Apple introduces a universal design across platforms
apple.com695 points by meetpateltech a day ago
695 points by meetpateltech a day ago
Oh no. It looks like every button and menu is now a translucent layer, so that any noise from the background shows through and muddles the text. This seems like an accessibility nightmare.
Translucent layers generally make software unusable for me. In the video, I saw several instances that would be really really bad for me, where I’d be straining to understand the text. Looks really cool and futuristic though. Just like a movie. Big whoop.
I’m autistic, but this won’t only affect autistic people. A lot of people are going to have problems with this. I hope there’s a very prominent way to turn it off.
This is also likely a performance nightmare. Funny that they mention that "new hardware has enabled us to..." which means that this will perform poorly on old devices.
At a previous company, we were forbidden from using translucency (with a few exceptions) because of the performance cost of blending. There are debugging tools we'd use fairly often to confirm that all layers were opaque.
Unlikely. Frosted glass blur was introduced almost twelve years ago in iOS 7, and was supported all the way down to the iPhone 4. Many apps like control center have used a full screen blur without any performance issues for a long time.
Apple at the time created their own 'approximate gaussian blur' algorithm specifically to enable this, and it ran crazy fast on devices where a simple gaussian blur would barely achieve double digit FPS. Even if this 'liquid glass' effect is heavier to compute, on the hardware we have today it will be a negligible performance concern.
> Unlikely. Frosted glass blur was introduced almost twelve years ago in iOS 7, and was supported all the way down to the iPhone 4. Many apps like control center have used a full screen blur without any performance issues for a long time.
"Without any performance issues"? Entirely false - reviews at the time noted iOS 7 dramatically reduced battery life - all across the board for Apple devices, even for the then latest iPhone 5S and 5c (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/09/ios-7-thoroughly-rev...).
The abuse of transparency/translucency in the UI was the primary reason - you could go to Accessibility settings and disable animations + transparency/translucency and get notable increases in both runtime speed of the OS UI and battery life.
Indeed, I remember the switch to iOS 7, for me battery life seemed to get slightly worse but there were conflicting opinions at the time. It's fresh in my memory as it was around the same time I binged on all five seasons of Breaking Bad :)
I's also true that iOS 7 made the 4/4S seem much slower, but the frosted glass effect still ran at 60FPS - that was my point. It was really impressive at the time. Though unless you spent hours sliding the control center up and down, it's hard to blame the blur effect for the reduced battery life, as it rarely appeared inside apps. Most likely the result of increased OS bloat and proliferation of background services.
You can’t judge battery life and performance off a .0 release when the priority is on delivering features with the minimum number of showstopper bugs. At least wait until the .1.
It has been like this for every Apple release for over 20 years.
Maybe for "Apple", but there's one team that takes performance seriously. The WebKit team has a zero tolerance policy for performance regressions (https://webkit.org/performance/) dating back to the implementation of the Page Load Test in 2002 (Creative Selection, p. 93).
WebKit sounds like the kind of scrappy startup Apple might want to acquire and gain some hard-earned engineering knowledge.
>The WebKit team has a zero tolerance policy for performance regressions
But apparently they still welcome app-crashing bugs and UI-stalling code!
> number of showstopper bugs
Screwing with the battery life on a mobile device would be a showstopper bug if Steve were still around.
If Apple has been shipping betas for 2 decades that do not meaningfully prepare the release candidate for users, something is horribly wrong. They're either not listening to the feedback they receive or they're not giving themselves enough time; both are firmly within Apple's control.
This isn't just a gaussian blur though, there's raytracing and refractions happening. The OS is becoming a low-key high-fidelity video game.
I would imagine that for a known geometry of glass, you can do the ray tracing once, see where each photon ends up, and then bake that transformation into the UI. If you do this for each edge and curve your UI will produce, you can stitch them together piecewise to form UI elements of different shapes without computing everything again from scratch.
From what I've seen,the refractions happen in predictable contexts so I suspect that they'll be able to create shaders, etc that will limit the performance hit
Ray tracing is done in shaders these days. Doesn't make it cheap.
The comment you’re replying to probably means “a shader that is a fine approximation of ray tracing (for cheap)”
where do you see raytracing? it's just reading back the texture of the layer behind a bit distorted. honestly that's cheaper than a blur
I don't usually say things are bloated but raytracing buttons is something I'd expect to be a parody...
And all of this just to make the whole UI white and generic.
I just want everything to look like Windows XP. I don't get it.
It’s almost certain to be a fairly cheap thing, at least for a GPU that can sling pixels at the gigabytes per second necessary to get smooth touch scrolling at these screen resolutions.
The demos only show a very limited array of shapes. Precompute the refraction, store the result in a texture, and the gist should be sample(blur(background), sample(refraction, point)). Probably a bit more complicated than this—I’m no magician of the kind that’s needed to devise cheap graphics tricks like this—but the computational effort should be in that ballpark. Compared to on-device language models and such, I wouldn’t be worried.
(Also, do I need to remind you of the absolute disdain directed by 95/98/Me/2000 users at the “toy” default theme of XP? And it was a bit silly, to be honest. It’s just that major software outfits don’t dare to be silly anymore, and that way lies blandness.)
> It’s just that major software outfits don’t dare to be silly anymore, and that way lies blandness
Great observation! We need some of that sillyness back. Everything is all serious and corporate nowadays, even 'fun' stuff like social media or games. Even movies can't be silly anymore.
Not sure about 'serious and corporate', the big corps like to appear cute, folksy etc. and recently we even saw new Google Material Design advertised as judged more "rebellious" by focus groups. Maybe bland and toothless is just a general direction of contemporary culture and style that they follow.
Myself, I can appreciate corporate stuff presenting corporate. More truthful, feels a little less manipulative.
>It’s almost certain to be a fairly cheap thing, at least for a GPU that can sling pixels at the gigabytes per second
Okay, but what about the battery connected to the GPU? The battery in my iPhone has already degraded below 80% health in the 2.7 years I've had it, so I'd rather not waste its charge on low-contrast glass effects.
You’ll be able to turn them off with “reduce transparency” setting like you’ve been able to since iOS 7
> And all of this just to make the whole UI white and generic.
3:30–3:45 in the video is painful. Describing “giving you an entirely new way, to personalise your experience”, while showing… white. White white white. Oh, and light tinted backgrounds to set your white on. I hope the personalisation you wanted was white.
My conspiracy theory is that dark/light theme was invented by companies to keep users from asking for full customization.
We used to have such customisation, then it kinda went away for a while because it was too hard and limited development, and then dark mode was hailed as a brilliant new invention.
But it is worth remembering that dark mode does actually get you some things; it’s not all bad: the restrictions do have some value.
Full customisation became paradoxically limiting: when you give too much power to the user, the app is essentially operating in a hostile environment. Of course, a lot of it was laziness on app and UI framework developers’ parts, but it really did limit innovation, too.
Dark mode gets you a pair of themes that you can switch between easily, and an expectation that there are only two themes you need to consider, with well-defined characteristics. This is a much more practical target, a vastly easier sell for app and framework developers.
The funny thing with monochrome icons is that in some ways they were actually a better fit for a full-customisation environment, where you had arbitrary background and foreground colours. Once it’s just mundane light and dark themes, you could more safely have full colour in two variants.
Certainly light mode and dark mode does not mean things need to be monochrome.
Early iPhone hardware was barely keeping with rendering the UI with a total ban on transparency. Even on iPhone 4 which improved the hardware a lot had the issue that it also increased amount of pixels to be pushed around.
And yes, later iOS on early hardware was huge PITA and slowdown.
Surely it's a performance nightmare because whatever is behind the frosting has to be rendered in full. Without this it can see that it's occluded and not have to render. Or does MacOS not do that?
“Supported” and “works well” ain’t the same. Do you remember how your iPhone 4 crawled when that effect was enabled?
Yes! And it was frustratingly patented! https://patents.google.com/patent/US7397964B2/en
I made a comment about this a couple of years ago, but I fudged the explanation of it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34937618
I suspect that their new technique implements the existing fast gaussian blur, and since the patent is about to expire, it was a good time to spice it up.
I suspect as others have mentioned here, they use a "Liquid Glass" shader which samples the backing layer of the UI composition below the target element and applies a lens distortion based on the target element's border radius, all heavily parameterized so as to be used with the rest of the system's Liquid Glass applications like the new icon system.
> this will perform poorly on old devices
I don't know how long you've been following Apple but with previous "high cost on old hardware" features they just disabled them for old hardware.
Apple loves their battery life numbers, they won't purposefully ship a UI feature that meaningfully reduces them. Now bugs that drop framerates and cause hangs, they love shipping those.
> Apple loves their battery life numbers
For devices currently being sold, primarily.
Maybe in the past, but my iPhone 13 still has pretty good battery life considering the battery has physically degraded over the years. No update felt like it killed the battery.
Eh, I use an iPhone 11 that's 5.5 years old, with the original battery and to this day the battery life is not noticeably different from when it was new.
It's the first iPhone I bought and has lasted longer than any of the three Android phones I had before it.
Literally impossible for your battery life not to have degraded in 5.5 years, battery tech just degrades - my 14 Pro was noticably worse in less than a year.
Hence the use of 'noticeably', as opposed to 'measurably'. There's no point in arguing about subjective experience.
Windows Vista introduced this same concept. Performance was awful unless you had compatible graphics acceleration. 20 years later, I think most devices should be fine, especially Apple devices.
Vista was dogged by issues caused by migrating display drivers from NTDDM to WDDM 1.0, something that was only finished by 7 (which dropped NTDDM fully and introduced WDDM 1.1) and 8 (which afaik had mandated WDDM 1.1 only).
Unlike previous GDI acceleration, DWM.EXE could composite alpha channel quickly with the GPU, and generally achieved much higher fill rates on the same hw - if the drivers worked properly.
Yeah one of the easiest ways to make windows vista+7 perform better was to simply disable all the fancy UI graphics that add nothing. I don't care if my window title bars have a gradient and animated transparency. It's actually a bit distracting and makes the system perform worse, so I just turned it off.
Even on modern devices though which have more computation and graphics power to the point that they aren't going to actually lag or anything while rendering it, why waste cycles and battery animating these useless and distracting things? There's no good justification.
Interestingly, in iOS 18, suppressing transparency (there’s a setting for it) makes performance worse, not better. The UI lags significantly more with transparency disabled. I expect it will be the same with iOS 26: there will be setting to reduce the transparency (which I find highly distracting) but it will make performance actually worse…
Did suppressing transparency also turn on processor throttling or something too? Like putting the device in a power saver mode?
these performance hungry "improvements" are forcefully introduced to legitimately slow down older devices and force the device refresh across the user base.
I have been using 8 year old iPhone just fine, but features like these over time will make the experience slower and slower and slower, until I am forced to refresh my iphone
I think probably a much bigger problem is app bloat. Devs are usually using very recent if not brand new top end devices to test and develop against which naturally makes several types of performance degradation invisible to them (“works on my machine”). Users on old and/or low end devices on the other hand feel all of those degradations.
If we want to take increasing device lifetimes seriously we need to normalize testing and development against slow/old models. Even if such testing is automated, it’d do wonders for keeping bloat at bay.
More likely it's a result of pressure to ship highly visible "improvements," combined with a lack of ideas that could improve the experience in a meaningful way. What do you do in that situation? Ship an obvious UI update that wouldn't have performed on the last gen hardware.
I haven’t used the new UI, so don’t assume this to be an endorsement of it, but even if you have good ideas about UI improvements and implement them, there still is pressure to make the UI look different because that, at a glance, shows users that they get something new.
And yes, “looking different” doesn’t have to mean “requires faster hardware”, but picking something that requires faster hardware makes it less likely that you will be accused of being a copy-cat of some other product’s UI.
And you base your first sentence on…? Surely not the ol’ “my phone slows down when my battery is failing so that I’ll buy a new phone” canard?
To be clear, these are new features that will likely have a setting to turn off. There’s no conspiracy, nothing “forcefully” added for the purpose of driving upgrades. (Ah, ninja edit): There’s not even a guarantee these features will be supported on an eight year old phone. EDIT: wait a minute...your eight year old phone won't even be supported.
(EDIT: reworded first paragraph to account for the ninja edit.)
What’s the exact canard here?
It’s a legitimate concern even assuming good intent.
But Apple has had to publicly admit bad intent specifically with their batteries and had to offer people money etc.
Strange to criticize people for something Apple publicly admitted they did wrong.
Apple publicly admitted they did wrong.
When is the last time a company has admitted wrong-doing? No, Apple admitted to slowing down phones when the battery was shot so it wouldn’t just suddenly shut down.
I adamantly believe this was the right call for Apple to make. I frequently switch between Apple and Android phones across different generations. At the time I had an aging flagship Samsung that did NOT do this. My battery indicator would say "18%" and it would last however long that implies...if I didn't do anything remotely CPU-intensive. If I did anything that boosted the CPU, the current draw caused the battery voltage to fall off a cliff and the phone would instantly shut down without warning.
The worst part was that during the boot sequence, the CPU ran at full-throttle for a few moments until the power-management components were loaded. So I couldn't restart it. As long as I didn't open a game or YouTube or a wonky website with super awful javascript, I could continue using the phone for another couple hours. But if the phone turned off, it couldn't be turned back on without charging it more ... even though it had "18%" battery left (as determined by voltage, not taking into account increased internal resistance in the battery as it ages).
I was envious of iPhone users that got a real fix for this (Apple slowing down the phone when the internal voltage got low). I would have greatly preferred that Samsung had done the same for my phone too.
I agree, it was the right call to make -- a temporarily-impaired device is always better than a temporarily-failed device, especially when you're talking about something you may need in an emergency situation.
That said, Apple _significantly_ erred in not over-communicating what they were doing. At that point, the OS would pop warnings to users if the phone had to thermal throttle, and adding a similar notification that led the user to a FAQ page explaining the battery dynamics wouldn't have been technically hard to do.
the solution to old battery is $15 replacement battery, not the $1500 replacement iPhone.
which I am doing exactly, but still new iOS version make my phone slower and slower and I cannot even opt out of updates.
because some apps are forcing me to use the latest version of iOS (Authentication, Okta 2fa, etc)
That was fake, tho. They slowed down old iPhones to make you buy a new one. My iPhone 7 wasn't auto shutting down, battery health was good, but they still made it so slow it was unusable the same week they released the iPhone X.
There is literally a zero percent chance it was anything to do with batteries. This is not a conspiracy theory. It's an objective fact.
They didn't admit bad intent. They admitted to doing something with good intent(the slowing was to stop crashes with near EOL batteries) but that they weren't transparent about it.
I'd much rather us have progress and people with 8 year old phones suffer than ensure that everything continues to run smoothly on any old device for eternity.
Disagree. I much preferred my phone running slightly slower to shutting down randomly. Maybe that’s just me.
No matter what happens in the world someone will blame it on a top down conspiracy decided in some smoke filled back room.
But this one is true. Apple obviously puts out slowdown updates right as they release a new phone. They made my iPhone 7 unusable the same week they released the iPhone X.
I'm very happy with my iPhone 13 Mini, my wife is very happy with her iPhone 12. They feel exactly the same as when bought new.
Whatever is it that you're saying that Apple does, it's either not obvious or they're shit at it.
if conspiracy makes hundreds of billions $$$ then nothing stops people really.
like Charlie Munger have said: "Show me the incentives and I will tell you the outcome"
I don’t think your overall take is wrong (it’s about money), but maybe the simplicity of it is.
Reality is that designers, product managers, engineers — they all wanna build cool things, get promoted, make money etc.
You don’t do that by shipping plain designs, no matter how tried and true. The pressure to create something new and interesting is ever present. And look we have these powerful Apple silicon chips that can capably render these neat effects.
So no I don’t think it’s a shadowy conspiracy to come after your iPhone 8. Just the regular pressure of everyday men and women to build new and interesting things that will bring success.
In the late 90s/early 2000s desktop computing was moving at such a pace that an 8 year old PC was near unusable. Overtime progress slowed and its not unusual to have a decade old desktop now. The problem is thinking that mobile has slowed that much too. Mobile is still progressing quite rapidly so yeah an almost decade old device is going to feel slow.
You have what an iPhone 6? 1GB of RAM vs 8GB for modern devices, the first A chip came out 2 generations after yours as has 2% of the power of a current chip so modern chips are likely close to 100x as powerful as your phone.
Why should we hold back software to support extreme outliers like you?
So trashing fine working hardware that was produced using valuable and rare resources sounds perfectly sane to you?
For what? So a designer can get a promotion? This is not progress, this is pure fashion. As if the planet being literally on fire needed more fuel.
Yes, everything has a lifetime, 10 years is a very good run for a complex piece of technology you can carry in your pocket. Send it in for recycling.
So that we can have better features and functionality in our future systems. Backwards compatibility is an anchor. If you want new things then expect to get new platforms to run them on don't expect everyone to limit their possibilities to support you.
The vast majority of things don't get recycled properly.
We are not talking about new features. Of course no one expects to run a LLM on an ten year old phone, again we are talking about fashion. It is change for change's sake. It is not providing value to users it is so the the designer gets to eat and management and shareholders are kept happy.
There is a difference between actual technical progress and you throwing out your skinny jeans because baggy pants are now in fashion.
Why shouldn't we build phones that last ten year, twenty years, or even more?
Apple offers a recycling program.
>We are not talking about new features
We are, you are just choosing to ignore them and call them fashion. There have been immense changes in capabilities over the past 10 years.
>Why shouldn't we build phones that last ten year, twenty years, or even more?
We do, dumb phones, why don't you own one of those instead of trying to limit progress in the phones pushing progress?
> Why should we hold back software to support extreme outliers like you?
What are apps and mobile sites doing differently today besides loading up unnecessary animations and user tracking? How has user experience improved for those operating on devices fast enough to make up for developer laziness?
Games are dramatically bigger in scale and graphics quality.
I can now do on-device transcription without issue, security improvements at the chip level, HD graphics for video streaming, etc.
if I want to play games, I will buy the latest iPhone. If I want to a smartphone with couple simple primitive apps that just send JSON and call REST APIs in the cloud, I don’t want to be forced to shell out $1500 every couple years
Right, but you choose when to play the games right ?
You can't choose when to use your OS, and you need to 'update your os' to stay secure.
Windows 10 keeps telling me I need to buy a new Desktop in October. I don't remember when I bought it, but it runs fine for everything I do. I've been running Linux for ages on my laptops, I be upgrading my desktop to Linux too!
No one is holding back software. You're not running local LLM or anything useful, you're adding performance cost for merely displaying icons on screen.
No one is holding back software because they aren't being allowed. If we were forced to support decade+ old devices though software would for sure be held back.
Laggards cost society by running insecure devices that generally impact the rest of the world besides just complaining about no one continuing to support them long after the useful life of their devices.
> Laggards cost society by running insecure devices that generally impact the rest of the world
Maybe there's also a cost to updating phones as frequently as people do, and inefficient software running across billions of devices.
I wouldn't blame people who make their hardware last longer and call them "laggards". And it's not their responsibility to write security patches for their device, that falls on the manufacturer.
For these people, me included, they don't need the latest hardware features to ray trace a game or run some local LLM. We're just taking some photos, making calls, getting map navigation, messaging, interacting with CRUD apps, and web browsing. None of that requires the latest hardware, and especially Apple hardware from 8 years ago is more than capable of handling it smoothly.
Ask anyone who had to deal with supporting IE back in the day what the cost to the world is fort supporting tech laggards. They are an anchor on tech growth and a real issue.
If you're running an insecure device past it's support life it's your responsibility and your fault if it's used to attack others. You are fully to blame for choosing to use something past it's serviced life. You cannot expect companies to support old software forever.
Currently replying from my iPhone 16 pro (granted, not old by any means) on the iOS 26 dev beta. MOST things actually feel smoother/snappier than iOS 18. Safari is a joy to use from a performance perspective.
It’s in beta so ofc I’m getting a ton of frame hitches, overheating, etc. but my summarized initial thoughts are “it’ll take some getting used to, but it feels pretty fast”
How can you get overheating and better performance? Is it just using the big cores for basic OS functions now?
My guess- GPU is probably being used a ton for the blurs causing the heat but the CPU is still free allowing for snappy scrolling performance.
> MOST things actually feel smoother/snappier than iOS 18
I have a feeling the whole smooth animations thing contributes to this a lot. Obsessing about the reaction time and feeling of how stuff comes on the screen. But yeah iPhone 16 pro is probably a bad performance test case
Real test probably iPhone 12 Pro. Anecdotally, I still see a tonnn of those in the wild.
> It’s in beta so ofc I’m getting a ton of frame hitches, overheating
Since overheating was already mentioned, I give you one guess how that affects battery life.
These transparency effects have been in macOS, ipadOS, iOS, and tvOS for years though?
There's a difference between something like a transparent background (you can run i3/picom on a potato) and having to composite many little UI elements to render a frame.
I can think of a couple of creative ways to dramatically optimize rendering of these effects. There is probably quite some batching and reordering possible without affecting correctness.
Ceteris paribus your performance is always going to be substantially worse even with tons of fancy tricks. Those also get much harder to implement when you're building a complete UI toolkit that has to support a ton of stuff rather than just writing first-party apps/OS components.
I think that the batching that I have in mind would work especially well with complex layouts. The thing to realize is that even if you have tons of elements on a screen, their visual components aren't actually stacked deeply in most cases and the type and order of applied effects is quite similar for large groups of elements. This allows for pretty effective per-level batching in hierarchies, even if elements don't have the same parents.
"ceteris paribus" - "all else equal"
Right. My point is the response to this is "well if we optimize it more we'll improve performance", but oftentimes if you optimized the existing code you would also improve performance. Your end state is still worse.
Is it really worse if the GPU spends maybe 0.5ms more per frame on these effects? I'd be surprised if a good implementation adds much more to the per frame rendering time.
The consideration for mobile devices (laptops, tablets, and phones make up the bulk of apple's hardware sales) is more power consumption.
But even then it doesn't matter in practice. I dare you to measure the battery life impact of this change.
> At a previous company, we were forbidden from using translucency (with a few exceptions) because of the performance cost of blending.
I imagine this was on mobile devices.
Blending was relatively expensive on GPUs from Imagination Technologies and their derivatives, including all Apple GPUs. This is because these GPUs had relatively weak shader processors and relied instead on dedicated hardware to sort geometry so that the shader processor had to do less work than on a traditional GPU.
Other GPUs vendors rely more on beefier shader processors and less on sorting geometry (e.g. Hierarchical-Z). This turned out to be a better approach in the long term, especially once game engines started relying on deferred shading anyway, which is in essence a software-based approach that sorts geometry first before computing the final pixel colors.
Modern iOS and Mac devices have plenty of GPU power for a shader effect. They already do one with the translucent blue.
This reminds me of disabling the Windows Vista translucent UI to claw back performance on my crappy Gateway laptop in uni.
Translucency being a main feature of Mac OS X is decades old at this point. I remember a magazine article touting it as an advantage over the upcoming release of Windows XP!
> At a previous company, we were forbidden from using translucency (with a few exceptions) because of the performance cost of blending. There are debugging tools we'd use fairly often to confirm that all layers were opaque.
I feel like a few years back when I still used an Intel macbook i noticed an increase in battery life and less frames dropping (like during 'Expose' animations) by disabling transparency in Accessibility settings.
I think this was after the BIg Sur update.
> Funny that they mention that "new hardware has enabled us to..." which means that this will perform poorly on old devices.
They're going to backport this? I seriously doubt it.
These modern chips have so much graphics processing capability, I think they just throw the problem at the hardware and let it do its thing.
It may not be overt, but it also seems they are working to justify the hardware with the software.
Meh, Vista laptops could run lots of translucency fine (well as long as they were actualy Vista era laptops and not just XP era laptops with Vista installed)
you just proved that MSFT released slow OS to force people refresh hardware.
Plus, vista was released in 2007, XP SP2 (the most popular version) was in 2004. so its like ~3 years diff. So its not like hardware has progressed in 3 years, its more like new software got significantly slower
I don't think upgrading was the reason for Vista performance. MS wasn't in the hardware business back then (and is just a marginal player even today).
They WAY overreached in their goals with Longhorn. When they finally decided to cut back features to something actually attainable, they didn't have enough time to make a high-performance OS.
Windows 7 was a well-loved rebrand of what was essentially just a Windows Vista service pack and improved performance (though it was still too heavy for a lot of the older machines people tried to upgrade to Vista). If they'd have cut back on their goals earlier, Windows 7 is likely a lot closer to what would have shipped as Vista.
A lot of problems was simply a fight with device makers and shit drivers, to be quite honest.
Windows 7 benefited from coming later with Vista being the battleground in which vendors were forced to update to NT6.0 models.
I agree, I think it extends to anybody who wants a calmer experience or has vision trouble or strain. I guess you can turn those options off but if the aesthetic appeal of the design is based on them then I assume we'll be getting a second-class version of it. I was already leaning towards switching to Linux for other reasons but I think this is the thing that finally pushes me there. I think optimizing for VisionOS is quite a bad idea from a UX POV, since they're two entirely different usecases. With augmented reality you need and want to see things in the background, whereas on other devices you don't. It's a fairly fundamental difference, and it's sad that they chose to go this way in my opinion.
To me it looks plain ugly, especially with all the bounces and transforms. Look at those sliders and toggles..
It's straight from the 2000s, with Linux users using Compiz and... Amethyst(?), stuffing their entire desktop full with gaudy transparency, transforms, jiggles and bounces.
More of a nit, but the sentence
The new design extends across iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS Tahoe 26, watchOS 26, and tvOS 26 to establish even more harmony
They switched the positions of the codename and version this time (macOS 15 Sequoia to macOS Tahoe 26). I'd give it one more version cycle until the codenames go away.
Or maybe they standardise on the codename across platforms? If they're going to aim for meaningful cross-compatibility, then that would make a lot more sense than confusing, boring version numbers.
Thought you guys were just being whiney until I looked at the linked “beautiful new design” page and saw the screen shots they selected. Literally gives me a headache to look at the first sample and I am one of the people that miss the candy coated look of early OS X.
The section on macOS only used the name Tahoe, like the 26 idea hadn’t made it to the copy for that section.
This is an existing and somewhat nitpicky issue, but it's also annoying how they specifically insist on rounded corners "because that matches all modern devices" in the announcement. Pretty much all third party external monitors don't, and even their latest top line laptops only have them at the top of the screen. So we're stuck with these dumb little triangles of background peeking out. It's kind of the "charging port on the bottom of the magic mouse" of MacOS.
Rounded corners vex me so much.
I can barely cope with their being no option to turn them off on Mac, especially for windows. I literally had to make my background pure black because the few pixels of backgrounds always showing pissed me off so much.
It makes taking nice screenshots so much more awkward, if not impossible. Just give us a quick toggle option, please!
Command+option+shift+4 then press the space bar to take a screenshot of a single window (shadow included).
You know something that almost never has rounded corners? Glass.
I have several objects on my desk made of glass with rounded corners. The glass lunch container I ate out of a little bit ago. A squircle glass bowl on my desk holding various nicknacks. The glass on the front of my phone. The glass I'm drinking out of right now has rounded corners. I used to have a kitchen table that had the top as one giant sheet of glass as a square with rounded corners. The windows in my car have some corners rounded. Tons of glass things have rounded corners.
No you don't.
Just kidding: Yeah, it's just that when I think about a digital glass effect it feels more right with square corners than rounded corners. Because glass windows which we look through usually have square corners. Says I, who spend most of my time looking through a curved motorcycle helmet visor.
Almost every common glass object I can think of has rounded corners. The only obvious exception is most household window panes. I have to think pretty hard to come up with another one...maybe aquarium tanks? Some mirrors and glass tables, although the images that comes to mind for those are just as likely to be round as square.
I'm very curious which items you went through before concluding that glass almost never has rounded corners.
I should have specified glass panels/panes, specifically windows and mirrors, which you mention.
The fate of all perfectly squared glass sheets is to become quite round if you get them hot enough. If you get a moment, try looking up glass fusing. It is admittedly a niche hobby, but it's pretty interesting what starts happening when you apply a little heat.
"Turning off" could just put solid light/dark under the glass. That would be decent-looking (not much different than before), accessible, and easy to implement.
> I think optimizing for VisionOS
Yeah, this really looks like an Apple temper tantrum of "Nobody wants to program for the Vision Pro? Fine. We'll MAKE you program the iPhone like the Vision Pro. Take that developers. Now get back to doing our job for us, you lazy slobs."
What is the reasoning behind this comment?
This UI "update" is so obviously detrimental to anyone who doesn't have great 20ish-year-old eyesight, that it is going to negatively impact customer support costs, sales, engagement, etc.
So, you can either assume that Apple are blundering, incompetent dolts who have completely lost the plot (certainly possible) or that Apple has an actual purpose behind this.
If you ask for the purpose and the look at the GUI, you see Apple cramming a UI update targeted with the design language from AR (transparency behind everything, motion cues to activate orienting reflex, etc.) down the throats of all developers as opposed to just those on the Vision.
Ironic that it's the 20th anniversary of this other design masterpiece:
https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Scree...
I don't know that a redesign was called for at all. I guess they needed to show something if Siri still isn't ready, but this is just not it.
I'd have personally hoped for them to beef up iCloud+ but I know it doesn't sell devices to the general user.
> I guess they needed to show something if Siri still isn't ready, but this is just not it.
This certainly is not that. Like it or not, a huge multi-OS redesign is not something you rush out for a keynote because your first choice didn't pan out at the last minute.
It's not something you rush out at the last minute, but it might be something you plan a long time ahead as "our interesting stuff might not work out, so let's do a huge redesign too to be confident we can pretend to be releasing something excitingly new either way".
(I don't particularly have an opinion that this was their line of thinking, just pointing out that for a company like Apple they would have been thinking "what if X isn't ready in time" months or even years before the point of actually knowing if X is it isn't ready on time.)
That's probably driven by some kind of an AR headset. AR can't properly render solids, so it is stuck with having everything transparent. Now it won't look worse than everything else.
Because everything else looks worse instead. That's one way to solve it, I guess.
Not autistic, but this is just so weird.
Why would you design readability and visibility to depend on chaotic, highly varied and probably sometimes bad underlying backgrounds?
I fail to see any systematic approach/ consistent design language at play here.
Let's hope this does not survive for long.
I’ve noticed a recurring theme on iOS where interactions intended for an app get trapped by the OS (especially multi-window interactions on iPad). The OS is less and less a foundation to support what you actually want, and more the product itself. If the actual content of the phones matters less than the fact that iOS itself is “the latest” then this makes perfect sense and is in line with the general momentum over the past several years.
Fully agree with your sentiment, and it was kinda sad to see the demo going there.
"And this is how easy I can replace this custom component with a new glass component...".
The whole thing is just wild.
There was plenty of UX enhancements which looked solid, but just for them to be paired with a design choice of N=1 elements is... well let's see if it pays off I guess?
>I fail to see any systematic approach/ consistent design language at play here.
O no, there is a systematic approach.
1. Bosses in UI division get promotions & raises for their new implementation of shiny
2. Marketing guys get to use their bird brains to promote shiny
3. Apple UX guys get to have their med prescriptions renewed
What does autism have to do with it?
Autistic people tend to have very different sensory sensitivities than neurotypical people. Most are very highly sensitive and tend have trouble picking out a signal when there’s too much noise around it.
To me, being socially awkward is kind of a secondary, less important trait, but that’s the one everyone seems to notice. We’re weird on the outside because inside, we’re dealing with overwhelming sensory input.
Whoops, I didn't see parent comment and thought the reply was to the submission. It seemed massively out of context but absolutely wasn't :-)
Curse HackerNews' narrow indents!
Check the parent comment.
Oh! I've long struggled with the narrow indents on Hacker News comments. I thought this was a reply to OP.
Thank you.
Fortunately you can turn off the transparency in accessibility options.
https://preview.redd.it/zzxh77iv906f1.png?width=2358&format=...
+1. I wish they would concentrate more on bug fixes instead of adding “features” you have to turn off to make the OS usable.
I’d bet there’s a toggle that dramatically increases opacity or eliminates transparency entirely while keeping the shading and gloss. If it exists I’m sure it’ll be popular.
Probably, but they tend to also make for an ugly look, like the “Increase Contrast” setting in iOS. The other way around would be better: Have an accessible down-to-earth default, and a secondary “fancy visuals” mode for those who want that.
the autistic user base is vastly smaller than the neurotypical user base. So it makes sense to ship settings that most people would like.
It’s simply a matter of “which settings would MOST of our users want enabled by default?”
I do agree that the accessibility settings can make ios pretty ugly though. It’s a real shame. :(
The version most people would like is usually the first or second iteration. Then designers need to change things to keep it looking new and fresh and the changes are inherently going to be worse because that's the only option available.
I’m don’t think that most users want a fancy new look that also decreases usability and readability. At least that’s not the impression I get with the users I talk to. Maybe most users let themselves be impressed in a marketing sense, but that doesn’t mean they would actively want it by themselves.
I'm hoping that's true and there's still an option for a flat, minimal look.
so all they had to do to get people to quit bitching about the flat look was to introduce the translucent look!
updating ticket to closed
Did burntalmonds bitch about the flat look before? Or was this the fallacy where people assume everyone else is 1 person?
or more like the fallacy that people can come online and snipe a thread when they miss the joke and think everyone else is serious trying to prove a fallacy. let's get meta
I hope it removes the shading and gloss too. Literally nothing in this design update is an improvement to accessibility.
Ever since we didn't use bolder text for bright text on dark backgrounds (dark mode) to keep with typographical principles, it looks like we're doubling down on the readability sins.
Surely anyone who's fiddled with the caption background opacity on their TV or video player knows this is a mess?
Would have been nice for someone to explain why we're getting Windows Aero[1] for main content and not just bezels.
I don't think this design language is mutually exclusive with readability, it actually looks really cool in many ways; I just can't fathom why the examples in the presentation seemed good enough to show.
I'm on the same boat. The specularity around edges don't match the refraction patterns and it throws me off every time. Somehow they thought this wouldn't affect readability of whatever button or panel it's applied to. They also use the specular bits as a border that's also so uneven depending on which direction light hits from. I noticed that some of the dark panels had almost no borders at the lower right corner.
Another bit I'd like to pick on is the speed at which transparent context bubbles spring out. Waiting for a panel to bounce back and forth so that you know where to put your finger next is so bad as a UX choice that I'm losing confidence in Apple.
From a visual point of view, there is now flat design mixed with this voluminous transparent design which is a weird combination of skeuomorphic and abstract designs in one. I really don't know what they were thinking.
macOS (I'm still on Sonoma tho): System Settings -> Accessibility -> Display -> Reduce Transparency. (I also recommend Reduce Motion, but YMMV - some animations are really helpful.)
iOS: Settings -> Accessibility -> Display & Text Size -> Reduce Transparency.
You're welcome.
Everyone affected by this will know to look for those deeply nested setting, right? Or will the 70 year old with bad eyesight just stop being able to use their phone? Or use it a lot less, or be frustrated and stressed by it? A lot of people don’t bother fiddling with their settings and just take what they’re given.
I’m not just thinking of myself here. I’m concerned that a lot of people who don’t consider themselves disabled will be disabled by this.
My 70 year old relatives seem to have no problem finding the setting that makes everything on the phone 2x bigger. Probably because Apple is good at this and offers it up as an option in the OS onboarding and after every major update.
It’ll be fine.
Apple designs stuff this way on purpose. They think it's neat to "discover" something that should be obvious. The new camera app is a perfect example of this. No indication that swiping up from the bottom brings up a menu for camera controls. The fact any of these obviously terrible design and implementation choices are praised is baffling.
On Mac OS the first significant thing on screen after turning it on for the first time are the accessibility settings with screenshots and animations to explain every option. You can also access those options with the Spotlight search, typing "tran" will give you the "reduce transparency" toggle directly in the search results without having to open settings first (though to be fair the search indexing is a bit lacking, like on iOS - the animation toggle is called "reduce motion" and so it can't be found via typing in "animation").
You can also disable animations on iOS.
When switching between screens, there’s just a long pause instead of the animation. These pauses drive me crazy, it’s simply not possible to configure the device to be responsive.
I'm just as annoyed by this, but from what I understand, the animations are used to hide loading times, so the delay is not optional.
That explanation makes no sense in this case. The workspace transition animation takes a full second, on extremely performant devices that can keep up their pace up until the OS swaps around 15GB, at which point animations start lagging so they actually make it even worse. Meanwhile a Linux setup will switch workspaces instantly. Same for Windows 11 if you turn off animations, by the way.
This animation slows every transition by one second including entering and leaving fullscreen mode, because on Mac OS fullscreen works by moving the window to a new workspace. There is no justification for this.
They're not [always] about hiding loading times. Even switching from an app to the desktop screen has a slow animation, or switching back and forth between two running apps.
macOS is awful in so many places. I would prefer if they had an option to disable only some of the animations. "Show Desktop" is so sudden and zoomy I almost get motion sickness, but Mission Control is more subtle and really helps me figure out which window is which.
My strategy for multiple desktops is to not use them at all. But I'm enjoying the comfort of a 43" screen, so all the windows I need just fit.
IMHO iOS strikes an almost perfect balance. It animates things in response to continuous drag gestures (notification centre, app switching), but almost nothing else. Maybe macOS could take a page from that book? E.g. dragging the menu bar; the animation plays out in direct response to user action.
> You can also disable animations on iOS.
No, you can not. You can reduce _some_ animations, but most of them actually remain. Including the most annoying ones like the slowwwww screen switching, or the bottom sheet animation.
An amusing anecdote: I have animation turned off entirely on my Android phone, and I was demoing an app on it. People commented how amazingly fast it felt compared to iOS, simply because there were no animations.
Yeah I'm pretty sure that setting has been there since Yosemite. That was the version that first prominently featured blurred translucency. (The transparency in earlier versions like Mavericks was really subtle and would not need such a setting: see for yourself in this image found by Googling https://i0.wp.com/morrick.me/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/001-....)
I'd argue that it doesn't even look that cool or futuristic. Kind of looks like Windows 7.
That said, Windows 7 had an option to turn off all the translucency, so hopefully Apple ripped that idea, too.
There has been a reduce transparency option in iOS and it has this effect on the new OS.
https://preview.redd.it/zzxh77iv906f1.png?width=2358&format=...
Accessibility aside, I don't see the appeal in this design. I find the current design quite pleasant and usable. Translucent 3D text sounds like teenage-me messing around in Photoshop in the early 2000s.
The new glass design feels fresh and playful. Like a more refined luxury version of Frutiger Aero. The current design is functional, but it feels pretty stale and mundane after years.
That is actually a feature. An UI should never be, under any circumstances, in line with a trend, fresh or different for the sake of being different.
It should, however, be as invisible as possible. Being only functional is a compliment.
Huge disagreement here. Maybe true for something critical like the control board on some heavy machinery.
But for something like a phone or messaging app, I want to see the return of fun, creative, and unique. We had such a great era of design around 2006-2013 and then it all rapidly went incredibly dull since then.
I want to see creative menus back, I want to see whacky UIs like windows media player skins back. Ultimately for basic stuff of low importance like your phone, the most absolutely optimal UI doesn’t matter, much like I don’t care for the most absolutely optimal furniture. Its visual appeal matters.
>We had such a great era of design around 2006-2013 and then it all rapidly went incredibly dull since then.
I agree with the huge disagreement. That 2006-2013 era was, in my opinion, horrendous and takes the second spot as an offender just after “peak flat”.
However, I never denied that visual appeal matters. But design is how it holistically works, not how it looks.
Maybe, at some point, some team will get back to Dieter Rams 10 principles and hammer it into an UX experience. We were so close in the 90’s.
Maybe we can agree on: make the os maximally unobtrusive by default but include options to customise to taste?
My phone is the control board of my life. It is critical infrastructure and serious.
No one is getting mangled in machinery if I take 100ms longer to send a text message. There’s time to spare to actually enjoy the design.
911/112 calls are still made via phones, and I have to say that even making a simple phone call has, at times, become highly problematic on these new and very complex smart-phones.
With that said, my pants' pocket still manages to somehow initiate the "emergency call" procedure every couple of months or so, I have no idea how that happens (I don't even know how I'd do that with the phone placed in front of me).
> Pant's pockets
Yep. I keep making accidental emergency calls too. Another interesting incident which happened only once:
I accidentally opened instagram, a group chat, and changed the background to bubbles or something like that, all with my phone in my pocket. I guess I put my phone into my pocket unlocked by accident because I can't imagine accidentally typing my PIN.
Apple know their customers and what they like.
I am actually Apple-phobic, a diehard linux user and incapable of doing simple tasks on Apple products. However, I think they have got a winner here. Although people talk of Vista Aero, it is more sophisticated than that, and, when this rolls out, Android will look distinctly old fashioned and low status, even if it is better as far as accessibility. I like what they have done here, even if it is not for me.
Disagree on almost all points. Glass and the relative absence of color, texture and patterns make it look cold, detached, almost inhuman and absent of anything your eyes could rest on. There are ways to make this approach look cool and futuristic, but it suffers from the same downside as a lot of the white/glassy modernist architecture: the human eye abhors lack of detail and natural/organic patterns and texture. (It makes for a great canvas for graffitti though...)
Meanwhile, Android's Material You/Expressive design language is taking almost an opposite approach. Personally, I prefer it to Liquid Glass by a wide margin.
Architecture without structural integrity is terrible no matter how it looks. User interfaces that aren't usable and clear are bad no matter how they look. Sure the human eye enjoys looking at trees with thousands of leaves, but you won't find a person who enjoys a UI with a thousand buttons on screen.
To me visual noise in user interfaces is a severe distraction and I tend to prefer applications with minimal UIs (not minimal features). I disabled text cursor blinking in the browser and use a program to auto-hide the mouse pointer after a few seconds because it can distract me from reading.
I do like this new UI Apple shows here, though I would probably get tired of the effects if I had to use it for extended periods of time. Just like animations look satisfying until you realize they slow down everything you do on the computer because often their main purpose is marketing and not usefulness.
It’s going to be really interesting to see how this UI paradigm pans out. I think this captures a shift toward the extreme in responsive, fluid, convergent, whatever-you-want-to-call-it, design.
We’ve had books/scrolls for thousands of years, laid out in beautiful proportion, and now it has all melted in the oven!
There is, they outline it in this video. It looks like there are three ways to turn it off: high contrast, reduced motion, and frostier glass. So it looks like there's just a way to have a full basic icon with just the icon and the outline and a white background.
PSA: High Contrast mode on MacOS, incidentally, destroys theming on Microsoft Edge (I know, I’m a weirdo who uses Edge on Mac). I use theming to differentiate between several browser profiles. For months I thought Edge had decided they wanted the themes to be ultra lame and subtle, but it was my usage of that setting that broke it.
Besides that huge dealbreaker though, HC mode is amazing for people like me who think UIs should be clear, obvious, and functional first rather than “elegant” and pretty as the main priority.
The translucent blur is... alright. The refracting edges look incredibly distracting for me.
I find transparency annoying enough that if it becomes more prevalent on MacOS in a way I can't turn off, I may switch to Linux for that reason alone.
You can turn off the current transparency (just search for transparency in settings)
There is a 'Reduced transparency' mode which you can enable in system settings. Safe to assume this will still exist in the new OS versions.
This will be a massive improvement in usability over flat design, which made UIs only learnable by trial and error.
I don’t see a lot changing about the problem of labels and active controls still being hard to distinguish, and the like.
there is a setting labeled “increase contrast” under Accessibilitt > Display & Text Size. That may help? i haven’t tried it.
It helps only in some limited ways, while also making some elements look more ugly. It does too little to solve the overall issue.
The future is translucent tablets ( smart glass pads ). It's not about what this UI is - it's about where it's going. This is the UI to bridge to the next hardware modality and begin to train people to prepare for (at first) HUDs everywhere, then smartglass and holoprojective displays.
It is, once again, designing interfaces based on "vibes" instead of science or principles or used feedback, optimising for looking good on screenshots and marketing materials and not for actual usability or user friendly was. With "vibes" here standing for whatever some SV asshole thinks it's cool and modern.
Alegria, flat design, pastel colors, or unholy amounts of whitespace. It's been the story of the last 15 years of UI design at least.
> , designing interfaces based on "vibes" instead of science or principles or used feedback
Well, this is what Apple does, and the reason I hate their devices with a passion. It always was style over substance.
You must be too young to remember because a lot of the early user interface design principles, based on actual research, were pioneered by Bruce Tognazzini and Jef Raskin at Apple. Tog on Interface and Tog on Software Design were THE bibles back in the day and Apple's Human Interface Guidelines showed how a company could and should adopt consistent user experience across all of their products.
It honestly saddens me how far Apple has fallen.
And Larry Tesler, who was a particular champion of usability testing and important in the development of the Human Interface Group. Larry cared a lot about usability.
When I was at NeXT, Steve Jobs told me that if it was up to him, Apple would get rid of the Human Interface Group. (Steve was rather hostile to Larry.)
Later, when it was up to Steve, he did exactly what he said: he got rid of HIG.
I think it’s easier to sell visual design than it is to sell usability because people see visual design immediately, but it takes time and experience to see and understand usability (and some users never seem to consciously notice it at all).
I had no idea Steve Jobs felt that way about Larry Tesler. There were so many great UI experts at Apple, like Larry Tesler, Bruce Tognazzini, and Don Norman. While I love Mac OS X for its stability and its Unix support, I prefer the interface of the classic Mac OS, and it seemed to me that many third-party applications of the era were even more compliant with Apple’s human interface guidelines compared to later eras.
A dream desktop OS for me would be something with a classic Mac interface and with conformity to the Apple human interface guidelines of the 1990s, but with Lisp- or Smalltalk-like underpinnings to support component-based software. It would be the ultimate alternate universe Mac OS, the marriage of Smalltalk (with Lisp machine influence) with Macintosh innovations. Of course, there were many projects at Apple during the 80s and 90s that could’ve led to such a system.
Now that I’m a community college professor, I have more free time in the summer months for side projects...
> You must be too young to remember
Hopefully. I wouldn't mind being young. I am also not a designer, so UI/UX history may be lost on me.
I can only say that the only Apple product I genuinely enjoyed from a design perspective was the iPod Nano I bought sometime in early 2000s.
> It honestly saddens me how far Apple has fallen.
Same. For just one example, consider how submenus work. You don't notice when they're done right, but when they're done poorly, they will disappear when you try to choose a submenu item, or stick around when you expect them to go away. Getting them right is subtle; Apple got them right, and plenty of web pages still get them wrong.
That's interface design. Flashy translucency effects are something else.
I feel the same way about Google's design and development principles. What the fuck happened?
You mean how they heavily researched their latest redesign of Android? https://design.google/library/expressive-material-design-goo...
I can't tell if you're joking. M3 Expressive is godawful and throws away so many hard-won lessons in UX R&D.
I spent some time navigating through the linked page.
I don't doubt designers spent a lot of time researching it. It still reads like an incredible amount of carefully crafted bullshit.
The more the design of things "evolve", the more I appreciate designs that simply don't.
Well to be fair their research confirmed that half of 55+ year-olds didn't like the new design
Funny, someone else mentioned in another reply that I may be too young to remember something from like 25 years ago.
I'm a Schrodinger's old man.
Do you really think that Apple, of all companies, did a cross-platform UI refresh based entirely on vibes without considering user taste, usability, accessibility, etc?
You've already judged the system as only good for "looking good on screenshots and marketing materials" when you haven't even seen anything other than the announcement.
> Do you really think that Apple, of all companies, did a cross-platform UI refresh based entirely on vibes without considering user taste, usability, accessibility, etc?
Yes, I think they would do that.
Lots of historical examples of Apple making weird design choices for decades now. I'm old enough to remember the hockey-puck mouse on the original iMac.
Also, here's a list of bugs I've personally observed over just the last two months: https://gist.github.com/BenWheatley/29a3c22203d90ae80465cdb1...
3.3 trillion dollar market cap, and the *clipboard* is no longer reliable. The mail badge is an unreliable count. The wallpaper sometimes disappears. The alarms don't play out of whatever speaker or headphones you're using for all your other audio.
> Do you really think that Apple, of all companies, did a cross-platform UI refresh based entirely on vibes without considering user taste, usability, accessibility, etc?
Yes, and where have you been for the last two decades? :) The last time Apple did actual UX research must have been in the late 1990s.
> Do you really think that Apple, of all companies, did a cross-platform UI refresh based entirely on vibes without considering user taste, usability, accessibility, etc?
We are talking about the same company that to make a the MCP a little bit thinner released that crap with only two USBC ports, forcing everyone to carry fucking dongles everywhere.
And let's not forget that awful butterfly keyboard.
So much usability, so much accessibility. No vibes, no sir.
Perhaps they learned something from that? Look at modern MBP models which have MagSafe, HDMI, and SD card slots.
I think the implication was that if they went on anything but vibes, they would have never removed MagSafe, HDMI, or SD card slots.
Mr. Vibe works for OpenAI now.
Mr. Vibe wasn't the issue. Tim Apple was the one who gave his leash infinite slack, and he's still there calling the shots. Probably conferring equally stupid protections onto whoever replaced Ive internally.
Lord only knows Altman is probably doting on him in the same way. This industry just never learns.
Are you telling me that the trillion dollar company had to actually release a laptop with only two USBC ports to "learn" that people need more ports on a laptop? And you do that on a straight face on a sequence where it was claimed that they carefully consider usability and accessibility?
And yes, I am aware those silly toy computers have a couple more ports nowadays, I have to use that on a daily basis for work.
Of course they would. Have you used Sequoia? It's a hot dumpster fire that's caused me unending frustration with how they've broken the bluetooth and networking stack, introduced unprecedented instability (anyone else's macbooks suddenly crashing and restarting while the lid is closed and it's in sleep mode?) and a host of other issues. Apples has been taking one step forward and two steps back with their software and design for a long time, and they have increasingly preferred form over function, and hidden, obtuse UX.
If their hardware wasn't so damn good for my professional work, I wouldn't go near this child slavery enabling shitshow of a corporation. I don't know if I've ever felt as trivialized or patronized as watching someone in formal dress talk to me about how many new ways I can express myself to my friends via emoji or whatever else as I have when watching Apple keynotes. It feels like they've tried to commoditize interaction even more than Meta. It all feels so hollow. You can tell Steve is gone.
Absolufuckingloothy.
The Apple of today is nowhere near what the Apple of Steve Jobs was.
Bugs galore, UX issues galore. Overall it's a mashup of various staff egos over everything.
I agree that these changes are distracting. I don’t want effects that change things as I move it. I want fewer distractions and don’t want things all over the place.
I liked webpages in the 1990s before the blink and marquee tags. I wasn’t excited by skeuomorphic design, but it was at least fun. Then there was flat blocky design which really sucked. Then that was undone by putting curves back in, and it was ok. Then people started adding a shit ton of empty space everywhere which was the first time when Millennials started f-ing up design. I still blame them today because they’re still the most opinionated and make terrible, TERRIBLE design decisions. I don’t think I’ll ever be happy again with interface design. It’s super f-d.
I imagine they overdid just in case and will receive enough feedback to dial back the translucency just a tad.
The "liquid glass" design changes shown by Apple look mostly like slight tinkering around the edges of how widgets look/feel. Way less of a design change than the move to flat design was.
Yes, knowing Apple, this has probably been in development for years and seen a million internal iterations.
Someone put the Windows phone screen against this design, with opaque colorful blocks and clear text - and I was like "yep, I wish we go back to that. That is the future."
I think it's going to look alright on iOS/iPadOS where apps are inherently full-screen and the "background images" are really "foreground content" where you do kind of want the controls to "recede".
On the other hand, I can already tell I'm going to despise this on macOS. I always work with windows maximized on my laptop, because I just want to concentrate on the document I'm editing, or code I'm writing, and have maximum space for that. And the past couple of versions of macOS by default make your menu bar a weird pale purple or pink or green that is hugely distracting because it's a blurred image of your desktop. Fortunately you can turn that off with the "Reduce Transparency" accessibility option, which I do.
But the idea that people using Macs want to always being seeing some colorful desktop image around the edges and at the top just seems bizarre to me. iPhones and iPads are more for consuming, so this makes more sense. And within apps on Macs this seems like it'll be fine. But I hate that it doesn't seem designed to let me "tune out" the desktop image while I use an app. It's taking existing translucency and just making it worse...
Yep, nailed it. This is such regressive, ignorant junk. I mean... WTF? Welcome to the failed "transparent UI" fad of two decades ago. Apple tried to revive this trash a few years ago, but then seemed to back off (or maybe I just disabled it)... and now this?
Even for the current sorry state of Apple's design regime, this is disappointing. It's way beyond a squandering of desperately-needed-elsewhere engineering resources; it's a dated-looking degradation of usability (and potentially performance).
Depressing.
Yeah. On Windows some apps (the new Terminal) used to have the opacity set to 0.9 or something by default. First thing I did was set it to 1.0. Having the background bleed through is distracting for no real value.
I’m usually a big fan of Apple design and UX. Any change faces some initial resistance, but this is first real “Ugh, hard no” reaction I can recall after seeing some of those.
Same same. And yes, I hate the translucency in Windows terminal as well and immediately turned it off. I do not understand the insanity of turning these things on by default.
A "hard no" is where I am with this "improvement".
There will undoubtedly be optional low-transparency and high-contrast modes, just as there are in iOS now.
Apple is pretty good on accessibility but sometimes it does involve changing some settings.
> accessibility nightmare.
It’s also annoying, slow you down, and anyway useless if you don’t have a physical issue with them.
i think apple has historically always shipped their products with plenty of accessibility settings. Even today it’s possible to easily increase contrast, reduce transparency, reduce animations, and way more on ios.
i’m not too worried, but let’s see. The new design is super ugly though.
Also, Apple is already bad at translucent UX as if it were beneath their consideration.
If there's a bright blue background behind the control panel buttons (like the wifi button), you can't tell if it's blue because it's on or because it's off but the background is blue.
Slide down the control panel when the blue weather app is open to kinda see what I mean.
> This seems like an accessibility nightmare.
One of the accessibility features included in macOS for visually impaired people lets you reduce transparency for exactly this reason.
I’m bothered by how swaywm leaks the background into transparent gaps in windows, but I should be thankful tbf— macOS is just another level of nightmare entirely.
They say the text color adapts to the background based on contrast.
I'm just wondering if Apple is going to make matching CSS updates in Safari so web app developers have matching visuals.
The problem is the background can be more than 1 color.
Which is why the gaussian blur was invented...
People pretend this isn't a solved problem.
I'm just wondering if Apple is going to make matching CSS updates in Safari so web app developers have matching visuals.
color: contrast-color(rebeccapurple);
So change the background to solid color then.
I used to like solid background, but lately screens got so good that it makes sense to put something up.
Apple takes accessibility more seriously than most. I would be shocked if there isn't a setting to instantly remedy this for people with any sort of vision issue.
I bet there will be, but let not dismiss that good accessibility is when the UI is readable/accessible by default.
Anyway, I also bet they will tone this transparency stuff down a lot in the betas leading to the stable version in September. iOS 7 all over again…
Let's also not ignore that, whether apple has actually achieved this or not, the highly-accessible version of something necessarily excludes many design idioms and either looks worse or relegates one to a limited range of creative expression. As such, most designers will not want to design for that by default.
''Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like,'' says Steve Jobs, Apple's C.E.O. ''People think it's this veneer -- that the designers are handed this box and told, 'Make it look good!' That's not what we think design is. It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.''[1]
Interface design is not a place for unlimited creative expression. But recent user interface trends exclude many design idioms and relegate one to a limited range of creative expression also. Some people think they look better. Some do not.
Accessible interfaces have become uglier in ways which did not improve accessibility. And recent trends have made them less accessible in some ways also. Choose not enough contrast or too much. Choose contrast or color where both were before.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/30/magazine/the-guts-of-a-ne...
Since when did we care about what designers want? It's called User Experience, not Designer Experience. The target audience is not people who are intimately familiar with digital idioms, that's why skeuomorphism is remembered more fondly than the iOS 7 design.
Reminds me of when Jony Ive had the run of the place and gave us the bending iPhone and MacBooks with no ports. All for the sake of "Designer Experience".
they will not. Apple has accessibility features for all of the use cases and surely for this as well.
> I’m autistic, but this won’t only affect autistic people. A lot of people are going to have problems with this. I hope there’s a very prominent way to turn it off.
How can that possibly be? Didn't he say it will: "bring joy and delight to _every_ user experience"
That means YOU as well. No way he could over-selling something. Inconceivable.
Apple has historically been above average in terms of considering usability. So, I think seeing this new design as being asinine is not an unexpected opinion.
I installed it. I really wanted to love it but it’s bad. It’s very busy and the proportions in the Settings app are awful. It’s on the “cozy” side of things (as opposed to “compact”). This means you see less options at one time on the screen and have to scroll more around the OS to get where you need to.
As for accessibility… It’s hell. Have a look: https://imgur.com/a/6ZTCStC
This looks like a screenshot from one of the jailbreak themes from like 15 years ago, and not one of the good ones
As a former Cydia user, my 12-year-old self takes that as validation that I was living in the future after all!
The accessibility for this design is pretty terrible. There's a reason the gold standard for closed captions is still white text with solid black background. That way, regardless of what's going on in the background, the text is still readable for someone with poor eyesight.
Out of curiosity, I used this site [1] to get the contrast of some text, specifically the artist name on the Apple Music now playing bar (in the "Updated App Design" part of the page). During parts of the video, the contrast of the artist name with the background was 1.7:1, which is terrible. For reference, the minimum recommended contrast by WebAIM is 4.5:1 [2].
Maybe there are accessibility options that improve things, but the defaults seem terrible. The goal for any design should be reasonably accessible as default, with robust options for people with more specific needs. As it stands, this UI is just too hard to read, and Apple needs to make a second pass.
That screenshot is utterly unreadable. It makes my eyes hurt. For the young people out there, I'm not exaggerating or being metaphorical. Literally pain in my eyes as they try (and fail) to focus on the appropriate UI elements.
I was going to upgrade to an iPhone 16 this week. I might be checking out Google or Samsung devices instead.
You might want to look at the new design language that Android is going for:
Somewhat amusing after this how the top comment mentions "Apple ... never makes marketing content like this about its design language"
Not just the top comment, that whole top thread is basically glazing Apple. Deliciously ironic.
You might want to look at the new design language that Android is going for:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43975352
Feels very much like a fruit-colored version of late 1960's early 1970's pop culture design.
Change it to browns and oranges and golds, and it'll be perfectly groovy.
I think it's also just ugly to be honest. Completely opposite of Apple's values of focusing on one thing at a time and even basic grid alignment. And I am an Apple fanboy....
Wow. That is really bad. Apple already does the transparency thing with the control center menu, but it blurs the background so much that you don’t notice it. Why they’d want to lessen the blur and make it more transparent is beyond me.
Remember this is the first developer beta. I’m pretty sure a lot of iOS 7 was dialed back between announcement and release
The fact that it ever made it to this stage is troubling. It was quite literally the very first thing I thought when I saw their landing page for ios 17. https://www.apple.com/os/ios/ Look at the notifications front and center in the very middle of the screen. It's unbelievable. How are these the decisions being made at one of the biggest tech companies on the planet.
This means devs and users need to be vocal and outraged at every new design (as it will be overdone on purpose), and Apple gauges how much they dial it back based on the heat of it....
That doesn't sound like a healthy relationship to developers to me.
oomph, looks like this might finally be (my) year of the linux desktop..
Not yet for me, still waiting for a 8-hour battery...
I get 30 hours on a 2017 Dell, using Linux mint. auto-cpufreq or even just making an alias to disable some cores let you push it very far
Nothing screams "Linux desktop" quite like a custom terminal command to manually manage your CPU cores being presented as a solution for longer battery life.
OMG, I expected bad but not this bad. How did designers ever think this will fly is beyond mind-blowing. Visual disturbance is off the charts. I am just hoping it to have good accessibility options to turn whatever-this-is off immediately.
Holy cow that's bad. 2 slightly different grids overlaid with transparency feels like a joke but here t is
Wow, that was full in "thanks, I hate it" territory for me.
I think that design triggered me for 2 reasons. First, it really gets to something that's bugged me a lot about technological advancement in general over the past 15-20 years or so. It used to be that I felt like tech advances were great because they actually solved a human problem. Now, so much tech just feels like "tech-for-tech's-sake". Like I get you need to have a lot of designers at Apple, and now that devices have more processing power that they want to do something "cool" with it, but this just seems like someone that literally nobody asked for and nobody wants.
Second, I'm someone who thinks very "linearly". I like to do one thing at a time, and I hate distractions (because I'm easily distracted). I hate these translucent interfaces because they are literally distracting to me even if I'm looking directly and squarely at one single thing. It just seems like another way that tech is constantly fucking with our attention.
I thought the same, about distractions, whilst watching the videos. Even the highlights and speckles at the edges of the icons grab your attention. It's the visual equivalent of running your finger over velcro: slip, catch, slip, catch the whole way down.
Yeah, the address bar in the browser in the video at 2:10–2:13 is appalling. And how they describe it!—
> it responds in real time to your content, and your input, creating a more lively experience, that we think you’ll find truly delightful.
“Infuriating” and “horrifying” would both be much more accurate words than “delightful”. Even if you liked it briefly, it would get old really quickly.
This truly is stunningly, spectacularly bad.
The entire press release made my brain hurt.
>> Meticulously crafted by rethinking the fundamental elements that make up our software, the new design features an entirely new material called Liquid Glass. It combines the optical qualities of glass with a fluidity only Apple can achieve, as it transforms depending on your content or context.
What the fuck does that even mean?
Feature litmus test: if you can't describe why it's better in plain English... it's probably not better.
> What the fuck does that even mean?
Nothing. It's corporate bean-counter speak. Some poo-brained exec says a lot of words that sound inspiring but adds up to mean exactly nothing.
This is the kind of garbage I have to listen to in so-very-important quarterly "huddles" with thousands of people. It's nonsensical but makes the speaker feel so very special.
I guess this really gives insight to how Apple got here. It really has been taken over by a bunch of people who like how their own farts smell. Now they're trying to gaslight you and I into liking it.
Puh. That's pure amateur hour. They need to _at_ _least_ add something like: "synergy with ideographic interface, achieving unrivalled experience while preserving the individualized touch".
The only thing worse than shitty design is when the shitty design changes each time you use it.
I know I am going to sound like an asshole but I scrolled, started watching the video and the guy speaking made me cringe so badly I closed the tab. This is reads and looks like satire. And here I thought OneUI 8 was bad.
I hope they tweak the opacity before they go live with this because I find the shared image quite unpleasant. I have no issues with the current design. Kind of like the camera button and the touch bar, I hope this goes away fast.
How does it look if you enable "Reduce Transparency" in Accessibility - Display settings?
It looks awful, and doesn't actually remove all of the transparency effects, though that might be due to the fact that its Beta 1.
I cannot confirm that.
Reducing transparency, the entire background gets greyed and the background/ look is much more akin to iOS 18.
Oh yeah that's bad. I hope there is an option to disable translucency globally. I don't need to see a desktop/home screen under another menu, or even another app under the menu. I can't interact with something underneath the top menu and it really messes with readability from your screenshot.
Good lord, I started getting a headache just looking at that image for a few seconds. Apple has always preferred form over function but this UI change takes it to a whole other level.
I mean I really don’t like it either, but I have to say, it screenshots 10x worse than it really looks. There’s enough ‘glow’ that things look largely distinct.
I would still prefer 5x the blur; I really, really, really hate the shapes of the tab switchers; and they use space so inefficiently I feel like I’m using an iPhone SE… but the liquid glass is ok. Gimmicky and ugly but it is mostly usable
OMG that image is hilarious. It's a total disaster.
And it's not like someone had to go out of their way to find something clashing like that. Pulling up control center from the home screen is something you do all the time.
Like, I genuinely would have assumed that control center would need to be non-translucent precisely because of that. But... nope?
It's Apple Maps bad!
Apple Maps is actually great now.
Depends on your region. It is fantastic in Cupertino. It is literally unusable in Japan or Taiwan. Literally--it will fail to get directions or even find your destination (typing in English or the local language).
I find the search pretty poor on Apple Maps, but I’ve traveled the world using only Apple Maps and I’ve gotten around fine in quite remote areas.
The only reason I ever use google maps is to search somewhere and copy paste the address into Apple Maps.
Can’t speak towards Japan or Taiwan specifically but it’s been fine in extremely rural Africa, India, Brazil, Indonesia, Bosnia, Australia, etc. Much better than Google Maps in most of Western Europe and America these days.
Really? I’ve had it work very well in Japan for me. Taiwan I’ve never tried.
Half the time when I input a destination (kanji or romanji) it fails to find what I’m looking for. Google Maps never fails.
Going from Apple Maps to Google Maps is now like going from ublock origin to a stock browser. Crap everywhere that you didn't ask for, slowing you down as you try to locate what you're actually trying to find.
Meanwhile the maps/data quality is quite good, probably 95% there for the things I care about. I've been able to use it full-time for years now.
This might be true in the US but it's close to worthless in a lot of the rest of the world.
It's true in most rich countries at this point. Apple's been steadily launching more of their capabilities in new countries. I just used Apple Maps across eight countries in Europe. I did send a few problem reports, but they're better than Google now everywhere I went.
At this point if I lived somewhere they weren't great, I'd submit improvements for all the places I went
Just checked my commute to work on the west coast. It found 1 of 3 public transit options, doesn't know that my company has an office at that location (public info), and doesn't list the cost. I also just finished a driving trip through Central Europe with an apple map user, where it got stuck in construction Google knew about (+1h), didn't have good traffic info at other times, and also chose the most boring route. The trip improved once we switched to routing with Google.
Apple maps is adequate now, but as a map power-user it's been pretty far from great every time I've tried it. I'm happy they finally managed to get an accurate basemap though.
In asia it is still unusable. I have to re-download Google Maps (I abhor using Google products) every time I travel to that part of the world.
It’s pretty much equal to Google maps in Australia. It’s mostly lacking in reviews.
Wow. It would almost be OK if they had had the sense to dim the background substantially, but... wow.
It had better be possible to turn this crap completely off. Is it?
Holy shit. That has to be a joke. It looks like some bad UI mockup from Jon Prosser
please please please, everyone, submit feedback at https://www.apple.com/feedback/
I was ok with the system settings redesign, could get used to it. But this whole new design is a different level of bad.
Normally I don't have strong opinions on UI design but that just looks wrong.
Straight from early 2000s. The early photoshop effects everyone applied on their geocities webpages.
Wow ! That is ugly.
Wonder if Apple has any Quality Control department at all.
I mean, a designer comes up with a proposal, someone else ought to check it.
Sad thing about Apple is that this was designed by a huge design team and about a million keynote presentations to execs that sounded exactly like this.
Funny, I'm pretty sure glass on glass is one of their guidelines no-no situations. Nice of them to implement it on their own control centre to prove how bad it is.
This looks horrible to be honest.
This new liquid glass will lead to liquid brain, because my brain will be melting trying to process all that visual mess daily.
Now of course, I'll have to experience this new design in practice to be sure, but judging from the screenshots it looks really hard on the eyes. Hopefully they'll allow the translucency to be customized.
Apple had a good run, I've genuinely enjoyed using their platforms daily, but I'm afraid they're dropping the ball now.
I guess on a long enough timeline, every company is bound to disappoint. It's hard to get it right, consistently.
Same. I was kind of slowly preparing myself that I might be switching to android and it seems this might be the final straw. Will wait until Sept to see how new iphone and google pixels will look like but most likely I will do the transition (even though been developing for iOS for more than 10 years.
Sure, it's reasonable to consider a switch. But while Android devices have come a long way in terms of physical design, capabilities, UI/UX, etc, out of the box Apple still offers a more comprehensive, user friendly and privacy focused security solution: lockdown, tighter controls of hardware/software integration, etc. So there's that.
I was a diehard Android person for years, and I really really wanted to like it. Even when it dropped calls, failed to even show incoming calls, apps crashed regularly. This was a Google phone on Google Fi, unaltered and supposed to be the "pure" Android experience. My final realization and the impetus for the switch was that Android is an app ghetto; Good apps are designed for iOS first, and half-assedly ported to Android. Android's store has so much trash in it as to make it impossible to find a real app that isn't malware.
I switched to iOS and despite its flaws, the experience is so much better.
Agreed; I will probably be staying with iOS no matter how garish it becomes - Apple has the foundations right.
I can't say I feel the same about macOS before; as a user since the early 1990s, I'm likely moving to Linux rather than Liquid Glass for my personal computer.
Liquid Glass looks better on iPad and iPhone.
On the Mac it is offensive. Vulgar. Disgusting. Loathsome.
I agree. I installed the beta and after just a few hours, I can tell this won't work for my eyes.
It's like staring into a chrome bumper while trying to use your computer. But also, it's see-through.
It is a shame because Android has everything they need to be just as good but its fragmentation as a whole just gets in the way of its potential.
I have been using android for maybe 11-12 years and once locked down it great for me. But I suspect less than 1% of users would use these things like this.
Apple user friendliness only extends as far as you're willing to do things the Apple way. If you want to do something Apple doesn't approve, it's going to be difficult, impossible, or miserable.
Example: file syncing and password management. Possible, but my Nextcloud and Keepass experience was janky. 3rd party Youtube client, impossible. Adblocking - all solutions I tried were terrible to mediocre (around 2020, but I doubt it improved since). On Android I can run any browser I want and install uBlock. Music: I can just dump my collection of mixed format music files (aac, mp3, mpc, flac, wavpack) over USB and play them with foobar2000. Foobar2000 is available on iphone, but needs dumb workarounds to play files not natively supported by Apple. And so on...
If you're balls deep in the Apple ecosystem, you probably have none of these problems. I never allowed myself to get locked in, which also made it very easy to leave ios behind.
Only thing I miss a little is the ios email and calendar clients. They were alright.
Try getting a device like a foldable phone that has no i-land analogs! That will provide a nice way to get benefits from the transition.
Lmao. Just some wildly untrue, especially with Pixel phones.
As someone who has daily driven Pixels since the first one but listens to plenty of Apple users: no, Apple really does have it better for most default experiences. Really, the main thing Android still has going for it is that sideloading is easy and I can have a full terminal.
I've tried to escape the walled garden to Android before, and I've given up. No matter which company's phone or what version of Android, it didn't work well as a phone, alarm, and reliable device that I use for stuff like my home security. Things broke on Android like clockwork, and the clock didn't work.
The latest Google pixel devices are specifically blocked from using Wyze devices right now due to a typo in the pixel's configuration files, for example. Stuff like that happens constantly with any phone in the super fragmented Android ecosystem.
They are both broken in their own ways. However, on one of those, I have some amount of flexibility/freedom to put in my own fixes/hacks/solutions to make it work. I will pick the additional headache that flexibility brings over being in a straight jacket everytime.
Even the non transparent stuff looks bad - a plain Finder window: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/macos-tahoe-26-0-beta-1...
Did they "squircle" the window? I've been enjoying the look of the liquid glass thing but this looks unserious, toy-like.
Here I was, thinking it couldn't get any worse than Big Sur like a fucking moron.
Reduce Transparency in Accessibility settings removes the glass effect, but I believe has been updated to be closer to the translucent effects in current iOS.
I find the "reduce motion" toggle to be a more pleasant experience on iOS as well.
Also this is way better compared to Android, where "remove animations" make apps feel like a dumpster fire, many of them lose parts of UI that were animated instead of showing them statically, feedback for touching gets often lost, things are waiting for animation so you are still stuck waiting a second or two for nothing, etc.
> Apple had a good run, I've genuinely enjoyed using their platforms daily, but I'm afraid they're dropping the ball now.
I haven't owned a (personal) Mac since High Sierra. The UI had been going downhill since Yosemite in my opinion, but gradually; it took a nosedive with Big Sur (I think that's the one that introduced all the SwiftUI apps?) to the point that I realized I probably wouldn't own another Mac until they figured out that a Mac is a computer, not an iPad. Looks like they still haven't yet.
That being said, I believe that 10.5-10.9 is probably somewhere close to what peak computing looks like. It's not perfect but it makes sense to some degree. I had no problem teaching people of any technological skill level how to use Snow Leopard or Lion; and not just getting by, properly becoming competent computer users. On the other hand, I've been watching my parents (both of whom have been using computers since the late 70s) slowly lose the ability to "understand" both modern macOS and iOS, and are more and more frequently struggling to find old and new features and functionality (like being able to see all of their emails on their phone).
It's disappointing really. For a while I couldn't stand using Windows and regular Linux desktop distros were too fiddly to be useful, and Mac really was the best option for "I just want to do X" with the least friction. Nowadays, Windows sucks for a whole host of reasons, and the Linux desktop is more usable but still Linux, and apparently Mac has decided to shoot itself in the head. If my grandmother asked me what computer to replace her Mac Mini with if it died right now, I really don't think I'd have an answer.
> trying to process all that visual mess daily.
That's exactly the thing, that's what I don't get. Apple's brand is all about simplicity and visual clarity.
This is a visual mess. We've gone from clean delineated color areas to... slop?
I really expected them to use subtle glass and shadow effects, but with minimal translucency. Heck, a lot of this is barely even translucency, more like transparency.
I'm really surprised, because I didn't expect Apple to produce a design language that so easily turns into seemingly visual chaos.
> I didn't expect Apple to produce a design language that so easily turns into seemingly visual chaos.
I don't understand how anyone can act surprised anymore. Seriously. The App Store is an absolute mess, and Apple seems to be okay with it because it makes them money. Same goes for Apple News, Apple Music, AppleTV+, Apple iCloud, Apple Fitness+ and Apple Arcade. To say nothing of the quality of these apps (for their benefit), it's brand dilution. Am I supposed to believe that MacOS and iOS are spared from Apple's attention being divided into a hundred pieces? Am I supposed to expect them to invest in high-quality tentpole software when their logo is the only thing required to make people spend money?
At some point, consumers have to distinguish between the identity that Apple markets to them, and what Apple's actual impact is on the carelessness of modern design. People have been saying this since 2013, Apple's new design languages aren't even close to the HIGs from the Macs of yore. Liquid Glass has been destined to fail ever since, it's an iteration on iOS7 and not an interface people actually like.
I think it's time for me to look back at Linux.
(*Looks at Gnome.*)
Hm, they're getting worse faster than Apple does. Never mind.
I like Gnome. I prefer my desktop to be designed around one unifying philosophy instead of a hodgepodge of customizations which don't work well together. The Gnome team has done pretty well at avoiding the classic Linux issues with the latter, though it doesn't win them any favors from people who would've been using KDE or some tiling WM anyway.
> I prefer my desktop to be designed around one unifying philosophy instead of a hodgepodge of customizations which don't work well together.
I agree. It's why I prefer Gnome over KDE, and macOS over Windows.
My main point is: Gnome can't tell simple from simplistic. Terminal cursor blinking. Removing every command until everything fits in one menu and/or title bar. It's so crammed with buttons, I can't tell what is what. But ironically, there's no desktop icons, despite "Desktop" folder being pinned in Nautilus. Everything is so spaced out. Top bar has three interactive elements, but it takes four clicks to log out. There's a dock, but you can't move it to the left/right side, so it takes up even more vertical space. You can fix some of that with extensions, but half of them get disabled on every upgrade.
This is in stark contrast with macOS. If you can't find something in the menu bar, there's a search field in the help menu. If you use some menu bar option often, you can bind it to a custom key. Both of these are provided through standard system APIs, so every application uses them by default. Title bars have buttons, but are spacious enough so that there's always an obvious place to click-to-drag. (Gnome had to solve it by making ordinary widgets draggable... How do you know if you're selecting text in a URL bar, or moving the window?) I could keep going, but macOS has always been more intuitive and more friendly to power users.
Seconded. GNOME is simple and cohesive. Sure, some of the apps are a bit feature light, but I do most of my heavy lifting in the terminal anyways - I really don't need my "core" GUI tools like the file explorer to do a whole lot.
Did you look at KDE?
.... and I'm pretty sure KDE did the glass everywhere theme maybe 20 years ago
The damage Gnome does to the reputation of Linux is surreal
And there are no alternatives.
I learned to love KDE, but I understand why people don't default to it. All other alternatives are dead and it makes sense. The scope of something like KDE or GNOME isn't really reasonable these days. I learned to install the most minimal version of KDE.
The (maybe) rising solution is "build-your-own-desktop" options like:
- Hyprland (for Window management and other random tasks like wallpapers and lockscreen)
- Waybar (for task bar/menu bar)
- Rofi/Wofi (for Spotlight/Search&Launch)
Then you a la carte your File Manager, photo editor, browser, and whatever apps you like.
While I find that somewhat appealing, and those solution are flexible enough to pretty much build whatever you like your DE to be like, they are also extremely complex. For most things there is no "defaults". You don't get to do anything "by default" other than boot into a GUI environment. You configure a shortcut to launch your terminal or apps, a task bar that also has an empty default. Things that have defaults are gonna be extremely "basic" (think html no css). Just the data dump, and it expects you to style it. They are entirely configured (and styled) through a series of conf/css/ini/yaml/json files.
These apps/environment pretty much dominate all the Linux desktop discussion these days. (At least discussion I can find on here or reddit or Twitter when I used to check it)
It's really hard to tell if anyone is actually using those things or not. They are extremely tedious and a giant pain in the ass for daily use. Maybe it's early days. It's been about 8-6 years now since all the talk has become about new Wayland compositors. There were dozens of them, but Hyprland seems to have the most mindshare? maybe? hard to tell. It's the youngest, but it would take many years to reach KDE or GNOME maturity
> It's really hard to tell if anyone is actually using those things or not.
They do.
You're mostly spend a few days on configuring the basics, then tweak things over the next months. Then you don't touch anything for years as everything is working exactly the way you want. Some programs do better with defaults so you can tweak the shipped config.
I don't need GNOME or KDE maturity because what I need is just a fraction of what they can do. And what I concocted is more stable and don't require clickops to get the same version on another computer.
> And there are no alternatives.
I am happy as can be running Linux Mint Cinnamon. It just works.
Also there is good old Xfce, in fact there are lot of good alternatives.
This year was the first time I ever used a Mac and I was shocked how bad the desktop was. You can barely be productive without installing ten different apps that allow you to use basic stuff like alt-tab or properly rebind keys..
Linux users have it really good, all things considered.
should have have mentioned Wayland is what I was considering. Mac is pretty rough I agree.
Yeah, using Wayland is the mistake. X11 works.
Wayland will probably still need a few years to mature and actually be viable.
> The (maybe) rising solution is "build-your-own-desktop" options [...].
This is not a solution for power users, this is a half-hearted non-solution for people with too much time on their hands. As a power user, I need the computer to do the stupid work for me, so I can focus on the more interesting/important stuff, like playing games, recording a song, building an app, or just making a living.
I play guitar. I tried building one. It was terrible. There's a good reason why there's very few luthiers among guitarists.
> Maybe it's early days.
People have been doing this since before KDE. I started using Linux around 2002, and it wasn't long until I was theming Fluxbox.
If you want a decent and hackable desktop environment, start with matching the functionality of OS X 10.4, then work from there.
Dunno if you missed it but Linux Mint team forked libadwaita into libadapta to enable theming
I find that KDE just works like most people expect a computer to work, and it doesn't get in my way, or try to impose a way of doing things. The defaults are reasonable, but you can tweak nearly anything to your liking.
My "favorite" Gnome-ism was something that happened a year or two ago. At work there's a machine in the workshop we use to reference technical drawings, charts and so on. So I wanted to set the display to never turn off, because I got annoyed with having to drop what I was holding (and sometimes walk down a ladder) and wiggle the mouse to wake up the machine.
That is impossible on Gnome. You get a dropdown of a few fixed values, none greater than 60 minutes, and you better like what choices the Gnome devs have granted you. The workaround requires some brain surgery in the terminal.
On KDE I can set the timeout to any integer I want.
> That is impossible on Gnome. You get a dropdown of a few fixed values, none greater than 60 minutes, and you better like what choices the Gnome devs have granted you. The workaround requires some brain surgery in the terminal.
AFAIK what gnome does is not give you any options above 15 minutes, but they do provide a toggle for disabling screen power saving and toggles for other such power saving features.
I've always been able to disable if fine, what irks me is the artificial 15 minutes limit in the drop down menu, forcing you to edit dconf entries to increase it...
> I understand why people don't default to it.
Can you explain why KDE shouldn't be the default?
> The (maybe) rising solution is "build-your-own-desktop" options like
That's not new, people have been doing that with twm, awesomewm, dozens more for over a decade. That's niche though, the majority see Gnome and that's it. They will never even know that there is something else, they probably don't even know that Gnome != Linux.
True. They're stuck in between badly aping Apple, trying too hard to do their own thing, and being toxic to the rest of the developer community.
They're not a trillion dollar company. Sure, many projects would do well with more decisive decision-making, but the strength of free software comes from community and collaboration.
I've found GNOME developers to be pleasant to work with & I enjoy the experience I have with the DE.
<https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217>
TL;DR: if you want window decorations, link with libadwaita.
SDL ended up linking with libdecor. You know how when you use a Qt app in Gnome, it looks out of place? Now even the window decorations look inconsistent from one another.
I'm well aware of this issue. I don't expect windows to look the same to each other. I like that the title bar can have other content in it other than just the app name and the close button.
For that reason alone I avoid Qt apps, as almost none draw their own title bar. Qt apps aren't even consistent among themselves in theming/style, for example the only apps that look in place on KDE are specifically made with KDE in mind.
I don't understand where the "consistency" obsession comes from, all these apps use different tool kits and will look different regardless.
Agreed. I've used Macs since 1986 and at one point worked for Apple. I used to make the same jokes about Linux on the desktop as everyone and yet I see myself seriously considering it more every day.
I recently switched to Linux Mint on a makeshift PC and it feels a bit like going back to Snow Leopard. It's snappy, pleasant to look at and has all the necessary modern features I need. Very surprisingly and unlike everything I experienced before on Linux desktops, it all worked out of the box (plus a few extra clicks on a GUI to get some proprietary drivers).
I never worked for Apple, but I've used mostly Macs since System 6, and am feeling the same frustration with their software. Unfortunately their laptops are way better than anything else out there, so I'm forced to tolerate it. I ran Linux on a PowerBook for awhile, but it was janky, and it seems like that has not changed. OS X is still basically Unix, so I'll go on running the Unix stuff I need, and turn off the lickable distractions to the extent I can.
I like it a lot. Reminds me of the OG Mac OS X Aqua theme, except a more reactive/dynamic version of it to account for accessibility.
Refreshing counter to the brutalist styles that were trending. The problem with brutalist styles is that they tend to be busy, which becomes confusing and unintuitive to new users.
This seems like it would help separate elements for easier focus, to make things more obvious.
> Reminds me of the OG Mac OS X Aqua theme
What I find surreal is that most comments are exactly like those back in the day, too! (Pinstripes, what were they thinking? Glossiness is distracting! Where's my platinum? This is a stupid toy!)
Anyway, this will be refined and fine tuned and we will all be fine.
Platinum's pinstripes and Aqua's glossy buttons didn't interfere with contrast. That's the golden rule - as long as content is legible, you can go off doing whatever sorts of cute baffles you want as a bonus. The pinstripes created texture that defined the titlebar in Platinum, Aqua's color emphasized interactive elements using visual contrast. In my opinion Aqua looks awful, but I do accept that it was an extremely usable interface for people with weak vision or little computer experience. The same can be said for Comic Sans and it's deliberate ugliness.
How will those same audiences react when they see a glassy squircle pop up on their iPhone? What is it a metaphor for? Is it a button? A notification toast? An entry window? An app? A widget? Did they forget to put on their glasses this morning? Is it interactive, are there gestures or buttons to close it? How do you call someone from this screen?
This is objectively bad design. I would argue you don't know what made Platinum and Aqua great if you're comparing those complaints to this clown vomit.
> Aqua's color emphasized interactive elements using visual contrast.
There were loads of complaints about readability with Aqua, particularly of the menus and the windows title bars, both of which were translucent and had pinstripes. Briefly discussed here for example: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2011/05/mac-os-x-revisited/ . There was also the uproar at Leopard’s transparent menu bar and glossy dock, discussed here: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/10/mac-os-x-10-5/ . All these were over the top initially and were toned down and tweaked over time.
> How will those same audiences react when they see a glassy squircle pop up on their iPhone?
It’s a button. It has a shape, some physical character, and when you poke it wiggles and does something. It looks miles better than the label-button-links things that looked all identical in iOS 7 and that still plague modern design.
> This is objectively bad design. I would argue you don't know what made Platinum and Aqua great if you're comparing those complaints to this clown vomit.
I did not really like Platinum (I spent quite a lot of time with Kaleidoscope, which I miss very much). I really liked Aqua, though, despite its occasional brushed metal excesses. I would not mind going back to Lion, when they toned down the glossiness they introduced in Leopard. I think that UI was very elegant. But I have to admit there is a kind of playfulness with the concept of liquid UI that is intriguing. I love how the Dynamic Island reacts and behaves as it splits, grows, and shrink. I think I like it better than iOS 5-era glossy everything, and definitely more than iOS 7+. I am willing to admit that I have bad taste, but I am optimistic about the possibilities with the concepts they showed.
That said, I swear I read the clown vomit but about Aqua back in 2001. Some things never change.
The Apple customerbase never changes. When Apple hypes up a bad update, people apologize and say "wait for the next point release" as a healing salve. When Apple releases a flop like the Vision Pro, everyone has to point out that the Newton failed so the iPhone could run. Maybe, just maybe, Apple's characteristic product management results in blatant failures. Mice that put a charging port on the bottom. Serial cables that are a white-label USB with licensing fees. Lisas that inhabit landfills. We can't always argue that Apple exists independent of other marketing influences and can just do whatever they want as a result - they have to compete! Resting on laurels isn't good enough.
I'm willing to give Apple their credit, where due. Mojave and Catalina was polished to a professional sparkle, it was very believable as a professional OS back then. Big Sur wasted a lot of screen real estate without any good way to get it back, and now Liquid Glass is sacrificing visual clarity to Mammon in hopes that it sells more Macbooks. I don't think it makes sense, any way you cut it. Not everything has to be history repeating itself, Apple has proven more than adept at inventing new ways to fail. Apple Car and Airpower both come to mind - sometimes it just doesn't work out.
Apple learned a lot of lessons with Aqua and eventually dialed back the translucency. Unfortunately, they seem to have forgotten those lessons.
As a user centered designer I naturally agree with most criticism shared here. Not the direction I would have wished for.
Trying to understand where this is coming from, I guess two sources:
1. It's a fashion update to give GenZ and younger something they haven't seen before. They are too young to remember Windows Vista, and are the most important future target group that spends 12+ hrs / day on their iPhone. Also it is an audience that heavily customizes their UI, and care more for visually communicating cool-ness, than to get work done with efficient UX. Similar to using rainmeter on a desktop PC. Unsurprising, this look a lot like a rainmeter skin.
2. This is a way to communicate unmatched quality. Similar to what AirBnB are doing. When everyone can use icon- and component libraries like material and shadcn to build UI:s, this is a visual language that communicates premium quality is through an interface and iconography that is different and too expensive for others to recreate. Many companies don't have the skill nor the time and money to do custom icons in 3D software, or create elaborate translucent effects. Let's see what multi-plattform apps will look like with this new UI, perhaps the goal is to make them stand out as "outdated"
I'll quickly correct you as a zoomer: Gen Z is too young to remember windows vista, but just old enough to have enough fuzzy memories of skeuomorphism to be nostalgic for it (think of it like millenials liking vaporwave despite being very young in the 80s).
This makes far more sense as #2 with a flavor of cashing in on zoomer nostalgia.
> millenials liking vaporwave
From context, I'm assuming this is a misnomer and not a jab. XD (Although, admittedly, I'm not sure what the reference is actually to...)
Browser/webview have had iOS 7+ style blur for a while now, but won’t have an answer to emulating Liquid Glass shaders for a while.
EDIT: although perhaps this will allow emulation in webview if performance isn’t abysmal https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/SVG/Reference/E...
I wonder how much of this transparent/glass design language is setting Apple up for AR interfaces where UI is overlaid on what you're looking at. Since you literally cannot have fully opaque elements with AR glasses this would be a smart way to ensure overall design is unified across platforms.
Right before the unveiling, Craig specifically said visionOS was the driver for these changes. So the new UI is literally because Apple is still betting on visionOS.
The thing I find really weird there is that visionOS panes and windows are more opaque than this. They have some transparency, but it's a heavily tinted frosted glass effect with entirely readable contrast. This may be "inspired" by visionOS, but this looks like somebody really just threw out that design and the usability with it.
good god. this never ends well.
It could be worse, at least they didn’t rename the company over their VR headset.
TBF it is a less prejudiced name than the one they used before.
I think they really wanted to change their image, and the metaverse thing happened to also be a decent candidate for that.
Bingo. It seems like the same mistakes made by MS in the 2000s when they prioritized a touch interface onto devices without them... why is Apple so desperate to make Vision happen?
Because it's the only thing they have that even has a chance of being "the next big thing".
So they're gambling everything on it; Steve would have shitcanned it a year ago and fired everyone involved.
I think asserting that there is no consumer product to be had in the realm of AR/spatial computing is shortsighted.
And if so, then why not work on it? The research in AR has already improved the phones as well.
I love the switcheroo thought experiment: imagine we have always had transparent glassy user interfaces; for whatever reason, that's what the techology allowed. And in 2025 we have made a breakthrough and finally achieved opaque buttons. Would this change be just as controversial?
No, it would be a massive net positive. Everyone would love these new opaque buttons that obscure the noise underneath so that you can easily read foreground text.
In light of AR glasses, this thought experiment is even more relevant...
Also a great way to speed up hardware upgrades. Each new os update can add more computationally expensive frills to make the older phones slow down.
This was also my first thought, "imagine how many who think their device is too old after installing this "everything transparent" OS update". I bet shareholders will love it though.
We had operating systems with transparent windows 20 years ago. I have a hard time believing this UI will stress any device released in the last 5 years.
One of the more common “problems” people have is that their devices are so much more powerful than they will ever use.
Wouldn't that be a crazy bet, given how much AR has flopped? Or do people still think it's more than a fad of the early 2020s?
You are incorrect. Apple’s (current) AR system uses cameras and video feeds, not translucent/transparent displays. You absolutely can have fully opaque elements; when the AVP is worn, all you see are displays. When it’s off, you see nothing but pure black.
> Since you literally cannot have fully opaque elements with AR glasses
Why not?
Because AR glasses, by definition, overlay an interface onto the real world that you are seeing through the transparent glasses.
VR glasses like the VisionPRO can add a video stream of your surroundings, but they are physically opaque and thus don't suffer from this limitation.
But why does the interface have to be transparent? Why can't it just be opaque then disappear when not needed and/or be placed in the periphery?
If we're still speaking about AR glasses, no current technology can make the images more opaque than the screen itself. So if the screen itself is transparent, whatever you draw on it with light will be at best as opaque as the screen - so, still transparent.
As an indie app developer, this design update discourages me massively. The previous, minimal design gave the impression of being a platform, even though it was always mostly Apple stuff in Apple land.
The new design is so visually overwhelming that I think the only way for users to deal with it is to reduce complexity. I read a statistic that said the average user had 21 apps on their phone. I think that will reduce to 15 now, or less.
As for my app, this basically throws my whole design system out the window. I don't want to add glass to all my UI elements. Remember the visual noise that translucent window borders introduced in Vista? Why would I do that to my UI?
I like the fact that the new design introduces a sense of hierarchy, and that it has more animations. I also like that transition animations are now interruptible by default (watch the "What's new in UIKit" video for that). But that could've happened without the glass nonsense.
It was hard to feel excited in previous WWDCs, but I just took it as a sign of platform maturity. This year, on the other hand, is outright discouraging.
I don't post here often, but I hope someone at Apple is reading this as this is one of the worst designs I have seen from this company. Even in their own presentation they shows text hard to read, text on top of text. It's an accessibility and usability nightmare. I really don't want to give up iMessage but if what ships looks as bad as this I may jump ship.
truly contender for the worst redesign of the decade. It's hard to see how a trillion dollar company would stumble so bad here. They must be real zealots on AR to even go here.
We have these brilliant high resolution displays, and these powerful, energy efficient GPUs that are always running and compositing frames like a game engine 120 times a second.
It's about time we start seeing more physicality in our user interfaces!
We can make things look convincingly like glass, or metal, or even materials that don't exist in reality. One reason for flat design is because it was the lowest common denominator and easy for devs to implement. If Apple makes it easy to implement this liquid glass stuff - Rectangle().background(.glass) or something - then it's going to be really successful.
Just because we can doesn't mean we should. Using this new design language as an example, things are now harder to read, identify, and understand. That's a huge loss to productivity and ease of use.
> things are now harder to read, identify, and understand
What makes you think that? Do you have a specific example from the keynote in mind?
There must be something since you've never actually used this design system yourself. Or is this just your pre-judgement?
Even in their animations on this page there are things where the user scrolls the interface and the part under one of these glass buttons looks more exaggerated and draws the eye in an unpleasant way, and depending on where they land with it, the text on the button isn't particularly readable.
Looking at Apple's curated headline hero image on https://www.apple.com/os/ios/
Every single example of the five are hard to read, especially the second.
At least half of the example screenshots and videos I've seen in the keynote and on various Apple website pages are hard to read. The lense effects, only visible in the animations/videos, are technically impressive, visually stimulating, but terrible from a utilitarian perspective (unless you consider convincing people to buy iPhones using attractive visuals in a cinematic sort of way but not actually trying to use the devices as some sort of utility to Apple).
In the keynote, they showed an app, I think it was Messages, where the UI at the bottom was illegible because it was translucent and the background image and text were showing through too much. There are other examples that I was able to find were legibility was negatively impacted.
Just the short demo videos on their website.
Their example of the music app. You have a translucent bar showing the currently playing music app.
It gets harder to read when it overlaps with the background music album covers. I can very easily see a situation where you need to scroll to an empty bit, just to be able to read what it is actually playing.
Now, imagine you have a visual impairment. It's already hard to read with mostly normal eyes. This will be impossible for anyone with bad vision, probably even worse if colorblind.
It is genuinely unreadable, and a mess visually.
> What makes you think that? Do you have a specific example from the keynote in mind?
Almost every button and menu they showed was harder for me to read than the ones on my current generation Apple gear. The icons on buttons are indistinct, the text is hard to read. The buttons themselves seem to sink into the content "below" making both the buttons and the content hard to see.
Some examples:
- the tabs at the bottom left of the photos app
- the address bar in Safari (what a complete mess... you can't see the content beneath because the address bar blurs it, but you also can't read the address bar because the glass effect destroys contrast
- in the colourless "translucent" colour way, all the icons look the same
- the (admittedly cute) "squish" effect when tapping menus and some of the buttons looked like it would slow down all interactions
- the highlights and light/colour bending effects are utterly distracting, catching your eye when you really want to be skimming the content or overview to orient yourself in the UI
True, I've not used it... but I was watching along with the launch video with rapt Apple fan-boi attention and I was surprised by how uncomfortable the new UI seemed to be. I've never felt that before.
This new design style is certainly "fun", but it looks like it'll get in the way of fast use of the tools.
I want my OS to promote clarity of affordances, and then to recede away from my attention so I can get on with doing what I was trying to do. This new design style looks like it's trying to hold on to my attention all the time I'm using the devices. (Admittedly today's keynote was an ad for the new design, so that sense of attention grabbing was hopefully accentuated over day to day use... but I'm skeptical.)
Look at the notifications in the middle of the landing page for iOS 17. https://www.apple.com/os/ios/ It is immediately awful. I hadn't even seen the keynote yet when I went to apple.com to see what had been announced and my very first thought was "Oh no"
Reminds me of when they added more transparency to the UI around Mac OS X 10.9 where they argued that it "helps you focus on what's important". Huh? By showing me what's behind what I'm trying to look at? The first thing I do when I setup a new machine is to go to accessibility settings and turn on "reduce transparency". Hoping there is a way to do something similar with this.
Similar with how MS brought 'glass' into their Aero theme for vista or win7. There was exactly no benefit to being able to see some blurry version of the background window if I'm trying to read the foreground. I don't think a version that lets background detail through clearly will do any better outside of flashy demos.
> That's a huge loss to productivity and ease of use
Have you used it yet?
I have looked at the screenshots and videos. I can tell from those that text is hard to read and icons are hard to differentiate. iOS has a long history of these gaffes.
Microsoft did glass with windows 7, maybe even vista. Can't remember.
Kinda old hat at this point tbh.
And just because we have all this powerful hardware, does not mean we need to waste it on physically accurate glass surfaces on UIs.
If this rolls out to all iDevices, how much energy (in other words CO2) will be expended worldwide on rendering things like this?
> that are always running and compositing frames like a game engine 120 times a second
Which is complete idiocy if you ask me. Why update a static screen at 120 fps? Are our batteries too large?
> Why update a static screen at 120 fps?
Good thing it doesn't do that then, variable refresh rate displays that go down to 1 Hz are fairly standard now on phones as well as other displays.
Even before that, mobile UI frameworks are retained mode GUIs, not immediate. They aren't drawing to a blank framebuffer 120 times a second if they don't have to. Redraws only happen when something changes (e.g. "Dirty" rects).
They don't. GPU rendering only happens when something changes. Even composition only happens when something changes thanks to panel self refresh (this is independent of the more recent VRR that also lowers refresh rate when idle, this is a relatively small savings compared to the other two)
By this token, why not add particle systems and fancy explosions to every button click? Why stick to squares or rounded squares etc, when you can use voxel shading to generate complex n-gons with thousands of edges?
The problem with all this - and 'liquid glass' as well - is that far from adding anything to the experience, they take away from it. They muddy and visually complicate what should be a visually clear and simple interface, one that gets out of your way as much as possible while allowing you to reach what you really care about - the content in your apps.
only if each iOS app experience wasn't worse with each release. SwiftUI apps feels much slower than UIKit. My iPhone 13 experience with latest iOS overall feels very sluggish to old iPhones. This design feels not bringing much benefits but only drawbacks - more energy wasted, slower performance on older iPhones (apple want you buy new phone) and IMHO is just worse UX.
> It's about time we start seeing more physicality in our user interfaces!
It's actually quite resource intensive to have translucency, in many implementations across the web and mobile.
>It's about time we start seeing more physicality in our user interfaces!
I'm not sure if this is a joke or not.
We had that, it was called skeuomorphism: https://miro.medium.com/v2/da:true/resize:fit:1200/0*6DRkHp3...
Then we got rid of it because it looked too 2010 now we are bringing it back because flat looks too 2020.
so what you're saying is that we need to resurrect skeuomorphism?
I get the sense that the Scandinavian minimalism thing has worn too heavy on everyone and now we're taking a collective step back to explore things that are a bit more fun and maximalist. So yeah, maybe a little more skeuomorphism but done differently? That was a fun era!
> I get the sense that the Scandinavian minimalism thing has worn too heavy on everyone
As a Scandinavian: I don't feel like we tried that since Braun. Apple has tried to mimic a Scandinavian sort of minimalism, but only in appearance. The iPhone UI is way to busy and is to hard to navigate for me to classify it as minimalism.
Skeuomorphism in the sense of exactly mimicking existing physical interfaces probably mostly not, but skeuomorphism in the sense of using physically-inspired visual effects to add depth to a virtual interface I think so for sure. Liquid glass is so damn pretty.
I think modern skeuomorphism must be in a weird spot compared to a few decades ago. Right now our real world devices designers would be inspired are less likely to have physical controls, so the virtual versions are pulling from a more distant original source that's already been through a few degrees of separation. If the original industrial design that computer interface graphics was pulling from was the rise of industrial and consumer electronics through the 20th century (the various switches, dials, indicators, tuning knobs, etc), what new physical design is there to inspire that isn't feeding on itself.
From one point of view, this design language is a type of skeuomorphism, by it mimicking pieces of rounded glass laid on top of one-other.
The problem with skeuomorphism in iOS' first design language was that resemblance to real-world objects was taken too far — at the expense of legibility. Users attributed affordances to virtual objects that they didn't have.
The problem with iOS 7's flatter interface was that the anti-skeumorphism went too far in the other direction, again at the expense of legibility. Users couldn't see what controls were supposed to do.
... And now the pendulum has swung back in the other direction, again too far, and missed the goal.
This is the Jevons paradox [1] in full display here. It's much easier to take advantage of hardware to run software at 120 FPS, so why not?
And I agree about liquid glass being successful iff they make the developer tooling for this as easy as additional modifiers to components, or even the default for SwiftUI.
> One reason for flat design is because it was the lowest common denominator and easy for devs to implement.
The 3D buttons in Windows 98 (Start button, for example) must have be harder to develop due to the animation involved. Yet, that was perfectly fine on hardware much older than those on which flat UIs were developed. I think you are missing the main point, which is that designers maul designs every season exactly like in the fashion industry due to merely being employed to do so and feeling a need to produce something new all the time (, which is sub-optimal for the humans who have to bear the UX consequences, to say the least).
I don't mind physicality, but not glass. Please.
There are reasons why most controls are NOT made of glass in real life.
There are myriads of glass controls around you, just pay attention to it. From car interiors to elevator buttons, it's there.
Glas actually makes sense, given its an extension of the device's hull.
Probably the main reason is because they have ugly electronics behind them instead of pretty dynamic colors.
I mean probably because they would break, no? I think glass-looking buttons are great (think Sony's Dualsense controller, Xbox controllers, tbh many controllers have glass-ish buttons)
I think it's a nice aesthetic. It obviously needs some tuning (contrast, transparency, etc.), but the idea is nice! I've installed the beta, and it isn't as bad as it looks, just takes some getting used to.
I also theorize this may be some grand transition phase to prepare everyone for the visionOS future apple wants to happen, but that could just be a stretch.
I really dig apple's work. It's so refreshing to get a tech event in 2025 where design is a huge focus and not just duck taping another LLM to everything. Design is expensive and it's clear they've invested a massive amount of resources into liquid glass. It's not perfect, but I think they'll iron out some of the contrast bugs.
Agreed with other commenters that crappy electron apps will look increasingly out of place (... slack ...). Too bad LLM's coding efficiencies haven't been used to try to get us back to native UIs from electron yet. Companies would rather pocket the savings.
It's so refreshing to get a tech event in 2025 where design is a huge focus and not just duck taping another LLM to everything.
I don't want to make this an Apple vs. Google comment (Mac user since 2007, iPhone user since 2009), but Google spend a good chunk of time on their Material Design 3 Expressive redesign at the Android event a few weeks ago.
MD3 feels pretty tame in comparison, though. Mostly still the same flat look but with more roundness and louder colors. I think it’s going to end up dated looking much, much more quickly than MD1/MD2 did.
Tame is what Apple should have shipped instead of this liquid glass disaster.
Apple didn't talk about AI or Siri because they're currently flailing and so behind it's concerning.
This was design-focused because skin-deep was all they accomplished.
When they announced Apple Intelligence, I had hopes that it would come with Siri supporting more languages.
These features, that duck taping llm as parent comment says looks nice but not when your language isn't supported. 13 years pass by since Siri was introduced and I still can make use of it beyond setting timers and managing music playback.
They did still have a lot of AI features, just not AI chat.
Users can now use AI in Shortcuts, developers can use the various on-device models, I assume the call and text screening uses AI. Those are a few things off the top of my head. We need to some thinking the start and end for AI is a text field with a submit button.
The AI features they promised 1 year ago are still not here. And they are not even close to shipping it. End of story as far as i’m concerned.
But yes, it is nice to see some incremental AI improvements with suggestions in various apps, etc. Better than nothing.
To be fair, they did say it was going to be a decade long arc to move to more AI stuff.
We have a lot of other options for generic AI chat, so I’d rather them get it right than rush out something that isn’t any good.
only concerning if you have major investments in apple, and rely on ai hype to drive the stock up. I don't know if it's because I watch so much sports but to see someone fall behind doesn't really make me believe they lack the ability to catch up
I don't want the AI features, either -- but I do want a company that can deliver on what they promise.
Apple has fallen behind before; I don't doubt they can recover I just hope it's a good Apple that we get to live with on the other side of what they're going through.
Apple of the last few years hasn't been consumer or developer friendly; their privacy promise being one of the big standouts in their favor.
> Apple didn't talk about AI or Siri because they're currently flailing and so behind it's concerning.
Either concerning or reassuring depending on your perspective. I for one will be glad if there's a platform left that hasn't been invaded by AI.
I wouldn't find the company's inability to deliver on their own top priorities something to take a sigh of relief about.
What internal issues is a company like this also failing to deliver? A problem like this doesn't come about in isolation.
Eh. Apple have always been good at products and bad at services.
If you're here to make excuses for them, that's totally fine. I'd like to see Apple do better.
> because they're currently flailing and so behind
...behind what? Siri doesn't have a meaningful competitor on iOS. Nothing else even has access to my personal data.
As far as I know, Siri cannot (by Apple's design) have a competitor on iOS.
Unless you consider unlocking your phone, opening an app like Amazon, and tapping a microphone to talk to Alexa as a fair access for competition.
Sure, but that raises the question of what siri is falling behind if nobody else can fill that void.
Now I haven't owned an android in many years, but I haven't heard a peep from google about how they're using AI to improve their basic apps.
I recommend trying an Android device with an assistant -- they can just do so much more I'm not sure how to tell you in words, other than Siri is in its own league and it isn't the big league. The things Apple lauded yesterday were on my Blackberry-branded Android. Let that timeline sink in.
I appreciate Siri's privacy features. Full stop. Nothing else about Siri is even close to what Google delivered 2+ years ago. Definitely try Google Assistant and others if you wish to be informed on this; Apple isn't going to be a good source of setting the bar for user experience with automated assistants for a long time.
I've installed the beta, and I really like how it looks and works. Like you said, it's not perfect, but I expect the small gripes I have so far will be ironed out before long.
Not sure a massive misallocation of resources is something to celebrate.
> Agreed with other commenters that crappy electron apps will look increasingly out of place
Aesthetics is the smallest problem I've had with Electron (or generally non-native) apps.
This feels suspiciously like the goals of Microsoft's "Metro" design from the Windows 8 era. It will be interesting to see if Apple can do a better job of keeping the same design without damaging the desktop experience than Microsoft did.
It’s terrible and an unsolvable “problem” that many have tried before and there’s no way of getting this right.
Transparent UI components always add noise by nature, especially glass that is intended to be realistic - see all the refractions shown in the keynote.
Aqua was also playful and suggested the same feel but never got in the way of clarity and was beautifully implemented almost feeling revolutionary at the time.
What is on point for VR use cases where this is taken from, unfortunately ruins a desktop or handheld experience.
A massive loss of precision, focus and a big step backwards.
> It’s terrible and an unsolvable “problem” that many have tried before and there’s no way of getting this right.
except apple dictates to its fans whats right. i feel apple has already begun a slow process of making them similar;
what im more curious about is how they will improve the settings app (it seems the desktop settings is the worst its been design and flow wise - ive never liked the ios settings design - i do hope they change both of these for the better)
edit: more newlines
They've already started ruining the desktop experience with the macOS 11 redesign and there's no sign of them stopping. For example, the recent settings app redesign that no one asked for broke the fundamental desktop UI design rule that controls never scroll, only content does.
one of my favorite examples of how bad the System Settings app is: find where the Default Browser setting is, without using search.
Oh wow. Took me several minutes of aimlessly poking around.
Actually, even without that, the grouping and the hierarchy don't make sense. Why are some things top-level items and other under "general"? Same for "privacy and security" (I assume that's what it's called in English), for some reason "passwords", "lock screen" and "touch ID and password" are separate top-level items even though they do very much belong to "privacy and security".
The more you look at it, the less sense it makes.
Your smoking gun is to not use the app in the most intuitive and obvious way?
> Your smoking gun is to not use the app in the most intuitive and obvious way?
Search isn't the most intuitive and obvious way to everyone. Just adding a search function also isn't an excuse to just totally ignore good UX design and information hierarchy.
I've been a sysadmin my entire career, and still do end-user support occasionally. You'd be surprised how few people use the search function, for anything, on their computers. Just opening the windows start menu and showing them they can search there is like black magic to a frighteningly large amount of people.
I've met fellow Mac users that don't even know spotlight exists, and navigate through the OS and every app via mouse and clicking around.
So yeah, just throwing a search box in your app as an excuse for ignoring the experience of navigating it any other way is bad UX design.
By the way, macOS has a super useful search field under "help" in the menu bar. It searches among all menu items in the current app and even shows you where they are. Very non-obvious, but once you try it, you don't understand how you lived without it.
This is one of my favorite features of macOS. It's actually coming to spotlight in 26
There's a search bar in the System Settings app, you don't need to know what Spotlight is.
I'm staying with family and just handed my 64 year old mother who has never used a Mac my Macbook Pro with the settings app open, and after explaining the concept of default browser in non-leading language (not mentioning the word default), her first thought was to click Display.
When nothing familiar was there her next thought was to click Search and then type in Browser and she made the connection of "Default Browser" to the concept I mentioned immediately.
-
Non-techies are not going to learn the groupings for OS settings any easier than they'll figure out a UX pattern that's been widely accepted for decades: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/search-visible-and-simple/
Of course, who don't know anything about UX tend to assume personal anecdotes map to a much larger sample size than they actually do.
Different people may approach the same UI differently. A good practice in UX design is to put things where people expect to find them — and duplicate them if different people go looking in different places. So a working search function doesn't absolve you of having to make the structure of your screens/menus/whatever make sense.
Life is not smoking guns, objective truths, or us and thems.
I do find it amusing how disorganized the app has become, and that has become my favorite example.
I find it even more amusing that you think citing search as a primary UI path is your “smoking gun” of good information hierarchy and interface design.
It's just a bad example. Sorry you're upset I called it out.
The original settings app had a nondescript "General" label for this same setting: neither tells me to expect a default browser setting.
Overall the old UI was just the current UI with lower information density.
> A setting's placement in the menu hierarchy "is a bad example" of the Settings app's being bad because search is available.
> Search is always available while the app is open, across all menus and functions.
> Therefore no placement or layout can be singled out as better or worse in the Settings app. All possible hierarchies or arrangements are equal.
> I unroll my Apple UX Researcher Toolkit (contents: blindfold, dart, dartboard, crack pipe), and use it to make my decision: I put the dropdown 3 levels deep under Touch ID, safe in the knowledge that I cannot be criticized, because we've also included a search bar.
It's just bad thinking. Sorry if you're upset I've called it out.
Search is... bad, generally.
How is that setting spelled? What synonym did they use? Are there multi-work linking hyphens? Will it work with or without them? Is the search fuzzy?
And then localization comes in. Take any translated UI and the search often falls short. Did they translate the setting name? Did they translate it right, or did a google-translate of their localization plist? Will it find the setting if I spell it without accents? Which dialect does it use? Wait I don't know how to say this specific technical work in my native language because nobody actually uses it?
So yeah, please keep categories that make sense.
I couldn't search System Settings when I setup my laptop for over an hour because it was indexing files I migrated from my old Mac. It made for a frustrating user experience trying to set this thing up.
Search only works if you know what you're looking for and what it's called. Horrible for discoverability.
I mean, by your logic the whole settings app should just be a search box when you open it. Clearly there’s a use case for browsability in a settings app, so that you can discover what settings exist. Given that, it’s probably important for the location of each setting to be intuitive.
Metro on phones worked so well but MS failed to translate it to desktops.
As for the second part, Apple does a remarkable job at updating all of the OS to a new design language. Unlike Windows, which last time I used it, had three different settings panels and UI controls resembling archaeological layers going back to pre XP.
You can still get the Windows 3/NT 3.5 directory picker if you dig around enough.
The biggest problem with Metro is how little effort was put into properly adapting it to desktops. It tried to handle everything from smartphones to tablets to non-touch PCs with 27” monitors with the same UI. It’s an understatement to say that it was awkward to use with a keyboard and mouse, because it almost acted like those forms of input ceased to exist.
If Apple makes the right platform-specific affordances (which they have a much better chance of doing) I think it can work.
> It tried to handle everything from smartphones to tablets to non-touch PCs with 27” monitors with the same UI
That was a big part of the problem, but the issues with the UI/UX went far beyond that.
For exemple, if you used the search bar in the "start menu" to get something from the control pannel, it would ONLY show the new W8 Metro dialog box that barelly has 1/5th the features and would refuse to show you the real one. It also took multiple years before the metro apps inlcuded in the OS (eg. pdf viewer) could be used in windowed mode (they were fullscreen mode like a video game, without taskbar), even the ipad at the time had better multitasking than the W8 Metro apps.
And as I understand it, much of that sort of problem comes down to the “warring factions” model found at Microsoft internally where the whole company is never on the same page, a problem that Apple doesn’t suffer from as badly.
It isn't quite as simple as that. The guy that ran the windows org during that time thought himself the Steve Jobs of Microsoft and didn't hear anything different (to the point of having multi-page public blog posts about how much the launched windows 8 US was the best thing ever and if you didn't agree, you were just wrong).
During that time they also instituted "anti-leak" measures so teams would develop and commit features internally and keep them behind hidden flags that required special permissions from the org to change (via an app they called "red pill"). That means that by the time many teams saw what was happening with the UX in various places in the OS, it was too late to come to consensus.
The entire cycle for the OS was empire building and emperor has no clothing from start to finish. It wasn't until he was ousted that they started to try and pull things back with 8.1 and eventually 10.
Metro never had this much transparency ingrained in the UX - and where it had, it was tastefully done with no/minimal accessibility concerns - doesn't seem like a valid comparison. Windows 8, especially 8.1 was a very pretty piece of software, the whole gesture- and card-based interface fiasco ruined its good name.
I didn't mean the visual style so much as the "let's use the same design on phones and on giant desktop monitors" philosophy.
Window's problem has always been their legacy systems. I believe to this day you can bring up windows 95 era dialogs somehow in Windows 11?
It’s also a much deeper and broader ui. In the past 20 years of using windows I don’t recall one time that I needed to bring up the command line to do something. Linux on the other hand is a constant battle with random commands with close to zero discoverability. macOS sits somewhere in between, but definitely a way more ui friendly system compared to the various Linux desktop distros
You seem out of touch with the current trends, as it is right now you have to open a command line window during the installation of windows and run some commands just so you have the privillege of being able to install the system without the requirement of an online account. (And it's now a mandatory procedure if you have no internet access! You are locked up from even proceeding with installation until supplying access to the internet, unless you do that CLI kung-fu) Also, make sure you have the correct incantation because Microsoft keeps changing it from time to time!
I've also noticed a lot of solutions to issues in windows now adopting the usage of power shell one liners as an easy way to fix it, and some times even the only way to change a setting or disable something in the system.
Meanwhile in Linux land with the more recent distros running Gnome I've noticed less and less need to use the command line. Can still be annoying though, but I guess it's the price to pay when you roll the OS of your choice on a system that wasn't really validated for it. (it's amazing it works as well as it does honestly)
Everything is deep down beneath all this W11 acrylic translucency. MS did a good work around W7 when they patched majority of old icons and resources and then made widgets flatter in W8 and W10 so they would fit better. That gray 9x legacy is here and will stay - for compatibility reasons
Do you mean Aero Glass from Windows 7? Metro is a flat design that looks nothing like this.
I assume they might be talking more to the "universal design" aspect.
Though Apple has long had a universal design across platforms. Not always in lockstep, but visual traits and behaviours and traits and appearances end up in all of their platforms, which even if it wasn't logical from a design perspective, there is loads of shared code so it's inevitable.
But really a lot of what they showed today reminded me most of Aqua from 25 years ago.
As a followup on this, it's notable that Apple has changed the title of the linked post to "Apple introduces a delightful and elegant new software design", making the subtitle "A universal design across platforms brings more focus to content and a new level of vitality while maintaining the familiarity of Apple’s software"
Everyone was keying on the universal design thing, and the seeming importance of "introduces" as if this is a first, and it was such an odd thing for Apple to denote given that they have been using a universal design for a long, long time.
Definitely in the minority here but I liked Metro, I always felt it was just a decade ahead of it's time (as was Windows 8 generally)
The esthetic wasn't bad, the problem is that it was a massive reduction in functionality. For example, the fact that Metro apps included on windows could only be use in fullscreen mode and only one copy of it could be used at the same time. The new Metro settings they included to replace the ones from the control panel had only like 10% of the functionality of the old one and they actively tried to prevent you from finding the old one. The content density was significantly lower and dialogbox/dropdownmenus couldn't be resized to display more items (eg. list of keyboard layouts that can only display 3 items at the same time)
The issue with Metro, imo, is that it was dizzying to use as you were swept away into new interfaces and for many tasks we lost a lot of usability.
Yes especially given that XP was the most useable version of Windows ever. They just threw it all away and expected people to relearn the basics of interacting with their PC.
XP was good but I’m partial to 7. It was like a refined Vista that brought proper alpha blending support and a number of QoL improvements without setting the core experience on fire.
Metro was terrific on mobile - especially for older people who had no issues reading information from tiles or navigating sharp interface. Once my mother's HTC 8S broke and she had to temporarily switch to iPhone she complained how the interface was small and barely readable. It's the desktop where it failed - you can't just force users into a mobile interface, at the same time remove the most recognisable element of your product (start button and menu) and believe people will adapt.
What I find wild is that there were internal W8 releases with a proper start menu but they abandon it at some point to fully embrace Metro.
I really liked metro on windows phone but I did not understand it on desktop. It didn’t help that they took away the usual UI
Right but go a decade ahead when many more people use their phones as their primary computer, much less of a problem
Familiarity was not the only problem. A good UI for a small touch screen is a bad UI for a large screen, keyboard, and mouse.
Not Metro, which was flat, but their newer Fluent UI, shown in their design videos [0].
It doesn’t look like Apple changed how the desktop fundamentally works. Microsoft put a touch-first UI on the server, and replaced the start button with a hot corner. Using that with RDP was a horrible experience.
If anything, we saw the iPad make serious roads towards functioning like macOS.
I need to experience it more to have a clear opinion, but looking at those videos, these types of translucent UI layers with a magnifying glass effect feel so annoying when they move; it's distracting.
Knowing that people will be spending hours of the day with these animations, it could be overwhelming. I'm not someone who suffers from videos or video games with photosensitive content warnings, but for many people, this might feel similar, like a friend of mine who can’t play Quake 3 Arena because it gives him nausea. I’m sure there will be an option to turn it off.
I also suspect that Apple, for marketing reasons, felt the need to present something visibly new and eye-catching. They probably turned to flashy design resources meant to impress rather than serve real usability needs. It feels more like a UI concept made for a sci-fi movie than something designed with accessibility and productivity in mind.
When Apple introduced the whole skeuomorphic analogy, they did it because they needed to make a new way of interacting with touch-based apps feel tangible. That seemed totally fair.
When Apple brought a spatial analogy to the Vision Pro, it also felt fair they were thinking in terms of volume and dimensions, after all, they were teaching people how to interact with a new reality.
I can even understand Apple wanting to unify their design approaches, but bringing the “liquid glass” look to everything feels like a massive step backward. The interface looks messy, clunky.
It feels like Apple is entering a design hell, and I don’t know how they’ll get out of it.
It's probably to train the users for augmented reality UI. We will probably all see some kind of floating transparent user interface over a camera background. That the "liquid" transparency is dynamic and can change depending on the thing underneath and the thing being shown seems to directly point to this.
It does indeed feel like a step backward - I was also weirdly reminded of the Forstall skeuomorphism era of UIs.
The video says: "It beautifully refracts light, and dynamically reacts to your movement, with specular highlights"; ugh, why? Why add dynamic==distracting high-frequency details that supply zero information?
The recent super flat UI aesthetic bugged me for awhile for its apparent lack of affordances, but when used consistently it made sense. Now it seems we still get zero affordances, but also visual noise.
> When Apple introduced the whole skeuomorphic analogy, they did it because they needed to make a new way of interacting with touch-based apps feel tangible.
Skeuomorphism was on the Apple Lisa in 1983, and they didn't invent it. Apple's first touch device wasn't until ten years later in 1993 in the Newton MessagePad. The MessagePad didn't really have "apps," that wasn't until like 2008 when it was added to the iPhone, but now we're twenty-five years after Apple's first usage of Skeuomorphism. The Xerox Star was in 1981 and had Skeuomorphic elements.
So I'm not really following what you're trying to say in that sentance.
You're comparing multi-touch technology to the experience of the MessagePad? Also, do you know a bunch of people who were big Xerox Starheads? It doesn't count if you don't have mass adoption.
Likewise, I'm not really following what you're trying to say in that sentence.
> You're comparing multi-touch technology to the experience of the MessagePad?
Nobody mentioned multi-touch at all. We're talking about Apple's first usage of skeuomorphic UI design, and or their first usage on a touch device in particular.
> Also, do you know a bunch of people who were big Xerox Starheads? It doesn't count if you don't have mass adoption.
I genuinely don't understand what you're responding to or trying to say. I'm not following the relevance nor what you mean by "count" (or not-count).
I feel like you're trying to have a conversation about something else, but I'm really not sure what or what it is you thought you read.
> Apple introduced the whole skeuomorphic analogy
IBM was doing it 10 years earlier.
So, it's official: I'm now old. I have seen the new that became old become new again.
This reminds me a lot on the visual we were saying for Windows Longhorn before Vista was released, peak Apple being their usual trailblazing self.
My thoughts exactly. On windows we turned off most of this in exchange for speed. And then when I went to turn it back on, it did not look good anymore.
I don’t know. I think Aero was quite far from what was envisioned due to technical limitations and I’m quite sure it will look better now.
I’m just amused we have somehow circled back.
https://www.lux.camera/physicality-the-new-age-of-ui/
This blog's prediction got remarkably close. I've been a sucker for glass UI since the first Longhorn (later Vista) screenshots.
I figured out why I don't like the icons
https://www.lux.camera/content/images/size/w2400/2025/05/Mai...
zoomed out they look blurry and unrefined, but when viewed zoomed in and large (like how a designer probably created them) they look kinda nice. Too bad they will all be small on iphone.
I find the assumption that these icons were designed huge and never tested at smaller sizes kind of baffling. There may be a difference in taste, but to think that Apple wouldn't look at their icons at different sizes is really, uh, something.
Fair enough. I should wait to test it on iphone. Although sometimes concept ideas get mandated from above and the designers are left to figure it out the best they can.
After trying this out on my iphone, I can say your conclusion is exactly correct. The icons look subtly out of focus in a way that's quite unsettling.
I think your parent said that they look good at some sizes and bad at others, and pointed out that this could be explained by their only being tested at the larger sizes, but didn't say that they necessarily believed that's what happened. The alternative, "tested but don't care," may be worse. (Or maybe you're disagreeing with the aesthetic judgment?)
I mean, that just blog sums up the whole attitude issue here.
"It’s an exciting time to be a designer on iOS. My professional universe is trembling and rumbling with a deep sense of mystery."
This person is excited that their job designing iOS apps will be more interesting (and the prospect of plenty of work in the pipeline doesn't hurt either).
Fuck the end users who need to adapt to this needless change, suffer newly slow devices or invest in new ones, and put up with a hodge-podge of different UIs. Fuck the orgs who need to fund all this rework if they want their app on new devices. Fuck the waste of energy spent in the extra client-side cycles rendering all the needless new bling.
Indeed. This attitude is found throughout the tech industry. It stinks from a product manager's spreadsheets down to the infrastructure that runs it all. The design is just what is immediately obvious.
In this case I am lucky, as I find glassy UIs visually appealing.
It's button camouflage.
My 82 year old mother has enough trouble figuring out what is a button vs. what's not. She just taps everything on screen to find out. This is going to make it worse.
Guess this is universal because mine does the same. Perhaps it's a frustration that screen doesn't responds in same way as e.g. a remote control where there's a physical press. Sure there can be a haptic feedback on phone but it's not the same. Especially for older people.
Tbh I’ll be doing the same thing when my devices get this update. It’s inscrutable. Tap tap tap….taptaptaptaptapTAPTAP!!!
>It's button camouflage.
Exactly. It's like they are trying to make it harder to use.
As someone who's getting old and whose eyesight is getting worse, this makes things strictly harder to read with lower contrast.
The 4th image on the page showing "All Of Me, Nao" is really hard for my eyes to read. I can't read "Nao" at all if I view that page on my iPhone. I can only read it on my Macbook Pro on a large external monitor.
I suppose there will be an accessibility setting to turn it off
Good Lord, this concept of „liquid glass“ is ugly. Not visibly distinct, looks blurry, not clear and sharp. And then they overlap with the content. I never liked the overlapping menus in Notability app either.
This is a flop like the flat keyboard design. Making worse by trying to make it better. Verschlimmbessert.
And this from a company with unlimited financial resources.
Liquid glass , like windows vista before it, looks plasticky. It's tupperware and it looks cheap and almost smells of garlic.
For those who complain that the old interfaces were better and the current ones are horrible, including this one (I tried using some glass interfaces, transparencies, etc. in the past. It's horrible to use) you're right, and that's not going to change. It's a question of the market.
When nobody used computers, it was necessary to attract people. How? With the bestter interfaces, usability. A graphical operating system running on a CPU of 20 MHz or less was something. It's not fast, but it's the best possible for the time!
And after 2000, everyone is using computers. The market is not expanding as companies expected. It's no longer important to attract people, everything can be done without worrying about the user, he's no longer important. Now, the Android keyboard is bigger than the Windows 95 installation, and my computer crashes from time to time with CPUs operating at GHz.
No, the interfaces of the past were not perfect, but they were made to try to fool people.
Remember Netflix? It used to recommend sharing passwords, now it tries to charge for each different IP. Is the same thing, the stream market is stable now...
The good UI is lost, it's a thing of the past.
Having used it very briefly, I think it’s a reasonable direction. Before you all jump to tell me why I’m wrong:
1. It makes depth and layering extremely clear.
2. It prioritizes focusing on the content.
These are good principles and I think they’ll last the distance. There are plenty of refinements needed, especially for accessibility. I suspect over the next few years we’ll see the direction toned back a little while still retaining the best parts.
I appreciate your focus on the long run. Apple has a long history of focusing on the long run. So I am replying to tell you why you are right, given that I feel my single upvote wasn't thanks enough for your first hand take.
I am not sure we have a long run, as both dooms & destiny loom (eg Future Shock .. Singularity], but if we do then here is my background for my short take ...
1. Unlike you, I have not used the beta but I thoughtfully watched both Monday developer sessions on Liquid Glass & their new design system
2. My early computing experiences were, eg, ASR-33 teletype with paper tape to timeshare, then Altair 8800 and then punched card batches, so I have lots of personal evolution in ui/ux over many decades. Sadly my parents--born in 1922/1923--never used computers nor understood why I loved them and programming
3..665 omitted for brevity
666. in recent years I have devolved into Stone Knives & Bearskins dev mode within iPad Safari, because no one cares what I do and so I get to enjoy tinkering with tiny things in odd ways; ie I might be slightly crazy, so caveat emptor ...
Apple is threading a needle here. If they push too hard and fail they're doomed. If they don't take the lead (atop shock wave of tech) they're doomed.
Their leadership is rich and could easily retire, and Apple~ponderers need to always factor in that they dogfood their products because they believe in them.
Like Capital B Believe in Apple/products in that very real way in which one doesn't just say they dig a band but actually struggle and sacrifice to get to a concert thousands of miles away.
Allow me to observe that we already live in a trending post~Literate society and the ongoing collapse of the USA educational system, Covid~lost-years, the current Administration chaos, and the unstoppable engulfing of everything by ~AI++ makes a completely non-traditional ui/ux near term inevitable just by the principle: Flux !== inertia.
I am observing that the traditional ~marketplace deciders coupled with generational fashion du jour flocking are dwarfed by our Interesting Times just as diaspora can elevate tulips to mania and wheelbarrows full of money can fail to buy lunch.
Within that point of view (and if you're reading this far, no, to answer your question, I do not do drugs or write manifestos for public consumption) I will offer this condensed thought about Apple's current ui/ux steps ...
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Applying that to our extraordinary circumstances with a McLuhan Tetrad lens (Retrieval) suggests that all of classic myths to 20th Century SF&F invocation of magic words, gestures and holodecks are nearly upon us for reals.
Our devices are about to watch us, listen/hear us, immerse us in interactive faux reality to an unprecedented extent, ie apart from thousands of years of fanciful storytelling. Genies and demons. Dragons and Wizards.
Gods taking human form.
So.
If Apple is on a 1.5 year track to force developers to unify their runs-on-any~device ui/ux to a ~simplified magic, then I say we are witnessing Apple trying to mount their surfboard, quite calmly, incoming tsunami considered.
Lots of us may not be looking forward to getting wet.
But that is hardly Apple's fault.
Surfboards for the Mind(TM)?
lurker mode back on
I hate it. The distortions and refractions of every page element in the UI as you scroll (including moving in the opposite direction) would be maddening. I really hope there will be an option to turn this off, or at least tone it down.
Every Electron app is going to feel incredibly out of place.
And for the few that aren’t okay with feeling out of place, the devs of those apps will now have to contend with shipping more macOS specific styles and workarounds.
I’m not looking to discuss Electron performance/etc so please ditch that discussion before it starts. I just find it interesting how comparatively tricky this particular UI styling might end up being for cross-platform developers.
Electron apps are already out of place. In the space of Mac-apps-for-SaaS-products such as Linear, Slack, Notion, Asana, Figma, GitHub, and Spotify, they inflict the company's own design system on Apple's OS rather than try to ship Apple's design system applied to their product. Even the most popular IDE, VSCode, is just a wrapper around a web page.
And they're rational to do it this way. These companies shipping apps to millions of people all came to the conclusion that investing in native Mac software is not worthwhile to their business. Users don't avoid Electron-based products, and building native Mac apps slows you down. It's easier both technologically and organizationally to ship your web site as an Electron app. It costs less and you don't lose any users.
So I would be surprised to see _any_ popular Electron app get design updates to accommodate these changes.
As a user it makes me sad, but I find myself blaming Apple for losing this fight, not the hundreds of successful companies that all somehow make the same choice. If building native were an advantage, people would take it.
I certainly avoid Electron apps on macOS and konw I am not the only one who does.
Which apps do you avoid in particular which are associated with a service you are required by your job to use? Or, what purchasing decisions have you made on behalf of your company that took Electron-ness into account?
> Which apps do you avoid in particular which are associated with a service you are required by your job to use?
Electron apps are not all B2B or associated with a service. This restriction is odd.
> Or, what purchasing decisions have you made on behalf of your company that took Electron-ness into account?
Password manager. PDF software. REST client. Other developer tools.
So when you have mention 'users' it was actually about 'companies'?
It was actually about customers and incentives. You're right that I shouldn't have said "users;" I should have said "customers."
It's rational for businesses to do things that make them money, and to not do things that don't make them money or make them lose money. SaaS business believe that spending R&D budgets on growth hackers and web product engineers is a better return than spending those same budgets on macOS engineers. I suspect they are right.
It doesn't matter to these businesses that you personally avoid Electron apps. They don't care, and Apple has made it easy and rewarding for them not to care.
> Electron apps are already out of place.
You're taking the boring argument track here. Yes, they use their own design system language, but they still roughly fit in with an OS that's not random transparency/glass effects everywhere.
They clearly will not fit in with the new UI styling without significant thought and work.
Every Electron app is going to feel incredibly out of place.
It's not going to matter, most Electron apps look out of place on the Mac already. The developers are not going to care and probably most users are not going to care either (I used to be staunchly against Electron for this reason, but gave up, and now I choose just enjoy apps looking the same between platforms).
Apple neglected the desktop from ~2016-2020 and made two frameworks that are unpopular among developers (Catalyst and SwiftUI) after that. Outside some indie devs, the native Mac app ship has sailed. Even developers that had their roots in macOS (e.g. AgileBits) have given up and switched to Electron.
Even if you like the general direction of SwiftUI it's way less mature on the mac and being tied to the OS version means you have to deal with all the churn it's had in the last three years to ship with it on the mac. Very few devs are going to bother with this.
Ever since the death of WinForms and Cocoa we've moved away from apps having a unified visual experience on an OS to apps pushing their own consistent theme across platforms. A big contrast between app and OS theme in recent times was when apps offered Dark Mode before it became an OS wide setting.
> Every Electron app is going to feel incredibly out of place.
AFAIK, most people do most things on the Web. So, no, Electron Apps will feel like what most people use most of the time. It's native apps that will feel out of place.
Nah, native apps end up feeling nice and cozy by comparison. :)
The design language of native controls is usually much quieter and more subdued than the garishness that is allowed in the name of branding.
I won't be surprised if we see a CSS filter that attempts to model this in Safari. Then it'll just be a question of whether Chromium (and thus Electron) get it.
Can't you access rendered elements from JS? Then this will be a massive security issue, because anybody can read all the content from behind.
> Every Electron app is going to feel incredibly out of place.
Consistency with native app/style had never been an issue, ever. It's stylistic choice. while I get that someone would like to have the same theme everywhere it does not prevent anything.
Every single webpage is different that the other and yet everybody browse the web.
I think differing app styles can work under this new macOS design, they’ll just need to have more physicality, dynamism, and overall more involvement from the design department. Devs just won't be able to drop a dumptruck of flat roundrects on the screen and call it a day if they don’t want their app looking bad.
I mentioned this elsewhere, but if LLMs are improving developer performance so drastically, why are none of these gains being used to get back towards native app development?
Because devs lack the will to build native apps. Even on HN, native app dev is seen as somewhat esoteric because it isn't cross-platform by default.
There's plenty of pragmatic reasons not to build a native app. The concerning thing IMO is the hegemony of opinion here. After all, nothing says "hacker" quite like following all the rules properly and always doing the sensible thing. :)
> if LLMs are improving developer performance so drastically
IMO the jury is out on how much they are.
> why are none of these gains being used to get back towards native app development?
because the different platforms are still radically different in a way an LLM can't easily and simply paper over. How do I specify a UI in a way that an LLM can competently implement it in HTML, SwiftUI and whatever Windows is using these days?
> why are none of these gains being used to get back towards native app development?
One argument might be that, like with any LLM output, you still do need to know it well enough to know if it's good or not implementation-wise. You still need that knowledge to understand if your performance for rendering in some scenarios is going to fall off a cliff.
Web (via browsers or Electron/etc) are mostly one train of thought. When you're doing native application development using host OS frameworks, you have to actually know the framework. LLMs don't really save you from that; i.e, I could have an LLM spit out whatever flavor of Windows-specific UI I need. I have zero way of knowing whether it's correct or not.
Based on the demo and screenshots I don’t quite like this. It seems more distracting and gimmicky than actually nice to use in a day to day setting..
But I’ll probably get used to it.
> more distracting and gimmicky
This. The animations on iOS are already a bit too much—now they've taken it to the next level.
I wonder if there will be a big difference between a 60Hz and 120Hz Display. Blur is distracting if the content is dynamic.
Like the flashlight. There’s no reason to have that much pageantry behind turning on a flashlight.
I’m not sure what you mean. I turn on the flashlight with two touches: drag from the top right corner to bring up the control center, then click on the flashlight icon.
Yet more glossy 'form over function' nonsense from Apple in my opinion. Was hoping '26 would be the release that tackled their massive technical debt around broken/reduced functionality. I did see a Reddit post that summarized it nicely, a screenshot of a Youtube video where the play button overlaps the name so it reads Liquid*ass
It looks cool, but I'm worried about readability on the phone. The text in some of those menu bars and notifications really blended in with the wallpaper in a few of those screenshots.
I noticed the same thing while watching their youtube promo video. I grabbed this screenshot that shows exactly how problematic this design is.
The children yearn for ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶m̶i̶n̶e̶s̶ Frutiger Aero
15 years later, Shine 2.0 for Windows is still the most modern and best designed GUI for computers:
https://www.deviantart.com/zainadeel/art/Shine-2-0-for-Windo...
Wow this unlocked repressed memories for me! DeviantArt was a treasure trove back in the Win7 days for windows theming. I used Shine for quite a while!
I was going to comment something similar; this is just Aero with higher DPI and more GPU-intensive gimmicks, right?!
This clearly wasn't in dogfooded long enough or the designers would've gotten sick of it themselves.
This is the kind of design that does great in a 15 minute user test, but is annoying 2 months on.
I agree. Apple's been down this path before... From Mac OS 10.0 to 10.9, the march was steadily toward trimming back the excessive Aqua-ness.
Then we went totally flat in 10.10, and it was pretty awful then too. I'll stay on Sequoia until Apple irons this out in 2-3 future macOS versions, or maybe it's finally the year of the linux desktop... at least in my world.
Aqua, reminds me of OS X (Aqua theme) from 20+ years ago.
And while it was very pretty, the movement away from translucency was due in large part because of accessibility (for all users).
It's actually quite difficult to see controls (and read text) when not on a flat/solid background.
Can they fire all their designers and Cook?
And go back to Mac OS the most easily usable GUI?
I don't want to watch Avatar XXXVI when I pick up my phone to check my messages.
Cook added 2 trillion (more?) in market cap.
Cook stays.
He collected 2tr in rent
Renting out... iPhones?
So ... what's your point? I don't get it.
That some company is making money?
That tim cook is reaping the rewards of their earlier innovation. The opposite of economic rent is economic value creation.
I still don't get your point.
"Reaping the rewards of their earlier innovation" is literally his job.
The point is that tim cook is less responsible for apple's weath than the innovators before him, he just reaps what others have sowed.
Ok ... so I guess they should stop selling the iPhone ... out of some sort of ... rules? ... that you're appealing to?
I still don't get your point.
Apple is a public company. It's mission is not to impress @mjburgess but to make money for its shareholders, which they do really well.
The style here suggests a split between tools and content, which is something I'd love love love to see emerge. Having one and only one app be both viewer and toolkit feels like a convenience trap, one that NeXT tried to fight (as did OLE) and that feels unlikely to ever be turned back from, but I want to dream. This UI doesn't materially move us towards a more aggregative/accreted system of systems model, but it visually suggests some of the absurdity of there being such heavily coupling, if the UI is really incidental that floats atop. I'd love to see this pushed further, to emerge into a multilayered information world, where Rainbow's End discourse piles up and forms trees out and up.
I hear folks on contrast concerns. I have hope though. I really like the de-emphasis on compute. On tools being less the thing, on the content first, on getting computing out of the way, making it ambient. Unboxing the content, unframing it.
The glass refraction seems like a an amazing leap forward. Material has been around forever and there's all these developer docs showing the stack up of layers, implying the depth of the system, but in the 2d user world everything is flat, composited into indistinction. The visual sepration, allowing semi transparent motion, but using refractive style to clearly separate the layers, adds such clarity that it feels obvious in retrospect immediately to me.
I still lack hope that XR is going to be a huge huge thing, that it will be comfortable over time, but it makes such sense to me that XR would inspire & lead this shift, to depriotizing the UI & emphasizing the content.
I'm stressed a bit trying to imagine the transforms required to make this refraction happen. I don't think CSS is going to be enough. The new CSS Painting API ("Houdini") also seems more generative than able to modify & script what is?
How does liquid glass unbox and unframe the content?
Instead of the content having controls and a slide up drawer at the bottom of the screen, those are now overlayed onto the content. The content extends across much more of the screen's vertical space.
> Having one and only one app be both viewer and toolkit feels like a convenience trap
It's a decade too late for that. Websites and mobile applications are the de-facto metaphor for using computers, trying to fight that trend ostracizes your most promising markets. Hell, it even ostracizes a lot of Mac users that like the new approach.
Maybe it's time to face the music - people like convenience. MacOS does not have potent enough windowing controls to make most users comfortable throwing around several windows to use one app. iOS and iPadOS both neglect their multitasking abilities to the point that people practically forget you can use more than one app at once.
I don't hate the idea of trying to enforce a more informative windowing model, but I also don't think most people can intuit how to use it. If Stage Manager is any indication, most people just want a fullscreen view of a single-page app.
All local maxima are optimized into. Until there is a break.
I agree that right here right now change feels impossible. That the monolith app as everything as the sole decider of all UX feels absolute & total, a fief never to be invaded.
But I'm less confident this fortress really will hold forever. And liquid glass has some of the seeds of undoing this totality, by emphasizing content, by making tools a visually separate layer.
The whole event should have been titled:
We completely ignored all the things you actually wanted and did this instead.
I hate things that are translucent. I find them very distracting, and hurt my eyes.
I hope Apple gives the option to turn this whole thing off.
I notice the borders now also have shadows / gradients due to reflection, that's also something I'd like to remove personally.
> I hate things that are translucent.
Same here. I do not understand the fascination with making things harder to read and see.
This looks tailor made to be hard to recreate easily in CSS.
Which is just going to make people try even harder.
That's like saying this is hard recreate easily in playdough.
It's not at all a concern for Apple, nor should it be.
We already have "standards" to implement this the web-standards way, but they don't have wide compatibility yet.
1. Use CSS Images Module Level 4's element() function to capture an image of the layer below. (currently only implemented in firefox)
2. Feed that image into an offscreen canvas.
3. Use a shader to distort the image as needed. This can be done in a paint worklet so it doesn't slow down or hold up the main thread.
4. Use CSS Painting API Level 1's paint() function to paint the contents of the canvas onto the background of the button. (currently only implemented in blink based browsers)
How can you use element() to "capture an image of the layer below" and pass it to a canvas?
I might be wrong, but without more context, that sounds like it'd defeat browser protections to avoid leaking your browser history via the color of :visited links.
Similar thing happened in iOS7(?) where they released glassy panels. Not far from that `-webkit-backdrop-filter` was added that allowed similar effect, I expect similar will happen. For new glassy effect it seems you need a separate filter for border, or maybe it's just gradient + blend mode.
Refraction effects like that require a surface normal, even inferred from something like a bump map, or the result of a blur filter used as a bump map. I'm not aware of any CSS filter that could take a normal and do the appropriate ray redirection.
In raw shader code it's verging on trivial, like old school environment mapping. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflection_mapping
If this ships in the current iteration, I will seriously consider jumping ship to Galaxy.
AirTags are still holding me in Apple ecosystem but now Androids have their own tracking thingies, maybe it's time.
The marketing text feels like it's trying way too hard, to the point that it makes me second-guess my positive first impression. I do think the UI looks cool, and I did like Aero Glass too, but having the headline straight-up tell me that the UI is “delightful and elegant” and having the first-sentence-of-first paragraph “beautiful new software design” hyperlink cheapens the whole thing IMHO.
Yes I know Apple have always been like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nx7v815bYUw (BOOM)
But at least the Stebe Jovs keynotes gave me the chance to be impressed for a moment in my head before laying in to the superlatives.
Looks terrible. I hope that what he said in the video about "only Apple being able to achieve this" is correct because I don't want this coming to my devices
It's got some KDE 4 vibe https://news.softpedia.com/news/How-to-Install-KDE-SC-4-4-on... which in turn had probably a Windows 7 feel. A random image at https://www.computerworld.ch/software/windows/microsoft-deta...
Aside from the (glaring) accessibility issues, the aesthethic doesn't look great.
Looks like Apple (re)discovered Sun's Project Looking Glass from 2003.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Looking_Glass
Liquid Glass looks a lot like coming up with changes for the sake of them.
Oh cool, I had forgotten about this project, thanks for posting it! This is the first time I’ve noticed that they had the perspective "glass table" style dock that Apple used a couple of years later in Mac OS X Leopard.
Terawatts of green energy being wasted to make your screen unreadable
It's... awful? Why would I want all this distracting shimmering as I scroll?
Apple really isn't what it once was, this is embarrassing.
I would've loved to have been a fly on the wall throughout the various discussions as this idea made its way across the Apple org.
That this was the dominant topic during the keynote of their annual developer event doesn't seem to bode well for the state of the ecosystem. Especially combined with how cutting the sarcasm was for the new version numbering and new macOS name announcement(s).
Perhaps contrarian (here anyway) but I think Liquid Glass looks neat, and represents the next evolution of the "backdrop-filter: blur;" effect that we've been seeing on the web a _lot_ as of late... Which, funnily enough also gained adoption in a large part IMO due to Apple's usage of it in macOS for the past few years now.
I think the new design approach here is a clever nudge towards "Neo Skeuomorphism". Interface design is clearly heading in a much more skeuomorphic direction (see: AirBnB redesign) lately with the rise of AI. Liquid Glass is an apt way to provide more material-realism without devolving back to the objective realism that the old Skeuomorphic style pre-2013 represented.
Time and time again I see people bemoan Apple's UI direction and then sure enough within a year or two it becomes ubiquitous as web designers adopt the patterns for their own work.
The funny part is that the lede is getting buried here. The big story is of course the universal design _across platforms_. We're now ultra-ultra close to a unified OS, something that has been in materializing extremely slowly over the past decade and a half.
> Time and time again I see people bemoan Apple's UI direction and then sure enough within a year or two it becomes ubiquitous as web designers adopt the patterns for their own work.
This shows most designers follow trends. It does not show Apple's ideas were good.
I love designing and building UIs, but one thing that really depresses me is how you’re often pressured to keep changing things just to justify your continued employment.
It feels like that’s what happened here, to be honest.
It’s okay for a product to stay the same, if the current design is the right one. I just can’t imagine what problems they’re trying to solve with this update.
The icons look pretty bad and the glass reflection/blurring during scrolling looks distracting. But I do like the focus on fluid animations, transparent bgs by default for overlaid controls, and smaller contextual control areas.
This looks like a disaster. It is like it was fast-tracked based on the oomph factor because seriously, how come you didn't notice how hard it is to read text or even notice overlapping objects/controls? Maybe once we use it for some time, we will all get it - it is possible - but as it now stands, I hope there will be an option to turn all that off, _especially_ on MacOS which is what I use to get work done.
Am I the only one that hates the concept?
I want a good UI to fade into the background. But this one is like a UI designer's promotion fever dream: The UI is at the center, no matter the content. The promotional video says "This material brings a new level of vitality to every experience" and then they show a video player where now the control overlay has more contrast, more movements, and more bright lights than the actual movie. And then the other features are just bull*: "It responds in real-time to your actions". Gosh I hope other UI frameworks would respond to my actions, what a novel idea! And yeah, ever played a video game? Things reacting to user input in real-time isn't exactly groundbreaking. And then they top it off with "a fluidity only Apple can achieve", which is just delusional. Desktop Linux box + RTX 5090 + current video game + 240 Hz screen => a fluidity that exceeds everything that Apple can achieve on a phone.
I mean I like SwiftUI and I like how apps look on the current iOS. But I think it's already borderline intense just to use the OS. It certainly should not have any more additional glitter, blinking, movement, or animations. It might be the direction that GTK could benefit from, but not SwiftUI.
In short, this feels like a step in the wrong direction for Apple to me.
Why can't we leave good enough alone?
Heck, we hit "peak-UI" with Win 2K, AFAAIC.-
peak-UI was Visual Basic 3. Any component that wasn't in VB3 was post-peak UI.
I looked it up to double check if it is what I remember. And yes, you are correct.
From what I saw they were making more available screen space for content.
Content behind and in between controls is not available. And I saw padding which opaque controls wouldn't need. But excessive padding was common already so it could have been unrelated.
> It combines the optical qualities of glass with a fluidity only Apple can achieve, as it transforms depending on your content or context
Is there a reason only Apple can achieve this look, or is it just marketing crap?
After 16 years on iPhone and Mac, I’m finally making the switch. Apple’s latest design choices are not just aweful, they reflect a broader decline in the company’s direction across the board. I’ve considered moving to Linux, Windows, and Android for years. Now feels like the right moment.
This is Windows Aero all over again - why is this a persistent design?
You can't see or process the information behind the glass - at best it's major cognitive load to do so, at worst it's just very noisy with zero added information.
Because it looks really good in a five minute demonstration to the C-level execs.
It looks cheap and tacky. Apple really lost its way. Who thought this was a good idea?
Why, why, why, do all the Apple announcements have the exact same ASIMO stiff hand gestures? Hostage videos have more fluidity.
They undergo intensive training for weeks before. Scripted, rehearsed, perfected, trained. I've witnessed it. There's not much space for natural expression in these talks. Everything is choreographed. Where to walk, look up, wave hand, smile etc all planned!
The stiffness is because the presenter is mainly a techie, developer or manager and not a natural performer. Their bodies are resisting the conformity by conforming to the letter but not the spirit.
Might be an attempt at Steve Jobs imitation with special focus on the worst aspects. Regardless of his reported reality distortion skills in person, I always found his big public presentations stiff and fake. I, as not-a-fan of game consoles, think that Mark Cerny gives fantastic presentations. He is always fluent, comfortable, and has an air of sincerity (while the contents are a little salesy). Kinda like a much more polished but slightly more fake John Carmack.
There are some horrific looking UI on the screenshots, e.g. Acorns floating toolbar with integrated traffic lights - it looks awful and with a bevel emboss - remember that? Yes, the ugly Photoshop effect option that only looked cool in the early 2000s. Some of this looks very cheap and amateur Photoshop like.
It''s not terrible, but I will avoid it for a while. My biggest issue is the system resources this will require. I just don't care for the pretty, as much as I care for fast UI. Thinks Windows 11 delayed right click context menu.
Unifying their operating system design language makes sense, but ugh do we really need yearly operating system revisions like this. It is obvious that the engineers struggle with the marketing led pace judging by how many issues there are every major release of macOS. I don't upgrade to a new major until a .3 usually because of this.
Did Apple just do
*{
opacity: 0.36
}
I wonder if 'Liquid Glass' would have been less crass looking to me if Jonny Ive was still at the company and somehow approved it. It almost has the consistency of gummy candy, which isn't something I like to touch either.
Did any user or developer ask for this? This looks absolutely awful and I’m a huge Apple fan. I can’t get behind it. :/
Designers gonna design. Even when a UI is perfectly fine, huge design teams have to justify their existence and therefore change everything for no real reason. I guess it makes more work for developers, though the utility of the work is questionable.
God this is so real. Every saas app I pay for randomly and pointlessly changes up their UI every 6-12 months for literally no reason or productivity enhancement. I assume it's just bloated UI teams justifying the fact they're consuming so much payroll.
Interesting how it seems now Apple's realized they should have marketed visionOS for Enterprise from the beginning. Nobody was gonna be a $3k AR headset to edit text. The Enterprise is where the use cases are. And now seems Apple has pivoted towards that.
Then again in the keynote today Apple proudly said Vision Pro was used by "thousands" of companies. So it sounds like it isn't such a success (yet?) in the enterprise either.
Yes, because in 99% of the marketing material from launch, you see it being used by some rando in their living room.
More distractions, making the text difficult to read, and increased resource consumption from rendering these unnecessary animations.
Apple already had serious contrast issues that have been adding up over the last few years, notably yellow text on white background or grey text on dark grey background. This liquid glass design will make the issue ubiquitous.
Maybe a better iCloud+, a better iCloud (maybe version/history/logs?), a better way to operate/control two different seems (hint: "differently"), easy import/export of data from various services, less software opacity etc etc?
But instead we got this.
Does this how a massively large and rich company's intellectual bankruptcy begin?
I’m old enough to remember iOS7. It was dog ugly and universally reviled.
This is new update is dog ugly and universally reviled. They’ll fix the most egregious stuff in beta, and then in a year or two dial it in.
This is a big, bold move. I’m happy to see them do something that takes some courage and also ship it.
Most of the really bad/unreadable screenshots I see are people customizing things so they look terrible. All the defaults look great.
I think it’s great we have deep customization options coming. That’s good. To people that say you shouldn’t be able to make it look bad… No. My desktop OS is infinitely configurable and I can absolutely break it. I’m happy to see at least the most surface level guard rails coming off of iOS.
This is good.
It’s going to be really interesting to see how this UI paradigm pans out. I think this captures a shift toward the extreme in responsive, fluid, convergent, whatever-you-want-to-call-it, design.
We’ve had books/scrolls for thousands of years, laid out in beautiful proportion, and now it has all melted in the oven!
I don't use iOS in any capacity, but I'm sure anything they do will only improve what has always felt like a clumsy OS.
On the Macos side, I'm open to the new aesthetic, but I just hope to god they've been actually investing in performance improvements when it comes to SwiftUI, which has only barely been viable in some cases thus far. If MacOS gets a full UI update, but the Settings screen still lags when navigating between sections, someone's doing something wrong.
This could be a GREAT design if it implemented head/eye tracking to create a true layered/3d feeling with depth.
That's something that would have been VERY doable for them on the iPhone/iPad, too.
Probably not possible without a major hit to battery life to keep Face ID/front camera on persistently. I agree it would be insanely cool though. Someone actually put together a demo (in 2019!) where the UI chrome correctly reflects the device’s orientation relative to the ambient light here: https://youtu.be/TIUMgiQ7rQs
This translucent 3D look doesn't feel like they took usability into consideration. They just wanted to force a glass-look. At least the Aero look was frosted, this makes it so you have to strain to differentiate buttons and text on it.
I’ve noticed something no one has mentioned yet: Liquid Glass is natively HDR.
everything is mid 2000s again. this really feels anti-apple even though the design polish is top notch, but to just abandon accessibility for shinyness feels like something steve would have obviously been against.
but it definitely takes me back to endlessly tweaking with linux mint skins in my college dorm.
Can't wait for another turn to flat when '50 will be around the corner /s
The overall bulky style reminds me of the least appealing cosmic-techno-chrome Windows themes that were spawning like rabbits ~20 years ago: https://www.thepcmanwebsite.com/themes/images/themes/bounce_...
It's weird the amount of not asked/not needed things we do.
It is weird that they acted as through the design system hasn't changed much since iOS 7. They've overhauled and tweaked it every year since 2011- increasing font weights, using slower floaty/bubble animations, increasing corner radiuses and adding more negative space, adding depth and shadows to icons, etc. Control Center, for example, looks nothing like it did in iOS 7. iOS 7 was much more minimal, the least skeuomorphic, and a bit more geometric than the "neumorphic" changes they've made since then.
This updated design language seems to have similarities to Microsoft's Material/Fluent design system that brought more of that same glass material to Windows 11, with the more 3d-looking edge outlines on ui elements. So the glass metaphor seems to be a trending metaphor in these UIs, for better or for worse.
I like the glassy shader effect and concept even if lacking a bit of discipline in all of the places where it's applied at the moment. Though I think the real test of differentiation for this redesign is how approachable the 'liquid' animations will be for developers to implement outside of the UIKit elements. Will be interesting to see how this design language system changes how they approach elements of the experience as they get more used to thinking through it.
They're betting big on AR. This is for their glasses, but they'll have to split the design from AR/VR and non AR/VR
I agree with those saying this feels like a step back toward skeuomorphic design for Apple. I personally think it looks nice visually, but I do have some concerns: - Accessibility. I don't see good examples in their promotional videos about how contrast of text is ensured to be in an acceptable range. Even for those without visual impairments, this is important for UX. - Performance. I'm usually the guy in the room saying "Apple is not making devices slower over time on purpose", but this sort of graphical intensity is basically needless and I hope they have something in the plans around automatically disabling more complex visual animations if the phone is showing signs of slow-down.
At what point do we reach this attitude, where we do not rage against everything that's new?
I guess Windows Vista gets the last laugh, after all.
Anything that moves away from flat colorless rectangles is a good thing, I welcome this change.
Curious how much the work environment would deteriorate if an expert program with a large amount of information were redesigned with Liquid Glass. It's a bit perplexing that I have to look for a way to turn off this type of UI change under the accessibility menu.
Looks awful to be honest.
I like the idea of using a more glass-like UI, but the implementation is horrible. It looks like a school project rather than work from the biggest company in the world. I generally don't understand the idea of making every UI look more like a children's toy.
Feels very Walt Disney / multiplane camera to me.
Wanted to hate it but looks kind of cool so we’ll see how bad the accessibility is.
They call it a material so this is a new type of glass? Can I actually use a loupe on it or that’s just for fun?
Funnily enough, a lot in Liquid Glass is inspired by older design systems from Microsoft : Fluent Design (Win 11) and Windows Aero (Win 7). It shows how real tough it is now to come with something really new these days in design.
Only Apple could call an Aero-esque water based design "Liquid Glass".
One of the first things I do on app with transparent interfaces is disable transparency as it usually impacts battery life / performance and results in very low contrast UI hinting.
From the way they present it it looks like a 'looks' led, rather than usability led interface design.
Grrr...
Hard to tell for sure until you have hands on though.
They butchered the swipe actions on iOS it seems.
Open notes or messages, swipe left on an item.
In iOS 18, the options (silent/delete in Messages or share/ delete) were simply icons, cleary delineated as buttons with color matching backgrounds, no text.
Now the options have descriptive text under each button which of course is cut off 99% of the time as it exceeds the tiny width these action buttons have - and the buttons are harder to hit.
How? Why?
The time display on the lockscreen is hilarious. Who doesn't want a towering, gargantuan "9:41" implanted into their photos?
Can I have all that, but without the gaudy blurs and dynamic reflections?
Without all that glassy thing. A neutral consistent flat design without too many shades.
You know..., like Material design?
It's nice to see the Mac getting some love
I only caught a glimpse but what I saw for iOS Safari concerns me.
The browser navigation overlaps the viewport. I wonder if this'll break websites/apps that anchor a menu to the bottom.
I think iOS safari already breaks bottom bars by having phone controls show up when a user taps near the bottom.
I'm curious about the 'new hardware has enabled us to' part. I know they have full control over software, hardware stacks(A,M chip, Metal, OS), so I can easily imagine they do their best to optimization.
Is it possible to do the same job with same performance on Android? or Windows or any general target OS and software stack?
Seems that shader itself does not costs too much(normal map? lookup table?). What really matters is their UI/Shader job scheduling in realtime constraints on any CPU/GPU load state.
I wonder how long this will take to trickle down into webdev, automotive dashboards, embedded systems, and every other thing with a GUI? It's probably already happening.
p.s. If you like Aqua, you might enjoy playing around this open source glass rendering CSS library: https://www.specularcss.org/#materials/glass
They are also apparently doing away with tabs. Now tabs will appear as buttons and pills. Just to make sure that you are entirely and unmistakably confused
I wonder how long this will take to trickle down into webdev, automotive dashboards, embedded systems, and basically every other thing with a GUI. It's probably already happening.
p.s. If you like Aqua, you might like this open source glass rendering CSS library: https://www.specularcss.org/#materials/glass
Alright, I'm officially turning off iOS automatic updates.
This is what a company running out of ideas looks like
From an accessibility point of view, this seems unusable for those with visual deficits. I sincerely hope that this can be made non-translucent. The ability to distinguish between icons is already hampered with all icon artwork being the same color, with this translucent "glass", it will be the hardest to use iOS, MacOS design ever.
Windows at least did it (at least conceptually) in a way that should be fairly performant with their Mica material (just showing the desktop background and nothing else with a large blur and filters).
This looks far more complex and something almost like real time ray tracing.
This design is terrible. Also... no hope in Apple changing their mind. First time in 15 years that I am not looking forward to such changes.
Thanks, I hate it.
Floating menu bars over the content at the bottom is a great way to make it impossible to actually use the bottom of web pages.
The "liquid glass" stuff, even in their handpicked promo screenshots, has functionally unreadable text and illegible controls.
The vanishing buttons are going to make app UIs even more obtuse and undiscoverable.
Floating widgets are endemic across all the platforms now. I see it on Google, MSFT, and now Apple applications. Content used to be king, now it is a wallpaper for the UI/UX team to dress as they please.
It's like one of those terrible Winterboard skins I used on iOS 6.
This is essentially Microsoft's Fluent UI [0], right down to the translucent glass rectangular prisms (not to say that there haven't been glassmorphic UI systems since forever, including Apple's own Aqua).
All I wanted was an option in settings that allows me to turn off all animations on macOS. How hard can that be?
Seems overly distracting, and not a lot of contrast.
Every now and then my macbook will hide all of my windows so that I'm just looking at my wallpaper. It is a pretty wallpaper, but I don't really understand why I need a hotkey or gesture or whatever is happening just to allow me to gaze at it.
I guess this is more of the same? Some pretty picture can shine through at you because... pretty?
I may be mistaken but I believe the hotkey is "display my desktop, uncluttered" for those that still store files on their desktops.
Ah of course, I had forgotten that you could put stuff there. My home directory is a terrible mess, but my desktop is pristine.
I somehow continually hit that key stroke or did the mouse movement, so I went and disabled both
I hope I can disable the transparency, nothing makes it harder and slower to read than that for me. Distracting too.
Really wish that this sets a trend like iOS 7 did and move forward from this bland flat design that exists everywhere
From Aqua to Liquid Glass (AKA it will change over time and at some point ... disappear). I am just sad that it's the first feature announcement for Apple OSs 26. I understand Apple's point of view to communicate on that, but I have a big hollow feeling this is not enough.
I'm generally not a fan of the new design. I prefer my interface to be functional, consistent, and get out of my way rather than be flashy or attention-grabbing.
That said, I do greatly appreciate how the new guidelines and redesigned UIs make interactive buttons actually look like buttons. Each tappable element is visually distinct and represented in a consistent way. I just wish that Apple didn't insist on moving/hiding buttons in response to unrelated actions (ie WHY do I lose my action buttons when I scroll down, and why do they poof into existence when I scroll up? Why can I search on the root page of Settings but not on any subpage? Why does tapping a button that reveals a submenu hide that button?) Just stop moving things around, please.
Someone at apple spent too much time on r/unixporn
In order for any of that glass design to look like glass there needs to be a background with a mix of at least 3 colors. I implemented the glass design in an app last year and afterwards thought it was ok. It makes some text difficult to read depending on the background.
I'm all for great design but I hope that reduce transparency and motion settings just tone this thing down. I want my devices to be boring and subtle. I want to get them do what I want quickly, fade away and disappear. This redesign does the exact opposite.
What's the point of a translucent taskbar? I might understand in a taskbar of a desktop wallpaper to not disturb the scene, but what information does it hold if the search bar over a map or a link list is translucent? It's just useless noise.
Here's hoping that they'll keep the options to disable unnecessary transparencies and animations.
I have had both of those disabled for the last five years but I am really wondering what it is going to look like now with so much transparency everywhere.
What makes you think they’d remove accessibility options like that? They’re generally pretty considerate in that realm.
Apple Music on Mac ignores the 'Reduce Motion' accessibility setting for their very distracting animated playlist covers, while apps like Weather respect it.
Unpopular opinion: considering that last year’s WWDC was all about Apple’s vision for deep AI integration (still not yet released), and this year’s event mostly focused on a fresh coat of paint for iOS/macOS, it raises a fair question: "What has Apple actually been working on for the past two years if the AI still isn’t here and the main update is just new paint"?
Note: not being a hater and appreciate the complexities of working on huge platforms as Apple ecosystem. Just genuinely wondering, since it feels like maybe 2 years of start/stops/changing priorities.
> Just genuinely wondering, since it feels like maybe 2 years of start/stops/changing priorities.
I think it's exactly this. Apple got caught with their pants down on AI, had to shift quickly and that's what got us last year's announcements that never came.
Well, it still isn't ready, so they needed something to give this year since they are so committed to an annual release cycle (which I think is a mistake IMHO), so we get a design change & some love for the iPad.
OTOH, I like where Apple is going with private, on device AI. So if they need some more time to make it useful and polished, totally fine with me. I'd prefer they don't ship a half baked, hallucinating piece of crap. I personally don't/won't use any of the AI "features" so for me personally, it's refreshing to have a tech conference keynote not be "AI AI AI AI." It's worse than when blockchain was all the rage.
With this glassy schmlassy design everyone should forget about Siri right?
Visually very reminiscent of Win7 Aero, yet the 'unified' approach plus low information density is much more Win8 Metro (with some modern/Apple tweaks). A charming era of design but not one that deserves revisiting in such a big way.
so let's use up those extra CPU cycles and update the UI to slow everything down again.
It seems the "Universal Design" across platforms was the only thing new in this WWDC. There are lots of little Apple Intelligence features sprinkled everywhere, but most of them dont interest me.
I guess we will have to wait for State of Union.
It's really beautiful, but I don't want it on my device.
Installed iOS, iPad and macOS yesterday, some things are quickly obvious :
- In general, it always looks worse on dark mode
- The glass transparency effect is too local. It looks only at what's exactly below, so if you have two icons side by side in Control center on iPhone, one may show dark and the next one light, making you think one is active and the other one is inactive. It's pretty clear they wrestled with icons being too transparent so they blurred them a bunch, but it just makes it worse in those cases.
- It does have sensible defaults for (most) 3rd party icons that are flat, by adding some reticule on the flat logo to make it pop and look less out of place.
- The textfield contrasts can be horrendous. If you try to add a sky background to macOS messages (the first choice), the textfield is white text on lightly colored background. In Safari, if you have one of the default desktop background, you can get grey text on blue grayish background. There's absolutely no contrast and it's clear that they will have to address it.
- Safari for macOS takes the contrast issue above and pushes it to 11. It tries to reintroduce the universally hated concept of "the webpage takes over your browser window" but makes it worse. It's horrible enough to have your tabs and icons change color from white to black if you tab from say hacker news to github, but they've added a very slow (and buggy) animation for the UI on top. So while the tab switches immediately, the UI on top slowly morphs from white to black. Absolutely infuriating (and can't be disabled in beta 1). You also can't really see the selected tab in dark mode on a webpage with a black background.
In summary, some things look ok but in general it's really rough. The finder icon sums it best, they had a concept (transparent layers), and tried hard to shove everything through it, never stopping to question if maybe the concept needs adjusting when it clearly didn't work. I expect a bunch of changes, as is it's really rough.
My bet is the new iPadOS does nothing to quiet the gripes about the iPad. Window management isn’t the main issue. The main issue is that the iPad doesn’t do enough of what a Mac does when you need it, and so you bring your laptop just in case.
Oh and the Magic Keyboard? Great. Now my thin 13” iPad Pro feels literally as heavy as a MacBook Pro.
Someone tell me what is the point?
Glass UI can look good but you need to frost it pretty heavily for usability and accessibility. I’m not seeing that here. Hopefully they turn that up before this is fully rolled out.
Last time they redesigned the Home Screen they dropped most of the features which I used—except showing the time, and being able to open the camera.
I hope the funky animated time can be disabled and I can still open the camera.
I am incredibly annoyed that they’ve hidden all the camera controls behind an overflow button. Hiding functions is not the same as simplicity any more than shoving all the dirty laundry under your bed is cleaning.
So I guess 19 years is the ideal time to wait before copying Windows Vista.
There is no contrast. Wow! Why?
the most usable UIs are, i guess “not attractive” anymore. but they are productive, and a joy to use when you need to get something done. these new UIs are a pain to use, but they trick our depressed ADHD brains to keep flipping through the screens and menus with fancy colors and animations. AND THAT IS THE GOAL. screen time. because you are nothing but a target for ads and subscriptions.
for those who doubt me, use the Accessibility settings on your current device to disable all the eye candy and switch to gray scale. it will rarely impact your ability to make a call, send a message, look up some details (OK, photos will be semi unusable). but once the task is done, you’ll have no desire to keep fiddling with your shiny toy. try it.
I like it a priori. Let's see how it holds up in practice.
Oh God, it's as I feared.
Apple UI designer #1: Well, the flat design has been largely a success so far, but those darn users -- they can still easily pick out widgets from the background, and with a few tries still reasonably guess what they're for and how they'll respond!
Apple UI designer #2: I know! Let's make the widgets semitransparent. That way they'll be harder to pick out from the background, and Macs and iPhones will become delightfully fun puzzle boxes users will love trying to figure out, much like my dog loves his snuffle mat!
There’s a reduce transparency setting in accessibility. Wonderful what this will look like if that’s on. I’ve been using it for years as I don’t like frills.
Would be cool if they started using displays with multiple layers, kinda like the looking glass 3D display, to get actual 3d layering of UI. Would look amazing with this new UI design.
I like the clear transparent apps and widgets. I feel like that’s less stimulating like running my phone on grayscale. Mostly just a pretty picture with tools if I seek them out.
Looks like something you could do with a clever displacement map — or several mappings that would include a specular highlight map, etc. The tech is clever.
> iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS Tahoe 26, watchOS 26, and tvOS 26
Bumping from iOS 18 / macOS 15 etc. towards year-based naming, nice. I wish more projects followed this.
I liked it too with Windows 95, Windows 98 etc. Not sure why Microsoft dropped it tbh!
Wow, they've been really slowly moving towards this. I remember when I heard this for the first time, must have been more than half a decade ago, sounded like a logical step. I'm surprised they didn't want this to happen any faster though
Transparent glass UI will be good for UI in glasses :)
This is going to be awful for the large proportion of greybeards reading HN, but the kids are going to love it.
What is the purpose of the windshield in a car?
What is the purpose of text in a screen?
Does something really help that purpose? Anything that does not is WRONG.
So Apple goes Windows Aero?
It's the candy look from the early 2000s, from Mac OS X 10.1, turned up to 11.
Did Apple learn nothing from Windwos Vista and Compiz?
What's old is new again. There's a whole generation of users that never experienced those days. OS X 10.1 is 24 years old now. So for them, this is all brand new and innovative.
Huh, this reminds me of the Photos app. Apple completely broke iOS Photos in the last update.
I really hope apps like Ente can step up and get better and native, offer desktop backup + sync both as well. But then there's always the chance that Apple will just find a way to shut them down. or reject their updates, just like they did in the past.
Anyway, I guess we'll have to wait and see what else they manage to screw up with this "move."
That’s it. I’m finally switching to Linux and Android.
Got bad news for ya on Android... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43975352
It's not glassy (thank god), but it is just as disorientingly-bouncy.
I am quite happy with Mint/XFCE on the Linux side though. Clear and very fast. Glad to have finally shifted.
Windows Vista vibes gone wrong. What happened to Apple's design lead and taste? jeez
I like it, I think it will be great after ironing out a few obvious issues.
Eh, it could be worse. It looks like the over-the-top effects are limited to a few top-level elements such as the Navigation View, Homescreen, and Control Center. I wouldn't be surprised if these get dialed back in the future - especially the elements that break all contrast guidelines.
Many elements are still completely flat or more subtle. So, to me, it feels more like a new tool to convey hierarchy, rather than a complete new design: Secondary < Primary < Glass.
Also, the Safari-Redesign is back for round 2? It'd be funny if it runs into the exact same backlash again.
this ui is cosmically horrible. power users are seeing the end of the tunnel
Transluscency has always been a beautiful effect I don't care what brainwashed "UI/UX"designers post ~2013 think, they are literally conditioned to just repeat mantras.
The original reason for dropping transluscency was that "old people can't tell apart things", well we're way past the era of "no phone" generations, are we forever going to have things stay ugly?
Vista was the best looking OS ever with Aero on.
Did they introduce an easy way to remove the bloatware from MacOS?
It seems over the top to me, fatiguing even. Like I might have to take breaks from being so overwhelmed from using these interfaces. I have been mac exclusive for a long time now but I recently installed xubuntu for an intern and it made me quite jealous
How much battery life could you save by disabling these effects?
This is such a nothing burger and what happens when you let UI take control of your whole business model.
"Look at our presentation, UI updates"
What happened to actually innovating?
They really are promoting "set your alarm without closing your streaming video"
... I mean. Great. My life is gonna be so much easier.
> Users love widgets
MMmm Apple. Time to stop with the mushrooms
The excessive translucency makes contrast much worse and complex backgrounds poke through to distract from the test. Readability suffers severely. This is a terrible design direction. Kill it with fire.
my kingdom for usable bevel-gray toolbars and controls
Oh please God let there be some way of turning this off or at least dialing it down. Maybe worse than the dreaded glass performance hit on CPU/GPU is the promise that elements 'get out of the way', for instance tabs disappearing while scrolling. As someone who thought Word 2003 was aok, I have hated this convergence upon an 'empty square' as a design goal. Show me all the settings, please, and don't hide them in an ellipsis either.
Change for the sake of change. Because otherwise, there would be no news and we would stay at: "things are pretty good, besides the bad ui and ux in some parts".
Absolutely nothing interesting or innovative on the horizon, besides AI snake oil that they apparently just can't get right...
End stage big tech.
Apple have done it again - This is further proof that they are miles ahead of the competition. Kudos Apple.
Stunningly beautiful.
Please make that iphone doesn't start playback when I sit in my car I'm dying.
As someone who loved aero glass and aqua, this looks like absolute dogshit.
There was a reason nobody layered barely readable icons directly onto the glass surface in aero. Even the text in the title bar had a glow to increase the contrast at least!
Fire all the design team. Should have done it back when iOS7 came out but clearly it wasn't a one off.
The death and return of Aero.
I have a hard time reading the text in a lot of their examples.
The artist name "Nao" on the music player. The zoom level "1x" on the camera. The tab "Library" on the gallery. And even the URL "floralarrangem..." in the browser.
Seems to be a consequence of low-contrast, busy backgrounds, and overly aggressive use of transparency. Maybe a "tinted glass" approach and more considerate color/contrast choices would help.
Same response I had for iOS 7: Clown vomit.
Google and Apple are both on some weird bouncy shrooms or something this year. What the heck.
Both new UIs look truly awful, and seem like accessibility nightmares. I will continue enthusiastically disabling animations.
I want another Snow Leopard update with less glamor and a lot more bugfixes.
This is why Ive left.
im having flashbacks from when apple introduced flat design in ios 7. i refused to upgrade for 2 years...
It's just clear Aqua.
I thought this was an April 1st joke.
Can anyone convince me of why I should care about OS U8 design? Don't people spend 98% of their time inside an app that doesn't follow the system UI?
> "... and a fluidity that only Apple can achieve ..." (from the promo video on https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/06/apple-introduces-a-de... )
I'm excited to see this effect turned into a WebGL library in literally a week by some smart devs out there, and then adapted by Material Design in another month. Really? Only apple? This kind of rhetoric might have worked on me 20 years ago, but today it's just sad how obviously false it is.
Don't get me wrong. I'm all for people sharing what they created with joy. And I'll even rejoice with you if it's genuinely cool. But to say "only we can do this" is like saying "we're the best, all of you are beneath us, and you always will be" and is just really off putting. I get that it's a marketing tone, but you could have just omitted those words "only apple can achieve" and just showed off the really cool thing you had and got us excited about that, rather than putting focus on the company itself. It's like how in movies they say show don't tell. Just show us the product, don't tell us how great you are.
I’m very sad that Apple lost their main “no” guy.
It doesn’t seem like they have anyone who can say “we’re not shipping/announcing that” with ultimate authority.
The AVP never should have shipped in its current state. Then there was/is the Siri 2/AI debacle. Now macOS, too.
This is to say nothing of the butterfly keyboard.
Apple OS marketing updates exist for 2 reasons:
1. new wallpaper to differentiate yearly identical hardware increments
2. CPU bloat to hog resources, slow your device and push people to update their HW
these tick both boxes.
Most of these effects are happening under your finger.
But maybe on the desktop you can see them if you use a mouse.
Aero 2.0
looks like windows vista aero feature. wow.. we have come a full circle indeed!
So this is MacOs Vista?
Touch bar 2.0.
The idea of this transparent UI is so dumb. How could anyone at apple think this would be a good idee? Sure, let’s make it 100x harder to read and navigate the UI. Genius decisions being made at Apple here. I hope they do a lot of tweaking with this before it’s forced onto my device.
The Liquid Glass terrified me as someone started in green monochrome CRT days. Software people really have endless creative ways to spend hardware resource quota.
Perhaps human should be less obsessed in twisting nature to serve our comfort, and just adapt ourselves more to what nature provides.
> Software people really have endless creative ways to spend hardware resource quota.
If we have the hardware then not using it is wasteful. My iPhone doesn't get cheaper if I don't use all the power it provides.
Perhaps, use more affordable hardware instead, and reserve resources for those who are less fortunate.
Plus your battery will thank you for this.
Well that looks awful
It's the worst UI design I've seen from Apple, ever.
Makes everything harder to read, far more expensive on your battery. No benefits.
WTF.
That's the final nail in the coffin for me.
They should call the next macOS "KDE" and give credit where credit's due.
Apple designers: Please copy wobbly windows too.
So, windows Aero?
Awful everything
Can we get universal APIs then? E.g. no restrictions on JITs on iOS?
Windows 7 Aero
Every time Apple reinvents the wheel, they release it like it's the very first time it happened.
The biggest most coolest thing is new windowing and tiling controls for the iPad. Really cool stuff.
The glass stuff I am meh on but let’s see it in practice.
This looks like Windows 11's promotional video but we know Apple's UI is going to look exactly like it, for real and not just for show.
I didn't mind the preview of it on a play button or lock screen.
But why would a slider button suddenly become translucent when you move it? Awful.
Apple has invented Windows Vista
All I could think about is how beautiful those treetops are inside the Apple spaceship ... glorious view.
Still rocking a budget Android though ... don't see a reason to change.
Transparency has been around for a while - I remember playing around with it on linux desktops back when I was still using CRT monitors.
I turn it off now. Turns out the instances where I want to see through a window are basically nil. They make for nice screenshots though.
Running the iOS beta now. There's structural elements to this redesign that I think are generally great. Mostly, they've moved the search bar to the bottom of many of their apps (messages and settings are the most obvious). The centered island-style navigation bar feels better than the old boxy-style one.
The transparency effect is a nightmare. Its so fascinating to me how this made it through to an official iOS release. We'll see how it plays on GA. I think we're going to see some major changes to the way its designed before GA.
They can't even make a webpage that doesn't have janky scrolling in Safari. And it prompts me to enable notifications? I'm not so optimistic about their new UI design.
After installing the betas I'm very surprised at how much a departure this is on the Mac. Feels like using an iPad all of a sudden. There are some nice bits but they're going to have to tweak it significantly over the next couple of months. Safari tabs are an abomination. On other hand Spotlight has some great improvements and Launchpad is gone.
Oh right - I almost forgot we’re in the timeline where the “experts” always make the worst choice available to them.
I think years ago I made a joke that the reason we need compute shader support in WebGL was so we could do fluid dynamic simulations for our button hover effects. Nobody is laughing now..
First thing i thought is that they will have a setting to turn down the behind the last see through, the legibility is worse if you have a lot of graphics morphing wildly behind texts
This looks nice, but I can’t say it’s clear how a touch interface can be sent to macOS when MacBooks continue to not have touchscreens.
Maybe this is the start of replacing macOS with some form of iPadOS experience in the medium to long term.
Looks great, looking forward to trying it...
Honestly? It lacks the visual contrast that made skeuomorphism so popular. Material You gets this right by using accent colors to break up the uniform interface. It feels cohesive and well-made without feeling clinical or hard-to-read.
It's also, somewhat curiously, not neumorphism. All the interface layers appear distinct, which makes me worry if things like Dynamic Island and Control Center will be mistaken for app controls and not distinct phone controls.
Dude in that one video needs to go ahead back home and put on the sweater and slacks he deserves.
I'm really showing off my age here, but it has been all down hill since skeuomorphic design; because the focus was primarily on usability and teachability as first-class concepts. Heck, companies were spending millions on usability research at the time, much of which was used.
I taught people to use computers in the 90s and early 2000s, and having those concepts matching to real world objects helped immensely. Recently I had to teach my kids to use a PC (they no longer teach that in "computers" at school, by the way, iPads only), and everything was arbitrarily designed without even internal rules/consistency let alone building on real-world metaphors.
You've also had this ongoing trend of content density getting consistency worse, and now Apple is accelerating a trend to make UI elements difficult to see/harm discoverability further. Liquid Glass is going to be a painful period, and all the clones that do it even worse are going to be pure hell.
IMHO skeuomorphic design had a few wins, but also plenty of losses. Sometimes the real world interface is just not as intuitive as it should have been.
But I'm 100% behind you on "make buttons look like buttons" and "don't hide functionality behind arbitrary gestures that you never tell the user". UI designers may hate menus these days, but they were so good for letting a user browse through looking for the thing they want. Search boxes are a good speed improvement, but should never be the only interface object because many times the user doesn't know exactly what they're looking for.
This is also why most voice assistants don't get used very much, there's no easily accessible list of phrases they know and they aren't smart enough to really understand what the person wants, so people end up using the one or two phrases they know the assistant can handle and forget about it otherwise.
> This is also why most voice assistants don't get used very much, there's no easily accessible list of phrases they know and they aren't smart enough to really understand what the person wants, so people end up using the one or two phrases they know the assistant can handle and forget about it otherwise.
Thank you for saying this, you've just made me realise they share all the problems of text adventures while having none of the excitement.
I was actually complaining about this the other day: there is no manual (or even a searchable database) of recognized commands/features. I often discover that something was possible with Google Assistant when the announcement comes that it's being removed.
When you start a timer with Siri, it often announces that you can also tell it to stop the timer by saying stop. This tells me that even the most rudimentary functions of starting and stopping timers is not yet learned by users. Every time I hear that message I think of how much of a failure this whole thing has been.
Oh timers, you mean the one thing I use daily for cooking where they changed the recognized phrase between iOS 17 and iOS 18? It used to understand "notify me in 15 minutes" meant to set a timer. Now it asks for what I want to be reminded about to add it to the calendar. I have to explicitly say "set a 15-minute timer".
So long for muscle memory (oh and for consiseness, it's worse in French).
Anyways, that's the prime reason there's no list: either they want to change the commands willy-nilly, or they don't know them because that's whatever the model's learned.
>I have to explicitly say "set a 15-minute timer".
Only saying "15 minutes" initiates a timer for that long.
OMG thanks, it also works in french!
This goes even deeper in the "undiscoverable commands" issue at hand.
"notify me in 15 minutes" feels natural and casual, and how I'd expect to interact with modern voice assistants. "set a 15 minutes timer" feels overly formal and redundant (it does not help that in French, a timer is "minuteur", so you repeat the "minutes" sound twice), and how I'd expect to interact with old voice assistants. This new one is just some hidden trial-and-error thing deep in Siri that's likely an engineer that likes cooking that added it as a shortcut.
>This new one is just some hidden trial-and-error thing deep in Siri that's likely an engineer that likes cooking that added it as a shortcut.
Among the many shortcomings of Siri is that it seems as if it's not good with verbs. I've learned to avoid them as much as possible. Put another way, it's better with nouns, so I focus on them. I guess that's why
"15-minute timer" and
"15 minutes"
work well. But similarly, I wanted to use the stopwatch the other day. Not something I ever really do. Just saying, "Stopwatch" got it open. And testing now on some non-Apple apps also worked (in case Siri has some built-in pro-Apple bias). One was WhatsApp. The other was an app for an insurance and banking company. That one, just saying its name opened the contact card I have for the company. That's fair. Trying again, and saying "company name app" opened the app.
Of course, sometimes the verbs are necessary. But I've had more success when I could avoid them. Do note that I say all this using a Siri-only phone that is too old for any of Apple Intelligence that may get mixed in with Siri.
It's not a huge deal, but on google devices, setting a timer is different from setting an alarm. the end result is more or less the same thing, but it uses different underlying functionality and I have to remember to say timer instead of alarm when I'm cooking.
Saying ”set an alarm in 15 minutes” vs ”set at timer for 15 minutes” to Siri also do different things
Yep this gets me all the time. The biggest difference is that a timer will be displayed whereas an alarm is in the background. The display is very handy when cooking.
It’s a disconnect between the vision and the reality. Users shouldn’t have to learn Siri, it should just work every time no matter how you ask as long as it’s understandable to a person.
But the reality is it doesn’t work and users have to specifically learn the few things it can do.
It's a disconnect because we have this vision that language (as commonly spoken, not legalese) is perfectly clear and precise. But the reality is that even two live people who seem to speak the same language will misunderstand each other, including for "basic" things. So how should a computer be able to read your mind, when it most likely doesn't even have the context of where you're from?
Regarding the "notify" vs "timer", I had a very similar experience with a friend. I went to a bakery, and she asked me to get her some kind of pastry. To me, she meant some kind of bread. Queue confused faces on both sides when she asked where her stuff was. Sure, it's still in the broad "baked goods" category, just like a reminder and a timer. This was in France, both living in major cities 200 km apart. It's not like some extreme variation of English from the other side of the world.
Theoretically, large language models have enough common sense to understand all variations of natural language commands, and to ask for clarification if they think some request is ambiguous. It's probably not yet feasible to do Siri via an LLM, or not via a properly large one (that has the necessary intelligence).
I think we need a word for “buttons look like buttons”, as opposed to “the Contacts app looks like a real-world leather-cladded address book” skeuomorphism. I’m seeing “skeuomorphism” increasingly used for the former, where people mostly mean “not flat design”, whereas originally it meant only the latter.
Ideomorphic seems like it would work for that.
Turns out it's actually already a word: having the proper form or shape —used of minerals whose crystalline growth has not been interfered with
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/idiomorphic
That seems to fit amazingly well here too.
> I think we need a word for “buttons look like buttons”, as opposed to “the Contacts app looks like a real-world leather-cladded address book” skeuomorphism.
Likely related to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance#As_perceived_action..., but it's a jargon word most tech people and others don't know, and it creates debates about what it means among those that do know it.
I usually say something like it should be obvious it's clickable, or obvious what it does, when it comes up.
Affordances is a more general term, not necessarily purely visual, or even visual at all (it can be tactile, or auditory, etc.). It doesn’t denote a particular visual design, and full-blown skeuomorphic elements would also exhibit affordances. But yes, it approaches the heart of the problem.
Signifiers? https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/94265/whats-the-diffe...
> Affordances are what an object can do (truth). Perceived affordances are what one thinks an object can do (perception). Signifiers make affordances clearer (closing the gap between truth and perception). Signifiers often reduce number of possible interpretations and/or make intended way of using an object more explicit.
> A grey link on the screen might afford clicking (truth). But you might perceive it just as a non-interactive label (perception). Styling it as a button (background, shadow etc.) is a signifier that makes it clearer that the link can be clicked.
I don't think there's any more widely known terms here, and not any used within general tech audiences. I'd like it if there was a useful shorthand too but devs/users/clients are probably going to stick with e.g. "I couldn't tell that was a button" because the above have failed to catch on.
"Visual cues" feels accurate enough. I immediately understand "Buttons should look like buttons".
Thanks. Signifiers looks like a perfect fit here since they are elements which signify their affordance. It should ideally get more mainstream instead of someone inventing a new word.
Yeah, I find it interesting these words haven't become more mainstream though when they've been around for a while, and maybe that ship has sailed. They don't resonate? The definitions are too complex? (they often cause debates) They're not guessable? They don't shorten what you mean enough? ("it should look more like a button" isn't much longer than "it's lacking signifiers" to be worth the jargon) I see people drop "afford/affordance" into replies occasionally but most people don't know what it means and it rarely adds anything.
"Skeuomorphism" has caught on. It's not guessable but then it saves quite a few words so helps with communication. It probably got picked up by some tech news/blog sites and reached critical mass because skeuomorphism vs flat design resonates with people.
This is exactly the problem with Siri - if it was nothing but a vocal command line that I had to memorize exactly how to talk to it, and I could find a list of commands to learn, it'd be 1000x better.
This is similar to WolframAlpha. Theoretically, it can do countless different things, but you wouldn't know about them just from looking at the empty text box. The difference to something like ChatGPT is that it can interpret arbitrary commands, even if it can't properly execute them.
I think one thing that is involved in this is conventions, and when you've learned one set of rules on how to communicate on one form of interface that it transfers to other applications on that interface. If there's certain ways to use graphical elements, gestures, console keywords/option flags, spoken keywords, while other applications have the freedom to do their own thing it should be seen as better not to diverge and reinvent the wheel (so each needs learning its own rules) too much without good reason.
> having those concepts matching to real world objects helped immensely
A lot of those real world objects no longer exists, or are less frequently used than their counterparts, so I sort of see why moving away from that design language makes sense.
I'll hold of judgement of "Liquid Glass" until I've seen and used, but I don't feel like it's necessary. It's certainly not "the biggest" design update ever. System 9 to MacOSX was still greater.
This isn't really Apples fault, but I also expect others to start implementing something similar, but badly. Apple do have a point that this is something that only Apple can do well, because you do need to ensure that hardware can keep up. We're going to see other attempt something similar, but it won't been nearly as polished.
Overall I still feel that Apple is trying to force to much functionality into the phone platform. It would be really lovely to have an iOS light, that does less and with a simpler UI/UX.
> [...] this is something that only Apple can do well, because you do need to ensure that hardware can keep up.
Yeah, about that.
When iPhone SE2 was first released (April 2020), it featured the A13 Bionic, which was the most powerful SoC Apple has had at the time (to be succeeded by A14 in iPhone 12 couple months later), and ran iOS 13.
Every succeeding iOS release, the phone felt a little more sluggish. Right now, by iOS 18: it sometimes takes half a minute to open the share sheet; misbehaving apps can make the phone almost too hot to touch, and can freeze the app switcher UI for 10+s; Safari takes 4s to "cold start" into about:blank; and so on. None of these are signs of CPU throttling, it's all just software. I almost can't wait for Apple to drop support for major releases - even if the current release is crap, the next one will be worse.
I pretty much expect last year's devices to start struggling with this new design after 2 releases.
I have to admit that I don't feel that on my old SE 2, but I do see Apple not caring about the device type. Some of the UI elements overlap og doesn't line after the update to iOS 18.
> A lot of those real world objects no longer exists, or are less frequently used than their counterparts, so I sort of see why moving away from that design language makes sense
This reasoning never made a ton of sense to me. Gen Z don't use devices with knobs and buttons anymore, therefore we should all design our interface elements to look like nothing in particular?
If you give someone young and tech savvy a digital UI, they will figure out how to use it. It's precisely the oldest and least tech savvy users for whom interface design is most important, as they are more like to get frustrated and quit your app. Why optimize for the young, then?
(I mean, it's a rhetorical question, as I already know the answer - the designers creating the interfaces are themselves young and tech savvy gen-Z'ers.)
> Gen Z don't use devices with knobs and buttons anymore, therefore we should all design our interface elements to look like nothing in particular?
We have volume sliders rather than knobs, because that's easier on a touch interface. I get your point, but does the button need to look like the button on the radio in our grandfathers car from 1960? Probably not. I was thinking more in terms of filling cabinets, floppies as save icons or even the phone as the receiver on a rotary phone. Would it be easier to set a timer on your phone if the UI looked like a kitchen egg timer? Having the email icon be a letter doesn't even make sense anymore. My kid has sent one letter ever and all the mailboxes will be removed next year. How does having a letter as an icon going to provide any meaningful frame of reference when we daily receive more email than we do actual letters in a year, or two, or three?
I understand the concept that objects like letters are no longer used very much. My question is, what icon do you use instead of a letter icon, and what tangible benefit does it bring, given that people are already used to letter icons, and aren't going to be used to your new icon. Tangible benefit meaning "users will be able to use this interface more easily".
Usually the reasoning just stops at "but nobody sends letters anymore!" without going a step further and justifying why that even matters.
> My question is, what icon do you use instead of a letter icon
That is a good question. The "share" icon e.g. is something that has no real world equivalent, and I'd argue that it almost doesn't work. Technically it could be anything and we'd over time agree that "This thing means share".
We're still at a point where many still understand the references, but over time something like the letter in email icons, just becomes cargo cult. Perhaps you're right, it doesn't matter, as long as we agree what the icons mean.
The "share" icon e.g. is something that has no real world equivalent
The New York Times uses a box wrapped up in a bow.
I can't link to it because it's rendered as an in-line SVG, but this is HN, so picture this in your mind:
<svg aria-hidden="true" width="19" height="19" viewBox="0 0 19 19"><path d="M18.04 5.293h-2.725c.286-.34.493-.74.606-1.17a2.875 2.875 0 0 0-.333-2.322A2.906 2.906 0 0 0 13.64.48a3.31 3.31 0 0 0-2.372.464 3.775 3.775 0 0 0-1.534 2.483l-.141.797-.142-.847A3.745 3.745 0 0 0 7.927.923 3.31 3.31 0 0 0 5.555.459 2.907 2.907 0 0 0 3.607 1.78a2.877 2.877 0 0 0-.333 2.321c.117.429.324.828.606 1.171H1.155a.767.767 0 0 0-.757.757v3.674a.767.767 0 0 0 .757.757h.424v7.53A1.01 1.01 0 0 0 2.588 19h14.13a1.01 1.01 0 0 0 1.01-.959v-7.56h.424a.758.758 0 0 0 .757-.757V6.05a.759.759 0 0 0-.868-.757Zm-7.196-1.625a2.665 2.665 0 0 1 1.01-1.736 2.24 2.24 0 0 1 1.574-.313 1.817 1.817 0 0 1 1.211.818 1.857 1.857 0 0 1 .202 1.453 2.2 2.2 0 0 1-.838 1.191h-3.431l.272-1.413ZM4.576 2.386a1.837 1.837 0 0 1 1.221-.817 2.23 2.23 0 0 1 1.565.313 2.624 2.624 0 0 1 1.01 1.736l.242 1.453H5.182a2.2 2.2 0 0 1-.838-1.19 1.857 1.857 0 0 1 .202-1.495h.03ZM1.548 6.424h7.54V9.39h-7.58l.04-2.967Zm1.181 4.128h6.359v7.287H2.729v-7.287Zm13.777 7.287h-6.348v-7.307h6.348v7.307Zm1.181-8.468h-7.53V6.404h7.53V9.37Z" fill="#121212" fill-rule="nonzero"></path></svg>I don't even see the SVG anymore, I just see blonde, brunette, gift box with a bow.
The classic example is the save icon being a floppy disk. Older people understand the history, and young people figure it out, even if they don’t know the history.
Computers are full of these things though. The Shift key is a reference back to how typewriters worked. We didn’t change the name of the key, because nothing physically shifts anymore. Most don’t know what it means historically, but they still know what it does on their computer.
I’ll all for bringing skeuomorphism back.
IMHO this is precisely why clinging to old metaphors might not be optimal.
While the Shift key keeps some resemblance of the original object behavior, a shortcut like Cmd + Shift V makes no sense in the metaphor.
Same way holding Shift while selecting objects in the finder, or arrowing around breaks the mental image. In many ways, the Command key's higher abstraction makes it easier for newcomers to grasp that it just does magical things.
Cmd + S saving the document needs no additional lore or image of a past clunky machine would had somehow reacted in a Rube Goldberg way.
Interfaces should be simple to use for simple tasks anyway, getting rid of semantic noise is IMHO a better way.
And the "upper case" vs. "lower case" distinction, even though we no longer use a printing press in which each letter is sorted into a different box, or "case", depending on if it's a capital or not.
And we kept the letter "c", even though in English this is always* either pronounced like "k" or like "s", or the "ch" digraph. But sutsh ðings go in sykles, and one day ðe English language will be simplified.
* Saying "always" is a risk on a forum like this, no doubt there's an example I've not thought of.
Tsk, tsk! You're using thorn (ð) for two different 'th' sounds. Old English used 'eth' (þ) to mark both sounds but it'd be more precise to use both letters like in Icelandic, eg for the above: þings, ðe (although the vowel in 'the' is actually more of a schwa [ǝ] usually, or [i] before vowels). Also, you're still sticking to some English spelling pecularities there...
In a fictitious modern, phonology-based spelling system, you could write the above something like:
“Bat sač þings gou in sajkls, änd wan dej ðí Ingliš längwidž wil bí simplifajd.”
;)
Interesting, in my accent the "th" in "the" and the "th" in "things" sound the same.
Accents do make spelling reform difficult. For example, some of the people who grew up 5 miles from me (they were Cosham/Portsmouth, I was south Havant) pronounced both these "th"s as… I don't know the linguistic symbol, but something like a "v" or an "f".
The benefit of skeuomorphism was that it was universal.
Everyone decided that "save" = "disk"
Maybe a different looking disk, but still a disk.
That universality across apps for basic functionality was the biggest feature: it didn't matter if I knew what a disk was or not, because I knew the disk-shaped thing meant save in every app.
The original modern sin of UX was having the hubris to ditch universality because they believed whatever batshit they dreamed up was better enough to justify doing so.
It wasn't. Arguably, it couldn't ever be.
You could come up with a unique wiz-bang UX for something that's objectively 25% better than skeuomorphism, and it still wouldn't be a net improvement. Because no user cares about one specific app enough to train on it.
But building a hammer that looks like every other hammer doesn't get you on the cover of design/UX magazines...
> Everyone decided that "save" = "disk"
> Maybe a different looking disk, but still a disk.
I had a discussion about this with my parents, who saw the 5" disks actually flopping back in the days, but never cared enough about computers.
They thought the floppy icon meant it was saved on their drive, when it was actually commited to the cloud service they were using. They spent a while looking around, in their Document folder, Download folder etc. and gave up after a while.
I can't remember which service they were using, but boy were they pissed.
Well, things were fine before Microsoft, Apple, and Google decided that organizing things was too much to ask of the average user, and launched into the insanity of {latest version of multi-location library} and {cloud storage that pretends it's local storage}.
Adobe does the same, most businesses that can afford it will try going that route, as it means user lock-in and more subscription money down the road.
This reminds me of the Figma rant on how you can't do presentations offline even if you save your slides to disk, that's where the whole industry is trending.
The way I've come to understand "icon" is that it's as used like "religious icon". A painting of a particular figure is not so much about that figure, but what they represent, it's somewhat abstract. The save icon isn't about the literal bit of media as what you could do with it.
> Gen Z don't use devices with knobs and buttons anymore, therefore we should all design our interface elements to look like nothing in particular?
Knobs work as a tactile interface that require two fingers minimum to rotate predictably. With digital screens we lost the tactile element, and mandated a new one finger (thumb) minimum. Interfaces had to adapt, which is why knobs were replaced with sliders. Changes like this happened all over the place; not because of "gen-Z", but because they were the most effective solution for the platform.
> A lot of those real world objects no longer exists
Yep. What would the modern equivalent of the save icon - a cloud or an generic IC representing the soldered-on SDD? Hard drives, floppies, or any other user-controlled storage devices are now out of fashion.
I find it comical that macOS displays an HDD icon for internal storage. It's even using the "old", skeuomorphic art style, from before the flat design.
(It also displays a CRT with a Windows 95 BSOD for Samba network shares, but that's 100% on purpose.)
OTOH Apple's own apps haven't had a "save" button for a really long time now. Everything autosaves (and syncs to iCloud) automatically - use Undo if you need to. More complex apps, like Numbers, also automatically maintain a version history.
I've seen a few instances of an arrow pointing down into a box/tray. I'm not sure how I feel about it. It seems appropriate, but the only caveat is that a lot of applications already represent 'download' with a similar icon. I imagine some product designers would be unhappy with a download-looking icon representing saving to a location in "the cloud".
USB flash drives are still quite universally used and a direct replacement for the floppy's functionality. I've seen a USB stick shaped icon used as a metaphor for saving in some places. But I agree with the sibling post that the text "save" probably has more staying power.
Personally I'd just make it a button that says "Save", but I doubt that's going to be popular.
And while we're making the button say Save, perhaps we could put other buttons around it that just say what they do. We could even group those buttons into common types of activities, and then hide them in some sort of flyout dialog until you want to actually use them. We could group all File activities, all activities relating to the View, all activities relating to getting Help. This idea might revolutionize computing!
Especially not in non-English countries.
Icons make localisation much easier. In fact flat web design has evolved a fairly standard set of icons for basic operations. Most people know what a burger menu and x in the top corner of a window do. Same for copy, share, and so on.
The problem with Liquid Glass is that it's making the background style more important than the foreground content. No one cares if buttons ripple if they can't see what they do, because icons themselves are less clear and harder to read.
So I don't know what the point of this is.
Unifying the look with Apple's least successful, least popular, most niche product seems like a bizarre decision. I'm guessing the plan is to start adding VisionPro features in other products, but without 3D displays the difference between 3D and 2D metaphors is too huge to bridge.
I really liked Aqua. It was attractive and it was very usable.
This is... I don't know. It seems like style over substance for the sake of it, with significant damage to both.
"Save" is 4 characters in English, but it's over twice as long in German (9 Characters), and even longer in French (11). The variable length means the UX for word-based buttons would need to be designed for the longest case, which is why we mainly see them in title bars for navigation, or in very sparse UI.
This whole flat style fever which doesn't distinguish between active elements and informative text allowed to spread darkpattern tactics which lead to deploying adverse or even harmful changes for users. It also contributed to nullifying customisation under linux - looking exactly at you adwaita.
My age shows here as well and I'm not in any way excited about this design change at all. Suddenly Apple decided that this fancy acrylic glass animation for widgets, interface that says "look we aren't stagnant - we did something" will be enough to diverge attention from other problems. I sincerely doubt that it's gonna be.
This release feels like a return to transparency trend which we had somewhere around Vista and initial KDE Plasma releases.
> Suddenly Apple decided that this fancy acrylic glass animation for widgets, interface that says "look we aren't stagnant - we did something"
Maybe it's because I'm living in a country where we had to catch up with marketing and advertising after communism fell and I have some kind of "immunity" and cynical approach to such forms of product presentations... But this whole keynote video felt like it's on nearly same levels as car salesman, infomercials/teleshopping.
And I honestly felt sorry for woman who tries to sell me amazing emoji combining "technology". Who actually uses this beside the obvious die-hard fans on dedicated sites and forums.
> But this whole keynote video felt like it's on nearly same levels as car salesman, infomercials/teleshopping.
I was initially excited as on paper it sounds like a fantastic throwback to the Aqua design, which I still think was fantastic.
From the preview so far I'm not excited.
I have to say app icons look nice (the borders make them pop just a bit more), the border highlights are clear without being loud, and elements like the dock look nice. The inactive button states actually look great – as shown in the Camera and Facetime screenshots – they actually do look like little glass buttons, which is good.
Where I have issue is when multiple of these glass elemenst are shown at once they fight for attention and it's persnally quite overwhelming for me. The image of the video player controls on iPhone and AppleTV are in my opinion awful and load, and that's especially where you want a quiet UI.
When the shape has a strong refractive index and that's where it becomes really noisy for me with the Safari and music tab bars being absolutely awful in my opinion.
It's a shame because I think if they kept the idea but dialed it down from 11 it could be fantastic.
Someone installed beta and posted a screenshot down below somewhere; control center with these glass buttons over a colorful springboard icons grid turns interface into a visual mess.
I wonder if they manage to change anything or tweaks, polishing (sic!) will happen over next or two iOS releases.
> I taught people to use computers in the 90s and early 2000s, and having those concepts matching to real world objects helped immensely.
As I child of the nineties I was surprised to eventually learn that a file in a folder was a real thing and not only a computer concept.
> it has been all down hill since skeuomorphic design
I strongly disagree. I don't mind if people like skeuomorphic graphics. Want to make the "play" button look like a 1987 tape deck? Not my thing, but everyone has different preferences. That's fine.
But I loathe, detest, hate, despise, skeuomorphic user interfaces. Remember when Calendar.app would only let you turn one month page at a time because that's how desk calendars work? How Podcasts looked like a reel-to-reel recorder and waste tons of screen space? Contacts app imitating the limitations of a physical black book because that's how real books work?[0]
If you like brushed metal or whatever, right on. Again, not my thing, but you do you! But I cannot abide the fake limitations that skeuomorphic design pushed onto software in the name of making apps work just like their physical equivalents. The UI on the magic boxes we're typing this on are limited only by our creativity. Please, please don't infect them with the real world's restrictions when it's not necessary!
Agreed. Use the medium’s capabilities! Don’t cripple it for the sake of familiarity.
I think you have a romanticized revisionary memory of back then.
I went to school in the 90s and learned computers in school.
All they taught us was the basics. How to use Windows explorer. What files are and how to rename and delete and undelete them.
And some hypercard clone. Which barely taught us anything about computers except "they can do stuff you tell them to," which I guess was a valuable lesson?
I've been hearing that kids do not understand files and hierarchal file systems due to cloud and iOS.
> and all the clones that do it even worse are going to be pure hell.
This is my #1 take-away from this. At this point it seems pretty safe to assume that interfaces made by Apple will probably still be decent, in spite of this design philosophy.
The clones, however, are going going to take accessiblity to new lows.
Attack of the clones, yes.
Just as visual design across the majority of digital touchpoints seems to have arrived at a mature level, this will unleash a giant wave of noise including gradients on text.
Brrr.
something funny would be a kind of Erotic sake cups, when a safe image reveal something completely different when transformed by the the glass upon it.
The whole thing is Windows Vista Aero Glass and iOS 7 all over again. Repeating all the SAME mistakes with 3D translucent design.
Right now I really want skeuomorphism back.
Much like iOS 7 they will have to spend another 2 - 3 years "tweaking" or basically walking back some of these design decisions.
I believe the problem is when Tim Cook decided to merge "Design" under one umbrella. So the Design team now takes over both Hardware and Software Design when they kicked Scott Forstall out. A lot of Apple's UX went down hill from there.
When Cook became CEO, all of this was inevitable. I used to blame Jobs for not picking Forstall as his successor, but it recently dawned on me that it was never his choice to begin with. The board probably crowded him out again, just like the Sculley situation.
In a month Apple will have been on autopilot for longer than Jobs was at the company during the 1997-2011 heyday. Jobs became iCEO in September 1997. After 167 months passed, he left in August 2011. It has been 166 months since then.
Cant believe Tim Cook is about to be CEO longer than Steve Jobs. Thank You for that perspective.
On the other hand Steve Jobs has accomplished far more within the same time frame compared to Tim Cook with far fewer resources. I really like the analogy of "autopilot".
I do think Steve could push Forstall as his successor, but didn't because Forstall wasn't ready as CEO. Tim Cook was a much better choice at the time as they have to compete with Android and they need market share ( in terms of user not sales ) to not repeat the same mistake with Mac vs PC. Tim should have mediate between Forstall and Ive instead of picking sides. The restructuring created power vacuum for Craig and Eddy Cue to pick up. With Crag we end up with OS that is constantly resume / features release driven and Eddy Cue which we end up with Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Fitness, Apple Arcade. None of them in my opinion are good decisions or great products / services.
Accomplish more is relative. At a large, later stage, companies become a lot more stability and long term revenue & sustainability. Which Tim Cook has absolutely excelled at. Sure, Steve was more of a tech revolutionary. But weird designs were super common under him! The Apple design language has been pretty consistent over the past decade.
I think it’s odd this thread is largely complaining about Apple taking too many risks, or making weird designs they don’t like, or being too feature-driven. The fact of the matter is that Apple has by far created the most stable tech ecosystem of any comparable company. With a very consistent design language as well.
Windows has a horrific track record (with only Windows 7 & 10 being well regarded in the past 15+ years). Android typically doesn’t support devices with major software updates past a small handful of years. Apple’s combo of privacy, long term support, and extremely consistent release cadences & design language make it a much more stable platform than practically anything else. They even did an entire hardware architecture change under our feet without downgrading the user experience in any meaningful way.
I mean whether or not you agree or like Apple’s service products like Apple Music, it is absolutely a very smart business decision to continue investing in them. Apple TV has a higher percentage of high quality content than other providers. Apple Music is at worst hardly that different than Spotify. Apple Arcade is just a way to bundle products that already exist.
Cook is not "about to be CEO longer than Steve Jobs", he was also CEO from 1976-1985
I suspect ego played a part in Steve Jobs selecting Tim Cook as his successor. Famous CEO's tend to pick a successor that is less charismatic and more risk-averse than they were. CEO's that retire 'honorably', so to speak, don't want someone who will outshine them or make sweeping changes to the brand or the company's organization. In other words, they want to preserve their legacy.
Tim Cook is exactly this kind of executive. While he has done an incredible job with leading the business and operational side of Apple, the public doesn't give credit for that sort of thing. Now imagine if Steve appointed someone just like himself and the business fumbled. Steve would hate for his legacy to be tarnished by appointing a brash successor.
All that being said, for what it's worth, I don't think anyone could have lived up to Steve's reputation. It is quite unfair to Tim Cook that he will always be compared to what people think Steve Jobs would have done.
IDK, I think Apple creating its own laptop/desktop-class CPU was a pretty bold move with a huge payoff. It's less sexy than introducing an entirely new category of product, but it's not exactly risk-averse either.
Cook saw it through, but Apple began moving towards replacing Intel back in 2008 (under Jobs) when they acquired P.A. Semi.
> While he has done an incredible job with leading the business and operational side of Apple
Can we say that yet? A lot of value was made in the short term, but it kinda feels like that would happen to any CEO that has an iPhone moment on their hands. Cook's real challenge was to flip the scenario into something sustainable; can Apple take the excitement and turn it into a product line?
They certainly tried. Cook led the charge on the Apple Watch, which fell short of a tentpole offering but still found an audience. Airpods took off, presumably after Cook learned from the failure (and acquisition) of Beats by Dre. And Vision Pro... the less said the better. Maybe there's something still in the holster, but I expect this to be a dead-end product line moreso than Airpower.
Are disposable headphones enough to build a legacy off of? The Apple Watch certainly isn't, and don't even get me started on Vision Pro. We could point to the big one that everyone likes to credit him as; "the supply chain guy", but even that seems to foster political contention in America. Apple's software faces antitrust scrutiny, privacy concerns[0], and an overall degradation in app quality as their attention splits into different markets. The legacy is the important question, and if Tim Cook were to resign tomorrow I think he would be remembered as the CEO that screwed Apple over for good.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-...
> They certainly tried. Cook led the charge on the Apple Watch, which fell short of a tentpole offering but still found an audience.
That's an interesting way to say "is the best selling watch model of all time, and outsells not only all other smartwatches combined but also a substantial chunk of all normal watches put together."
> is the best selling watch model of all time, and outsells not only all other smartwatches combined
Apple has about 25% of the global marketshare for smartwatches: https://www.counterpointresearch.com/insights/global-smartwa... They are the _largest_ supplier, but they certainly don't outsell everyone combined.
It also took Apple about 4 years to find the actual use-case for the Apple Watch: health tracking and payments.
Literally everything I've ever read about Forstall and his behavior post-Jobs makes me think he would have been an awful CEO. It just sounded like he was "Game of Thrones-ing" from the second Cook became CEO. E.g. it was widely reported that Ive and Forstall could barely stand to be in the same meeting with each other. I may have some criticisms in my mind about some of Ive's design post-Jobs, but I don't think I have ever heard other folks be critical of Ive's leadership style or personality - everything I've read about him uses words like "inspirational", "remarkable", "calm", etc. I've read tons of criticism about Forstall.
Mind throwing some links my way? I love me some Scott Forstall anecdotes.
Here, I'll start:
- https://randsinrepose.com/archives/innovation-is-a-fight/
Nothing new probably - I just remember diving down the rabbit hole from the Wikipedia page on Forstall a couple years back, e.g. stuff like this: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-20514464.
But more importantly, I take issue with the main theme of your first link, as it's stuff I've heard a bunch elsewhere. I can agree that "innovation requires some tension", but I think it's a huge mistake to think that because Forstall had some (or at least looked like he had some) of the qualities of Jobs that he was the right man for the <no pun intended> job. I.e the argument usually goes something like "Hey, Jobs was disagreeable and kind of an asshole, so since Forstall is disagreeable and even more of an asshole he should be CEO."
But that clearly misses the fact that Forstall could in no way engender the level of respect that Jobs had, and I don't think people would have respected him more if he became CEO. People really admired Jobs at a deep, deep level, and that was clearly not the case for Forstall based on the many other Apple execs who couldn't stand him.
TBF Jobs wasn't a well-rounded human being either.
It all comes down to what results they can produce inside the organization, people will bear the worst assholes if the output can justify it somehow.
I would agree about Ive, based on what he chose to mention about his team in a recent interview - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLb9g_8r-mE
Man, if Apple 2011-2025 is "on autopilot" I wish I was on autopilot like that. Can you give me a company that wasn't? I'm curious what your bar is exactly.
Jobs pick him because he knew he's gonna to handle company's financials good once he's gone. My partner says Cook is just a good accountant focused on keeping numbers up and nothing else.
It’s not “mistakes”, it’s fashion. The cool thing about fashion is you can never run out of innovation. If something has been out of fashion for 15 years you can bring it back! It makes it seem like everything is forever changing and new. I’ll bet your ass that material design will be all the rave in 10-15 years or so.
Given that this look appears to be imitating frosted glass, it's very much compatible with skeumorphism. Maybe not the one you want, but it's very much attempting to mimic a physical look.
There's been a lot of hardware improvement since Vista. Apple is also in a much more commanding position when it comes to both design and hardware. They basically own the design and the hardware.
While I'm not an Apple user I believe these iOS devices are going to sell like hotcakes.
iOS 7 made sense though, they really did need an upgrade back then. the design showed its age. even compared with Android at that time.
this... I don't understand the reasoning. Nobody is complaining about iOS design? Nobody asked for this? This is just bad?
This gives Windows Aero vibes, but somehow even worse.
> Apple introduces a universal design across platforms
Looks like shit.
> The new material, Liquid Glass, combines the optical qualities of glass with a fluidity only Apple can
God this marketing copy is sickening
Literally who wrote this, and who did they write it for??
I'm honestly shocked at the new interface. It's like Windows Vista all over again - everything's broken. The whole thing looks like a broken HTML page with CSS slapped on top of macOS Finder. Text readability is terrible and I really hope you can disable most of the glass effects in accessibility settings.
This'll probably stick around for years until Apple decides to switch design languages again, and they'll never admit the old one was bad - classic Apple.
It's unbelievably broken... like an Android phone with 30 themes installed at once.
iOS 18 actually looks good and is readable, which makes this worse. That's the thing about peaking - it's a long way down. Feels like they had to ship something because their AI isn't just behind - it's absolutely broken like shit. Siri's been stale for 15 years, and they're not even polishing features that others have half-baked into their products. They've got... nothing.
The form over function school of design continues its grim march towards decreasing usability.
Look at the most basic UI interaction - text cursor movement - and note how this new liquid glass adds more confusing visual noise by adding text reflection for no good reason, which makes, for example, an empty line appear as a line with some text due to this reflection, thus making it harder to see that your cursor is located at the top line.
> more focus to content
it's the opposite, you dilute focus on content by manufacturing non-existent noise.
And the claim to being "natural" in the video falls flat - compare to the actual physical movements a few frames before - the lens doesn't change in width or height! So the digital animation noise is unnatural!
Similarly with the menu sheet adding new rubberband effect in the corner- what underlying natural interaction does it reflect? What signal does that jiggly noise send?
But yeah, if you live in a "lively delight" fantasy of design, nothing would stop you.
I got a minor amount of hate for it, but to repeat what I wrote here [1]:
"Slowly, I'm coming to the conclusion that designers should never be employed, only consulted on a per-project basis. If they sit around 8 hours a day, they end up changing something or the other to justify their existence. But human beings are not used to change at such a rapid cadence. Humans take time to settle into a design and establish patterns of usage."
I don't understand how you can both appreciate the importance of good design, but at the same time claim that making good design is not a full time job.
Because good design turns into bad design when the designers have nothing better to do.
I think this is rather intentional. A sparkly design to distract from Siri failure. Oh look at that glass. It's almost real.
Could be also another side-benedits for apple:
- on older iphones this design probably wont render so well or fast (I guess require modern iphone with raytracing functionality) -> people need to buy new iphones
- put wrench into those cross-platform apps like flutter, capacitor to make their apps feel off.
> If they sit around 8 hours a day, they end up changing something or the other to justify their existence
I've seen this - it's not limited to designers, I've also business stakeholders with limited scope pushing for meaningless changes and revamps. The incentives to absolutely find something to do are too great. No one in higher management ever wants to hear that everything is fine and that we should do nothing. You'll be instantly booted saying that for lacking ambition and vision even if you're right. There should always be the next thing. As part of the tech industry earning a salary you always need to sell "something" internally.
this++
We need more UX that people can "settle into" instead of the constant assault of superficial change that drains energy from everyone's ongoing effort to adapt to exponentially increasing fundamental change!
This is why UX teams should be data-driven. Do user research and A/B testing to hone your UI.
uhm, maybe no... data-drive in UX means sliding towards the lowest common denominator, optimizing at first for the dumbest user, then later giving in to dark patterns and quasi-scamming
there's room for creativity in UX, lots, just not at the "how does the texture of a button feel and flow" - need to move HIGHER level, towards eg thinking of experience minimizing cognitive load, increasing synergy and augmentation ppotential etc etc ...the ceiling is waaaay higher than most UX ppl think
Bad designers are like bad engineers. Seeking interesting things to do rather than serving the audience. Honestly, can't blame them either. They want to enjoy life not make profits.
Really good designers exist and are about as rare as good engineers.
I don't fully disagree but this is not the root of the cause.
If I'm being employed to create bad product (bad UI) then I'm bad at my job.
Everything single decision should have a rational about it. You should fix what is broken, improve what can be improved and certainly not doing feng shui changes.
TL;DR: It's a management issue.
Some Windows Vista designer is shedding a tear right now. Got such a huge nostalgia hit watching the "liquid glass" demos during the keynote. Installing a leaked "Longhorn" OS on a PC back in 2005 and seeing all the translucent refractive glass really felt magical and futuristic. 20 years later, everything old is new again.
The 'win32' way, layers.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/winmsg/windo...
That's exactly what I thought. Look, they invented Windows Aero. Bet the John Gruber types who laughed at Aero and called it an Aqua ripoff are going full "two soyjaks pointing meme" over this.
Was Aero trying to look like Quartz? The big improvement I see is that the plumbing has better integration and with Continuity it's really impressive. Even if it looks like Aero the functionality the OS is providing is the real feature.
Aero wasn't trying to look like Aqua. Steve Jobs would have launched a devastating hypercombo of legal action if it were. But it was clearly a response to Aqua: use 3D acceleration to provide fancy effects and shiny widgets. The previous release, Windows XP, still did everything with lines, solid-fill rects, and blitted bitmaps and was starting to look long in the tooth compared to Mac OS X.
I stopped working with windows after 3.11, NT4. I was referring to the transparency/layer aspects.
On top of wasting GPU cycles, such low-contrast graphics are terrible for older users. The Apple Music navbar is hilariously unreadable and distracting.
Accessibility -> Display -> Reduce Transparency?
Basic visibility should be the default, most people never change their settings.
The URL bar at 02:11 in the video looks awful, with all the background shining through making the text hard to read from a distance. This is sort of hidden by the video having 3x zoom, making the text thicker, but unless they tweak the transparency it's gonna be a real visual mess on a real device.
Awesome I wasn't having enough trouble figuring out what I could tap and not now everything has this crappy distorted look.
Apple's new video presentation style is so cloying, it really didn't help with the letdown this software is.
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Apple claiming that Liquid Glass is a technique only Apple can achieve, will be replicated, or at least indistinguishably replicated, in pure CSS... within 48 hours of today, out of spite
It's just a shader, so maybe not in pure CSS, but you could probably achive something like that in WebGL.
About "only Apple can achive that": It would be pretty simple for MS to do something like this in Windows. DirectComposition (or whatever it is called nowadays) could set the appropriate shader when drawing windows. You cannot do it as a normal user, because you can only pick from a select set of backdrop shaders (but if some hacker wants a challenge, you could inject the code into dwm.exe to do so :-)).
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> conflict provoking comment
> irrelevant time-wasting demand
It simply doesn't feel like an HN thread until someone gets insecure enough to berate non-sequitur Open Source projects, does it? When I browse the rest of the web, I always end up missing HN's iconic Jungian groupthink. You lot tend to shoot yourself in the foot before anyone even notices you're drawing a gun.
Oh god this looks like a horrible, visually indistinct mess.
That video. This is why I can't take Apple, and, sorry, many of their fans, seriously.
Liquid glass is gorgeous. But it's hard to reconcile next level design like this with complete disasters like Apple TV. Maybe spend some time on getting the fundamentals right too, before inventing the future
Why do you view Apple TV as a disaster? I don't own any Apple devices other than an Apple TV, since IMO it's better than basically all of the alternatives: it has no ads and it's extremely fast.
* […] it has no ads and it's extremely fast.
See recent "Breaking down why Apple TVs are privacy advocates’ go-to streaming device":
* https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/06/all-the-ways-apple-t...
I always find this take amusing, because there are ads. They're just for Apple services and they do a better job of blending in.
Case in point, the largest screen in the lead image in the linked article does nothing to showcase this new UI, but it does promote Fountain of Youth, a show on Apple TV.
That's awfully pedantic, though. In practice the answer to "does it have ads" for what most people mean by that question is "no."
These are ads. How much money would Paramount+ pay to have such a “preview” shown to Apple TV users? Whatever this number is it is certainly much larger than $0. Therefore it is an ad.
No, not quite. "Content previews", not "ads". A distinction with a difference.
When you 'hover' over an app on an Apple's tvOS, the app populates that preview section with whatever content it wants. In the linked article's screenshot, the Apple TV app is being hovered over, so the 'preview' section is populated with content from Apple TV.
If the user swiped right, to hover over the Arcade app, that preview would change to show some Arcade game. Hover over Netflix, Max, Hulu, Spotify apps, and you'll get content previews from them.
So yes, they are "ads", in a hyper-literal sense, but not strictly, not facilitated by the operating system, and not in any way that matters.
Product placement in movies and tv shows are ads. Product placement on Apple TV are ads. Previews for new movies at a movie theater are ads. We live in a society where filling up your car with gas subjects you to ads. They are everywhere. We are so inundated with ads that people think what Apple does are not ads.
Okay, to fit this definition of content previews for an app when hovering on that specific app as an ad: I like that my Apple TV does not show ads for apps I don't explicitly select in the UI, unlike almost every competing device which shows intrusive ads for unrelated stuff that I haven't selected in the UI, and may not even have installed or subscribed to. (I also like that it's the lowest latency streaming box.)
Apple TV is AFAIK the best device in its category.
I also think your definition is overly broad and doesn't reflect what an "ad" is. For example, if Apple cut the feature from iOS that allowed you to control your music from your lock screen, Spotify would also be willing to pay Apple to be able to control specifically Spotify from your lock screen. Does that mean "being able to control music from your lock screen" is an ad for Spotify? No. Does iOS allowing app-specific widgets on the homescreen count as ads, since if it didn't exist, companies would be willing to pay to be on people's homescreens? No, widgets are not by definition ads (even if some widgets may be ads!). Similarly, the Apple TV OS providing the ability for installed apps to show interactive app-specific UI on hover (i.e. the user has chosen to interact with this app, or has chosen it as their primary app in the OS), does not mean the OS itself has ads.
No, dude. What Apple is doing is providing an API [0] that app developers can do whatever the hell they want with. Apple is delivering ads in the same way that your web browser is (giving other people a blank canvas to draw on).
[0]: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
Apple is delivering ads
We agree then that the Apple TV has ads in it.
I get the crux of what you're saying -- the Apple TV homepage has a giant ad banner at the top; just another billboard in a world covered by them.
What I dislike about internet discussions is that we've gone back and forth over pedantic definitions of what "ads" are, rather than discussing your more interesting meta-point.
People say Apple has not innovated much lately but they’ve innovated in the advertising space. They have just enough services and products to make it worthwhile for them to covertly advertise them to their customers. They don’t feel like ads and it seems natural the way they do it. To me it is quite clever. I never noticed it until it was pointed out to me.
The OS does not have ads. Some apps can contain ads. This is in stark contrast to other streaming box OSes, which contain ads built into the OS and have apps that have ads in them.
Nobody is claiming otherwise. They’re just pointing out that this isn’t what people are asking about when they ask if it has ads. You, like GGP, are being pedantic.
Apple TV certainly has ads. It’s just that it’s ads for Apple products.
No, it doesn't. I have one. There aren't ads.
There are pre-installed apps like Apple Fitness+. When you scroll over that app the top part - maybe 1/4 of the screen - is a picture of a workout. This is an ad for Apple Fitness+. Similarly if you use the Apple TV app you’ll see an ad for Apple TV+ shows.
I don't think a preview of the app, that displays only when you select that app in the UI, really qualifies as an "ad."
If you do, I suppose what I would amend my statement to is: it doesn't show ads for apps I don't explicitly select in the UI. Either way, that's much better than most competing products... And it's incredibly fast, with the lowest latency of any streaming device.
I don't like Apple's locked ecosystem, and avoid most of their products. But the Apple TV is just head and shoulders above anything else on the market, so I own one and am quite satisfied with it.
You didn’t select to have Apple Fitness+ pre installed on the Apple TV and have placed in such a way that you will scroll over it occasionally.
They made it so almost everyone uses the Apple TV app for at least some viewing and there you get ads for Apple TV+ shows and their suggestions include shows that require a subscription to a service you may not already have. Or the suggestion will sometimes require a rental or purchase through the iTunes Store. These are ads.
I can place the Apple Fitness+ app wherever I want, and can place it last in the list such that I never scroll over it. In fact, this is exactly what I do, since I don't use it. Thus, I never see any app-specific UI from it. I don't think hovering on an app, and seeing app-specific UI from that app, is an ad; it's just app-specific UI. Some apps may use that to show ads, but that doesn't mean the OS has ads, and you are free to not use apps that do that.
I have no idea what you mean by "they made it so almost everyone uses the Apple TV app." You mean, they made an app that many people like, and that app has ads in it (but not the OS)? That doesn't mean the OS has ads.
Personally, I never use the Apple TV app: I use Netflix, Crunchyroll, HBO Max, and the Criterion Collection apps. And I never see what I would consider to be ads in the OS, and I never see content previews for apps I don't use.
There's ads for new shows and movies when you start a new Apple TV+ one, and there's ads for channels and subscriptions. You just didn't notice them?
If you mean "some apps have ads in them," that is true. What I mean is the OS doesn't have ads, unlike Google and Amazon's competing products... And unfortunately even Roku now.
You are free to never open apps that have ads in them on the Apple TV.
(If you mean: installed apps are allowed to show content previews when you hover on them in the UI — I think that's pretty different from an ad, and it's a feature I personally like, since it means I can easily resume a show I was previously watching without even having to open the app-specific UI. That's quite different from my perspective than showing ads for services and apps that I've never used, that I can't remove.)
Can you share what you don’t like about Apple TV? I have one and really like it. I very much prefer using an Apple TV over using apps built into the tv.
It's an excellent device overall, but getting content onto the device to view is frustrating. Apps like VLC can have local storage, but the OS periodically purges locally stored content inside app storage.
It’s really meant for streaming though, I play movies directly from my NAS/Jellyfin with Infuse on the ATV.
+1 for Infuse. I tried to make Plex work for me, many times over the years, and it's always been so frustrating. From needing a server that can do transcoding, to demanding that I name my files in the way it wants them to be named, it just feels so incredibly constraining.
Infuse just lets you... play a file. How novel!
Genuine question, what happened to Apple TV to make it a complete disaster? I feel like I probably missed something. (There's no good way to ask that without sounding like a fanboy, sorry haha. I just genuinely don't know.)
I'm not sure what you call it, but the "unified view" thing where you're supposed to be able to view content across providers is a complete nightmare. I'm not actually sure how I end up there -- I think it happens after I finish watching a program on AppleTV+ (oh, yeah, the naming is a disaster too). I'm not sure how I'd launch it if, for some reason, I _wanted_ to use it, and the navigation is just incredible strange.
Figuring out which elements are selected in the UI is often hard.
The trackpad on the remote is not good -- I've tried setting it to disable trackpad and click on, but then I'll inevitably find an app that needs a trackpad.
Overall I'm quite happy with the AppleTV as a device, but the UI could use quite a bit of help.
You people are funny, trying to reason about readability and distractions. Go drink your americanos in your skinny jeans (or whatever is the most recent thing falling out of fashion in favor of the next big thing).
Apple products are gonna be perceived as the icon of the beauty and usability regardless of the actual qualities. Be sure, Xiaomi and Huawei (and probably even Samsung) will try mimicking the newest Apple design language. Like it was before with crippled keyboards, enormous touchpads, glossy reflective screens, notches, etc..