Apple's Liquid Glass: When Aesthetics Beat Function

> 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

sigh

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.

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.

The fact that the "switch cameras" button isn't immediately visible in the Camera app but slides in after ~2s is beyond "mildly" infuriating.

My iPhone mini does like this trend of hidding UI elements I have to say =)

> The transparency, blur and contrast issues are stupid but so obviously stupid that I assume they’ll be fixed.

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

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

Yes beta is a work in progress.

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.

Beta 3 walked it back and added frosting.

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.

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.

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.

Cool, so I will wait for iOS 27.

> All the friggin' shaders we have to run to waste GPU cycles,

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.

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.

Those huge rounded corners do waste a lot of screen estate.

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.

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.

> The first beta came out and it was _very hard_ to see the lock screen if you had notifications. How was that missed?

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?

> 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 ;)

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.

My new Toyota is all physical interfaces for everything except infotainment.

I would adore a new car that has no digital displays or touch screens.

I have a feeling I will need to settle for finding and restoring a car from before 1990.

Mazda has embraced physical touch controls for the most part.

Here you go: https://tftools.com/en-us/collections/martinez-hammers

(I'm not a customer or an owner.)

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>

>But with a GUI, it's a tool and they work best when there are no frills.

That must be why everyone is using CDE...

It kind of makes sense…

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.