Assorted Notes on Liquid Glass
I’ve been trying to make sense of Apple’s latest user-interface redesign — Apple calls it Liquid Glass — that will affect all their platforms in the next iteration of their respective OS versions. But it’s hard to make sense of it when, after checking Apple’s own guidance, I’m mostly left with the feeling that at Apple they’re making things up as they go.
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Now take a look at the area I’ve highlighted in the image. Why would you want to “focus on the underlying content” here? Tab bars and toolbars still cover the underlying content, and the more transparent/translucent they are, the worse. When something fades to the background, it literally ceases to be in the foreground, so there’s no point in focusing on it. This is like proposing an interface that helps you focus your sight on your peripheral vision.
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Another thing that irks me about this obsession with icon simplification is that when you abstract things this much, you dilute their meaning instead of distilling it. Take the progressive degradation of the Dictionary icon, for example. In its subsequent iterations (as soon as it loses the ‘book’ shape), it could just be the icon for a font managing app. Because it ends up losing a lot (if not all) of its uniqueness.
People really expected Apple to shift back toward the kinds of things that made us all fall in love with their platforms and products to begin with. […] But the pendulum never swung back. Instead, we got Liquid Glass.
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And so it seems to me that the people who spearheaded both iOS 7 (2013) and iOS 26 (2025) either did not understand that the visually-rich style from 2001–2013 played such a significant role in Apple’s success or they simply did not care that it did.
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Yet as years go by, we seem to lose more of OS X’s good things. Year after year, draggable borders and frames became thinner until they disappeared. Scrollbars vanished. Stronger contrast softened. We lost the visually rich design in applications and icons. And now, we’ve even lost the ability to make unique icon silhouettes that Apple once specifically retained when introducing the iOS 7 aesthetic to macOS because that was a distinct element of its heritage.
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It’s asking a lot. For almost nothing in return. I keep looking at all the changes Liquid Glass brings, and I cannot find one instance where it has markedly improved the experience in any way.
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But what I am now absolutely sure of is that if the last decade represents Alan Dye’s vision for this platform, then I disagree with it. I don’t trust this direction. I didn’t need the last ten years to see that, but I’m disappointed that in ten years he still doesn’t see it.
In the past, technology used to be my coping space. A place for a knowledge worker like me to nerd about his tools and related passions — user interfaces, UI/UX design, typography, etc. And if I have developed these passions and interest is largely because of Apple. Apple had a huge impact on my life ever since I started using their computers. I carried out my apprenticeship in Desktop Publishing on a workstation that was comprised of a Macintosh SE, a Bernoulli Box external drive, and a LaserWriter printer back in 1989. I’ve always appreciated the care and attention to detail Apple put in their hardware design but also in their UI design.
But it’s true — something important died with Steve Jobs. He was really Apple’s kernel, for better and for… less better. This Apple has been dismantling Mac OS, as if it’s a foreign tool to them. They’ve bashed its UI around. And they seem to have done that not for the purpose of improving it, but simply for the purpose of changing it; adapting it to their (mostly misguided) idea of unifying the interface of different devices to bring it down to the simplest common denominator.
Well I think it is very clear that Apple does not believe there are new ideas to be had. This is a much deeper discussion, but to me all of their actions are representative of a company that believes technology is “mature” and all that is left to do, at best, is polish. Setting aside whether one agrees with Apple’s decisions/taste/whatever, I think it is not up for discussion that while these changes may be disruptive, they are not, nor are intended to be, “transformative”.
Baked into the explanation that Liquid Glass “frees your content from the tyranny of the UI” is the inescapable admission that you have determined that the highest priority item left for iOS is to “return roughly 40px of screen real estate, or 3% of the vertical space of an iPhone, to users”. That is the important part here. Not whether LG does or doesn’t deliver, but rather that Apple did not find, and thus does not believe there exists, anything more interesting to do in all of 2025.
Also, there are bugs that have been around for more than six years (I was still working when I reported them) that they could have been fixing, but those don’t even get looked at. They’re too busy making new bugs instead.
Previously:
- Roundrect Dictator
- macOS Tahoe 26 Developer Beta 2
- iOS 26 Developer Beta 2
- Liquid Glass
- The macOS App Icon Book
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Sometimes I think I’m too cynical. But like paranoia, I suppose it’s not cynicism if their motivations really are self serving.
This seems like it will wind up being a lateral movement at best, talk about shuffling deck chairs. They have tons of real issues right now but they chose to further alienate their developers.
So that Alan Dye can make everything look like Vision Pro. And Tim Cook is too busy chasing Hollywood celebrities to stop him.
Saying Liquid Glass "frees your content from the tyranny of the UI" has a subtle, icky message in there. Besides the blandness of the word "content", it feels like they're trying to take power away from the end users (the UI is what empowers us to interact with and control our devices) and focus on consuming more unending shlock from Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
If anything, for many of us who have been with Macs for 30+ years -- or even only since OS X debuted -- seeing Apple slaughter the UI for no apparent reason other than change for the sake of change is just... very depressing.
It doesn't help that they really have no competition in the desktop space for a better UI.
Translucency and most animations don't help make the UI better AT ALL.
I feel like Apple is trying to turn its platform's UI into the type of bullshit that you see in sci-fi films.
Sometimes I wonder if Apple execs just use their computers to look at wallpaper and get mad whenever a computer part of the computer’s interface gets in the way.
Within Apple one camp delivers embedded exclaves running on a variant of L4. The other drives macOS UI inexorably closer to iPadOS’s. I am beginning to wonder if the Car project, or other large internal projects with little to no traction, drained away too many resources. Leaving a part of Apple, originally contributing very much to products success, apparently on the self destructive path of recycling former glories. Liquid glass as a twisted Aqua.
After working with it for a couple of weeks on iOS I feel that they’ve done some really simple clever changes that enable much better consistency across apps (lets ignore concentricity and glass effects for a moment). The reality is that their hardware is so much better that we have to roll with the software punches however stunning they may be.
@Name
We don’t though, I am personally rejecting the liquid glass aesthetic in all the apps I work on because it is such an enormous regression in terms of usability.
I was already rolling my own sidebars to avoid the muddy mess that is the one that can be printed with desktop wallpapers (which makes coloured distinct icons difficult to implement).
I guess now I’ll roll my own tab bars and tool bars too.
Honestly if I could turn off the stupid dynamic shrinking away the UI in safari when I scroll I’d do that too.
UI shouldn’t move when i am trying to use it and I don’t need the now playing controls to get even smaller just to show me less than an album or one more song.
Even with the nav bar, now playing bat and tab bar I can still see more rows than I could back in the iPhone 5 days…
