Whither Liquid Glass?
Apple’s Liquid Glass redesign of all of its operating systems from iPhone to Mac may have proven divisive, and it was certainly spearheaded by Alan Dye. But there is no possibility that it will be dropped, even as Bloomberg now reports that several designers left alongside Dye when he moved to Meta.
This new report from Mark Gurman’s “Power On” newsletter says that Apple whipped out Liquid Glass as a wild card to distract from its failings in Apple Intelligence. But then in the same breath, the report also says that Liquid Glass was many years in the making.
That’s certainly what it seemed like at the time of the announcement, that it had been in the works for a while but wasn’t mature enough yet (even if you liked the concept).
Mark Gurman said the latest internal versions of iOS 27 and macOS 27 do not have major Liquid Glass design changes. He also mentioned how Apple’s new software design chief, Steve Lemay, was “a driving force” behind Liquid Glass and was “deeply involved in its development.”
I think Steve Lemay is a good guy. I kind of fought with him when I was an engineer, he was a young, new designer (at Apple). But I always respected his point of view—even when we argued.
[…]
The bigger argument I remember with Steve revolved around the drawer UI element. With regard to PDF’s, (the half of Preview that I worked on, another engineer handled images), the drawer was to display thumbnails for each page. If the PDF had a TOC (table of contents) the drawer is where we would display that as well.
So when you opened a PDF in Preview, the PDF content of course would appear in the large window—thumbnails, TOC (later search) would be relegated to a vertical strip of drawer real estate alongside the window—the user could open/close the drawer if they liked to focus perhaps on the content.
Steve Lemay insisted the drawer live on the right side of the window. This was inexplicable to me. I saw the layout of Preview as hierarchical: the left side of the content driving the right side. You click a thumbnail on the left (in the drawer) the window content on the right changes to reflect the thumbnail clicked on.
iOS 26.1 lets you choose between “Clear” and “Tinted” options for Liquid Glass, with the “Tinted” look adding more opacity to user interface elements. And with iOS 27, which is expected to be released later this year, Apple might go even further.
iOS 26.2 introduced a slider that allows you to manually adjust the opacity of Liquid Glass, but only for the Lock Screen’s clock. Starting with iOS 27, Gurman said the setting might be expanded to the entire operating system.
There’s been a lot of talk recently about Liquid Glass on MacOS, and it being an abomination (epic rant from Nilay Patel there). OK, it’s not recent, but there’s still a lot of talk and Nilay’s rant got me thinking[…] What if there was an Apperance toggle that said something along the lines of “Use the pro look and feel”, and all apps got a variant of the Sequoia UI, but spiffed up a bit more? It’s Gizmo vs. Platinum all over again.
Previously:
- Welcome (Back) to Macintosh
- 2025 Six Colors Apple Report Card
- iOS 27 “Rave” Update to Clean Up Code
- Sebastiaan de With Rejoining Apple
- Liquid Glass Disbelief
- Alan Dye Leaving Apple for Meta
- iOS 26.1
- macOS 26.1
- Liquid Glass Toggle in appleOS 26.1 Beta
- Shipping Liquid Glass
- Apple Delays “More Personalized Siri” Apple Intelligence Features
Update (2026-03-19): Rosyna Keller:
It still gets me that Apple keeps adding more switches to disable some Liquid Glass feature on iOS to placate people when it just helps Ad SDKs fingerprint you more easily.
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If Lemay was really a "driving force" behind Anal Dye's Liquid Ass and had the bright idea to make thumbnail drawers live on the right side, it inspires little confidence of a proper rollback of the insanity. Instead of a toggle to "Roll back ALL Tahoe garbage" we'll get 9 more toggles to tweak transparency and layer dumbery and no fixes for anything that matters.
The Lemay hype always felt super weird considering he'd been part of the team all along. It'd be like hailing Steve Jobs' return to CEO if he'd never left and was responsible for hundred different Performa models that were polluting the market.
Glad I’m working on selling my old Studio and haven’t upgraded my laptop yet. My experiments with switching to Linux have been going great. I have yet to find a single desktop environment that is as bad as current macOS.
At this rate, I’m going to be switching my laptop over to Linux as well eventually and not have any more Macs. Though, I don’t think I’ll be able to get my family off of them, so maybe more of a pipe dream.
Apple leaking "no changes to the most hated interface of the last 20 years" through Gurman is a bad omen.
Lemay described as "a driving force" behind Liquid Ass is a death knell.
The awful state of macOS is a fixable problem (with years of effort). macOS becoming a locked-down "console" + Apple not being able to recognize gold from garbage (and pushing more garbage like LA) is what's driving me away.
It always seemed preposterous and naive to me that one person leaving Apple would somehow signal that they were going to reverse the ship and start fixing these design problems. Obviously the problems at Apple are far, far deeper than that. I think it would take exactly the right kind of monumental shakeup of the entire company to get things back to the quality they were at 15 years ago, and I'm not holding my breath.
I managed to dodge the horrible touch bar Macs by getting the one model that didn't have one, and sticking with it until the M1 came out.
Was hoping I could just stay away until Glass is removed.
That says alot about how well my M1 holds up.
I have to say, I don't find Liquid Glass to be much of an issue. The main thing is to avoid most Apple apps and the worst offenders among third-party apps, but I realized that most of the apps I use are built on Electron or similar tech stacks that aren't affected by Liquid Glass at all.
The main thing is that Finder has become atrocious, but I just use Bloom instead.
Apple's developer-hostile behavior is showing its advantages. Most devs just don't use Apple's offerings at all and thus aren't affected by Liquid Glass's insanities.
The only annoying thing I notice regularly is the app switcher's stupid refraction effects. Depending on what is behind the switcher, it looks extremely confusing.
@gildarts "I have yet to find a single desktop environment that is as bad as current macOS."
Have you tried Windows 11?
@Doodpants: every single day. When did Windows become a Linux distribution?
But that said, yes, I’d say that Windows 11 is better than macOS for basic productivity at this point. It doesn’t constantly interrupt me with useless permissions prompts for one thing. Also, at least Windows fixed their stupid transparency problems rather than adding more.
@Plume
> The main thing is that Finder has become atrocious, but I just use Bloom instead.
Oh, I hadn't seen that one before - looks nice. Much appreciated.
Hey, we should all buy MacBook Neos and then return them, claiming that macOS 26 is unusable. That’ll teach ’em. Unfortunately, just like the last time I called on everyone to buy an Xserve for their parents and grandparents, nobody followed through and the product was discontinued.
I am only joking, mostly because it’s so tragic that we don’t have a lobby. For every person who still deeply cares about the platform, there are (1) thousands of users who never complain since they only really use Chrome and Office, and (2) hundreds of Apple engineers who grew up in a different era and simply do not share our sensibilities.
There was a three-hour SwiftUI live event on YouTube about a month ago. The culture within Apple has shifted so much that even when they attempt a live format, very little remains of the human element that made sessions like for example “What’s New in Cocoa” at WWDC 2006 have some kind of, I don’t know, soul?
I admit I skipped through a lot of that recorded SwiftUI event, but did anyone actually find a single live demo of what they were discussing on stage? For me, born in the 70s, the high production value is actually depressing and drives me out.
There is a Q&A session with Apple engineers at the end, but it turns out to be just them interviewing each other. They actually ended by sharing their upcoming vacation plans. I’m not kidding. The soulful part of Apple has become mechanical. It’s just a tone-deaf thing they’ve inserted at the end of a bone-dry presentation to end on a high note.
I also found out today that if you tap with three fingers while editing text in iOS 18, it brings up a toolbar for undoing, redoing, cutting, copying, and pasting.
See what I did there? ;)
