell.
Shader-based refraction/blur/chromatic aberration seems to be generating a lot of hype, but it’s stuff that game developers have been doing for decades.
The bigger news is draggable, resizable windows in iPadOS 26. That’s quite an upgrade.
This just looks like Android launchers of the past 10+ years. I'm remembering also Windows Longhorn leaks and Sun's Project Looking Glass.
Ironic Apple gets good at hardware and then can't even build a UI or AI.
What I am curious about is that isn't there a team or group in Apple with a keen eye for UX that are independent of the designing teams, sort of dogfood these changes over a period and have the authority to initiate corrections/fixes? Sort of like UX QA but with actual powers?
Or, the public?
sure but I also said:
> have the authority to initiate corrections/fixes
The Tahoe beta implementation is incredibly rough.
Because it is trying to simulate diffused glass layers apps have a kind of low resolution look to them and certain UX elements just do not work at all with odd spacing and gaps because of different sized rounded corners. Where the UX works is where the implementations are the most minimal.
It will get better before launch, but I worry the concept is a bit half baked.
I hope they can tweak the design for finder because the current beta looks bad.
I’ve been using the beta on both iPad and iPhone for the last couple days and I have to say I quite like it.
I find the interactions intuitive, and the rearrangement of the UI (placement of buttons and such) better than prior versions.
I was concerned about readability, but has not been an issue at all.
There are some awkward portions, but seems like something that can be worked out.
This style of simulating faux-realistic materials (such as glass or aluminum) on the screen looks dated and cheesy now -- (Windows engineering team 2012)
https://web.archive.org/web/20120614042824/http://blogs.msdn...
Looking back at this article, Windows 7 UI was really peak Microsoft
They really took that idea a little too far especially considering they never executed it even more than half way. We still have control panels that are using their pre-2012 look and feel.
I don't want to be a hater, I've been an Apple fan for a long time. I'm hopeful they can finish strong and get this redesign over the high quality bar by the time it leaves beta. But this video diminishes that hope for me.
Almost everything they describe as advantages (primarily the fluid motion features) can be done without making the controls see-through. Everything else seems to be a straight-up degradation in quality. It all feels totally over-engineered.
Also, if you'll allow me to old-man-yells-at-cloud for a moment:
> The motion of liquids is something we all have an intuitive feel for
Ignoring that they're highlighting literal bubbles at that point in the video (famously not liquid, except at the bottom of the ocean), liquid is also famously hard to simulate well. It's literally the least intuitive form of matter.
> Tinting helps legibility and contrast
I want my controls to be legible always! Tinting should draw my attention or trigger a mental pathway (e.g. "red for dangerous operation"), not be the core thing that makes a component legible against its background.
> Here is a button that is using a solid fill instead of tinting. As you can tell [sic] it is completely opaque and breaks the visual character of Liquid Glass [also sic, there's no liquid glass in the shot yet]. But notice when it starts using the new tinting. All of a sudden it feels more transparent and more grounded in its environment.
No it doesn't! It literally appears more detached from it which is why it looks better and THE WHOLE POINT OF TINTING that you just described. I love the look and feel of this tinting example, but you just made it seem like you got to a good place by total accident.
I really want to believe y'all know what you're doing this time around.
Given that Apple has really smart people, I assume this design was the right answer to whatever actual problem they were set. My guess - someone noticed a small cohort of potential new users that want this; and the company prioritized the marginal user over the core user base. Maybe there's a cohort of VR users not on iOS yet?
When they care more about the words than the usability.
I see some "it's just Aero all over again" comments.
Isn't this a common Apple schtick though? Doing something that others have done already, but doing it more comprehensively, executing it better? I'm sure this isn't perfect yet. But watching the video, I certainly felt like a more holistic approach went into this than what Microsoft tried years ago. Time will tell whether the design teams goals will have the reach to actually matter in the wider breadth of Apple's execution of it.
Liquid Glass looks awesome, people are just piling on.
Agreed. I initially thought "this is going to make everything look so messy" but after I watched this particular video, it's clear that they've put so much thought into every scenario imaginable, including giving developers a lot of advice on when to use it, and when not to use it.
All that is very old-school Apple actually. Way way way more thought put beneath the surface than just meets the eye, when it comes to UI interactions.
I remember the inertial scrolling, rubber banding stuff on iOS. During those early days, people analyzed things like the navigation push and pop animations, and there was a lot more going on there than just "go left, go right"
Yes, this. When I first heard about OS X all those years ago, I dismissed the ideas as eye-candy until I actually played with it. I quickly noticed how much thought had been put into what was conveyed by all the little animations and finesse touches.
The same thing applies here, I think - I watched the video expecting to see the exact opposite of what I want in a UI, but came away impressed by how much thought and consideration has been put into it.
No one is denying that it looks cool. The problem is how it affects UX.
They ran tons of a/b testing on user groups. I can tell you it feels fresh to me which is very necessary with aesthetics (fashion). Their main operating principle I believe is that they have acclimatized users to the position and flow of the UI for over a decade. At that point, you can embellish the UI.
If I skinned HN to anything you would still be totally intimate with where things are so long as I didn’t put yellow on light blue or something wild like that.
A/B testing doesn’t work if the actual answer is C
I don’t want my computer (which I use for work) to be a fashion statement. I stare at the UI all day, every day. My opinion matters just as much as any designer’s.
Is this video a real human or is it an AI rendering? Either way, there is something uncanny about his speech, gaze, and hand gestures.
I agree. Feels like he's trying to hypnotise me into joining a cult.
The need to emphasize each term. Talking heads might be boring, but lecterns and tables are useful because unless you are walking, modt of the time your hands should be still.
Subtext: If you’re not under 30, with great eyesight, fuck you. If you’re neurodivergent, fuck you. If you just want to use your technology to do useful things and don’t need to be “delighted” by every button press and interaction, fuck you.
I don’t see how this won’t disable a lot of people. It’s cruel.
The section where they talk about how it adapts to different situations so that it still shows the top layer information did not inspire hope. I’m autistic and I have a hard time picking out signal from a noisy background easily. In the demo, it’s as if the icons are constantly dancing (delightfully, no doubt) but the information is lost.
For those that say that Apple always has accessibility settings where you can lessen effects like this, that’s not enough. We’re techies. We know about fiddling with settings. A lot of people won’t know. A lot of people that will be affected by this won’t consider themselves disabled, so they don’t even know the word “accessibility”. It’ll just subtly make every interaction with their technology more difficult and more stressful.
As an Apple user myself, I still find it really hard to watch official Apple presentations because they’re so full of stupid adjectives that make their products sound like divine intervention when in reality they were just built to look “cool”.
I mean, I get the need to promote things in a favourable light. But Apples language sets off my “bullshit detectors” with every sentence they utter.
It’s no wonder they polarise people like a religious cult.
A little tongue-in-cheek speech was fine when done live on stage. But I certainly don’t enjoy their prerecorded videos anymore.
A deep dive on how this new material works, way more advanced than how it looks from screenshots.
Two problems from what I've seen so far:
1. Browser navigation overlapping website viewport in iOS Safari. What is the real height of the viewport?
2. Floating side panel on macOS: necessitates needless extension the app body. Also, the App close button is in the side panel, which is floating IN the app body. This seems like a betrayal of their so called structure philosophy.
This year it's been 25 years since the introduction of OSX and its Aqua theme. I wonder if that was a driving factor here, to have the next generation aqua interface.
I'm not a designer but, while I like the glass effect, I don't think the icons (1:42) really look that good. They are overly black / white and have harsh looking edges. Not horrible, but not optimal either imo.
Liquid Glass takes too many brain cycles for the user. It takes too much cognitive attention to watch all its changes and wait until buttons are ready to click. I don't want to waste a lot of attention "appreciating" Apple's new UI. I just want to get stuff done.
i really don't want to waste my phone's cpu on pure visual effects that damages readability
This is the first time that I truly don't like what Apple has done with the UI.
Honestly there have been things where I had to give it some time, and maybe this design will grow on me too. Lord knows Apple puts a lot of resources into this.
But still it looks so Windows Vista...
Honest question: are the app icons going to be monochrome? If so, then paint me baffled.
No, it is just one option you can select.
OK, that gives me some peace. All the screenshots show them mono.
I thought the glass effect on Windows Vista was pretty good 15-20 years ago but eventually disappeared. I'm sure this will be much better since Apple are far better than anyone else at design. Of course, I use Linux most of the time and crack open my MacBook once a week at most so I won't benefit from it much.
Linux got plenty of good glass effects. Kvantum for instance.
I doubt it would be as cohesive as what Apple would do - they are paying legions of top designers to think about every pixel. If it comes super well designed out of the box I appreciate it but I don't care enough to bother tweaking anything. I've tried various plug-ins in Gnome but all pretty amateur compared to what Apple is doing. Of course, I'll stick to Linux as I want to develop in the same environment that my code will be running in production. The other aspects matter far less to me.
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The real question for me - what will my Qt-based Mac apps look like on macOS 26? Are existing controls going to be broken? Am I going to have to get every icon re-done? Apple are not exactly known for putting any effort into backward compatibility.
I must be in the minority, but I love the design.
I was skeptical at first but like it a lot after trying out the betas. It's all very intuitive if you've used visionOS before and the potential readability problems aren't really an issue in practice.
I like it a lot. More rarely used elements are now out of the way and muscle memory works well for the remaining buttons.
I think the UI is far more fun and usable than I remember Vista being.
They could be priming users for a transparent interface, like a transparent iPhone. Or glasses.
I think this would look much better if the blur radius / strength would be increased
I think the fact that it supports colored glass, and it has 2 variants, and it promotes dimming layer - says that current implementation is probably not the end of the story
One thing I haven’t heard yet about Liquid Glass: Glass is good for looking through it. So an OS based on this could be ideal for Extended Reality. Having iOS resemble visionOS more might be a step towards using iPhones as XR devices. Could we then potentially see a fancy Apple version of Google cardboard in the future, where you use your iPhone as an AR device as well…?
I feel sorry for Steve Jobs
The most important thing about this new design is that it differentiates itself from Android. Not super important in the U.S. where iPhone lock-in is pretty endemic, but for the markets where there is competition, this bit of eye candy will make a big difference.
Usability is secondary. The directive from on high was probably about creating a more visually distinctive UI which takes advantage of Apple hardware, thus making it harder to emulate.
Think of the next YouTube review comparing devices. Liquid glass will stand out, regardless of its user experience.
Non-Apple flagships have powerful GPUs too. They could clone Liquid Glass easily, and I would expect some chinesium manufacturers to do so next year.
If it would work as well as it does in the beta, you're right it would stand out, but in the negative sense.
I agree with your reasoning, but I would add that customers also want to be easily distinguished from using an Android or a different device. Apple has long recognised the importance of this sign value and is acting accordingly.
Apple and Androids relationship I would say is known and stable.
I suspect they are more worried about HarmonyOS phones in China and other markets as Huawei are fierce competition.
“Calculations based on data from the government-affiliated China Academy of Information and Communications Technology showed that April shipments of foreign-branded phones in China rose to 3.52 million units from 3.50 million a year earlier.
Apple has faced increased competition from domestic rivals in China and has resorted to price cuts to stay competitive.
Chinese e-commerce platforms were offering discounts of up to 2,530 yuan ($351) on Apple's latest iPhone 16 models in May.“
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/apples-iphone-sales-capt...
Will this design change take a hit on the base iPad? I'm looking to get one and wondering if I should get the M3 air instead?
Eh I am still not convinced that this will be good UI. I wish they would have put a one 1px white border around the glass UI button elements or something small like this to enhance it just a little better. I will have to use it to really get a feeling... Also that switch toggle shown in the video looks weird its so satisfying turning on/off a switch UI element without anything else interfering with such a simple concept.
I have liked MacOS UI upgrades over the years though, I am glad we don't use the brushed metal anymore :)
It is funny, when they showed how easy to ignore all the Apple TV menus would be, all I could think was my consistent opines to various elderly TV users who I’ve complained to about smart TV/TV app menus.
“I just want the ugliest, highest-contrast menus possible, with everything labeled in large font“
In 3 years when apple goes back to a readable design, they will get high praise.
Butterfly keyboard "revolution" heard your :D
I really can’t stand these augmented-voice videos. I get that they’re meant to sound polished or stylized, but to me it just comes off as creepy and distracting. Whatever processing or autotune effect they’re using strips the humanity out of the voice and gives it this artificial vibe — like a personified LinkedIn post. What could be an interesting technical walkthrough ends up feeling more like a spammy marketing pitch than a real person sharing insights.
Maybe there’s an audience for that kind of aesthetic — especially among people who grew up immersed in highly produced digital media — but I’d much rather hear someone’s actual voice, imperfections and all. That rawness is what makes content engaging and authentic. When everything is filtered and synthetic, it’s hard to connect with the speaker or take the message seriously. (Maybe that’s why Apple has had to change spokes models every two minutes since Jobs.)
Honestly, I wish people would stop overproducing everything. I wouldn’t be surprised if this guy was using a green screen too — for no good reason! It just adds to the weird, artificial feeling.
so this did all this transparency stuff without it being the run up to the launch of a new augmented-reality device? I don't understand what they are thinking.
They want a common design language across all their current devices and the devices we don’t know about yet.
https://omc345.substack.com/p/from-skeuomorphic-to-liquid-gl...
Edit: added a link.
Apple just announced their new keyboard: https://imgur.com/b9n5862
Design they called "Crystalline Glass"
Looks good. It has too many buttons, for an Apple product, though. /s
Ever relevant classic from the Onion: https://youtu.be/9BnLbv6QYcA?si=ZoMeZPsyEWux7DL_
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Cringe
I am not a UI designer. I am no expert here.
Like many of us, my initial reaction is to criticize because it feels like they asked ChatGPT to create the script for this demo video with a lot of filler words. It's exhausting parsing all the "connecting to the physical world" phrases just to understand they added refraction between UI elements. I wish someone would just speak these new things to me straightly.
However, I can't pass over that Apple's Design team is top-notch. They absolutely take the little polishes to the highest degree they can. A lot of it doesn't look necessary. We clown on Apple but comparing the iPhone UI to Android, there are just many less visual glitches and jagged edges on iPhone. Apple is known for its polish. A lot of it looks like repeating the visual eye candy of the past that people quickly grew tired of.
To me this looks like they're bridging the gap to running the UI as a full 3-dimensional physics sandbox. They talk about how the new glass surfaces are broken into 4 layers that adapt to each other. I think this is cool how this works mechanically, but I know this will be hardly be legible to most users. I'll have to train myself to get used to it. I do prefer flatter, more minimal designs with less complexity.
I think the future is the UI going from 2d elements to 3d elements. I think scrollbars and buttons and such will be defined as full material objects in 3d space in the future with inherent weight and inertia, etc. I know as an outsider I'm probably naive that this is already so in some ways. Right now most UI elements are 2d materials emulating 3d ones. I do think we've moved up to the point where our less powerful devices like watches and phones can handle running a 3d physics sandbox all the time, and sipping power while they do.
This is the precursor to 3-dimentional physics-based UIs. It's sort of a joke but I do expect ray-traced shadows in the future/soon. Much less static assets, many more materials. MMW~