iOS 26.1 lets users control Liquid Glass transparency
80 comments
·October 20, 2025aylmao
wpm
The other problem is that the effect is so subtle everywhere until it gets in your way. Even on a system with actual binocular screens, the Liquid Glass effect is barely noticeable and has been since visionOS 1.0.
It's like a horrible compromise between the indulgences of early 10.2-era Aqua and the worst flat boring low contrast bullshit "mimimmumunlism" crap from iOS 7-18 and macOS from Big Sur onwards.
dabinat
It’s technically impressive that they’re simulating the way light travels through glass. But a lot of the time it’s so subtle that I wonder if they could have just used simple semi-opacity and it would have had 85% of the same effect at a fraction of the CPU cycles.
arghwhat
I seriously doubt they're doing anything more than a boring shader with some decent approximation.
We can stimulate light, but that's just a waste of ray tracing and introducing annoying complexities.
pointlessone
They probably do because the effect can be pretty closely recreated with a displacement map in SVG.
Gigachad
I'm not sure how but it doesn't seem to use that much processing power. My 5 year old apple watch seems to render the glass UI fairly well and I assume this thing has the bare minimum processing power.
dlivingston
It's a GPU shader(s), so you'd have to measure its resource usage indirectly (device heating up; shorter battery life).
monster_truck
I feel like this is a big miss for them. Am I really supposed to believe that the company making its flagship phones burn at 14W to simulate the travel of light through glass for a UI actually cares about the planet?
spankalee
How did they not do enough user testing to know users wanted this before it even got to beta?
Are they so paranoid about secrecy that they can't do event the most basic of UX design processes?
isodev
I would’ve killed it even before user testing. It’s borderline malicious that this thing was shipped in the first place
kridsdale3
Apple does zero user testing and AB testing, and has always worked that way.
Austin_Conlon
Even in services?
basisword
Keep in mind the people complaining are more than likely the loud minority. Personally I had some issues in the early betas (too much opacity causes readability issues) but I haven't had any issues since July. Unfortunately Apple is listening to feedback when they should ignore it and continue improving their work (which is what they usually do).
montroser
So, so, much money, time, and resources poured into this update that only made things worse; and now again to roll it back...
GenerocUsername
I don't see it said enough, but liquid glass slowed my M3 noticably.
Odd I got the update 2 weeks before M5 launch.
Software as a means to obsolete hardware.
Trillion dollar company
Gigachad
I don't think that's the UI, it's some other bug. My M1 is still running at full speed after Tahoe. Some people have said there is a broken version of Electron which causes slowdowns on Tahoe currently, most but not all apps have updated to a newer fixed version of Electron.
zamadatix
The M3 can run modern 3D games at high frame rates, surely it was something else about the update than the glass effect in the UI causing slowness??
It's a more appreciable burden on older iPhones though.
monster_truck
It barely handles that, and even the M5 still cannot cope with 8khz mouse input coupled to a high refresh rate (>240) screen. I laugh every time they try and sell us on these things being able to play games
throwaway48476
The glass transparency effect is just very computationally expensive.
mikepurvis
Wasn't Windows 7 doing this same stuff back in like 2009?
fujigawa
If we follow the same pattern, iOS 27 and corresponding releases will be completely flat and look like Mac OS System 7. Chicago font wants to live another day.
Windows 8 got some serious hate back in the day, it had some sound ideas that were implemented poorly, but no one could deny it was lightweight. It had the smallest memory footprint of all the modern Windowses IIRC.
Gigachad
Nah liquid glass isn't just transparency and gaussion blur, it refracts/bends light around the rims as well as a kind of sub pixel colour splitting on some elements like when you have a water droplet magnifying your screen.
AlexandrB
I think the liquid glass transparency is more complex than Aero - with curved glass objects distorting what's behind them significantly in some cases. Don't know how much more computationally intensive that is.
t1234s
I think LG made the finder windows buggy as they have issues focusing when I click on them. Didn't have this issue before Tahoe
frizlab
I have an M3 max and see literally no difference in performance. YMMV I guess!
I do have performance issues on my iPhone 13 mini, but I expected it.
mroche
I migrated from a 13 Mini to a 17 Pro last week. Updated the Mini to 26 beforehand to mitigate any potential 18->26 issues with data transfers/backups.
I'm still getting accustomed to the device size, the Mini was such a perfect device. If only app and web developers would actually preview their work on its dimensions, I probably would have just replaced the battery (76%).
Reduced Transparency is a hard requirement for iOS 26.
jsheard
I mean your M3 Max has a 3-5x bigger GPU than OPs base M3, you'd certainly hope it could rip through those new shaders.
tiahura
Four trillion
fidotron
Apple product managers are falling into the trap Microsoft did in the run up to Windows 8: a belief that unifying across Mac, iOS, Apple TV and Vision Pro will make them all stickier. In truth it really does just make everything obnoxiously bad.
etempleton
Unifying the look and feel to such a literal degree on desktop was a weird choice and I hate it a lot on my personal and work machine.
afavour
Exactly what happened with iOS 7 as well. 7.0 make all the text incredibly thin and light and then 7.1 made it darker and bolder.
m-hodges
I had to change my iOS wallpaper because of how bad the liquid glass distortions looked when swiping my home and lock screens. I get that Apple wants to control the experience, but ruining my own wallpaper ... a thing that is a very personal touch to many users ... felt beyond hostile.
throwaway48476
In big engineering programs engineers are paid bounties for every kg they remove from the design. We need software developer bounties for removing CPU cycles and memory.
cardanome
Give me proper theming support.
Allow me to disable all animations, rounded corners, opacity, white space and whatever else I don't need. Imagine how snappy and productive it could be!
JumpCrisscross
> give me proper theming support
This is sort of like walking into an art gallery and demanding they hang different art.
Apple has always been visually opinionated. That’s fine. Not everything needs to be customisable. The problem is their aesthetic historically varied between daringly great and daringly fucked. Nothing about Liquid Glass, on the other hand, screams daring, thought or even vision. It’s just a random new effect, completely unjustified, whose only genuine utility for me has been making app icons less engaging.
electric_mayhem
There are settings under the accessibility heading that let you adjust transparency and some other things.
They’ve also gotten less effective over time.
And they don’t get rid of rounded corners currently.
But it still does have a positive impact on the busyness of the os
busymom0
What I really need them to give me is a way to disable the border around the Home Screen icons. They look ugly whenever a black or dark background is applied. Probably because glass itself doesn't look good in darkness.
nipperkinfeet
This should have been in place from the beginning. The current state of large technology companies is really quite depressing. The intellectual capabilities of these companies have become completely stagnant.
mycodendral
I switched from Android to iOS exclusively because of Liquid Glass. It's amazing. I'll just sit there and drag the glass back and forth over different things on my screen and stare in awe.
joshuat
You forget that HN is incapable of detecting even the most obvious sarcasm
gessha
At this point the comment is more for internal vs external pleasure.
throwaway48476
I dont mean to impugn, but that sounds like how someone would describe a toddler being given an ipad. I turn off animations and use apps with an OLED theme.
monster_truck
The first thing I do every time I install a new version of iOS or get a new iPhone is disable all of the animations and enable reduce visual motion in accessibility. Not only is it faster in the countless cases where overambitious UI designers subject us to >0.2s animations, but it dramatically extends battery life
BestHackerOnHN
[dead]
gambiting
I mean I do remember the feeling of switching over to KDE from Windows around.....2005-2010 era and just being blown away by how pretty everything was. I yearn for that feeling again. But I have both android and iOS devices at home and the liquid glass is just......not that nice(imho). I hope I'll get that feeling of awe with computers at some point again.
adastra22
KDE to Windows? You missed out on peak Enlightenment.
BriggyDwiggs42
Upgrading randomly broke my ultrawide second monitor. Now macos can’t figure out what resolutions it supports and the only two options look awful and stretched. Can’t figure out the refresh rate either and defaults to less than half the correct value.
aucisson_masque
My mother iphone is still on iOS 18, I'm honestly afraid to make her update because I know she will be lost and I'll have to come to the rescue a thousand times.
I can't understand how they decided to work on that, they must know that a significant part of their customer is boomers that want things simple and intuitive. Liquid glass make everything hard unintuitive, how are you going to know that this button is important if you can't use contrast because everything is transparent ?
liuliu
pupppet
All of this baloney they added to their OS they now need to support for who knows how many years across who knows how many devices. What a waste.
lotsofpulp
Perhaps it was a move to ensure job security.
As a user, I would have looked forward to a few years of simply fixing bugs and making the OS more efficient.
IMO a big problem with Liquid Glass is that you're trying to recreate an effect that's highly reliant on the sense of depth we get from binocular vision in a 2D screen.
When looking at glass in real life, your left eye and your right eye see slightly different refraction patterns since they're looking at the surface from slightly different angles. It might be minimal, but light refraction patterns can change a lot when looked at from slightly different distances. This is depth information our brains automatically interpret, and it makes easy to tell what is "the glass" vs what is "on the glass".
On a 2D screen both eyes see the same refraction pattern— your eyes are receiving no depth information. It's just up to color contrast and semantics to figure out what's part of the glass vs laid on top of it, so things that might look legible or easy to tell apart on physical glass will look messy on the screen.