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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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+.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
"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
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.
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.
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.
> ...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.
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 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.
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)
>> 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.
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.
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.
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.“
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
GUIs made with cross-platform toolkits, the kinds that do their own rendering on a blank canvas instead of using system controls, always looked like ass on macOS, so nothing new here.
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.
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…?
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“
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~
seydor|8 months ago
whiteboardr|8 months ago
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.
serial_dev|8 months ago
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.
bigstrat2003|8 months ago
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.
naikrovek|8 months ago
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.
ljm|8 months ago
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.
wapeoifjaweofji|8 months ago
foobarian|8 months ago
At the same time remember how much of a struggle it was in the 90s to show transparent layers? Good times
nomel|8 months ago
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.
jameshart|8 months ago
jameslk|8 months ago
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
DidYaWipe|8 months ago
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.
kylebenzle|8 months ago
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mrtksn|8 months ago
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.
kace91|8 months ago
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.
chartered_stack|8 months ago
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.
Kwpolska|8 months ago
throwaway290|8 months ago
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.
flohofwoe|8 months ago
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".
mvkel|8 months ago
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.
gyomu|8 months ago
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.
matusp|8 months ago
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.
HellDunkel|8 months ago
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.
Kwpolska|8 months ago
martin-adams|8 months ago
Apple are much further behind with Siri than they realise.
farzd|8 months ago
okdood64|8 months ago
Can we stop blaming Gen Z for everything? This happens with every generation.
v5v3|8 months ago
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.
throw0101c|8 months 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.
ivape|8 months ago
wpm|8 months ago
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.
conradfr|8 months ago
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.
jl6|8 months ago
GreenVulpine|8 months ago
lvl155|8 months ago
unknown|8 months ago
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mrafii|8 months ago
iTokio|8 months ago
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.
matwood|8 months ago
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.
nixpulvis|8 months ago
What I want are UIs built more like E readers or newspapers, with screen updates taken seriously.
whycome|8 months ago
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.
steve_adams_86|8 months ago
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.
juntoalaluna|8 months ago
weiliddat|8 months ago
I'd probably do that after the first day of using it.
deergomoo|8 months ago
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).
sixothree|8 months ago
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.
aprilnya|8 months ago
int_19h|8 months ago
tropicalfruit|8 months ago
to understand the motivations, look at the outcomes.
ThouYS|8 months ago
rkagerer|8 months ago
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.
jeroenhd|8 months ago
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.
sixothree|8 months ago
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.
ajam1507|8 months ago
rkagerer|8 months ago
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.
sixothree|8 months ago
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.
unknown|8 months ago
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travisgriggs|8 months ago
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.
noisy_boy|8 months ago
nofunsir|8 months ago
As a user, I want color back on my GD buttons!
Also, I don't trust anyone who would wear those outfits.
nkrisc|8 months ago
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.
TheJoeMan|8 months ago
WhitneyLand|8 months ago
deergomoo|8 months ago
wpm|8 months ago
SwiftyBug|8 months ago
cyode|8 months ago
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.
dylan604|8 months ago
deaddodo|8 months ago
seanhunter|8 months ago
ErrorNoBrain|8 months ago
nofunsir|8 months ago
thomascountz|8 months ago
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.
janalsncm|8 months ago
plorkyeran|8 months ago
M4v3R|8 months ago
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)
basisword|8 months ago
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.
1123581321|8 months ago
nomel|8 months ago
unknown|8 months ago
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russellbeattie|8 months ago
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.
khurs|8 months ago
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...
Kwpolska|8 months ago
If it would work as well as it does in the beta, you're right it would stand out, but in the negative sense.
omnee|8 months ago
thorio|8 months ago
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.
hershey890|8 months ago
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.
zerr|8 months ago
Shadowmist|8 months ago
AJ007|8 months ago
crazygringo|8 months ago
mholm|8 months ago
user____name|8 months ago
sampton|8 months ago
raspyberr|8 months ago
tevon|8 months ago
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.
noisy_boy|8 months ago
Ylpertnodi|8 months ago
bluescrn|8 months ago
The bigger news is draggable, resizable windows in iPadOS 26. That’s quite an upgrade.
DavidPiper|8 months ago
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.
Naru41|8 months ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20120614042824/http://blogs.msdn...
sixothree|8 months ago
dgellow|8 months ago
bird0861|8 months ago
Ironic Apple gets good at hardware and then can't even build a UI or AI.
qwertox|8 months ago
travisgriggs|8 months ago
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.
ivape|8 months ago
deafpolygon|8 months ago
larrysalibra|8 months ago
LexGray|8 months ago
I think the UI is far more fun and usable than I remember Vista being.
lnrd|8 months ago
dbg31415|8 months ago
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.
etempleton|8 months ago
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.
popalchemist|8 months ago
nanna|8 months ago
pfortuny|8 months ago
robertclaus|8 months ago
hnlmorg|8 months ago
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.
bergfest|8 months ago
fnord77|8 months ago
edhelas|8 months ago
user____name|8 months ago
whytaka|8 months ago
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.
osigurdson|8 months ago
asmor|8 months ago
wetpaws|8 months ago
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dimal|8 months ago
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.
VikRubenfeld|8 months ago
slmjkdbtl|8 months ago
apexalpha|8 months ago
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...
hermitcrab|8 months ago
grishka|8 months ago
pfortuny|8 months ago
BSVogler|8 months ago
osigurdson|8 months ago
Inviz|8 months ago
yesbut|8 months ago
csk111165|8 months ago
hulitu|8 months ago
kgdinesh|8 months ago
unknown|8 months ago
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grishka|8 months ago
f_allwein|8 months ago
vvilliamperez|8 months ago
niklasbuschmann|8 months ago
BinaryMachine|8 months ago
I have liked MacOS UI upgrades over the years though, I am glad we don't use the brushed metal anymore :)
Barbing|8 months ago
“I just want the ugliest, highest-contrast menus possible, with everything labeled in large font“
unknown|8 months ago
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briian|8 months ago
jes5199|8 months ago
ErneX|8 months ago
https://omc345.substack.com/p/from-skeuomorphic-to-liquid-gl...
Edit: added a link.
trippsydrippsy|8 months ago
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wetpaws|8 months ago
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unknown|8 months ago
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2809|8 months ago
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timzaman|8 months ago
unknown|8 months ago
[deleted]
thunderbat3982|8 months ago
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~