The transparency, blur and contrast issues are stupid but so obviously stupid that I assume they’ll be fixed. What worries me more about iOS 26 is the continuing trend of platforms being so ashamed of any visible UI that they feel the need to hide it. More ‘…’ menus everywhere, some of them only appearing after certain scroll gestures, which means tools that used to be ever-present and immediately tappable now require three gestures to activate. This desire to squash every UI down into one barely visible drop of glass isn’t ridiculous because of the glass, it’s ridiculous because UI is important. These devices have big screens and tons of pixels (not to mention hardware buttons) but somehow we only have room for the main content pane in any app. I agree with the article that skeuomorphism has gone too far, beyond mere analogy and now into the realm of completely impenetrable metaphor. Give me a brutalist UI that isn’t embarrassed to show itself. Gimme things that both explain and enable the app’s features. By all means make them shiny and lickable but please stop trying to take them away.
I hear you, but for most applications I don't want a lot of UI because it wastes screen space. It really depends on what I'm doing, but I feel the opposite that you do - most applications I use are full of widgets, separator bars, dots, mini buttons while I just want an empty canvas for work. When I add everything, I lose 1/3 of my workplace to UI alone and I don't like it.
That's one thing I miss from menu+hotkey UIs - the menu bar is all you have to worry about.
I couldn't agree more. I didn't even like when Windows started adding those little transitions when you minimized/restored windows, because it delayed the presentation of the window for pure aesthetics. For a work machine, give me a Windows 2000 interface any day over the form over function approach of so many modern UIs.
> The transparency, blur and contrast issues are stupid but so obviously stupid that I assume they’ll be fixed.
lol
I thought the same when ios 7 came out - hidden menus requiring multiple taps, touch targets that don't look like touch targets, small targets, terrible contrast, silly unreadable fonts, on and on...
but not only didn't this get fixed, the SAME designs leaked into the rest of the world.
for example, the tesla car UI adopted ALL the same deficiencies. Hard to read center display? critical functions that require multiple taps? all while you're driving... wow
> Give me a brutalist UI that isn’t embarrassed to show itself. Gimme things that both explain and enable the app’s features. By all means make them shiny and lickable
[...or not, according to user preference. -- my addition /CRC]
In other words, give me Windows 7. Where I could select everything from the "Classic" (Win 95/NT4/2000) via the XP to the Vista UI "themes" (and then modify to my exact preference from there).
With apps from ~the XP era, when their UIs too were still useful.
I wholeheartedly agree. There are two great examples of this in the latest iOS beta:
In Safari, there used to be a button at the low right to reveal all the open tabs, allow, allowing you to close the current tab, or any other others using just two taps. Now you have to hit a “…” button, followed by ”all tabs”.
Also, I noticed in the podcast app there used to be a skip 15 seconds button always available at the lower right when content started playing. Perfect for avoiding those obnoxious loud ads at the very first sample of audio. Now it’s two clicks away. Incredibly frustrating.
Absolutely. JetBrains are, as one HN commentator put it "speedrunning enshitification" -- in no small part by attempting to ditch their classic GUI for some absolute piece of shit minimalist rip off of VS Code.
The sad part about this is how many other products will likely blindly follow suit.
This problem is endemic to the industry. All mainstream operating systems have been done products for quite a while. But because full-time designers need to be designing something even when nothing in the company needs designed any more, they start redesigning existing products. And the more radical and courageous the redesign, the better for their performance review.
I hear this complaint about designers wanting radical redesigns or chasing trends, but the actual UX designers I've worked with seem to prefer spending time on usability testing, eliminating workflow steps, clarifying hierarchy, making consistent design systems, that sort of thing. True, some of them make things too minimal or rearrange the layout for minimal gain.
However, in my experience the mandate to drastically redesign a product or "make it look more modern" have always come from sales and/or product owners, and in turn they're driven by competitors and customer choices.
I'm not sure I entirely agree. The design of smartphones has largely been unchanged for a decade. Prior to that there was a renaissance of various designs, shapes, folds, panels, buttons, keyboards, etc. Today everyone carries around rectangular slab.
What is happening here is Apple is unifying their product lines. All OS versions have converged to 26, 27, 28. The M processor runs iPads, Laptops and Vision. You can install iOS apps on macOS.
The headset is not a hit but it's a sign of things to come. The hardware will get better and I'm expecting seamless handoff between all your apple devices. Start a facetime call on your laptop in your office? Transfer that to your visionOS headset and start walking. Move to the living room and toss that app at your apple TV and finish up the call from the couch.
We've seen apple move toward unifying their various OS interfaces for a long time. People were forecasting this when OS X 10.6 started using the app store and app icons taken straight from the iPhone.
As the article says, liquid glass works best for spatial computing. That's apple's next big bet and the whole ecosystem is going to cater to it.
Not introducing any changes can lead to becoming “uncool” among the younger generation, which can be detrimental to the longevity of the business. Generally I agree with you, but it’s not that simple as our (HN crowd’s?) attitude of “function over form” is not that common out in the wild. People will spend money on stuff that makes them feel or look better. However, designers can screw that up too, and make the new”thing” uncool.
This is a tired take, not unlike when people bash web developers to make slow and bloated web pages. Completely disregards how little say the individual has in the final product, and especially in the design of that product.
What's actually happening is that companies are expected to a different standards, by customers and other companies alike. By trying to anticipate these expectations, companies go ahead and do the changes that they think will strengthen the brand that they are trying to project. That's all there is to it, the rest is implementation.
As a designer I can say that the truth is that customers expect things to get remade and updated and if you wait too long the stale aesthetic begins driving away new AND existing users who want to try out shiny new things. Nice hallucination though blaming it on designers, the folks with no decision making abilties who are often blocked by PMs and devs.
Performance review driven development is the bane of the whole industry. People inventing bullshit work for absolutely no reason other than to pad their yearly reviews. I've been through two large useless rewrites at my current job just so a bunch of folks could get promoted.
IMHO it's not specific to design - in big companies incentives (for unknown to me reason) set in a way that small incremental improvements are discouraged by managers and delivery of a big shiny project is the best way to get a bonus/promotion. Managers don't want designers and developers to keep improving things, they want something completely new (a project they can attach their name to) or at lest some big change - the bigger the better.
It doesn’t even look particularly good? And I’m not even a design-Luddite – generally a fan of a lot of Apple visual design and I hate old windows 98-style buttons. I’m the type of person who should enjoy it. (Only speaking about the visuals here)
The only wow feeling I get is the refraction effect. Like, it’s a ”novel” effect in GUIs. But when elements are still it looks the same as regular glassomorphism which we already had years ago. Buttons look totally different depending on what’s underneath, and in 90% of cases it’s messy and blurs together. The wow feeling will fade quickly, but the clutter will remain…
The only thing I like is that it makes layering a bit clearer (groupings, buttons vs indicators) compared to ultra-flat design of the last years. But that could have been achieved with subtle 3d/parallax effects, eg based on gyro.
My theory is that Apple specifically wanted an effect that can’t be replicated in webviews, to drive more devs towards native, out of FOMO for looking ”cheap”.
> It doesn’t even look particularly good? And I’m not even a design-Luddite – generally a fan of a lot of Apple visual design and I hate old windows 98-style buttons. I’m the type of person who should enjoy it. (Only speaking about the visuals here)
Same, and liquid glass so far is just...bad, in a way. I don't mind it nearly as much on the iPhone but it's particularly bad on macOS. Excessive padding, lack of clean information density. The transparent menu bar doesn't adjust text for the wallpaper, so if you set a white background you still get (now unreadable) white text, but everywhere else the text changes colors based on the background. There's not even a glass effect in the menu bar, it's just transparent.
Honestly macOS 26, still as of Beta 4, looks like a bad GNOME/GTK theme. I'm incredibly disappointed in Apple here - a company that said they would never converge their interfaces together have basically morphed macOS into iPad OS.
Meanwhile on the mobile side of things, Material 3 expressive is actually looking really nice, aesthetically and I'd prefer that but then I'm giving up all of Apple's other conveniences.
Hurray for no competition.
> My theory is that Apple specifically wanted an effect that can’t be replicated in webviews, to drive more devs towards native, out of FOMO for looking ”cheap”.
I get this vibe too - they want something that can only be made using their toolkits, drive more to the app store and that sweet sweet 30% commission.
> My theory is that Apple specifically wanted an effect that can’t be replicated in webviews
This makes a lot of sense to me. I was also under the impression that all these lighting effects would be rather computationally expensive. This could encourage people to upgrade devices and make it hard to replicate this design on other brands’ less powerful hardware.
> Later iOS 26 beta releases show Apple reducing transparency and adding blur effects for better readability.
This is a beta release. It is a work in progress. When iOS 7’s betas came out the reaction was similarly negative. I would suggest we wait and see what the system evolves into; by the time we get to iOS 27 I am quite sure that Apple will have found the right balance.
I've observed that some people like to gatekeep others from being allowed to criticize the beta, but then when the final version releases they gatekeep criticizing that too because "you should have given feedback during the beta!"
It is just a way people try to shutdown being critical of Apple's stuff in general. It is tiresome.
When Apple is dropping press releases trumpeting their "meticulously crafted" design that "makes even the simplest of interactions more fun and magical", it is not persuasive to cry "beta!"
Even the screenshots in the press release - Apple's best foot forward - were criticized more or less immediately; it's not like the problems with the design are rare edge cases.
Apple clearly owns the decision to go this route. No one forced them to announce it before refining it internally. It remains to be seen how drastically they will have to walk it back. Whether or not they rework it enough to reduce complaints, I can't see how they can call it a win in the end. They will anyway.
As for being "sure" Apple will find the right balance, they never fixed usability regressions in macOS introduced in the last redesign. And they have ~10 weeks to fix all this.
Ah. So they're reducing transparency to get better readability... If reducing transparency increases readability, then wouldn't the best readability occur at zero transparency?
Readability is obviously good for something. Is transparency?
I am quite sure that "the right balance" is zero transparency, but only about 99% sure Apple won't "find" that.
iOS 7 remains to this day a common meme among Apple developer community regarding design going too far, so naturally finding the right balance is kind of questionable.
But so is alpha, which is where looniness gets to live without judgement. Beta is supposed to be polished and working well, except where there are explicit warnings of incomplete or sketchy functionality. I.e. small areas that are still alpha.
Which is the opposite of how Apple framed "liquid glass" in the beta.
Apple lowered the bar on its beta. Strong feedback is how customers suggest a course correction at a higher level.
All the friggin' shaders we have to run to waste GPU cycles, just to get those blobs pretending to refract light. Don't even get me started about the ever-increasing border radii!?
One could suppose that they need to justify the GPU/NPU hardware bloat originally intended for "Apple Intelligence" now that "Apple Intelligence" seems overblown and under-delivered. Though they'd need a lot more shaders beyond just "glass" to really make a dent in the cycles available from all that hardware.
This rounded corner change feels very off. Since Apple has that same radius across all its products (software and hardware), it could be signaling a broader upcoming shift in their hardware, perhaps driven by industrial design needs for future AR/VR/MR glasses.
What I find comical is that the same people praising this on various networks are often the same that hate on cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin or AI because of the energy usage.
Apple has 1bio devices out there, if each of them consumes 10% more energy due to this change, that's a massive energy consumption increase - and this change offers no functional benefit at all.
My question is: Given Apple is one of the most valuable companies on the planet, they can (and surely have) hired some of the best designers in the world. Articles like this one and many others are virtually sharing what we all think and every time a new beta comes out, it's strange to see some of the decisions that are made. The first beta came out and it was _very hard_ to see the lock screen if you had notifications. How was that missed? Or keep liquid glass, but don't make the text bright blue, so it's so hard to see. Or trigger frosted glass if dependent on whatever the background is? I sincerely do find designers to be in a hard position (especially having worked with so many of them in the past directly), but a lot of these things seem like novice mistakes. Maybe it's not even in the designing, it's on the QA front? I'm not even sure here. I'm by no means a designer, but I have to believe that they are testing this as much as we are internally and have been for a long time now... I'd like to believe they aren't just changing UI elements on the fly based on what X / Twitter feels is good or bad.
Two theories are that Apple had to put something together quickly as a headliner because Apple Intelligence was clearly going to be a dud. So this is basically a hacked-together panic project.
Or someone high up has a Vision™, and they're so set on that Vision™ they're not listening to what underlings and users are saying.
Consider a parallel reality in which Apple did the next round of updates as a maintenance release and added some minor new features and UI tweaks. Would that have been a more positive outcome for the company?
My guess is there would have been some grumbling about not having anything new to offer, but also relief that bugs were being fixed. It would have been a bit of a non-event.
This seems more like a seismic negative event, with a lot of criticism from all quarters. (And some stanning, but less than usual.)
But form over function is the core of why Apple is such hugely successful company with just few products. Focus on emotions rather than technical aspects. Design over usability. Less choices for users, just compare how much you can tweak in android vs ios. Removals of buttons, 3.5mm jack, sim card, removable batteries and so on and on just in phone area.
You may not like it (certainly I don't) but its extremely well received behavior. Humans are mostly emotional beings, just look at politics if you think otherwise.
I've recently picked up writing again, and decided to share my thoughts about what most designers (developers, tech people) have been thinking about lately: Liquid Glass. It makes sense, consistency-wise, but I wonder if it's the right direction. Let's hope Apple fixes the readability issues soon. Is this the new Windows Vista?
> Apple is prioritizing visual consistency over readability
It's a bit like someone saying "To view this website, enable JavaScript in your browser settings and reload the page" to read a simple piece of text ;)
As a typeface and legibility enthusiast I obviously have my problems with it.
I've found that in the creative work I do, lots of things moved away from skeuomorphism too far. Yes it's easier to read the text on a flat black background with all the controls in a grid. but you lose some intuition compared to when it actually resembled a hardware unit that has logical places for things.
I'm in the market for a new vehicle so I'm particular interested in that last line: which companies are bringing back physical controls in cars?
Bugatti has chosen with the new Tourbillion to go for an all analog gauge + button setup. Because handcrafted gauges and buttons (these days) shows of luxury. https://www.bugatti.com/en/models/tourbillon
A flat touchscreen in a car is something that is now used in anything from a base Fiat Panda to the most expensive Mercedes S class. And it all looks cheap because visually there is little visual difference between that and a 25,- dollar AliExpress tablet.
At some point in time the luxury car brands must be getting this feedback from their customers.
I don't want skeuomorphism personally, but the problem isn't with the lack of that, it's with the lack of any consistent way to differentiate the various controls in general. Is it just a bit of text? A button? A checkbox? Who knows when it's all the same kind of flat.
Win95 was very much not skeuomorphic, but it had very strong visual cues in UI even so.
It's nice to have frivilous things in our life where form overtakes function. But with a GUI, it's a tool and they work best when there are no frills. Nobody makes a fancy looking hammer (looking forward to the fancy hammer replies).
My fear is that we are in a world were there can only be a couple of unique device types, and thus only a couple of unique operating systems and UIs. So that even for professional (metaphorical) “hammer” users, the function will end up performed by the same device/os/ui that is also handing more consumer oriented functions. There will be tension in the UI needs of different functions, but the market for consumer functions is just so large, that the hammer function will lose and be forced to adopt an unsuitable ui.
“Your colleague Joe just hammered an 8d nail!”
<Like> <comment>
> Early signs suggest they're already realizing this. Later iOS 26 beta releases show Apple reducing transparency and adding blur effects for better readability.
That statement on July 20 didn't age well, because beta 4 released yesterday, July 22, doubled down on transparency, undoing some of the minor improvements in beta 3.
Although, I suspect if AR really becomes a thing, it will be in a form-factor with actually physical transparency. Nreal is the design to beat, not the gaming headsets.
If the display is already transparent, adding a layer of pseudo-transparency to the interface seems kinda pointless.
> Instead, it introduces readability problems without any of the spatial computing benefits.
> Apple's Liquid Glass may win design accolades, but history suggests it will join the long list of beautiful solutions that made computing harder, not easier, for the people who actually have to use it every day. Unless they get it right.
> Early signs suggest they're already realizing this.
Succinctly written.
How can the third most valuable company on the planet with computing being the core of their DNA not realize this pre launch?
I have no experience with either SF/ SV or culture in large US enterprises.
>How can the third most valuable company on the planet with computing being the core of their DNA not realize this pre launch?
Large companies have lots of mediocre people making decisions and the larger a company is the further away those decision makers are from the experts that can guide them towards making the correct decision.
> How can the third most valuable company on the planet with computing being the core of their DNA not realize this pre launch?
They haven’t launched it. The version with the exaggerated effects was an early beta. The more recent betas are already far more refined.
Everyone is raging over some early pre-release screenshots and videos because they’re unfamiliar with how Apple works: The early betas of a new UI are always refined and adjusted significantly before launch.
I suspect it was UI work done to coincide with the assumed (at the time) forthcoming dominance of the Apple Vision, if you consider the timeline. Cant waste that work even if Vision flopped. If you cant get society to embrace Vision, integrate it into their 2d UI as a trojan horse to make it more familiar and try again with the next generation when AR comes back after the AI fervor dies down.
This same strategy is what brought coffee and starbucks to Japan using a ten year plan, first they had to start with coffee flavored candy to get the kids used to it, then 10 years later only then you can begin bringing in more coffee flavors, soon you have a Starbucks here and there.
I've been using the iOS26 beta and I HAAATE the transparent/blurry navigation bar.
I'm curious what the impact is to a11y users though—it's been a while since I had to think about it but I remember having pretty strict requirements on background/foreground font and color differences for users with suboptimal vision.
Great article. It cannot be said enough that sometimes physical interaction is just better than digital. Airline pilots, when they reach for certain levers, that lever has a certain feeling. So they don't have to think about it. Making too many things Digital is just way too confusing for the human mind.
The recent big new initiatives by Apple has been all kind of failure? Apple Intelligence, Apple Vision, now this?
I don't know. I don't want to be doomsdayer because even during its heyday Apple made lot of mistakes - remember Ping? - but they never felt like this.
Yesterday I dusted off my iPhone 4 that was on iOS 5 (skeuomorphic) and it was lovely to use. Like a bonehead I wiped it and let iTunes update to 7.1.2 and now it has the flat design similar to what we have today and it sucks!
> This may be the first time I will stay on an older iOS version.
i actually tried this last time but they found a way to sneak a reboot after pooping up a dialog randomly and me accidentally pressing ok... so, good luck with that...
Like Stockholm syndrome with dongles hanging out of the laptop, because having too many ports like PCs is bad for aesthetics, having a dongle hanging out of the laptop is much better.
I only use Macs on project basis, otherwise I am on PC, and is quite fun to see almost everyone on Apple side around the office carrying such dongles.
I’m glad that I hesitated and didn’t buy a Mac just before this new design. It’s really a blocker to me now because I freaking hate it and I know I can’t stand using it for every day
It seems that many people criticising transparency also think that it does make sense in AR. I never understood why.
AR is old. We have things like street signs, road markings, advertising and all sorts of other signage. Almost none of it is transparent, and why would it be?
No one can focus on a thing and what's behind it at the same time. There is no correct level of blur to fix this (but I'm sure they are going to spend years trying to find it anyway).
What I would like to be able to do sometimes is to make something transparent when it's blocking my view. It shouldn't be semi-transparent or blurred. It should be a faint wireframe outline so I know that something is there.
YouTube recently made this change too where fullscreen controls are blurry-transparent and i said out loud yesterday "omg YouTube if it's blurry enough to read the foreground text it's too blurry to read the background text, what is the point"
thom|7 months ago
glimshe|7 months ago
That's one thing I miss from menu+hotkey UIs - the menu bar is all you have to worry about.
RankingMember|7 months ago
m463|7 months ago
lol
I thought the same when ios 7 came out - hidden menus requiring multiple taps, touch targets that don't look like touch targets, small targets, terrible contrast, silly unreadable fonts, on and on...
but not only didn't this get fixed, the SAME designs leaked into the rest of the world.
for example, the tesla car UI adopted ALL the same deficiencies. Hard to read center display? critical functions that require multiple taps? all while you're driving... wow
sigh
CRConrad|7 months ago
[...or not, according to user preference. -- my addition /CRC]
In other words, give me Windows 7. Where I could select everything from the "Classic" (Win 95/NT4/2000) via the XP to the Vista UI "themes" (and then modify to my exact preference from there).
With apps from ~the XP era, when their UIs too were still useful.
lapcat|7 months ago
I find your confidence here strange, because something so obviously stupid never should have been implemented in the first place, yet it was.
Never underestimate the incompetence and obliviousness of powerful people.
matt-attack|7 months ago
In Safari, there used to be a button at the low right to reveal all the open tabs, allow, allowing you to close the current tab, or any other others using just two taps. Now you have to hit a “…” button, followed by ”all tabs”.
Also, I noticed in the podcast app there used to be a skip 15 seconds button always available at the lower right when content started playing. Perfect for avoiding those obnoxious loud ads at the very first sample of audio. Now it’s two clicks away. Incredibly frustrating.
airstrike|7 months ago
troupo|7 months ago
They won't be fixed. At least not quickly, and not easily.
Because Liquid Glass is literally not designed to be fixed, and has literally never been tested in real conditions.
We've seen that with Apple's flailing in the first few betas
unknown|7 months ago
[deleted]
illiac786|7 months ago
gjvc|7 months ago
The sad part about this is how many other products will likely blindly follow suit.
grishka|7 months ago
asoneth|7 months ago
However, in my experience the mandate to drastically redesign a product or "make it look more modern" have always come from sales and/or product owners, and in turn they're driven by competitors and customer choices.
mingus88|7 months ago
What is happening here is Apple is unifying their product lines. All OS versions have converged to 26, 27, 28. The M processor runs iPads, Laptops and Vision. You can install iOS apps on macOS.
The headset is not a hit but it's a sign of things to come. The hardware will get better and I'm expecting seamless handoff between all your apple devices. Start a facetime call on your laptop in your office? Transfer that to your visionOS headset and start walking. Move to the living room and toss that app at your apple TV and finish up the call from the couch.
We've seen apple move toward unifying their various OS interfaces for a long time. People were forecasting this when OS X 10.6 started using the app store and app icons taken straight from the iPhone.
As the article says, liquid glass works best for spatial computing. That's apple's next big bet and the whole ecosystem is going to cater to it.
tokioyoyo|7 months ago
npteljes|7 months ago
What's actually happening is that companies are expected to a different standards, by customers and other companies alike. By trying to anticipate these expectations, companies go ahead and do the changes that they think will strengthen the brand that they are trying to project. That's all there is to it, the rest is implementation.
cut3|7 months ago
mlinhares|7 months ago
citrin_ru|7 months ago
klabb3|7 months ago
The only wow feeling I get is the refraction effect. Like, it’s a ”novel” effect in GUIs. But when elements are still it looks the same as regular glassomorphism which we already had years ago. Buttons look totally different depending on what’s underneath, and in 90% of cases it’s messy and blurs together. The wow feeling will fade quickly, but the clutter will remain…
The only thing I like is that it makes layering a bit clearer (groupings, buttons vs indicators) compared to ultra-flat design of the last years. But that could have been achieved with subtle 3d/parallax effects, eg based on gyro.
My theory is that Apple specifically wanted an effect that can’t be replicated in webviews, to drive more devs towards native, out of FOMO for looking ”cheap”.
thewebguyd|7 months ago
Same, and liquid glass so far is just...bad, in a way. I don't mind it nearly as much on the iPhone but it's particularly bad on macOS. Excessive padding, lack of clean information density. The transparent menu bar doesn't adjust text for the wallpaper, so if you set a white background you still get (now unreadable) white text, but everywhere else the text changes colors based on the background. There's not even a glass effect in the menu bar, it's just transparent.
Honestly macOS 26, still as of Beta 4, looks like a bad GNOME/GTK theme. I'm incredibly disappointed in Apple here - a company that said they would never converge their interfaces together have basically morphed macOS into iPad OS.
Meanwhile on the mobile side of things, Material 3 expressive is actually looking really nice, aesthetically and I'd prefer that but then I'm giving up all of Apple's other conveniences.
Hurray for no competition.
> My theory is that Apple specifically wanted an effect that can’t be replicated in webviews, to drive more devs towards native, out of FOMO for looking ”cheap”.
I get this vibe too - they want something that can only be made using their toolkits, drive more to the app store and that sweet sweet 30% commission.
expensive_news|7 months ago
This makes a lot of sense to me. I was also under the impression that all these lighting effects would be rather computationally expensive. This could encourage people to upgrade devices and make it hard to replicate this design on other brands’ less powerful hardware.
mintone|7 months ago
> Later iOS 26 beta releases show Apple reducing transparency and adding blur effects for better readability.
This is a beta release. It is a work in progress. When iOS 7’s betas came out the reaction was similarly negative. I would suggest we wait and see what the system evolves into; by the time we get to iOS 27 I am quite sure that Apple will have found the right balance.
Someone1234|7 months ago
It is just a way people try to shutdown being critical of Apple's stuff in general. It is tiresome.
mpalmer|7 months ago
Even the screenshots in the press release - Apple's best foot forward - were criticized more or less immediately; it's not like the problems with the design are rare edge cases.
Apple clearly owns the decision to go this route. No one forced them to announce it before refining it internally. It remains to be seen how drastically they will have to walk it back. Whether or not they rework it enough to reduce complaints, I can't see how they can call it a win in the end. They will anyway.
vsl|7 months ago
Beta 4 went back again.
As for being "sure" Apple will find the right balance, they never fixed usability regressions in macOS introduced in the last redesign. And they have ~10 weeks to fix all this.
CRConrad|7 months ago
Readability is obviously good for something. Is transparency?
I am quite sure that "the right balance" is zero transparency, but only about 99% sure Apple won't "find" that.
pjmlp|7 months ago
Nevermark|7 months ago
But so is alpha, which is where looniness gets to live without judgement. Beta is supposed to be polished and working well, except where there are explicit warnings of incomplete or sketchy functionality. I.e. small areas that are still alpha.
Which is the opposite of how Apple framed "liquid glass" in the beta.
Apple lowered the bar on its beta. Strong feedback is how customers suggest a course correction at a higher level.
deadbabe|7 months ago
evrimoztamur|7 months ago
Aurornis|7 months ago
The GPU compute used by this is trivial for modern SoCs.
There is so much power and efficiency in a modern iPhone processor that these simple shaders are entirely negligible.
WorldMaker|7 months ago
notfried|7 months ago
abujazar|7 months ago
terhechte|7 months ago
Apple has 1bio devices out there, if each of them consumes 10% more energy due to this change, that's a massive energy consumption increase - and this change offers no functional benefit at all.
pookieinc|7 months ago
TheOtherHobbes|7 months ago
Or someone high up has a Vision™, and they're so set on that Vision™ they're not listening to what underlings and users are saying.
Consider a parallel reality in which Apple did the next round of updates as a maintenance release and added some minor new features and UI tweaks. Would that have been a more positive outcome for the company?
My guess is there would have been some grumbling about not having anything new to offer, but also relief that bugs were being fixed. It would have been a bit of a non-event.
This seems more like a seismic negative event, with a lot of criticism from all quarters. (And some stanning, but less than usual.)
jajko|7 months ago
You may not like it (certainly I don't) but its extremely well received behavior. Humans are mostly emotional beings, just look at politics if you think otherwise.
Aurornis|7 months ago
It’s a beta for a reason.
Past betas have also had graphical weirdness in certain new features, too. They iterate on it before release.
Why has everyone suddenly forgotten what beta means?
maxvij|7 months ago
sksrbWgbfK|7 months ago
It's a bit like someone saying "To view this website, enable JavaScript in your browser settings and reload the page" to read a simple piece of text ;)
anton-c|7 months ago
I've found that in the creative work I do, lots of things moved away from skeuomorphism too far. Yes it's easier to read the text on a flat black background with all the controls in a grid. but you lose some intuition compared to when it actually resembled a hardware unit that has logical places for things.
I'm in the market for a new vehicle so I'm particular interested in that last line: which companies are bringing back physical controls in cars?
bovermyer|7 months ago
I have a feeling I will need to settle for finding and restoring a car from before 1990.
thesimp|7 months ago
A flat touchscreen in a car is something that is now used in anything from a base Fiat Panda to the most expensive Mercedes S class. And it all looks cheap because visually there is little visual difference between that and a 25,- dollar AliExpress tablet.
At some point in time the luxury car brands must be getting this feedback from their customers.
KoboldAdvocate|7 months ago
int_19h|7 months ago
Win95 was very much not skeuomorphic, but it had very strong visual cues in UI even so.
adastra22|7 months ago
Popeyes|7 months ago
patrickmay|7 months ago
(I'm not a customer or an owner.)
appreciatorBus|7 months ago
“Your colleague Joe just hammered an 8d nail!” <Like> <comment>
os2warpman|7 months ago
That must be why everyone is using CDE...
AlexandrB|7 months ago
lapcat|7 months ago
That statement on July 20 didn't age well, because beta 4 released yesterday, July 22, doubled down on transparency, undoing some of the minor improvements in beta 3.
queenkjuul|7 months ago
npteljes|7 months ago
zero0529|7 months ago
bee_rider|7 months ago
Although, I suspect if AR really becomes a thing, it will be in a form-factor with actually physical transparency. Nreal is the design to beat, not the gaming headsets.
If the display is already transparent, adding a layer of pseudo-transparency to the interface seems kinda pointless.
unknown|7 months ago
[deleted]
thenaturalist|7 months ago
> Apple's Liquid Glass may win design accolades, but history suggests it will join the long list of beautiful solutions that made computing harder, not easier, for the people who actually have to use it every day. Unless they get it right.
> Early signs suggest they're already realizing this.
Succinctly written.
How can the third most valuable company on the planet with computing being the core of their DNA not realize this pre launch?
I have no experience with either SF/ SV or culture in large US enterprises.
Does someone has a hypothesis?
starky|7 months ago
Large companies have lots of mediocre people making decisions and the larger a company is the further away those decision makers are from the experts that can guide them towards making the correct decision.
Aurornis|7 months ago
They haven’t launched it. The version with the exaggerated effects was an early beta. The more recent betas are already far more refined.
Everyone is raging over some early pre-release screenshots and videos because they’re unfamiliar with how Apple works: The early betas of a new UI are always refined and adjusted significantly before launch.
abujazar|7 months ago
lagniappe|7 months ago
This same strategy is what brought coffee and starbucks to Japan using a ten year plan, first they had to start with coffee flavored candy to get the kids used to it, then 10 years later only then you can begin bringing in more coffee flavors, soon you have a Starbucks here and there.
elpakal|7 months ago
I'm curious what the impact is to a11y users though—it's been a while since I had to think about it but I remember having pretty strict requirements on background/foreground font and color differences for users with suboptimal vision.
Simulacra|7 months ago
JohnCClarke|7 months ago
tropicalfruit|7 months ago
apple is an inverted pyramid:
from legal and finance there is a call for streamlining (cost cutting)
karel-3d|7 months ago
I don't know. I don't want to be doomsdayer because even during its heyday Apple made lot of mistakes - remember Ping? - but they never felt like this.
2OEH8eoCRo0|7 months ago
suralind|7 months ago
andrekandre|7 months ago
unknown|7 months ago
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righthand|7 months ago
- they add a new menu view
- the menu views design get updated
When you run out of menus to add you’re left with design updates for the sake of design updates.
askl|7 months ago
pjmlp|7 months ago
I only use Macs on project basis, otherwise I am on PC, and is quite fun to see almost everyone on Apple side around the office carrying such dongles.
chaostheory|7 months ago
FollowingTheDao|7 months ago
I mean, are they trying to make the phone UI so bad that people finally give up and say “well I might as well get the goggles cause the phone sucks”?
daebersold|7 months ago
oldpersonintx2|7 months ago
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a012|7 months ago
fauigerzigerk|7 months ago
AR is old. We have things like street signs, road markings, advertising and all sorts of other signage. Almost none of it is transparent, and why would it be?
No one can focus on a thing and what's behind it at the same time. There is no correct level of blur to fix this (but I'm sure they are going to spend years trying to find it anyway).
What I would like to be able to do sometimes is to make something transparent when it's blocking my view. It shouldn't be semi-transparent or blurred. It should be a faint wireframe outline so I know that something is there.
queenkjuul|7 months ago