{"id":51262,"date":"2026-03-17T14:42:26","date_gmt":"2026-03-17T18:42:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=51262"},"modified":"2026-03-19T10:52:11","modified_gmt":"2026-03-19T14:52:11","slug":"whither-liquid-glass","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2026\/03\/17\/whither-liquid-glass\/","title":{"rendered":"Whither Liquid Glass?"},"content":{"rendered":"

William Gallagher<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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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<\/a>. But there is no possibility that it will be dropped, even as Bloomberg<\/em> now reports<\/a> that several designers left alongside Dye when he moved to Meta.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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).<\/p>\n\n

Joe Rossignol<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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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.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

John Calhoun<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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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.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

The bigger argument I remember with Steve revolved around the drawer<\/i> UI element. With regard to PDF’s, (the half of Preview<\/i> 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/i> real estate alongside the window—the user could open\/close the drawer if they liked to focus perhaps on the content.<\/p>\n

Steve Lemay insisted the drawer live on the right side of the window. This was inexplicable to me. I saw the layout of Preview<\/i> 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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Joe Rossignol<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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iOS 26.1 lets you choose between “Clear” and “Tinted” options<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

iOS 26.2 introduced a slider<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Gus Mueller<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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There’s been a lot of talk recently about Liquid Glass on MacOS, and it being an abomination<\/a> (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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n