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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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!
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?
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.
So, the design language of 2025+ is wobbly "organic" 3D'ishly morphing UI elements, either translucent or not. Surely it was hard work after engineering round-cornered windows and centered taskbars. Can't wait to see the future innovations of these $1T+ companies.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 one possible elegant and esthetically pleasing solution to keeping readability/visibility as high as possible while allowing dark/light modes AND complex backgrounds. It has the advantage of having the exact same visibility properties in both modes, no matter what you have as background. The downside... well everything is blurry and glassy.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
...funny how it coincides with the Android 16 release. now that Android has the same UI as Apple... the replication is complete and Apple has to differentiate itself again.
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).
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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...
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).
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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..
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
On top of wasting GPU cycles, such low-contrast graphics are terrible for older users. The Apple Music navbar is hilariously unreadable and distracting.
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
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
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..
Apple introduces a universal design across platforms
(apple.com)728 points by meetpateltech 9 June 2025 | 1184 comments
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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.
As for accessibility… It’s hell. Have a look: https://imgur.com/a/6ZTCStC
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.
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"
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
This blog's prediction got remarkably close. I've been a sucker for glass UI since the first Longhorn (later Vista) screenshots.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
But I’ll probably get used to it.
(https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frutiger_Aero)
This is the kind of design that does great in a 15 minute user test, but is annoying 2 months on.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_(user_interface)
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.
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.
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!
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 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?
Which is just going to make people try even harder.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Looking_Glass
Liquid Glass looks a lot like coming up with changes for the sake of them.
We completely ignored all the things you actually wanted and did this instead.
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.
- https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/06/apple-introduces-a-de...
- https://m3.material.io/blog/building-with-m3-expressive
- https://fluent2.microsoft.design/design-principles
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.
Apple really isn't what it once was, this is embarrassing.
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.
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.
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.
AirTags are still holding me in Apple ecosystem but now Androids have their own tracking thingies, maybe it's time.
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.
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.
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.
But instead we got this.
Does this how a massively large and rich company's intellectual bankruptcy begin?
but it definitely takes me back to endlessly tweaking with linux mint skins in my college dorm.
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.
Is there a reason only Apple can achieve this look, or is it just marketing crap?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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).
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.
The browser navigation overlaps the viewport. I wonder if this'll break websites/apps that anchor a menu to the bottom.
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.
p.s. If you like Aqua, you might enjoy playing around this open source glass rendering CSS library: https://www.specularcss.org/#materials/glass
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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?
p.s. If you like Aqua, you might like this open source glass rendering CSS library: https://www.specularcss.org/#materials/glass
We’ve had books/scrolls for thousands of years, laid out in beautiful proportion, and now it has all melted in the oven!
Absolutely nothing interesting or innovative on the horizon, besides AI snake oil that they apparently just can't get right...
End stage big tech.
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.
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.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/@microsoftdesign/videos
I guess this is more of the same? Some pretty picture can shine through at you because... pretty?
This looks far more complex and something almost like real time ray tracing.
That's something that would have been VERY doable for them on the iPhone/iPad, too.
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.
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.
I guess we will have to wait for State of Union.
Maybe this is the start of replacing macOS with some form of iPadOS experience in the medium to long term.
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.
I hope the funky animated time can be disabled and I can still open the camera.
Without all that glassy thing. A neutral consistent flat design without too many shades.
You know..., like Material design?
Grrr...
Hard to tell for sure until you have hands on though.
Makes everything harder to read, far more expensive on your battery. No benefits.
WTF.
That's the final nail in the coffin for me.
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?
Still rocking a budget Android though ... don't see a reason to change.
Bumping from iOS 18 / macOS 15 etc. towards year-based naming, nice. I wish more projects followed this.
But why would a slider button suddenly become translucent when you move it? Awful.
Apple designers: Please copy wobbly windows too.
What is the purpose of text in a screen?
Does something really help that purpose? Anything that does not is WRONG.
Did Apple learn nothing from Windwos Vista and Compiz?
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."
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
Both new UIs look truly awful, and seem like accessibility nightmares. I will continue enthusiastically disabling animations.
Stunningly beautiful.
But maybe on the desktop you can see them if you use a mouse.
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.
"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
Perhaps human should be less obsessed in twisting nature to serve our comfort, and just adapt ourselves more to what nature provides.
God this marketing copy is sickening
Literally who wrote this, and who did they write it for??
The glass stuff I am meh on but let’s see it in practice.
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.
Looks like shit.
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.
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.
"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."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44103131#44105292
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..