Liquid Glass – WWDC25 [video]
238 comments
·June 10, 2025seydor
whiteboardr
Plus, to be truly realistic it also would need to take into account ambient lighting scenarios surrounding the device displaying it.
Like this it’s really just another try in recreating glass which never made sense to be used in UI.
It is beyond me, how this got chosen as a way forward - taking visual design which makes sense in a VR/AR environment, to ruin their rectangular display UI.
It will make implementation way more complex than it is already and worse it will set off an avalanche of badly done imitations creating a mess throughout all touchpoints across companies taking years to clean up again - just as I thought that UI design finally reached an acceptable level of maturity.
Sad, really sad for a company like Apple to throw out precision, clarity and contrast for “effect”.
Sad.
seydor
It's not actually glass, instead the apple engineers and designers are basically simulating effect of surface tension of drops of liquid. Unfortunately the refraction at the edges of a droplet is not informative about whether the droplet is inward or outward facing (i.e. if it it toggled on or off). Hence why they use additional highlights and shadow to indicate the 3D structure. The liquid effect is a total gimmick . And they added insult to injury by adding color-changes and movement which is totally distracting when you re scrolling that diffucult paper.
rahen
I know most people couldn’t care less about this, but those gimmicky animations probably consume more computing power than the entire Apollo project, which strikes me as unnecessary and wasteful. Given the choice, I’d much rather have a clean, efficient interface.
I tend to like Material Design in comparison. It’s clean, efficient, and usable. I just hope Google won’t try to "improve" it with annoying gimmicks and end up making things worse, like Apple did here.
QuantumGood
Historically, design as a priority worsened UI for average and new users, and Apple has prioritized a feeling of elegance over ease of use.
Liquid glass puts UI second (feature cues) in favor of UX (interesting experience), harkening back to skeuomorphism but misprioritizing UI. I appreciated in Jobs's time how skeuomorphism was used to reveal more features, and give new users simple cues.
Now there is this idea that there is a higher percentage of advanced users, but since now there are MORE users (anyone with a screen), and continual change, I think there is still a large percentage of less advanced users.
philistine
I think they refuse to pick a shade of grey for their UI's background, so we're stuck with transparent elements.
jameshart
You know the dominant apps used on phones have large full screen user-generated video and imagery, right?
These are UI elements designed to work great over scrolling content feeds, full screen product images, album artwork, and thirty second videos of people doing meme dances. There is no room for ‘a gray background’.
hasmolo
the liquid glass ends up being vital for windows in AR. the vision pro has this, and it really helps you see behind the windows you've placed. while a shit experience on a phone, i do think liquid glass is a useful choice in the AR world
wpm
Back in my day (as far back as a month ago), we just called that effect “transparency” or “translucency”. Hell, there are types of AppKit popup windows that have the effect on by default, that have existed untouched since the early days of Mac OS X. Don’t give Apple more credit than they deserve here.
whiteboardr
No question about that - see above.
What works for augmented UI doesn’t in a desktop, mobile or 10ft experience.
It’s a terrible mistake porting something to an environment where transparency isn’t helping but brings about the opposite effect.
ljm
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.
christophilus
Their accessibility settings actually seem decent. You can turn off the animation, increase contrast, go nearly opaque… I still don’t think I’ll love this new paradigm, but it looks like I can mostly mitigate my concerns.
jameshart
End of the linked video highlights the accessibility settings.
serial_dev
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.
intrasight
I see no way around all that optics physics not sucking up computation and battery. Perhaps Apple will add liquid glass silicon to the mix to do that physics in hardware. Using glass to compute glass, LOL
LoganDark
Liquid glass can't possibly be that much more expensive than vibrancy (if it even is). The refraction effects are effectively just a displacement map (probably calculated realtime, but still).
seydor
my initial thought is that apple is preparing to launch physically deforming screens which will create bumps similar to this liquid.
jameshart
The linked video gives the explicit human interface guideline of don’t use it everywhere.
jameshart
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?
nomel
How is this wrong?
Our visual system is optimized, rather extremely, for understanding 3d scenes under the simple perspective model that our eyes are based on: x' = (x * f) / z
Outside of that 99.999% experience norm, that are brains are so used to, is disconnect and discomfort. If you've ever put on a new pair of glasses, with a different prescription, you'll understand exactly what he's talking about: depth offset and dizziness.
The disconnect is why refraction and lensing is interesting to look at: the model your eyes are used to seeing, for the world behind the thing, is not normal.
calrain
I wonder if this is linked to the reason that so many people become nauseous with 3D glasses.
When we see 3d movements that don't correlate with what our inner ears, the response is that our body assumes something is wrong, we have ingested a toxin, and a nausea / vomit response is created.
There is something visually jarring about this Liquid Glass UI, and it's possible it's related to movements not correlating with an internal frame of reference.
aquariusDue
I get car sick quite easily, same with VR, but I actually like the design language of Liquid Glass over the first iteration of Material (I like the new updates to Material too). I think people should watch from minute 13 onward if they're short on time and want the gist of it.
I guess I'm a weird outlier and that's fine.
LoganDark
I can't use 3d glasses because my eyes don't converge properly. Maybe one day I'll have surgery to correct that
seydor
the fact that it's surprising does not make it a visual cue. A cue to what? I am not aware of any psychophysics study that says we have perception of droplets or lens transformations (in contrast to shadows , gradients etc that are well studied). There also doesn't seem to be an evolutionary reason for it because the natural world does not have lenses and glass. And UIs are usually based on intuitive features.
oharapj
Not saying this makes the ui good but it should go without saying that the natural world has water which acts as a lens.
Also, of course we have perception of droplets. What we don’t have is an intuitive understanding of how light interacts with droplets.
I suspect that Apple are trying to leverage this lack of intuition to make their ui interesting to look at in an evergreen way. New backgrounds mean new interesting interactions. I’m not confident that they’ve succeeded or that that’s actually a good goal to have though. I have it on my iPhone 13 and personally I find it annoying to parse, and I feel relief when I go back to traditional apps untouched by the update like Google Maps
brookst
Is there any study saying that user interfaces should use visual effects for which our brains have hardware acceleration? It seems a reasonable premise, but is there data?
naikrovek
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.
kylebenzle
Apple is only for morons and children at this point, "liquid glass" seems like a great little gimmick for that group!
mrtksn
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.
kace91
This is not surprising at all.
I was a student taking an android dev course when the first iteration of material design came out. My classmates and I had the running joke of “this is an amazing design guide, someone should send it to google”.
You’d see even the most specific principles being broken, the left menu in gmail for example interacted with the header exactly the opposite way the guide said it should.
chartered_stack
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.
madeofpalk
iOS 7's first beta design was worse than this. They walked back some pretty distinctive parts of the design - mainly the ultra thin fonts - during the betas and following releases.
avalys
This hasn’t been “launched to the public”. It’s a developer beta so that developers can start working on testing and updating their apps for the new OS.
Kwpolska
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.
ErneX
It’s a beta though, plenty of time until this comes out to polish.
Kwpolska
It’s also the biggest software event in the Apple world. The implementation may improve, but the pre-recorded demo videos show off the bad parts pretty clearly, almost as if the terrible readability is intentional.
Spivak
And not even a public beta, a developer only beta.
flohofwoe
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".
cosmic_cheese
> Windows users might be lucky when Microsoft skips that fashion cycle by saying "been there, done that".
Given Microsoft’s track record, I’d expect worse, not better. Metro might’ve looked good on phones, but the desktop incarnation was pretty ugly (it was basically Windows 1.0 with antialiasing) compared to Aero. It would be completely on brand for them to do something like ditch their current reasonably nice looking Fluent in favor of something hideous and then stubbornly try to make it work without changes for the next decade before finally relenting.
throwaway290
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.
flohofwoe
> because people accuse Apple of copying others if they take time to do something right
Windows Vista had a translucent UI nearly two decades ago, that should be enough time for Apple to figure out if it's a good or bad idea to copy ;)
There's also plenty of computer games which experiment with translucency in their UIs.
If the Apple UI designers would look out of their ivory tower from time to time they could have realized that translucent UIs are an exceptionally stupid idea after the very shortlived "oooooh fancy shaders" novelty effect is over.
null
mvkel
I think I know what happened.
The A-squad design team left Apple 15 years ago.
The B-squad left 5 years ago.
What remains is a sea of Gen Z designers who weren't yet alive when the foggy glass of Windows Vista seemed like a good idea.
Meanwhile, the talent wars are raging, with every AI company offering 7-figure salaries to the best of Apple's prodigies.
Apple is now the old guard. They're no longer cool, and as a public company, cost controls are too stringent; they can't pay as much. What is Apple to do?
They can give the designers a sense of ownership. It's not a question of how (un)qualified the team is; it's a retention play.
Is the design good? The A and B squads would say no. But this is the best Apple can do these days to keep critical talent engaged.
They'll burn a cycle re-learning fundamental lessons in accessibility, retain talent, and cling to the hope that next year they'll have a midwit Siri than can book a flight with a decent looking UI.
gyomu
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.
aquariusDue
Yeah, sure. But it's more fun to talk in hypotheticals and point fingers at straw people and those young kids that make a fetish of old Nokia phones and dumb tech.
So I'm sure there's 3 Gen Z folks in a trench coat approving the work of those other Gen Z designers.
All this is just delegating to flavor of the domain "higher powers" instead of trying to grapple with the complexity of reality.
We just have to wait for Gen Alpha to bring back flat design 10 or so years from today.
willis936
And to think this is the same field that has an issue with ageism as indicated by this post yesterday. I take serious issue with people over 40 being protected while discrimination against young people "just doesn't exist". It's a clear case of the law being constructed to advantage the already advantaged. It's politically expedient because old people have wealth and influence and young people don't. Could you hire someone who can't demonstrate competence in an interview to do the job? Why does it matter if they're 20 or 100? Yet the two cases are treated very differently. You can say you won't hire a 20 year old because they don't know what they're doing, but can you not hire the 100 year old because their mental faculties have deteriorated?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44269225
Edit: this appears to be a hot take, so I challenge others to take a step back and consider other protected classes and anti-discrimination laws. They don't call out one race or sex, they say they're all protected and the very act of discriminating is not allowed during hiring. They don't say "you can't discriminate against white people or men but others are fine". That's what the ADEA does.
kristianc
Especially at Apple where it’s very well known that ultimate decision making is centralised around very few, very senior people.
FirmwareBurner
A lot of "old and senior people" also fumble with big mistakes a lot of the time. They're not all-perfect gods. In reality, most successful people are one trick ponies. They caught lightning in a bottle once early on that boosted their careers but that doesn't mean they're still relevant and correct with their decision making today.
Look at John Romero, he knocked it out of the park with Doom 1, 2 and some of Quake, but all his projects after have been flops of catastrophic proportions. Look at Jonny Ive's last design mistakes at Apple compared to the early successes that were perfection from all aspects.
Most people can't pull success after success forever, they always bottom out at some point then decline, some sooner than others, especially in a fast changing field like tech. So it's a high chance those senior higher ups at Apple are now dated and out of touch, but still have the high egos and influence from the bygone era. Happens at virtually 100% of the companies.
trippsydrippsy
[dead]
empiko
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.
teddyh
“Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:
First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.”
ngrilly
Agreed. But what is the alternative? No departments at all? Everybody belonging to one giant single team?
v5v3
In large companies, each project is approved at each stage by a steering committee. And then as appropriate more senior committes, senior leaders and eventually the CEO and the board.
The poster above is right in that if you create a design team they will want to justify their existence but it's the controls above and around it that is responsible for keeping them in check.
jajko
I see this daily in our banking megacorp. We have IT security team(s), which permeates all other IT activities like ink on paper. On its own its a good approach obviously, we weren't for example hacked or scammed in any high profile case, ever.
But there is no limit to how much additional security you can bring, so they do bring all of it. Recently had to get new Tomcat distribution deployed via Chef tool, of course our own package of it. Now it runs under 2 unix users, each owns various parts of Tomcat. Main startup config (options.sh) is owned by root, to which we will never ever get access, one has to do all changes in a complex approval and build process via Chef. Servers disconnect you after 2-3 mins of inactivity, if you deal with a small cluster you need literally ie 16 putty sessions open which constantly try to logout. And similar stuff everywhere, in all apps, laptops, network etc.
All this means that previously simple debugging now becomes a small circus and fight with ecosystem. Deliveries take longer, everything takes longer. Nobody relevant dares to speak up (or even understands the situation), to not be branded a fool who doesn't want the most security for the bank.
I would be mad if this would be my company, but I go there to collect paychecks and sponsor actual life for me and my family so can handle this. For now at least.
signal11
Conway’s Law is a bear.
Alternative approach, also from a financial services world: VMs are created with a DSL on top of qemu/firecracker, containers with Dockerfiles. Cyber are part of an image review group alongside other engineers that validates the base images.
But: no interactive access to any of these VMs at all. There’s hypervisors running on bare metal, but SRE teams have that scripted pretty well to the point a physical server can be added in a day or so. It does mean you’ve to be serious about logging, monitoring and health.
This is one instance where we got it right (I think). We do have some legacy servers we’re trying to get rid of. But we’ve learnt we can run even complex vendor apps this way.
Conway’s Law comes to bite us in other ways though! Like I said, it’s a bear.
HellDunkel
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.
hackyhacky
> Even if it doesn‘t improve the experience for users it could help distinguish themselves visually. And there is nothing wrong with that.
I think a lot of folks here would say that there is something wrong with degrading the user experience to achieve a win for branding.
user____name
I think the above comment is implying that the glass effects are more or less neutral, not degrading.
Kwpolska
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.
jeroenhd
In some Vista betas, where Aero wasn't finished yet, Aero's glass was a lot more transparent. This video shows some of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCDcekzU3cQ
There were parts of Vista that were mostly glass and they still looked fine. The widget picker comes to mind: https://istartedsomething.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/09/gad...
What Apple demonstrated in their first OS demo is not yet finished, and I'm sure they'll add some more frosted glass efects for legibility and such. What they show off in the video looks fine to me, and the explanation that comes with the visuals show that at least from a designer point of view, all of the weird stuff that jumps out in the macOS demo was violating the design principles.
I loved Aero and I bet once Apple adds the diffuse glass to the places it need to for legibility, I'm sure this will look great too.
okdood64
Low quality comment that is provably untrue based on the team's leadership.
Can we stop blaming Gen Z for everything? This happens with every generation.
wpm
I think more accurately, Apple’s, while imperfect, A-tier editor passed away in 2011, and no one replaced him.
It has been a downward slope since then after the momentum dissipated after his death.
Turns out, I didn’t like the operating system Apple made. I liked the OS Apple made while being curated and directed by Steve Jobs. His taste matched mine in a lot of important ways.
I have no tastes in common with Alan Dye.
martin-adams
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.
latexr
> Apple are much further behind with Siri than they realise.
I think Apple realises it way better than you’re giving them credit for. They simply weren’t able to do anything about it yet, even though they’re clearly trying.
farzd
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.
jeroenhd
I think this too. Microsoft thought something similar when they tried to unify Windows, Xbox, Windows Phone, and Windows RT in one design language.
With how badly Apple's VR headset actually sold, I don't think they're going to for a unified AR-first approach just yet. Then again, Apple did think their VR headset was a good idea, so maybe they're just high on their own supply.
calmbell
They have been doing this slowly over the past several years. I decided to move from macOS to Linux the day settings turned into a scrolling iOS-style list rather than an actual settings menu.
edhelas
Occam's razor.
Maybe they just made a bad UI/UX change.
djfivyvusn
My computer company would never do such a thing.
iTokio
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.
matwood
> 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.
steve_adams_86
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.
whycome
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.
argsnd
Dev beta 1 of any iOS release always has horrendous battery life and overheats the phone. Wouldn't be early pre-release software otherwise.
jeffhuys
For what it’s worth, any beta I’ve tried out in the past slurped my battery and made my phone act like a hand warmer.
juntoalaluna
I don’t think you can judge the final battery implications or whether it runs smoothly from the Developer Preview, they often have significant bugs.
deergomoo
> focus on content
This has been Alan Dye's modus operandi since he took the helm on software design and the problem is it does not scale to larger devices. On a phone and mostly on an iPad, where you're far more likely to be consuming content anyway, it's not the worst thing to shoot for.
On a Mac it's infuriating. I'm working on anywhere from a 14" to a 27" display, both have a wealth of pixels to work with: why are you hiding controls? You're not making anything simpler, I need those buttons to perform the tasks I'm trying to do. All you've done is make it less intuitive, less discoverable, and added extra clicks.
To be honest it has some problems even on the smaller devices too, mainly in the form of lack of visual affordances. So much functionality you would never discover unless you'd seen someone else do it or triggered it by accident (and even then might not realise what you've done—just yesterday I had to help my mother get out of private browsing in Safari because she'd swiped across to it and didn't know how to get back).
weiliddat
Are there accessibility controls to disable it, e.g. reduce transparency?
I'd probably do that after the first day of using it.
baduiux
Yes, thankfully there is. You can reduce the transparency in the Accessibility settings.
I’d wish that the computation load / battery drain would also be reduced by reducing the transparency. However, I think that the computation will still take place.
raphael_l
It was mentioned in one of their WWDC videos. IIRC “Reduce Transparency” now would affect the amount of blur. It was similar to the amount of blur in VisionOS.
But this was a few days ago and I can’t remember exactly which video it was mentioned in.
ThouYS
"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
dmazin
What are you talking about? My iPhone 13 Pro works perfectly on the newest OS. It’s actually hard to justify upgrading. I know lots of people who simply don’t upgrade anymore.
aprilnya
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.
rkagerer
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.
jeroenhd
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.
ajam1507
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.
rkagerer
This point is so salient. It's all just candy.
Neat eye candy, granted. I'm glad so much emphasis went into legibility, and that accessibility variants are baked in.
But I'd still love a modern device with very basic UI. Palm had it nailed, and I had no beef with the basic shapes of Windows 3.11 or colored squares of the NT/XP eras. Buttons, window edges and other controls you can readily distinguish that simply stay out of your way when you don't need them. No need for every pixel to scream out "look at me" when you trail your finger over it.
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thomascountz
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.
WhitneyLand
If someone at Apple said I want communicate in a natural way on video and not really go into TED talk mode would they get in trouble?
deergomoo
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.
wpm
They all sound like Christian Bale’s Patrick Bateman describing Huey Lewis and the News.
SwiftyBug
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.
deergomoo
For all his faults, Jobs always sold the idea that he really thought the stuff he was showing was the coolest thing ever. There was at the very least an illusion of pride and excitement, even if it wasn't always genuine. He'd crack jokes, make off-hand remarks, and wasn't afraid to mention competitor's products.
Modern Apple presentations are just like being read some marketing materials. It's very disingenuous.
wpm
I always think of the first Power Mac G5 introduction when after 5 slides of CPU block diagrams, talking all kinds of technical details, he gets to “And it has Massive Branch Prediction Logic…which I dunno…it predicts branches!” with a sly shrug.
travisgriggs
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.
noisy_boy
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.
wpm
What if they just picked a color? Maybe a light blue? Like the light blue of a pool or a tropical beach? Or a graphite grey?
Oh wait we had that already.
nkrisc
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.
bluescrn
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.
bird0861
This just looks like Android launchers of the past 10+ years. I'm remembering also Windows Longhorn leaks and Sun's Project Looking Glass.
Ironic Apple gets good at hardware and then can't even build a UI or AI.
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.