It sounds plausible, but only in the shallowest “yeah, make ‘em look the same” way. Just like when they started shipping the Catalyst-based Mac apps of Messages, Photos, etc so that they’d look the same as the iOS apps (and no doubt so they could reuse some code from there instead of wasting developers on the Mac platform they hate).
It’s not as though anything about Liquid Glass makes a meaningful difference in usability.
More likely the UX team touched AVP last, so some of the design language influenced what they were building.
The goal is most likely to unify the experience around iPadOS, so that one codebase ports down the phone and watch and over to the Mac and AVP.
The delta between Mac and iPad UX elements goes down every release. The latest one gave the iPad a menu bar and multi window support.
Looking at it from a certain angle, the iOS codebase is the only one which has a native team for a lot of large companies - they might not even create larger views for an iPad native version, and may instead ship Electron for the macOS release. Apple is trying to recruit the native mobile team to be able to support native releases for the whole ecosystem.
VisionOS doesn't actually have the degree of transparency of Liquid Glass, though, which makes the whole thing particularly weird. It has a much more opaque frosted glass effect.
It would help if it wasn't 3500 dollars, they did not embrace games, and were expecting developers to buy such devices for so little return in development cost, released at a time most headsets were already on yet again going down on another VR headset cycle.
Except Liquid Glass looks nothing at all like visionOS. If they had just taken a carbon copy of the visionOS UI and put it on Mac and iPhone, I doubt there would have been any controversy. Buttons don't look like they hover way higher than the UI. Sidebars and toolbar buttons are indented, they don't scream "LOOK AT ME!".
I would be shocked if Apple was making any product decisions to benefit visionOS at the expense of anything else. It’s so abundantly clear that the vision pro was a failure, it would be a horrible mistake to sacrifice anything to try and save it at this point. I think Apple is done with that experiment.
ChrisMarshallNY|2 months ago
I suspect that they were rather shaken at how poorly AVP was received.
emchammer|2 months ago
xp84|2 months ago
It’s not as though anything about Liquid Glass makes a meaningful difference in usability.
glhaynes|2 months ago
dwaite|2 months ago
The goal is most likely to unify the experience around iPadOS, so that one codebase ports down the phone and watch and over to the Mac and AVP.
The delta between Mac and iPad UX elements goes down every release. The latest one gave the iPad a menu bar and multi window support.
Looking at it from a certain angle, the iOS codebase is the only one which has a native team for a lot of large companies - they might not even create larger views for an iPad native version, and may instead ship Electron for the macOS release. Apple is trying to recruit the native mobile team to be able to support native releases for the whole ecosystem.
crooked-v|2 months ago
PufPufPuf|2 months ago
pjmlp|2 months ago
It was bound to fail since day one.
concinds|2 months ago
Except Liquid Glass looks nothing at all like visionOS. If they had just taken a carbon copy of the visionOS UI and put it on Mac and iPhone, I doubt there would have been any controversy. Buttons don't look like they hover way higher than the UI. Sidebars and toolbar buttons are indented, they don't scream "LOOK AT ME!".
Dye is just a moron.
ninkendo|2 months ago
Shadowmist|2 months ago
ics|2 months ago