Liquid Glass 27 Slider

"If you want to support macOS Sequoia, you’re now going to have to support three different UI styles. If you want to skip the macOS 26 version of Liquid Glass, you’re going to have to drop support for users on Intel Macs. It’s a no-win situation."

Eletron devs laughing all the way to the bank.

@Plume Exactly.

If I build a website, it can look and feel as I intend. I can lock and self-host my dependencies to prevent breakage. It would not be subject to the whims of another company with awful design taste that regularly breaks things. I can have finality and move on to produce other things.

If I build an app using Apple's stack, I'm in for a wild ride. Readability will be deprioritized by designers getting paid mid 6-figures who think UI is fashion. What works one year might require weeks of effort to keep running the next year. If I use SwiftUI, I'll live like an always on-call sysadmin, waiting for an unannounced point update to break my work in subtle or obvious ways. There's no finality -- you lose your time and sanity to constant upkeep.

--

If you're stuck doing Apple dev, I think the move is: completely ignore macOS 26 users. They can upgrade to 15 or 27.

Quoting Hartley Charlton from Michael's post:

>Apple said it has heard user feedback, which it “deeply appreciates,” and is now making adjustments to the underlying foundations of how Liquid Glass is constructed.

I'm not a developer or in tech. And I apologize if this reads like sarcasm or cynicism—I don't think we need more of those. What's the point of beta releases if not to get feedback and act on it? Why does this seem like Apple only responded to feedback after the official release? Is this another shortcoming of the yearly release schedule, that there isn't enough time for fixing anything more substantial than bugs? Something else?

@NaOH... "Is this another shortcoming of the yearly release schedule, that there isn't enough time for fixing anything more substantial than bugs?"

You forgot one thing - *after* 26.0 ws released (and for macOS that meant releasing a month earlier than usual) they had *eleven* more releases (including dot-dot releases) over the next 9 months. The only annual release is (likely) next September, whether it's ready or not.

"You forgot one thing...."

Bad writing on my part, Dave. Sorry. I should have written, Is this another shortcoming of the yearly release schedule, that there isn't enough time during the beta period for fixing anything more substantial than bugs?

@Kyle Howells:

"Design is making a choice, weighing the options and picking the best option."

This is the most toxic attitude to come from the Ive era, that designers should be opinionated, that they make choices they force everyone else to live with.

Utter nonsense.

Design *for a product* is about making the thing THE USER wants to use. It's not a freaking temple to your magnificence as a designer, it's a *tool* that different, diverse people will need to use in different, diverse ways.

These freaking design NAZIs with their glorious master race idea of universal perfection for a single universally perfect user are a nightmare.

Building systems with the inherent flexibility to be adjusted TO everyone BY anyone is what a designer is supposed to do. The DESIGN is in the system of flexibility, not the visual look.

This is what decades of hollowing out the design education pipeline (seen first hand teaching) does.

"These freaking design NAZIs with their glorious master race idea of universal perfection for a single universally perfect user are a nightmare."

Wow, someone woke up swinging today. I have a lot of complaints about Ive and Apple's designers, but genocide ain't one of 'em.

It's pretty obvious that there are some things designers should decide, and others that users should be able to configure. It's also pretty obvious that a slider that you have to turn up to make text readable falls squarely in the "designers should get this right" category.

Otherwise, this wouldn't be the world's only operating system with this setting.

@Plume

Hey, I'm Someone, not someone. ;)

And I was more referring to the disturbing purity obsession that has become a staple of design culture. People like Ive - Albert Speer, for example, are why what happened, happened. Creative types, overly certain in the rightness of their cause, and the correctness of their decisions.

I find it particularly annoying that people like Steve Troughton-Smith are out there talking about how this is just like Aqua when Aqua was a far superior design system. The new system is still lacking in taste and affordances and still prioritizes how it looks over how it works.
It feels like a lot of people just look at a design and if it has vague visual similarity they declare it the same without looking at all the ways the design system is still broken.

Apple getting rid of persistent scrollbars and no longer designing as if anyone has them turned on is a bad thing.
It's frustrating on phones where Apple set the trend and now it's hard to use scroll bars to rapidly move around large scrollviews. Scroll bars offer a useful control AND an affordance to tell you how long a page is and where you are in the document/page. It's annoying on desktop where you always have to reenable it and they don't design for it much anymore so they don't really look good anymore.

Why are buttons in toolbars in circle jail? Toolbars are already providing clear separation between content and controls, buttons don't need to be inside of circles. If you make toolbars opaque you can even add more colour and detail to your icons to make them easier to use.

It doesn't bode well that the good news everyone seems to happy to get is that Apple reversed *some* of the wrong decisions they made in their last OS releases, as though that's the best we can come to expect from them now: occasionally things get better but stay worse overall compared to several years ago.

This OS is looking like it may be better than Tahoe, but it's still worse than Sequoia, which was worse than Sonoma, and so on (except maybe Big Sur -- that was definitely a local minimum). But that whole era of macOS is still much, much worse than the 10.11-10.14 era.

@Benjamin

"Show Scroll Bars: Always" still exists in System Settings. Naturally, System Settings, the SlopUI posterchild, gets it wrong when you switch to it (its sidebar grows in width). But I wouldn't expect any less from a SlopUI app.

Capsule style toolbar groups have existed since 10.5 as a means to group together related toolbar items, but I agree there's a lot of unnecessary lines around things now which creates visual noise.

The dumbest thing is Toolbar items are cartoonishly large compared to everything else (like 40 points tall). Even in "NuApps" that combine the titlebar and toolbar, it looks stupid to have Toolbar items cartoonishly large next to normal-sized Window close buttons and the rest of the UI under it (scope bars, etc.). The old metrics looked better and preserved information density.

I agree with the general sentiment that iOS largely regressed macOS. Think of all the recent Apple hires whose first OS was iOS. They should be banned from touching macOS. Any tickets they file related to UI/UX should go straight to the trash.

@Bri

Agreed that things are regressing. It's not as ugly and stupid as Tahoe, but it's still a downgrade from what we had. Sometimes I wonder if Liquid Ass was a planned distraction from 3 straight years of AI failure during a bubble in which Apple achieved nothing.

@Hammer
I actually have that turned on at all times. It should be the default and iOS needs the same setting.

Capsule style groups weren't really common in all apps, and it was a bad decision when they did it to the finder, mail, etc... it just adds visual noise in most cases and reduces the space available for app icons. Pages 09 is still the gold standard for good toolbar design for example.

The toolbar icons should be larger than the window capsule buttons because they should be in a separate row. Window titles aren't just a pointless waist of space, they provide a clean drag handle, a place for an informative title that gives you clear place/document information. A titlebar also leaves far more room available for toolbars to show more controls.

@Hammer

I'll relate a story I've seen about "show scrollbars: always".

When Apple had iBooks for Mac as a part of the eBook proofing workflow, you could plug in an iOS device, and iBooks on he Mac would push the unencoded (zip compressed) directory to device as a "proof", and then it would live update on device as you worked on the files on the Mac.

There was a dropdown menubutton that listed all the iOS devices plugged in, so you could choose which one the proof was directed towards.

If you had scrollbars set to "always", the width of the permanent scrollbar caused the row entries for the devices to break to below the visible (and scrollable) bounds of the menulet popup, because their sizes were all hard coded to the full width of the menulet popup.

@Jesper +1

@Someone "idea of universal perfection for a single universally perfect user are a nightmare" - correct, especially when the universally perfect (arbitrary) concept gets scrapped for next year's universally perfect (arbitrary) concept.

@hammer: "If you're stuck doing Apple dev, I think the move is: completely ignore macOS 26 users. They can upgrade to 15 or 27."

No they can't, if they are still running Intel Macs.

I think the move is just keep with the Sequoia design until 28 is out.