[solfox]

100% this. I recall watching their launch video about Liquid Glass. It was filled with ego-driven "we're changing the world here" nonsense. They were designing in a bubble and wanted to do something different so they could justify the work. It was never about the user.

[btown]

My hot take on this is that there is a business goal to Liquid Glass that extends beyond ego - but it's about the restoration of Apple UI as an exclusive status symbol, not as a usable experience.

Apple looked at innovations in hardware form factor and, rather than trying to out-innovate in that sphere, said, instead: how do we make something in software that nobody would ever try to imitate, and thus position ourselves as the innovators once again?

And the monkey's paw curled and said: Liquid Glass is a set of translucency interactions that are technically near-impossible to imitate, sure, but the real reason nobody will try to imitate is because they are user-hostile to a brand-breaking extent.

And Apple had nobody willing to see this trainwreck happening and press the brakes.

[PufPufPuf]

The business goal is clear: visionOS. Liquid Glass is designed with AR in mind, that's the only place where it actually makes some sense. Pretty much the same thing as Microsoft did with Windows 8, trying to unify the UX and visual style across PCs and phones. And it's going similarly well.

[dbtc]

That's interesting and plausible.

It also contributes to obsolescing older hardware.

[ibero]

we saw this exact playbook with ios 7. i don't think you need to attribute malice or read into it much.

ios 7 relied heavily on blurring effects-- a flex at the time due to the efficient graphic pipeline vs android they had. this was coming off the heels of Samsung xerox'ing and they wanted a design that would be too expensive for competitors to emulate without expensive battery hit. liquid glass is following in this tradition.

and similarly to ios 7, the move to flat design was predicated on the introduction of new form factors and screen. flat design lent itself well to new incoming screen sizes and ratios. prior there was really one or two sizes and that was it, easy to target pixel perfect designs against. as apple moves to foldables and more, this design flexibility is once again required.

as for no one trying to emulate it, i'm not so sure, OriginOS 6 ripped it off back in October.

[gedy]

I honestly think they could have done that and still had some taste and considered usability much more than they did.

[dwd]

A design system I am required to use made a recent "major" update announcement: "Styles have been converted to variables. Styles are out and Figma variables are in".

Where what we really needed was a stable release version (now a year late from the original promised date) so we can build out UI components for the content editors to use that don't require constant design tweaks.

You know the designers are:

a) Just fucking around having fun

b) Making busy work to drag it out as long as possible

As it's now 4 years since they began working on the "design system", there's a good chance it will get canned as there's some more modern design they will want to use.

[jpfromlondon]

There is a product I have to use that updated its ui design some years ago, only the functionality is partially implemented and the new design has some functional elements that weren't present in the old configuration.

This has been solved with a button that switches the layout between the two designs, when I'm making changes it is sometimes necessary to flip back and forth between the two mid-change.

[hit8run]

Material Design?

[Perepiska]

I used to work for one big company. Every newly hired design director desperately wanted to create a new design for the corporate portal because it would add a new line to his resume.

[Rumudiez]

marketers are not designers and vice versa. of course the press release is going to be melodramatic no matter what the designers thought, or were told

[gyomu]

“Marketers are not designers” is fine, except it was the designers themselves pushing the marketing drivel in those videos.

[cyberge99]

You’re not looking far enough ahead. Liquid glass isn’t about Mac. It’s about VisionPro and wearables. This is a strategic play by Apple.

[wolvoleo]

Microsoft totally screwed up the windows interface with windows 8 to suit tablets which they viewed as the future of computing. Not only were they wrong, they also really broke the UX for the users they did have for a new product that hardly sold and still doesn't (windows tablets). Eventually they had to cave in but Apple is more stubborn than Microsoft.

Even if Apple is right, why shoehorn the future into the present on devices unsuitable for its new paradigms? The iOSification also only worsened the macOS UX. It's one of the reasons I moved to Linux with KDE which I can configure as I like.

If they want make the AR OS of the future then make it on the vision pro where it belongs.

[dehrmann]

Apple just reduced Vision Pro production, but Liquid Glass was in motion well before that. What leaves me scratching my head is I never got the impression Apple believed in Vision Pro. It launched because after years of research, management wanted to see if the effort was worth continuing to invest in, but that wasn't a vote of confidence.

[psunavy03]

. . . so other devices are required to have the same interface? No, they're not. Just because you want to share enough design cues to make people understand they're dealing with the same brand doesn't mean you have to hammer square pegs into round holes.

Not to mention the fact that first, you have to get to a point where AR wearables are commercially viable, and we don't seem to have hit that point yet.

[herval]

It doesnt really introduce anything that makes Vision Pro in any way better, though

[treymalikcruz]

I think this is the right read in terms of intent but I also feel it offers a lens into the silliness of Apple's current strategy around all this. VisionPro appears to be currently floundering, and no matter how much they try to make it unintrusive and airy and transparent in its interface, it's presently an unwieldy device not designed to leave the home or office. Predicating company-wide design systems on this line being the future feels aspirational at best and delusional at worst. And what good is liquid glass on a Mac? To show me an obscured glimpse of my desktop background and add visual clutter?

(Apologies to @cyberge99 if my tone comes off intense, this is not to come at you but rather is just me venting my frustrations with Apple. I think you are correct in your assessment of the idea here.)

[realusername]

Sounds like Windows 8 designing their touch-first interface for a desktop, with about the same success.

[schmuckonwheels]

>This is a strategic play by Apple

No, this is the fault of a company and industry with way too much money and not knowing what to do with it.

So they hired a bunch of artists who would otherwise be carving wood in a decrepit loft somewhere after taking half a mushroom cap. These people now decide how computers should operate.

I remember watching a documentary from the 80s where Susan Kare explained how every pixel in the Macintosh UI was deliberately put there to help the user in some way. One lady did the whole thing, the whole OS.

Now we have entire teams of people trying to turn your computer into an avant-garde art piece.

[CameronBanga]

Eh, I would disagree as there's nothing in it where you go "Oh wow, that's why they did it" in the context of Vision Pro or wearables.

It seems much more likely that the driver here was to produce a UI that was resource intensive and hard to replicate unless you control the processors that go into your devices as well as the entire graphics processing stack that sits above that as well. It seems created to flaunt the concept of "go ahead and try to copy this" to Google and Microsoft.

[Bluestrike2]

If it's a strategic play, it's a terrible one that douses usability in gasoline and sacrifices it at the altar of visual novelty for no real gain. Apple has spent literal decades working on and refining their Human Interface Guidelines for different devices. Between Tahoe and Liquid Glass, they seem to have just tossed them on the bonfire for no justifiable reason.

VisionPro was meant to literally overlay its interface over your field of vision. That's a very different context and interaction paradigm. Trying to shoehorn the adaptations they made for it into their other, far more popular interfaces for the sake of consistency? It's absurd.