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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.

This is also likely a performance nightmare. Funny that they mention that "new hardware has enabled us to..." which means that this will perform poorly on old devices.

At a previous company, we were forbidden from using translucency (with a few exceptions) because of the performance cost of blending. There are debugging tools we'd use fairly often to confirm that all layers were opaque.

Unlikely. Frosted glass blur was introduced almost twelve years ago in iOS 7, and was supported all the way down to the iPhone 4. Many apps like control center have used a full screen blur without any performance issues for a long time.

Apple at the time created their own 'approximate gaussian blur' algorithm specifically to enable this, and it ran crazy fast on devices where a simple gaussian blur would barely achieve double digit FPS. Even if this 'liquid glass' effect is heavier to compute, on the hardware we have today it will be a negligible performance concern.

> Unlikely. Frosted glass blur was introduced almost twelve years ago in iOS 7, and was supported all the way down to the iPhone 4. Many apps like control center have used a full screen blur without any performance issues for a long time.

"Without any performance issues"? Entirely false - reviews at the time noted iOS 7 dramatically reduced battery life - all across the board for Apple devices, even for the then latest iPhone 5S and 5c (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/09/ios-7-thoroughly-rev...).

The abuse of transparency/translucency in the UI was the primary reason - you could go to Accessibility settings and disable animations + transparency/translucency and get notable increases in both runtime speed of the OS UI and battery life.

Memory unlocked: the awful slog that was an iPhone 4S with iOS >= 7.

Indeed, I remember the switch to iOS 7, for me battery life seemed to get slightly worse but there were conflicting opinions at the time. It's fresh in my memory as it was around the same time I binged on all five seasons of Breaking Bad :)

I's also true that iOS 7 made the 4/4S seem much slower, but the frosted glass effect still ran at 60FPS - that was my point. It was really impressive at the time. Though unless you spent hours sliding the control center up and down, it's hard to blame the blur effect for the reduced battery life, as it rarely appeared inside apps. Most likely the result of increased OS bloat and proliferation of background services.

You can’t judge battery life and performance off a .0 release when the priority is on delivering features with the minimum number of showstopper bugs. At least wait until the .1.

It has been like this for every Apple release for over 20 years.

Maybe for "Apple", but there's one team that takes performance seriously. The WebKit team has a zero tolerance policy for performance regressions (https://webkit.org/performance/) dating back to the implementation of the Page Load Test in 2002 (Creative Selection, p. 93).

WebKit sounds like the kind of scrappy startup Apple might want to acquire and gain some hard-earned engineering knowledge.

>The WebKit team has a zero tolerance policy for performance regressions

But apparently they still welcome app-crashing bugs and UI-stalling code!

WebKit is the only browser that lags when there is too much logs in devtools console on my M1 mac... Pretty funny.

If Apple has been shipping betas for 2 decades that do not meaningfully prepare the release candidate for users, something is horribly wrong. They're either not listening to the feedback they receive or they're not giving themselves enough time; both are firmly within Apple's control.

Well, firstly, this is a developer beta. So the target audience are developers that want to get a head start on getting their app(s) ready. So measuring battery performance of those dev betas is dumb.

Also, they do listen to feedback and do gather it. They won't change entire design language now tho.

The parent comment wasn't talking about the developer beta, they were talking about the .0 release. They should use the release candidates as an opportunity to dogfood new solutions instead of shipping an MVP to prod.

Poor performance of a GUI is a showstopper bug. It should be, anyway.

> number of showstopper bugs

Screwing with the battery life on a mobile device would be a showstopper bug if Steve were still around.

Maybe we should stop accepting this?

This isn't just a gaussian blur though, there's raytracing and refractions happening. The OS is becoming a low-key high-fidelity video game.

I don't usually say things are bloated but raytracing buttons is something I'd expect to be a parody...

And all of this just to make the whole UI white and generic.

I just want everything to look like Windows XP. I don't get it.

It’s almost certain to be a fairly cheap thing, at least for a GPU that can sling pixels at the gigabytes per second necessary to get smooth touch scrolling at these screen resolutions.

The demos only show a very limited array of shapes. Precompute the refraction, store the result in a texture, and the gist should be sample(blur(background), sample(refraction, point)). Probably a bit more complicated than this—I’m no magician of the kind that’s needed to devise cheap graphics tricks like this—but the computational effort should be in that ballpark. Compared to on-device language models and such, I wouldn’t be worried.

(Also, do I need to remind you of the absolute disdain directed by 95/98/Me/2000 users at the “toy” default theme of XP? And it was a bit silly, to be honest. It’s just that major software outfits don’t dare to be silly anymore, and that way lies blandness.)

> It’s just that major software outfits don’t dare to be silly anymore, and that way lies blandness

Great observation! We need some of that sillyness back. Everything is all serious and corporate nowadays, even 'fun' stuff like social media or games. Even movies can't be silly anymore.

Not sure about 'serious and corporate', the big corps like to appear cute, folksy etc. and recently we even saw new Google Material Design advertised as judged more "rebellious" by focus groups. Maybe bland and toothless is just a general direction of contemporary culture and style that they follow.

Myself, I can appreciate corporate stuff presenting corporate. More truthful, feels a little less manipulative.

>It’s almost certain to be a fairly cheap thing, at least for a GPU that can sling pixels at the gigabytes per second

Okay, but what about the battery connected to the GPU? The battery in my iPhone has already degraded below 80% health in the 2.7 years I've had it, so I'd rather not waste its charge on low-contrast glass effects.

You’ll be able to turn them off with “reduce transparency” setting like you’ve been able to since iOS 7

the Winamp GUI and skins are "silly". This is just boring and bland.

> And all of this just to make the whole UI white and generic.

3:30–3:45 in the video is painful. Describing “giving you an entirely new way, to personalise your experience”, while showing… white. White white white. Oh, and light tinted backgrounds to set your white on. I hope the personalisation you wanted was white.

My conspiracy theory is that dark/light theme was invented by companies to keep users from asking for full customization.

We used to have such customisation, then it kinda went away for a while because it was too hard and limited development, and then dark mode was hailed as a brilliant new invention.

But it is worth remembering that dark mode does actually get you some things; it’s not all bad: the restrictions do have some value.

Full customisation became paradoxically limiting: when you give too much power to the user, the app is essentially operating in a hostile environment. Of course, a lot of it was laziness on app and UI framework developers’ parts, but it really did limit innovation, too.

Dark mode gets you a pair of themes that you can switch between easily, and an expectation that there are only two themes you need to consider, with well-defined characteristics. This is a much more practical target, a vastly easier sell for app and framework developers.

The funny thing with monochrome icons is that in some ways they were actually a better fit for a full-customisation environment, where you had arbitrary background and foreground colours. Once it’s just mundane light and dark themes, you could more safely have full colour in two variants.

Certainly light mode and dark mode does not mean things need to be monochrome.

Make things slow so they can sell more hardware to make it look faster?

I don’t know, just kidding :-)

If GPUs can handle it, I guess why not. It’s some people will notice and say “wow, looks pretty, glad I upgraded”

Hey now, this is Windows Vista. Get it straight!

From what I've seen,the refractions happen in predictable contexts so I suspect that they'll be able to create shaders, etc that will limit the performance hit

Ray tracing is done in shaders these days. Doesn't make it cheap.

The comment you’re replying to probably means “a shader that is a fine approximation of ray tracing (for cheap)”

I would imagine that for a known geometry of glass, you can do the ray tracing once, see where each photon ends up, and then bake that transformation into the UI. If you do this for each edge and curve your UI will produce, you can stitch them together piecewise to form UI elements of different shapes without computing everything again from scratch.

The sampling will still affect performance.

it looks like old school 2D bumpmapping to me, it's not expensive if you don't overengineer it

where do you see raytracing? it's just reading back the texture of the layer behind a bit distorted. honestly that's cheaper than a blur

Early iPhone hardware was barely keeping with rendering the UI with a total ban on transparency. Even on iPhone 4 which improved the hardware a lot had the issue that it also increased amount of pixels to be pushed around.

And yes, later iOS on early hardware was huge PITA and slowdown.

Yes! And it was frustratingly patented! https://patents.google.com/patent/US7397964B2/en

I made a comment about this a couple of years ago, but I fudged the explanation of it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34937618

I suspect that their new technique implements the existing fast gaussian blur, and since the patent is about to expire, it was a good time to spice it up.

I suspect as others have mentioned here, they use a "Liquid Glass" shader which samples the backing layer of the UI composition below the target element and applies a lens distortion based on the target element's border radius, all heavily parameterized so as to be used with the rest of the system's Liquid Glass applications like the new icon system.

iOS 7 made the iPhone 4 practically unusable.

“Supported” and “works well” ain’t the same. Do you remember how your iPhone 4 crawled when that effect was enabled?

Surely it's a performance nightmare because whatever is behind the frosting has to be rendered in full. Without this it can see that it's occluded and not have to render. Or does MacOS not do that?

Anyone who's ever written a blur shader knows that blurs aren't cheap.

> Wirth's law is an adage on computer performance which states that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law

> this will perform poorly on old devices

I don't know how long you've been following Apple but with previous "high cost on old hardware" features they just disabled them for old hardware.

Apple loves their battery life numbers, they won't purposefully ship a UI feature that meaningfully reduces them. Now bugs that drop framerates and cause hangs, they love shipping those.

> Apple loves their battery life numbers

For devices currently being sold, primarily.

Maybe in the past, but my iPhone 13 still has pretty good battery life considering the battery has physically degraded over the years. No update felt like it killed the battery.

Eh, I use an iPhone 11 that's 5.5 years old, with the original battery and to this day the battery life is not noticeably different from when it was new.

It's the first iPhone I bought and has lasted longer than any of the three Android phones I had before it.

Literally impossible for your battery life not to have degraded in 5.5 years, battery tech just degrades - my 14 Pro was noticably worse in less than a year.

Hence the use of 'noticeably', as opposed to 'measurably'. There's no point in arguing about subjective experience.

> Apple loves their battery life numbers

...under pressure of consumer protection and e-waste laws. As it should be, I hope the other phone manufacturers are experiencing the same pressure.

Windows Vista introduced this same concept. Performance was awful unless you had compatible graphics acceleration. 20 years later, I think most devices should be fine, especially Apple devices.

Vista was dogged by issues caused by migrating display drivers from NTDDM to WDDM 1.0, something that was only finished by 7 (which dropped NTDDM fully and introduced WDDM 1.1) and 8 (which afaik had mandated WDDM 1.1 only).

Unlike previous GDI acceleration, DWM.EXE could composite alpha channel quickly with the GPU, and generally achieved much higher fill rates on the same hw - if the drivers worked properly.

Yeah one of the easiest ways to make windows vista+7 perform better was to simply disable all the fancy UI graphics that add nothing. I don't care if my window title bars have a gradient and animated transparency. It's actually a bit distracting and makes the system perform worse, so I just turned it off.

Even on modern devices though which have more computation and graphics power to the point that they aren't going to actually lag or anything while rendering it, why waste cycles and battery animating these useless and distracting things? There's no good justification.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Aero

20 years later and they're building the start menu in React Native.

these performance hungry "improvements" are forcefully introduced to legitimately slow down older devices and force the device refresh across the user base.

I have been using 8 year old iPhone just fine, but features like these over time will make the experience slower and slower and slower, until I am forced to refresh my iphone

I think probably a much bigger problem is app bloat. Devs are usually using very recent if not brand new top end devices to test and develop against which naturally makes several types of performance degradation invisible to them (“works on my machine”). Users on old and/or low end devices on the other hand feel all of those degradations.

If we want to take increasing device lifetimes seriously we need to normalize testing and development against slow/old models. Even if such testing is automated, it’d do wonders for keeping bloat at bay.

More likely it's a result of pressure to ship highly visible "improvements," combined with a lack of ideas that could improve the experience in a meaningful way. What do you do in that situation? Ship an obvious UI update that wouldn't have performed on the last gen hardware.

I haven’t used the new UI, so don’t assume this to be an endorsement of it, but even if you have good ideas about UI improvements and implement them, there still is pressure to make the UI look different because that, at a glance, shows users that they get something new.

And yes, “looking different” doesn’t have to mean “requires faster hardware”, but picking something that requires faster hardware makes it less likely that you will be accused of being a copy-cat of some other product’s UI.

And you base your first sentence on…? Surely not the ol’ “my phone slows down when my battery is failing so that I’ll buy a new phone” canard?

To be clear, these are new features that will likely have a setting to turn off. There’s no conspiracy, nothing “forcefully” added for the purpose of driving upgrades. (Ah, ninja edit): There’s not even a guarantee these features will be supported on an eight year old phone. EDIT: wait a minute...your eight year old phone won't even be supported.

(EDIT: reworded first paragraph to account for the ninja edit.)

What’s the exact canard here?

It’s a legitimate concern even assuming good intent.

But Apple has had to publicly admit bad intent specifically with their batteries and had to offer people money etc.

Strange to criticize people for something Apple publicly admitted they did wrong.

Apple publicly admitted they did wrong.

When is the last time a company has admitted wrong-doing? No, Apple admitted to slowing down phones when the battery was shot so it wouldn’t just suddenly shut down.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batterygate

I adamantly believe this was the right call for Apple to make. I frequently switch between Apple and Android phones across different generations. At the time I had an aging flagship Samsung that did NOT do this. My battery indicator would say "18%" and it would last however long that implies...if I didn't do anything remotely CPU-intensive. If I did anything that boosted the CPU, the current draw caused the battery voltage to fall off a cliff and the phone would instantly shut down without warning.

The worst part was that during the boot sequence, the CPU ran at full-throttle for a few moments until the power-management components were loaded. So I couldn't restart it. As long as I didn't open a game or YouTube or a wonky website with super awful javascript, I could continue using the phone for another couple hours. But if the phone turned off, it couldn't be turned back on without charging it more ... even though it had "18%" battery left (as determined by voltage, not taking into account increased internal resistance in the battery as it ages).

I was envious of iPhone users that got a real fix for this (Apple slowing down the phone when the internal voltage got low). I would have greatly preferred that Samsung had done the same for my phone too.

I agree, it was the right call to make -- a temporarily-impaired device is always better than a temporarily-failed device, especially when you're talking about something you may need in an emergency situation.

That said, Apple _significantly_ erred in not over-communicating what they were doing. At that point, the OS would pop warnings to users if the phone had to thermal throttle, and adding a similar notification that led the user to a FAQ page explaining the battery dynamics wouldn't have been technically hard to do.

the solution to old battery is $15 replacement battery, not the $1500 replacement iPhone.

which I am doing exactly, but still new iOS version make my phone slower and slower and I cannot even opt out of updates.

because some apps are forcing me to use the latest version of iOS (Authentication, Okta 2fa, etc)

Apple provides a battery replacement program.

And you can use third parties as well which Apple now officially supports.

It is just a lie to say you need a new phone.

We don't need to carry water for greedy billionaires.

JWZ was right about us the whole time.

You can opt out of updates by not using new software. You want the best of both worlds.

the software forces me to update

That was fake, tho. They slowed down old iPhones to make you buy a new one. My iPhone 7 wasn't auto shutting down, battery health was good, but they still made it so slow it was unusable the same week they released the iPhone X.

There is literally a zero percent chance it was anything to do with batteries. This is not a conspiracy theory. It's an objective fact.

Right, yes, your anecdotal experience is totally objective fact.

They didn't admit bad intent. They admitted to doing something with good intent(the slowing was to stop crashes with near EOL batteries) but that they weren't transparent about it.

I'd much rather us have progress and people with 8 year old phones suffer than ensure that everything continues to run smoothly on any old device for eternity.

Disagree. I much preferred my phone running slightly slower to shutting down randomly. Maybe that’s just me.

I would prefer to be told that my battery is weak so I could make a decision on if I want to replace the battery, replace the phone, live with the phone shutting down randomly when battery is low, or continue with a slower phone. That's just me.

So why did they slow down iPhones that weren't shutting down randomly?

To prevent random shutdowns.

Apple absolutely effed up by not communicating the specifics well, but that’s corporate policy. Apple docs have always been targeted at the non-technical user and therefore inadequate for others.

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No matter what happens in the world someone will blame it on a top down conspiracy decided in some smoke filled back room.

But this one is true. Apple obviously puts out slowdown updates right as they release a new phone. They made my iPhone 7 unusable the same week they released the iPhone X.

Do you have some actual evidence that this is the case ?

Otherwise saying it is definitively true is misleading to put it mildly.

I'm very happy with my iPhone 13 Mini, my wife is very happy with her iPhone 12. They feel exactly the same as when bought new.

Whatever is it that you're saying that Apple does, it's either not obvious or they're shit at it.

Apple announces all iOS updates in June and releases them simultaneously with the newest iPhones in September. So you're right, but only trivially so.

Replying to you from an iPhone 7 that I use daily.

if conspiracy makes hundreds of billions $$$ then nothing stops people really.

like Charlie Munger have said: "Show me the incentives and I will tell you the outcome"

I don’t think your overall take is wrong (it’s about money), but maybe the simplicity of it is.

Reality is that designers, product managers, engineers — they all wanna build cool things, get promoted, make money etc.

You don’t do that by shipping plain designs, no matter how tried and true. The pressure to create something new and interesting is ever present. And look we have these powerful Apple silicon chips that can capably render these neat effects.

So no I don’t think it’s a shadowy conspiracy to come after your iPhone 8. Just the regular pressure of everyday men and women to build new and interesting things that will bring success.

In the late 90s/early 2000s desktop computing was moving at such a pace that an 8 year old PC was near unusable. Overtime progress slowed and its not unusual to have a decade old desktop now. The problem is thinking that mobile has slowed that much too. Mobile is still progressing quite rapidly so yeah an almost decade old device is going to feel slow.

You have what an iPhone 6? 1GB of RAM vs 8GB for modern devices, the first A chip came out 2 generations after yours as has 2% of the power of a current chip so modern chips are likely close to 100x as powerful as your phone.

Why should we hold back software to support extreme outliers like you?

> Why should we hold back software to support extreme outliers like you?

What are apps and mobile sites doing differently today besides loading up unnecessary animations and user tracking? How has user experience improved for those operating on devices fast enough to make up for developer laziness?

Games are dramatically bigger in scale and graphics quality.

I can now do on-device transcription without issue, security improvements at the chip level, HD graphics for video streaming, etc.

Right, but you choose when to play the games right ?

You can't choose when to use your OS, and you need to 'update your os' to stay secure.

if I want to play games, I will buy the latest iPhone. If I want to a smartphone with couple simple primitive apps that just send JSON and call REST APIs in the cloud, I don’t want to be forced to shell out $1500 every couple years

So trashing fine working hardware that was produced using valuable and rare resources sounds perfectly sane to you?

For what? So a designer can get a promotion? This is not progress, this is pure fashion. As if the planet being literally on fire needed more fuel.

Yes, everything has a lifetime, 10 years is a very good run for a complex piece of technology you can carry in your pocket. Send it in for recycling.

So that we can have better features and functionality in our future systems. Backwards compatibility is an anchor. If you want new things then expect to get new platforms to run them on don't expect everyone to limit their possibilities to support you.

The vast majority of things don't get recycled properly.

We are not talking about new features. Of course no one expects to run a LLM on an ten year old phone, again we are talking about fashion. It is change for change's sake. It is not providing value to users it is so the the designer gets to eat and management and shareholders are kept happy.

There is a difference between actual technical progress and you throwing out your skinny jeans because baggy pants are now in fashion.

Why shouldn't we build phones that last ten year, twenty years, or even more?

Apple offers a recycling program.

>We are not talking about new features

We are, you are just choosing to ignore them and call them fashion. There have been immense changes in capabilities over the past 10 years.

>Why shouldn't we build phones that last ten year, twenty years, or even more?

We do, dumb phones, why don't you own one of those instead of trying to limit progress in the phones pushing progress?

I am totally fine if I stop getting software updates. In general I prefer not to update software either, because every new version brings only bloat

Windows 10 keeps telling me I need to buy a new Desktop in October. I don't remember when I bought it, but it runs fine for everything I do. I've been running Linux for ages on my laptops, I be upgrading my desktop to Linux too!

Windows 10 is EOL. As a fellow internet user I'm glad Microsoft is taking a harder line these days on people running EOL software. The internet has a history of being swamped by people running EOL versions of Windows full of security issues causing problems for everyone else.

No one is holding back software. You're not running local LLM or anything useful, you're adding performance cost for merely displaying icons on screen.

No one is holding back software because they aren't being allowed. If we were forced to support decade+ old devices though software would for sure be held back.

Laggards cost society by running insecure devices that generally impact the rest of the world besides just complaining about no one continuing to support them long after the useful life of their devices.

> Laggards cost society by running insecure devices that generally impact the rest of the world

Maybe there's also a cost to updating phones as frequently as people do, and inefficient software running across billions of devices.

I wouldn't blame people who make their hardware last longer and call them "laggards". And it's not their responsibility to write security patches for their device, that falls on the manufacturer.

For these people, me included, they don't need the latest hardware features to ray trace a game or run some local LLM. We're just taking some photos, making calls, getting map navigation, messaging, interacting with CRUD apps, and web browsing. None of that requires the latest hardware, and especially Apple hardware from 8 years ago is more than capable of handling it smoothly.

Ask anyone who had to deal with supporting IE back in the day what the cost to the world is fort supporting tech laggards. They are an anchor on tech growth and a real issue.

If you're running an insecure device past it's support life it's your responsibility and your fault if it's used to attack others. You are fully to blame for choosing to use something past it's serviced life. You cannot expect companies to support old software forever.

Currently replying from my iPhone 16 pro (granted, not old by any means) on the iOS 26 dev beta. MOST things actually feel smoother/snappier than iOS 18. Safari is a joy to use from a performance perspective.

It’s in beta so ofc I’m getting a ton of frame hitches, overheating, etc. but my summarized initial thoughts are “it’ll take some getting used to, but it feels pretty fast”

How can you get overheating and better performance? Is it just using the big cores for basic OS functions now?

My guess- GPU is probably being used a ton for the blurs causing the heat but the CPU is still free allowing for snappy scrolling performance.

> MOST things actually feel smoother/snappier than iOS 18

I have a feeling the whole smooth animations thing contributes to this a lot. Obsessing about the reaction time and feeling of how stuff comes on the screen. But yeah iPhone 16 pro is probably a bad performance test case

Real test probably iPhone 12 Pro. Anecdotally, I still see a tonnn of those in the wild.

  > It’s in beta so ofc I’m getting a ton of frame hitches, overheating

Since overheating was already mentioned, I give you one guess how that affects battery life.

After using it for a couple more days, battery life hasn't really changed from 18. I'm tempted to say that it's better but I don't want to make any claims before I actually track battery life across a week and compare it to my battery life pre-update.

The overheating is a common occurrence, but it doesn't persist. It seems to be certain things (setting the animated backgrounds in iMessage is a good example), but the moment I'm not doing one of those things the temp feels fine. My battery does drop a percent or two during those cases (which sucks), but my typical use of the phone hasn't yielded any noticeable battery life loss compared to 18.5

These transparency effects have been in macOS, ipadOS, iOS, and tvOS for years though?

There's a difference between something like a transparent background (you can run i3/picom on a potato) and having to composite many little UI elements to render a frame.

I can think of a couple of creative ways to dramatically optimize rendering of these effects. There is probably quite some batching and reordering possible without affecting correctness.

Ceteris paribus your performance is always going to be substantially worse even with tons of fancy tricks. Those also get much harder to implement when you're building a complete UI toolkit that has to support a ton of stuff rather than just writing first-party apps/OS components.

I think that the batching that I have in mind would work especially well with complex layouts. The thing to realize is that even if you have tons of elements on a screen, their visual components aren't actually stacked deeply in most cases and the type and order of applied effects is quite similar for large groups of elements. This allows for pretty effective per-level batching in hierarchies, even if elements don't have the same parents.

"ceteris paribus" - "all else equal"

Right. My point is the response to this is "well if we optimize it more we'll improve performance", but oftentimes if you optimized the existing code you would also improve performance. Your end state is still worse.

Is it really worse if the GPU spends maybe 0.5ms more per frame on these effects? I'd be surprised if a good implementation adds much more to the per frame rendering time.

The consideration for mobile devices (laptops, tablets, and phones make up the bulk of apple's hardware sales) is more power consumption.

But even then it doesn't matter in practice. I dare you to measure the battery life impact of this change.

Thanks. Wasn't familiar with that latin

The reality distortion field is back, it seems.

> At a previous company, we were forbidden from using translucency (with a few exceptions) because of the performance cost of blending.

I imagine this was on mobile devices.

Blending was relatively expensive on GPUs from Imagination Technologies and their derivatives, including all Apple GPUs. This is because these GPUs had relatively weak shader processors and relied instead on dedicated hardware to sort geometry so that the shader processor had to do less work than on a traditional GPU.

Other GPUs vendors rely more on beefier shader processors and less on sorting geometry (e.g. Hierarchical-Z). This turned out to be a better approach in the long term, especially once game engines started relying on deferred shading anyway, which is in essence a software-based approach that sorts geometry first before computing the final pixel colors.

Modern iOS and Mac devices have plenty of GPU power for a shader effect. They already do one with the translucent blue.

Interestingly, in iOS 18, suppressing transparency (there’s a setting for it) makes performance worse, not better. The UI lags significantly more with transparency disabled. I expect it will be the same with iOS 26: there will be setting to reduce the transparency (which I find highly distracting) but it will make performance actually worse…

Thanks for this insight. It's very counter intuitive. Normally transparency is additional work for a GPU.

I had "Reduce Transparency" check-box in settings turned on because I distaste semit-transparent interfaces. Was not noticing performance problems except one application - Ogranics Maps which were unusably slow after switching to another app and returning to maps so I had to restart it freqently (swipe up). I was thinking that the problem is with Ogranics Maps code.

After seeing this comment re-enabled transparency (iOS default) and Ogranics Maps working fast even if I switch between Organic Maps and other apps!

It potentially only applies to older iPhones, I have an iPhone 12, what’s yours?

Also reported here for example:

https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/1d2ncvu/if_your_old...

I use iPhone SE 3rd gen, accordig to wikipedia it's on A15 Bionic SoC, newer than in iPhone 12 (A14 Bionic) but still far from the latest.

Did suppressing transparency also turn on processor throttling or something too? Like putting the device in a power saver mode?

My phone is always in power save mode. Re-enabling transparency actually made the UI less jerky. It was mostly the keyboard that became unresponsive, I could type 15-20 letters while it froze and it would then „catch up“.

Also reported here for example: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255911835

Re-enabling transparency improved this a lot, also keyboard still hangs a bit from time to time. I’m always in power save mode, on an iPhone 12, running iOS18.

> This is also likely a performance nightmare. Funny that they mention that "new hardware has enabled us to..." which means that this will perform poorly on old devices.

Not sure if it is planned obsolescence but it certainly is an upsell to upgrade.

I think brand most recent iPhones are ridiculously powerful for their average use, so I don't think this would be an issue.

For older models, on the other hand, it would be an issue, and will put pressure to people to buy a new one.

Translucency being a main feature of Mac OS X is decades old at this point. I remember a magazine article touting it as an advantage over the upcoming release of Windows XP!

> Funny that they mention that "new hardware has enabled us to..." which means that this will perform poorly on old devices.

They're going to backport this? I seriously doubt it.

It runs on iPhone 11 and later.

> At a previous company, we were forbidden from using translucency (with a few exceptions) because of the performance cost of blending. There are debugging tools we'd use fairly often to confirm that all layers were opaque.

I feel like a few years back when I still used an Intel macbook i noticed an increase in battery life and less frames dropping (like during 'Expose' animations) by disabling transparency in Accessibility settings.

I think this was after the BIg Sur update.

These modern chips have so much graphics processing capability, I think they just throw the problem at the hardware and let it do its thing.

It may not be overt, but it also seems they are working to justify the hardware with the software.

Yes, but I think it’s about giving the consumer “more” so that the upgrade train doesn’t stall out and stop moving. They need everyone upgrading iPhones every 3 years and,people won’t do that for just an abstract “it’s faster.”

This reminds me of disabling the Windows Vista translucent UI to claw back performance on my crappy Gateway laptop in uni.

Meh, Vista laptops could run lots of translucency fine (well as long as they were actualy Vista era laptops and not just XP era laptops with Vista installed)

you just proved that MSFT released slow OS to force people refresh hardware.

Plus, vista was released in 2007, XP SP2 (the most popular version) was in 2004. so its like ~3 years diff. So its not like hardware has progressed in 3 years, its more like new software got significantly slower

I don't think upgrading was the reason for Vista performance. MS wasn't in the hardware business back then (and is just a marginal player even today).

They WAY overreached in their goals with Longhorn. When they finally decided to cut back features to something actually attainable, they didn't have enough time to make a high-performance OS.

Windows 7 was a well-loved rebrand of what was essentially just a Windows Vista service pack and improved performance (though it was still too heavy for a lot of the older machines people tried to upgrade to Vista). If they'd have cut back on their goals earlier, Windows 7 is likely a lot closer to what would have shipped as Vista.

A lot of problems was simply a fight with device makers and shit drivers, to be quite honest.

Windows 7 benefited from coming later with Vista being the battleground in which vendors were forced to update to NT6.0 models.

It's almost like they said the same thing: Funny that they mention that "new hardware has enabled us to..."

oh wait. it's not like they did. they did say it.

I agree, I think it extends to anybody who wants a calmer experience or has vision trouble or strain. I guess you can turn those options off but if the aesthetic appeal of the design is based on them then I assume we'll be getting a second-class version of it. I was already leaning towards switching to Linux for other reasons but I think this is the thing that finally pushes me there. I think optimizing for VisionOS is quite a bad idea from a UX POV, since they're two entirely different usecases. With augmented reality you need and want to see things in the background, whereas on other devices you don't. It's a fairly fundamental difference, and it's sad that they chose to go this way in my opinion.

To me it looks plain ugly, especially with all the bounces and transforms. Look at those sliders and toggles..

It's straight from the 2000s, with Linux users using Compiz and... Amethyst(?), stuffing their entire desktop full with gaudy transparency, transforms, jiggles and bounces.

More of a nit, but the sentence

  The new design extends across iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS Tahoe 26, watchOS 26, and tvOS 26 to establish even more harmony

They switched the positions of the codename and version this time (macOS 15 Sequoia to macOS Tahoe 26). I'd give it one more version cycle until the codenames go away.

Or maybe they standardise on the codename across platforms? If they're going to aim for meaningful cross-compatibility, then that would make a lot more sense than confusing, boring version numbers.

Please no. I can never remember which Cali area we're on. I almost always know which year it is. This has been long overdue. Should have learned their lesson from OS X and gone that way after iOS 10 the latest.

Thought you guys were just being whiney until I looked at the linked “beautiful new design” page and saw the screen shots they selected. Literally gives me a headache to look at the first sample and I am one of the people that miss the candy coated look of early OS X.

The section on macOS only used the name Tahoe, like the 26 idea hadn’t made it to the copy for that section.

This is an existing and somewhat nitpicky issue, but it's also annoying how they specifically insist on rounded corners "because that matches all modern devices" in the announcement. Pretty much all third party external monitors don't, and even their latest top line laptops only have them at the top of the screen. So we're stuck with these dumb little triangles of background peeking out. It's kind of the "charging port on the bottom of the magic mouse" of MacOS.

Rounded corners vex me so much.

I can barely cope with their being no option to turn them off on Mac, especially for windows. I literally had to make my background pure black because the few pixels of backgrounds always showing pissed me off so much.

It makes taking nice screenshots so much more awkward, if not impossible. Just give us a quick toggle option, please!

Command+option+shift+4 then press the space bar to take a screenshot of a single window (shadow included).

FYI for anyone not aware it's CMD + Shift + 4 (no option)

Oops. Thank you!

You know something that almost never has rounded corners? Glass.

I have several objects on my desk made of glass with rounded corners. The glass lunch container I ate out of a little bit ago. A squircle glass bowl on my desk holding various nicknacks. The glass on the front of my phone. The glass I'm drinking out of right now has rounded corners. I used to have a kitchen table that had the top as one giant sheet of glass as a square with rounded corners. The windows in my car have some corners rounded. Tons of glass things have rounded corners.

And don't forget eyeglasses, which are named for the fact that they are made of glass, and which very often have rounded corners.

Here I was looking through them and not even thinking about them. Yes!

No you don't.

Just kidding: Yeah, it's just that when I think about a digital glass effect it feels more right with square corners than rounded corners. Because glass windows which we look through usually have square corners. Says I, who spend most of my time looking through a curved motorcycle helmet visor.

Rounded corners is easier than straight. When you work glass, its usually somewhere between a liquid and non-Newtonian fluid. Molding it into round frames is trivial.

That's why we have round glass coasters, round lenses, round glasses for drinking, etc.

Almost every common glass object I can think of has rounded corners. The only obvious exception is most household window panes. I have to think pretty hard to come up with another one...maybe aquarium tanks? Some mirrors and glass tables, although the images that comes to mind for those are just as likely to be round as square.

I'm very curious which items you went through before concluding that glass almost never has rounded corners.

I should have specified glass panels/panes, specifically windows and mirrors, which you mention.

These likely have small radius rounded corners too.

The fate of all perfectly squared glass sheets is to become quite round if you get them hot enough. If you get a moment, try looking up glass fusing. It is admittedly a niche hobby, but it's pretty interesting what starts happening when you apply a little heat.

"Turning off" could just put solid light/dark under the glass. That would be decent-looking (not much different than before), accessible, and easy to implement.

> I think optimizing for VisionOS

Yeah, this really looks like an Apple temper tantrum of "Nobody wants to program for the Vision Pro? Fine. We'll MAKE you program the iPhone like the Vision Pro. Take that developers. Now get back to doing our job for us, you lazy slobs."

What is the reasoning behind this comment?

This UI "update" is so obviously detrimental to anyone who doesn't have great 20ish-year-old eyesight, that it is going to negatively impact customer support costs, sales, engagement, etc.

So, you can either assume that Apple are blundering, incompetent dolts who have completely lost the plot (certainly possible) or that Apple has an actual purpose behind this.

If you ask for the purpose and the look at the GUI, you see Apple cramming a UI update targeted with the design language from AR (transparency behind everything, motion cues to activate orienting reflex, etc.) down the throats of all developers as opposed to just those on the Vision.

if you're switching to linux what device are you considering getting?

Ironic that it's the 20th anniversary of this other design masterpiece:

https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Scree...

I don't know that a redesign was called for at all. I guess they needed to show something if Siri still isn't ready, but this is just not it.

I'd have personally hoped for them to beef up iCloud+ but I know it doesn't sell devices to the general user.

> I guess they needed to show something if Siri still isn't ready, but this is just not it.

This certainly is not that. Like it or not, a huge multi-OS redesign is not something you rush out for a keynote because your first choice didn't pan out at the last minute.

It's not something you rush out at the last minute, but it might be something you plan a long time ahead as "our interesting stuff might not work out, so let's do a huge redesign too to be confident we can pretend to be releasing something excitingly new either way".

(I don't particularly have an opinion that this was their line of thinking, just pointing out that for a company like Apple they would have been thinking "what if X isn't ready in time" months or even years before the point of actually knowing if X is it isn't ready on time.)

That's probably driven by some kind of an AR headset. AR can't properly render solids, so it is stuck with having everything transparent. Now it won't look worse than everything else.

Because everything else looks worse instead. That's one way to solve it, I guess.

Not autistic, but this is just so weird.

Why would you design readability and visibility to depend on chaotic, highly varied and probably sometimes bad underlying backgrounds?

I fail to see any systematic approach/ consistent design language at play here.

Let's hope this does not survive for long.

I’ve noticed a recurring theme on iOS where interactions intended for an app get trapped by the OS (especially multi-window interactions on iPad). The OS is less and less a foundation to support what you actually want, and more the product itself. If the actual content of the phones matters less than the fact that iOS itself is “the latest” then this makes perfect sense and is in line with the general momentum over the past several years.

Fully agree with your sentiment, and it was kinda sad to see the demo going there.

"And this is how easy I can replace this custom component with a new glass component...".

The whole thing is just wild.

There was plenty of UX enhancements which looked solid, but just for them to be paired with a design choice of N=1 elements is... well let's see if it pays off I guess?

>I fail to see any systematic approach/ consistent design language at play here.

O no, there is a systematic approach.

1. Bosses in UI division get promotions & raises for their new implementation of shiny

2. Marketing guys get to use their bird brains to promote shiny

3. Apple UX guys get to have their med prescriptions renewed

What does autism have to do with it?

Autistic people tend to have very different sensory sensitivities than neurotypical people. Most are very highly sensitive and tend have trouble picking out a signal when there’s too much noise around it.

To me, being socially awkward is kind of a secondary, less important trait, but that’s the one everyone seems to notice. We’re weird on the outside because inside, we’re dealing with overwhelming sensory input.

Whoops, I didn't see parent comment and thought the reply was to the submission. It seemed massively out of context but absolutely wasn't :-)

Curse HackerNews' narrow indents!

Check the parent comment.

Oh! I've long struggled with the narrow indents on Hacker News comments. I thought this was a reply to OP.

Thank you.

It is, once again, designing interfaces based on "vibes" instead of science or principles or used feedback, optimising for looking good on screenshots and marketing materials and not for actual usability or user friendly was. With "vibes" here standing for whatever some SV asshole thinks it's cool and modern.

Alegria, flat design, pastel colors, or unholy amounts of whitespace. It's been the story of the last 15 years of UI design at least.

> , designing interfaces based on "vibes" instead of science or principles or used feedback

Well, this is what Apple does, and the reason I hate their devices with a passion. It always was style over substance.

You must be too young to remember because a lot of the early user interface design principles, based on actual research, were pioneered by Bruce Tognazzini and Jef Raskin at Apple. Tog on Interface and Tog on Software Design were THE bibles back in the day and Apple's Human Interface Guidelines showed how a company could and should adopt consistent user experience across all of their products.

It honestly saddens me how far Apple has fallen.

And Larry Tesler, who was a particular champion of usability testing and important in the development of the Human Interface Group. Larry cared a lot about usability.

When I was at NeXT, Steve Jobs told me that if it was up to him, Apple would get rid of the Human Interface Group. (Steve was rather hostile to Larry.)

Later, when it was up to Steve, he did exactly what he said: he got rid of HIG.

I think it’s easier to sell visual design than it is to sell usability because people see visual design immediately, but it takes time and experience to see and understand usability (and some users never seem to consciously notice it at all).

I had no idea Steve Jobs felt that way about Larry Tesler. There were so many great UI experts at Apple, like Larry Tesler, Bruce Tognazzini, and Don Norman. While I love Mac OS X for its stability and its Unix support, I prefer the interface of the classic Mac OS, and it seemed to me that many third-party applications of the era were even more compliant with Apple’s human interface guidelines compared to later eras.

A dream desktop OS for me would be something with a classic Mac interface and with conformity to the Apple human interface guidelines of the 1990s, but with Lisp- or Smalltalk-like underpinnings to support component-based software. It would be the ultimate alternate universe Mac OS, the marriage of Smalltalk (with Lisp machine influence) with Macintosh innovations. Of course, there were many projects at Apple during the 80s and 90s that could’ve led to such a system.

Now that I’m a community college professor, I have more free time in the summer months for side projects...

> It honestly saddens me how far Apple has fallen.

Same. For just one example, consider how submenus work. You don't notice when they're done right, but when they're done poorly, they will disappear when you try to choose a submenu item, or stick around when you expect them to go away. Getting them right is subtle; Apple got them right, and plenty of web pages still get them wrong.

That's interface design. Flashy translucency effects are something else.

Isn't macOS the one, though, which immediately closes menus if you accidentally click or release over a divider? That always bugs me.

> You must be too young to remember

Hopefully. I wouldn't mind being young. I am also not a designer, so UI/UX history may be lost on me.

I can only say that the only Apple product I genuinely enjoyed from a design perspective was the iPod Nano I bought sometime in early 2000s.

I feel the same way about Google's design and development principles. What the fuck happened?

You mean how they heavily researched their latest redesign of Android? https://design.google/library/expressive-material-design-goo...

> M3 Expressive designs were overwhelmingly rated higher for attributes such as “energetic,” “emotive,” “positive vibe,” “creative,” “playful,” and “friendly.”

Heavy research indeed

I can't tell if you're joking. M3 Expressive is godawful and throws away so many hard-won lessons in UX R&D.

I spent some time navigating through the linked page.

I don't doubt designers spent a lot of time researching it. It still reads like an incredible amount of carefully crafted bullshit.

The more the design of things "evolve", the more I appreciate designs that simply don't.

Well to be fair their research confirmed that half of 55+ year-olds didn't like the new design

Funny, someone else mentioned in another reply that I may be too young to remember something from like 25 years ago.

I'm a Schrodinger's old man.

Do you really think that Apple, of all companies, did a cross-platform UI refresh based entirely on vibes without considering user taste, usability, accessibility, etc?

You've already judged the system as only good for "looking good on screenshots and marketing materials" when you haven't even seen anything other than the announcement.

I think you're holding it wrong

> Do you really think that Apple, of all companies, did a cross-platform UI refresh based entirely on vibes without considering user taste, usability, accessibility, etc?

Yes, I think they would do that.

Lots of historical examples of Apple making weird design choices for decades now. I'm old enough to remember the hockey-puck mouse on the original iMac.

Also, here's a list of bugs I've personally observed over just the last two months: https://gist.github.com/BenWheatley/29a3c22203d90ae80465cdb1...

3.3 trillion dollar market cap, and the *clipboard* is no longer reliable. The mail badge is an unreliable count. The wallpaper sometimes disappears. The alarms don't play out of whatever speaker or headphones you're using for all your other audio.

> Do you really think that Apple, of all companies, did a cross-platform UI refresh based entirely on vibes without considering user taste, usability, accessibility, etc?

Yes, and where have you been for the last two decades? :) The last time Apple did actual UX research must have been in the late 1990s.

Exposé and multi touch seem too well designed for no research.

Of course they would. Have you used Sequoia? It's a hot dumpster fire that's caused me unending frustration with how they've broken the bluetooth and networking stack, introduced unprecedented instability (anyone else's macbooks suddenly crashing and restarting while the lid is closed and it's in sleep mode?) and a host of other issues. Apples has been taking one step forward and two steps back with their software and design for a long time, and they have increasingly preferred form over function, and hidden, obtuse UX.

If their hardware wasn't so damn good for my professional work, I wouldn't go near this child slavery enabling shitshow of a corporation. I don't know if I've ever felt as trivialized or patronized as watching someone in formal dress talk to me about how many new ways I can express myself to my friends via emoji or whatever else as I have when watching Apple keynotes. It feels like they've tried to commoditize interaction even more than Meta. It all feels so hollow. You can tell Steve is gone.

> Do you really think that Apple, of all companies, did a cross-platform UI refresh based entirely on vibes without considering user taste, usability, accessibility, etc?

We are talking about the same company that to make a the MCP a little bit thinner released that crap with only two USBC ports, forcing everyone to carry fucking dongles everywhere.

And let's not forget that awful butterfly keyboard.

So much usability, so much accessibility. No vibes, no sir.

Perhaps they learned something from that? Look at modern MBP models which have MagSafe, HDMI, and SD card slots.

I think the implication was that if they went on anything but vibes, they would have never removed MagSafe, HDMI, or SD card slots.

Mr. Vibe works for OpenAI now.

Mr. Vibe wasn't the issue. Tim Apple was the one who gave his leash infinite slack, and he's still there calling the shots. Probably conferring equally stupid protections onto whoever replaced Ive internally.

Lord only knows Altman is probably doting on him in the same way. This industry just never learns.

Are you telling me that the trillion dollar company had to actually release a laptop with only two USBC ports to "learn" that people need more ports on a laptop? And you do that on a straight face on a sequence where it was claimed that they carefully consider usability and accessibility?

And yes, I am aware those silly toy computers have a couple more ports nowadays, I have to use that on a daily basis for work.

Absolufuckingloothy.

The Apple of today is nowhere near what the Apple of Steve Jobs was.

Bugs galore, UX issues galore. Overall it's a mashup of various staff egos over everything.

I’d bet there’s a toggle that dramatically increases opacity or eliminates transparency entirely while keeping the shading and gloss. If it exists I’m sure it’ll be popular.

Probably, but they tend to also make for an ugly look, like the “Increase Contrast” setting in iOS. The other way around would be better: Have an accessible down-to-earth default, and a secondary “fancy visuals” mode for those who want that.

I have no complaints with the UI settings I use on iOS: reduce motion, reduce transparency, differentiate without color.

Given the huge change and sensitivity to accessibility I'm going to guess the opposite -- it will be designed to look nice without transparency.

"reduce motion" is gone in the new macOS beta.

no it isn't

the autistic user base is vastly smaller than the neurotypical user base. So it makes sense to ship settings that most people would like.

It’s simply a matter of “which settings would MOST of our users want enabled by default?”

I do agree that the accessibility settings can make ios pretty ugly though. It’s a real shame. :(

The version most people would like is usually the first or second iteration. Then designers need to change things to keep it looking new and fresh and the changes are inherently going to be worse because that's the only option available.

I’m don’t think that most users want a fancy new look that also decreases usability and readability. At least that’s not the impression I get with the users I talk to. Maybe most users let themselves be impressed in a marketing sense, but that doesn’t mean they would actively want it by themselves.

[dead]

I'm hoping that's true and there's still an option for a flat, minimal look.

so all they had to do to get people to quit bitching about the flat look was to introduce the translucent look!

updating ticket to closed

Did burntalmonds bitch about the flat look before? Or was this the fallacy where people assume everyone else is 1 person?

or more like the fallacy that people can come online and snipe a thread when they miss the joke and think everyone else is serious trying to prove a fallacy. let's get meta

I hope it removes the shading and gloss too. Literally nothing in this design update is an improvement to accessibility.

Ever since we didn't use bolder text for bright text on dark backgrounds (dark mode) to keep with typographical principles, it looks like we're doubling down on the readability sins.

Surely anyone who's fiddled with the caption background opacity on their TV or video player knows this is a mess?

Would have been nice for someone to explain why we're getting Windows Aero[1] for main content and not just bezels.

I don't think this design language is mutually exclusive with readability, it actually looks really cool in many ways; I just can't fathom why the examples in the presentation seemed good enough to show.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Aero

I'm on the same boat. The specularity around edges don't match the refraction patterns and it throws me off every time. Somehow they thought this wouldn't affect readability of whatever button or panel it's applied to. They also use the specular bits as a border that's also so uneven depending on which direction light hits from. I noticed that some of the dark panels had almost no borders at the lower right corner.

Another bit I'd like to pick on is the speed at which transparent context bubbles spring out. Waiting for a panel to bounce back and forth so that you know where to put your finger next is so bad as a UX choice that I'm losing confidence in Apple.

From a visual point of view, there is now flat design mixed with this voluminous transparent design which is a weird combination of skeuomorphic and abstract designs in one. I really don't know what they were thinking.

macOS (I'm still on Sonoma tho): System Settings -> Accessibility -> Display -> Reduce Transparency. (I also recommend Reduce Motion, but YMMV - some animations are really helpful.)

iOS: Settings -> Accessibility -> Display & Text Size -> Reduce Transparency.

You're welcome.

Everyone affected by this will know to look for those deeply nested setting, right? Or will the 70 year old with bad eyesight just stop being able to use their phone? Or use it a lot less, or be frustrated and stressed by it? A lot of people don’t bother fiddling with their settings and just take what they’re given.

I’m not just thinking of myself here. I’m concerned that a lot of people who don’t consider themselves disabled will be disabled by this.

My 70 year old relatives seem to have no problem finding the setting that makes everything on the phone 2x bigger. Probably because Apple is good at this and offers it up as an option in the OS onboarding and after every major update.

It’ll be fine.

On Mac OS the first significant thing on screen after turning it on for the first time are the accessibility settings with screenshots and animations to explain every option. You can also access those options with the Spotlight search, typing "tran" will give you the "reduce transparency" toggle directly in the search results without having to open settings first (though to be fair the search indexing is a bit lacking, like on iOS - the animation toggle is called "reduce motion" and so it can't be found via typing in "animation").

Apple designs stuff this way on purpose. They think it's neat to "discover" something that should be obvious. The new camera app is a perfect example of this. No indication that swiping up from the bottom brings up a menu for camera controls. The fact any of these obviously terrible design and implementation choices are praised is baffling.

You can also disable animations on iOS.

When switching between screens, there’s just a long pause instead of the animation. These pauses drive me crazy, it’s simply not possible to configure the device to be responsive.

> You can also disable animations on iOS.

No, you can not. You can reduce _some_ animations, but most of them actually remain. Including the most annoying ones like the slowwwww screen switching, or the bottom sheet animation.

An amusing anecdote: I have animation turned off entirely on my Android phone, and I was demoing an app on it. People commented how amazingly fast it felt compared to iOS, simply because there were no animations.

I'm just as annoyed by this, but from what I understand, the animations are used to hide loading times, so the delay is not optional.

That explanation makes no sense in this case. The workspace transition animation takes a full second, on extremely performant devices that can keep up their pace up until the OS swaps around 15GB, at which point animations start lagging so they actually make it even worse. Meanwhile a Linux setup will switch workspaces instantly. Same for Windows 11 if you turn off animations, by the way.

This animation slows every transition by one second including entering and leaving fullscreen mode, because on Mac OS fullscreen works by moving the window to a new workspace. There is no justification for this.

They're not [always] about hiding loading times. Even switching from an app to the desktop screen has a slow animation, or switching back and forth between two running apps.

macOS is awful in so many places. I would prefer if they had an option to disable only some of the animations. "Show Desktop" is so sudden and zoomy I almost get motion sickness, but Mission Control is more subtle and really helps me figure out which window is which.

My strategy for multiple desktops is to not use them at all. But I'm enjoying the comfort of a 43" screen, so all the windows I need just fit.

IMHO iOS strikes an almost perfect balance. It animates things in response to continuous drag gestures (notification centre, app switching), but almost nothing else. Maybe macOS could take a page from that book? E.g. dragging the menu bar; the animation plays out in direct response to user action.

Yeah I'm pretty sure that setting has been there since Yosemite. That was the version that first prominently featured blurred translucency. (The transparency in earlier versions like Mavericks was really subtle and would not need such a setting: see for yourself in this image found by Googling https://i0.wp.com/morrick.me/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/001-....)

Thanks.

Transparency confuses me regularly - and I then waste cycles trying to understand why a particular heading has a strange colour before I work out it is bleeding through from some unobvious background thing.

I'd argue that it doesn't even look that cool or futuristic. Kind of looks like Windows 7.

That said, Windows 7 had an option to turn off all the translucency, so hopefully Apple ripped that idea, too.

Completely agree, takes me back to the days of Compiz Fusion, wavy windows and fire trails.

There has been a reduce transparency option in iOS and it has this effect on the new OS.

https://preview.redd.it/zzxh77iv906f1.png?width=2358&format=...

Fortunately you can turn off the transparency in accessibility options.

https://preview.redd.it/zzxh77iv906f1.png?width=2358&format=...

+1. I wish they would concentrate more on bug fixes instead of adding “features” you have to turn off to make the OS usable.

The way you phrased it makes it sound like everyone will have to turn it off to make the OS “usable” - which is clearly false.

I agree that these changes are distracting. I don’t want effects that change things as I move it. I want fewer distractions and don’t want things all over the place.

I liked webpages in the 1990s before the blink and marquee tags. I wasn’t excited by skeuomorphic design, but it was at least fun. Then there was flat blocky design which really sucked. Then that was undone by putting curves back in, and it was ok. Then people started adding a shit ton of empty space everywhere which was the first time when Millennials started f-ing up design. I still blame them today because they’re still the most opinionated and make terrible, TERRIBLE design decisions. I don’t think I’ll ever be happy again with interface design. It’s super f-d.

Accessibility aside, I don't see the appeal in this design. I find the current design quite pleasant and usable. Translucent 3D text sounds like teenage-me messing around in Photoshop in the early 2000s.

The new glass design feels fresh and playful. Like a more refined luxury version of Frutiger Aero. The current design is functional, but it feels pretty stale and mundane after years.

That is actually a feature. An UI should never be, under any circumstances, in line with a trend, fresh or different for the sake of being different.

It should, however, be as invisible as possible. Being only functional is a compliment.

Huge disagreement here. Maybe true for something critical like the control board on some heavy machinery.

But for something like a phone or messaging app, I want to see the return of fun, creative, and unique. We had such a great era of design around 2006-2013 and then it all rapidly went incredibly dull since then.

I want to see creative menus back, I want to see whacky UIs like windows media player skins back. Ultimately for basic stuff of low importance like your phone, the most absolutely optimal UI doesn’t matter, much like I don’t care for the most absolutely optimal furniture. Its visual appeal matters.

My phone is the control board of my life. It is critical infrastructure and serious.

No one is getting mangled in machinery if I take 100ms longer to send a text message. There’s time to spare to actually enjoy the design.

911/112 calls are still made via phones, and I have to say that even making a simple phone call has, at times, become highly problematic on these new and very complex smart-phones.

With that said, my pants' pocket still manages to somehow initiate the "emergency call" procedure every couple of months or so, I have no idea how that happens (I don't even know how I'd do that with the phone placed in front of me).

> Pant's pockets

Yep. I keep making accidental emergency calls too. Another interesting incident which happened only once:

I accidentally opened instagram, a group chat, and changed the background to bubbles or something like that, all with my phone in my pocket. I guess I put my phone into my pocket unlocked by accident because I can't imagine accidentally typing my PIN.

But what if animated and "playful" do not make the UI enjoyable?

>We had such a great era of design around 2006-2013 and then it all rapidly went incredibly dull since then.

I agree with the huge disagreement. That 2006-2013 era was, in my opinion, horrendous and takes the second spot as an offender just after “peak flat”.

However, I never denied that visual appeal matters. But design is how it holistically works, not how it looks.

Maybe, at some point, some team will get back to Dieter Rams 10 principles and hammer it into an UX experience. We were so close in the 90’s.

Maybe we can agree on: make the os maximally unobtrusive by default but include options to customise to taste?

It's Aqua 2.0, or at least, I hope it's going to be like that.

Apple know their customers and what they like.

I am actually Apple-phobic, a diehard linux user and incapable of doing simple tasks on Apple products. However, I think they have got a winner here. Although people talk of Vista Aero, it is more sophisticated than that, and, when this rolls out, Android will look distinctly old fashioned and low status, even if it is better as far as accessibility. I like what they have done here, even if it is not for me.

Disagree on almost all points. Glass and the relative absence of color, texture and patterns make it look cold, detached, almost inhuman and absent of anything your eyes could rest on. There are ways to make this approach look cool and futuristic, but it suffers from the same downside as a lot of the white/glassy modernist architecture: the human eye abhors lack of detail and natural/organic patterns and texture. (It makes for a great canvas for graffitti though...)

Meanwhile, Android's Material You/Expressive design language is taking almost an opposite approach. Personally, I prefer it to Liquid Glass by a wide margin.

Architecture without structural integrity is terrible no matter how it looks. User interfaces that aren't usable and clear are bad no matter how they look. Sure the human eye enjoys looking at trees with thousands of leaves, but you won't find a person who enjoys a UI with a thousand buttons on screen.

To me visual noise in user interfaces is a severe distraction and I tend to prefer applications with minimal UIs (not minimal features). I disabled text cursor blinking in the browser and use a program to auto-hide the mouse pointer after a few seconds because it can distract me from reading.

I do like this new UI Apple shows here, though I would probably get tired of the effects if I had to use it for extended periods of time. Just like animations look satisfying until you realize they slow down everything you do on the computer because often their main purpose is marketing and not usefulness.

Going from the ratio of adjectives on the page, it is 2.5 times less functional than beautiful.

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!

There is a 'Reduced transparency' mode which you can enable in system settings. Safe to assume this will still exist in the new OS versions.

This will be a massive improvement in usability over flat design, which made UIs only learnable by trial and error.

I don’t see a lot changing about the problem of labels and active controls still being hard to distinguish, and the like.

there is a setting labeled “increase contrast” under Accessibilitt > Display & Text Size. That may help? i haven’t tried it.

It helps only in some limited ways, while also making some elements look more ugly. It does too little to solve the overall issue.

There is, they outline it in this video. It looks like there are three ways to turn it off: high contrast, reduced motion, and frostier glass. So it looks like there's just a way to have a full basic icon with just the icon and the outline and a white background.

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2025/219/

PSA: High Contrast mode on MacOS, incidentally, destroys theming on Microsoft Edge (I know, I’m a weirdo who uses Edge on Mac). I use theming to differentiate between several browser profiles. For months I thought Edge had decided they wanted the themes to be ultra lame and subtle, but it was my usage of that setting that broke it.

Besides that huge dealbreaker though, HC mode is amazing for people like me who think UIs should be clear, obvious, and functional first rather than “elegant” and pretty as the main priority.

The future is translucent tablets ( smart glass pads ). It's not about what this UI is - it's about where it's going. This is the UI to bridge to the next hardware modality and begin to train people to prepare for (at first) HUDs everywhere, then smartglass and holoprojective displays.

What the heck would I want translucent displays for? To be able to increase my screentime even more? And have a harder time reading stuff when I do?

Presumably the display can fade opaque, or translucent to give a readable background to text or when desired.

Many applications for see-through screens: HUDs, AR, literal camera viewfinder, tile-ability, low-weight.

Also just the general flex and coolness that a "no visible seams" (I mean no visible wires/metal) approach will bring - a case of form meeting function - the screen in the abstract sense is an abstract - a general portal through which anything can appear. A "pure screen" is the physical realization of that.

Haven't been able to turn it off yet. It's so awful looking and distracting, even with "reduce transparency" and "reduce motion" enabled. I actually think these settings are making it stutter more. It's definitely slower than iOS 18.

The translucent blur is... alright. The refracting edges look incredibly distracting for me.

Yep, nailed it. This is such regressive, ignorant junk. I mean... WTF? Welcome to the failed "transparent UI" fad of two decades ago. Apple tried to revive this trash a few years ago, but then seemed to back off (or maybe I just disabled it)... and now this?

Even for the current sorry state of Apple's design regime, this is disappointing. It's way beyond a squandering of desperately-needed-elsewhere engineering resources; it's a dated-looking degradation of usability (and potentially performance).

Depressing.

The "liquid glass" design changes shown by Apple look mostly like slight tinkering around the edges of how widgets look/feel. Way less of a design change than the move to flat design was.

Yes, knowing Apple, this has probably been in development for years and seen a million internal iterations.

I think it's going to look alright on iOS/iPadOS where apps are inherently full-screen and the "background images" are really "foreground content" where you do kind of want the controls to "recede".

On the other hand, I can already tell I'm going to despise this on macOS. I always work with windows maximized on my laptop, because I just want to concentrate on the document I'm editing, or code I'm writing, and have maximum space for that. And the past couple of versions of macOS by default make your menu bar a weird pale purple or pink or green that is hugely distracting because it's a blurred image of your desktop. Fortunately you can turn that off with the "Reduce Transparency" accessibility option, which I do.

But the idea that people using Macs want to always being seeing some colorful desktop image around the edges and at the top just seems bizarre to me. iPhones and iPads are more for consuming, so this makes more sense. And within apps on Macs this seems like it'll be fine. But I hate that it doesn't seem designed to let me "tune out" the desktop image while I use an app. It's taking existing translucency and just making it worse...

Someone put the Windows phone screen against this design, with opaque colorful blocks and clear text - and I was like "yep, I wish we go back to that. That is the future."

I'm sure they will continue to allow disabling transparency in accessibility settings, given that the current OS version has transparency throughout which can already be so disabled.

I'm not autistic and I don't like this upgrade, at all.

It looks so tacky.

They say the text color adapts to the background based on contrast.

I'm just wondering if Apple is going to make matching CSS updates in Safari so web app developers have matching visuals.

I'm just wondering if Apple is going to make matching CSS updates in Safari so web app developers have matching visuals.

  color: contrast-color(rebeccapurple);

The problem is the background can be more than 1 color.

Which is why the gaussian blur was invented...

People pretend this isn't a solved problem.

Yeah. On Windows some apps (the new Terminal) used to have the opacity set to 0.9 or something by default. First thing I did was set it to 1.0. Having the background bleed through is distracting for no real value.

I’m usually a big fan of Apple design and UX. Any change faces some initial resistance, but this is first real “Ugh, hard no” reaction I can recall after seeing some of those.

Same same. And yes, I hate the translucency in Windows terminal as well and immediately turned it off. I do not understand the insanity of turning these things on by default.

A "hard no" is where I am with this "improvement".

There will undoubtedly be optional low-transparency and high-contrast modes, just as there are in iOS now.

Apple is pretty good on accessibility but sometimes it does involve changing some settings.

I find transparency annoying enough that if it becomes more prevalent on MacOS in a way I can't turn off, I may switch to Linux for that reason alone.

You can turn off the current transparency (just search for transparency in settings)

It's not a layer … it's a new material

Their existing glass effect is distracting enough.

So change the background to solid color then.

I used to like solid background, but lately screens got so good that it makes sense to put something up.

Background meant anything behind. Not wallpaper.

https://imgur.com/a/AEEj5w1

I imagine they overdid just in case and will receive enough feedback to dial back the translucency just a tad.

> accessibility nightmare.

It’s also annoying, slow you down, and anyway useless if you don’t have a physical issue with them.

i think apple has historically always shipped their products with plenty of accessibility settings. Even today it’s possible to easily increase contrast, reduce transparency, reduce animations, and way more on ios.

i’m not too worried, but let’s see. The new design is super ugly though.

iOS currently has "Reduce Transparency" in Accessibility settings. I suspect they will have some sort of similar feature across devices. What will it look like... that's the real question.

Apple takes accessibility more seriously than most. I would be shocked if there isn't a setting to instantly remedy this for people with any sort of vision issue.

I bet there will be, but let not dismiss that good accessibility is when the UI is readable/accessible by default.

Anyway, I also bet they will tone this transparency stuff down a lot in the betas leading to the stable version in September. iOS 7 all over again…

Let's also not ignore that, whether apple has actually achieved this or not, the highly-accessible version of something necessarily excludes many design idioms and either looks worse or relegates one to a limited range of creative expression. As such, most designers will not want to design for that by default.

''Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like,'' says Steve Jobs, Apple's C.E.O. ''People think it's this veneer -- that the designers are handed this box and told, 'Make it look good!' That's not what we think design is. It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.''[1]

Interface design is not a place for unlimited creative expression. But recent user interface trends exclude many design idioms and relegate one to a limited range of creative expression also. Some people think they look better. Some do not.

Accessible interfaces have become uglier in ways which did not improve accessibility. And recent trends have made them less accessible in some ways also. Choose not enough contrast or too much. Choose contrast or color where both were before.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/30/magazine/the-guts-of-a-ne...

Since when did we care about what designers want? It's called User Experience, not Designer Experience. The target audience is not people who are intimately familiar with digital idioms, that's why skeuomorphism is remembered more fondly than the iOS 7 design.

Reminds me of when Jony Ive had the run of the place and gave us the bending iPhone and MacBooks with no ports. All for the sake of "Designer Experience".

In some ways. But they have many failings. It’s completely Impossibly to make the gui larger, for instance.

Not so.

https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/zoom-in-iph3e2e367e/i...

https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/customize-the-text-si...

Try making the window chrome bigger on macOS. You can’t do it.

You absolutely can do this: https://support.apple.com/en-il/guide/mac-help/mchl86d72b76/...

That isn’t an actual solution as it requires running the display at a non-native resolution and thus seriously compromises text readability. It’s basically just low tech digital zoom.

I want to make things bigger in pixel resolution, not make pixels bigger.

It's enough of an actual solution for Apple to have been using as all of their best-selling laptops' default setting since they switched to Retina in 2012.

Seems like they could not choose between flat and not flat.

> This seems like an accessibility nightmare.

One of the accessibility features included in macOS for visually impaired people lets you reduce transparency for exactly this reason.

I’m bothered by how swaywm leaks the background into transparent gaps in windows, but I should be thankful tbf— macOS is just another level of nightmare entirely.

they will not. Apple has accessibility features for all of the use cases and surely for this as well.

Also, Apple is already bad at translucent UX as if it were beneath their consideration.

If there's a bright blue background behind the control panel buttons (like the wifi button), you can't tell if it's blue because it's on or because it's off but the background is blue.

Slide down the control panel when the blue weather app is open to kinda see what I mean.

> 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.

How can that possibly be? Didn't he say it will: "bring joy and delight to _every_ user experience"

That means YOU as well. No way he could over-selling something. Inconceivable.

Apple has historically been above average in terms of considering usability. So, I think seeing this new design as being asinine is not an unexpected opinion.

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.

As for accessibility… It’s hell. Have a look: https://imgur.com/a/6ZTCStC

This looks like a screenshot from one of the jailbreak themes from like 15 years ago, and not one of the good ones

As a former Cydia user, my 12-year-old self takes that as validation that I was living in the future after all!

Cydia would be the only way I'd ever go back to using an iPhone as my main driver. Good days.

I can't even be sure Cydia is enough. I switched to Android a looong time ago and never looked back (not even for Cydia, sorry saurik :P).

The public beta hasn’t even been released yet, this is only a developer beta. Bit early to be assuming it will look like this by release no?

Glasklart?

The accessibility for this design is pretty terrible. There's a reason the gold standard for closed captions is still white text with solid black background. That way, regardless of what's going on in the background, the text is still readable for someone with poor eyesight.

Out of curiosity, I used this site [1] to get the contrast of some text, specifically the artist name on the Apple Music now playing bar (in the "Updated App Design" part of the page). During parts of the video, the contrast of the artist name with the background was 1.7:1, which is terrible. For reference, the minimum recommended contrast by WebAIM is 4.5:1 [2].

Maybe there are accessibility options that improve things, but the defaults seem terrible. The goal for any design should be reasonably accessible as default, with robust options for people with more specific needs. As it stands, this UI is just too hard to read, and Apple needs to make a second pass.

[1]: https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/

[2]: https://webaim.org/articles/contrast/

Wow. That is really bad. Apple already does the transparency thing with the control center menu, but it blurs the background so much that you don’t notice it. Why they’d want to lessen the blur and make it more transparent is beyond me.

Remember this is the first developer beta. I’m pretty sure a lot of iOS 7 was dialed back between announcement and release

The fact that it ever made it to this stage is troubling. It was quite literally the very first thing I thought when I saw their landing page for ios 17. https://www.apple.com/os/ios/ Look at the notifications front and center in the very middle of the screen. It's unbelievable. How are these the decisions being made at one of the biggest tech companies on the planet.

Maybe they overshot on purpose? When I change my gaming control sensitivities I will do this (overshoot and then dial back) because I think it helps me get used to them faster.

This means devs and users need to be vocal and outraged at every new design (as it will be overdone on purpose), and Apple gauges how much they dial it back based on the heat of it....

That doesn't sound like a healthy relationship to developers to me.

oomph, looks like this might finally be (my) year of the linux desktop..

I switched two months ago and it’s surprisingly usable. Come a long way in the last 10 years.

Nice; mine was in 1995!

Not yet for me, still waiting for a 8-hour battery...

I thought I’d try it again this year and immediately sleep was totally broken (would remake instantly to a glitched grey screen), and when I updated my release (Ubuntu) it broke my graphics drivers silently on a way that took me nearly 3 hours to “kinda” fix, with terminal commands. And I’m a software developer as a professional who’s used unix based systems for years.

I’ve long ago accepted that my dev machine will stay a Mac and my gaming rig will stay windows for the foreseeable future. Every 5 years or so I try Linux again and it’s the same deal.

I get 30 hours on a 2017 Dell, using Linux mint. auto-cpufreq or even just making an alias to disable some cores let you push it very far

Nothing screams "Linux desktop" quite like a custom terminal command to manually manage your CPU cores being presented as a solution for longer battery life.

As a two and a half decade user of Linux desktops, this comment is spot on.

That said, at work I'm using a Windows desktop for the first time in over 15 years. There are so many places I'd like to run scripts to improve this thing. i have come to the conclusion that running scripts to fix small annoyances is a feature of those who are drawn to Linux, not a shortcoming of KDE or Gnome. I'd do the same if it were even possible on this (locked down corporate) Windows box.

year of the linux mobile?

That screenshot is utterly unreadable. It makes my eyes hurt. For the young people out there, I'm not exaggerating or being metaphorical. Literally pain in my eyes as they try (and fail) to focus on the appropriate UI elements.

I was going to upgrade to an iPhone 16 this week. I might be checking out Google or Samsung devices instead.

You might want to look at the new design language that Android is going for:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43975352

Somewhat amusing after this how the top comment mentions "Apple ... never makes marketing content like this about its design language"

A lot of those comments didn't age well.

Not just the top comment, that whole top thread is basically glazing Apple. Deliciously ironic.

You might want to look at the new design language that Android is going for:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43975352

Feels very much like a fruit-colored version of late 1960's early 1970's pop culture design.

Change it to browns and oranges and golds, and it'll be perfectly groovy.

Ugly and a definite regression. But at least my eyes don’t hurt.

I think it's also just ugly to be honest. Completely opposite of Apple's values of focusing on one thing at a time and even basic grid alignment. And I am an Apple fanboy....

I highly recommend giving the S Ultra series a try. I use them for the built-in stylus, I had a few Note devices before the S.

Once you realise what life with a stylus is like, you'll not accept anything less.

I modify my devices slightly to make the stylus easier to remove, if you're interested I could show it off.

It’s a developer beta, don’t assume the release version will look like this mess.

That screenshot had the same effect on me.

Baffling choice.

OMG, I expected bad but not this bad. How did designers ever think this will fly is beyond mind-blowing. Visual disturbance is off the charts. I am just hoping it to have good accessibility options to turn whatever-this-is off immediately.

Holy cow that's bad. 2 slightly different grids overlaid with transparency feels like a joke but here t is

This kinda looks like a fake "iOS" skin for Android from 2018... nasty

Wow, that was full in "thanks, I hate it" territory for me.

I think that design triggered me for 2 reasons. First, it really gets to something that's bugged me a lot about technological advancement in general over the past 15-20 years or so. It used to be that I felt like tech advances were great because they actually solved a human problem. Now, so much tech just feels like "tech-for-tech's-sake". Like I get you need to have a lot of designers at Apple, and now that devices have more processing power that they want to do something "cool" with it, but this just seems like someone that literally nobody asked for and nobody wants.

Second, I'm someone who thinks very "linearly". I like to do one thing at a time, and I hate distractions (because I'm easily distracted). I hate these translucent interfaces because they are literally distracting to me even if I'm looking directly and squarely at one single thing. It just seems like another way that tech is constantly fucking with our attention.

I thought the same, about distractions, whilst watching the videos. Even the highlights and speckles at the edges of the icons grab your attention. It's the visual equivalent of running your finger over velcro: slip, catch, slip, catch the whole way down.

Yeah, the address bar in the browser in the video at 2:10–2:13 is appalling. And how they describe it!—

> it responds in real time to your content, and your input, creating a more lively experience, that we think you’ll find truly delightful.

“Infuriating” and “horrifying” would both be much more accurate words than “delightful”. Even if you liked it briefly, it would get old really quickly.

This truly is stunningly, spectacularly bad.

The entire press release made my brain hurt.

>> Meticulously crafted by rethinking the fundamental elements that make up our software, the new design features an entirely new material called Liquid Glass. It combines the optical qualities of glass with a fluidity only Apple can achieve, as it transforms depending on your content or context.

What the fuck does that even mean?

Feature litmus test: if you can't describe why it's better in plain English... it's probably not better.

Puh. That's pure amateur hour. They need to _at_ _least_ add something like: "synergy with ideographic interface, achieving unrivalled experience while preserving the individualized touch".

> What the fuck does that even mean?

Nothing. It's corporate bean-counter speak. Some poo-brained exec says a lot of words that sound inspiring but adds up to mean exactly nothing.

This is the kind of garbage I have to listen to in so-very-important quarterly "huddles" with thousands of people. It's nonsensical but makes the speaker feel so very special.

I guess this really gives insight to how Apple got here. It really has been taken over by a bunch of people who like how their own farts smell. Now they're trying to gaslight you and I into liking it.

The only thing worse than shitty design is when the shitty design changes each time you use it.

I know I am going to sound like an asshole but I scrolled, started watching the video and the guy speaking made me cringe so badly I closed the tab. This is reads and looks like satire. And here I thought OneUI 8 was bad.

I hope they tweak the opacity before they go live with this because I find the shared image quite unpleasant. I have no issues with the current design. Kind of like the camera button and the touch bar, I hope this goes away fast.

Wow. It would almost be OK if they had had the sense to dim the background substantially, but... wow.

It had better be possible to turn this crap completely off. Is it?

Reduce transparency in the accessibility settings.

Fixes it luckily.

How does it look if you enable "Reduce Transparency" in Accessibility - Display settings?

It looks awful, and doesn't actually remove all of the transparency effects, though that might be due to the fact that its Beta 1.

I cannot confirm that.

Reducing transparency, the entire background gets greyed and the background/ look is much more akin to iOS 18.

Except in Safari, you can still see the text on the page behind the URL bar as you scroll.

My eyes don’t know where to focus. Everything runs together.

Is the WiFi enabled, or does it just have a blue icon behind it?

Oh yeah that's bad. I hope there is an option to disable translucency globally. I don't need to see a desktop/home screen under another menu, or even another app under the menu. I can't interact with something underneath the top menu and it really messes with readability from your screenshot.

OMG that image is hilarious. It's a total disaster.

And it's not like someone had to go out of their way to find something clashing like that. Pulling up control center from the home screen is something you do all the time.

Like, I genuinely would have assumed that control center would need to be non-translucent precisely because of that. But... nope?

It's Apple Maps bad!

Apple Maps is actually great now.

Depends on your region. It is fantastic in Cupertino. It is literally unusable in Japan or Taiwan. Literally--it will fail to get directions or even find your destination (typing in English or the local language).

I find the search pretty poor on Apple Maps, but I’ve traveled the world using only Apple Maps and I’ve gotten around fine in quite remote areas.

The only reason I ever use google maps is to search somewhere and copy paste the address into Apple Maps.

Can’t speak towards Japan or Taiwan specifically but it’s been fine in extremely rural Africa, India, Brazil, Indonesia, Bosnia, Australia, etc. Much better than Google Maps in most of Western Europe and America these days.

Works pretty well in Australia but it didn’t use to. As an aside, last time I was in Japan google maps had some issues too, and people recommended other map apps

Really? I’ve had it work very well in Japan for me. Taiwan I’ve never tried.

Half the time when I input a destination (kanji or romanji) it fails to find what I’m looking for. Google Maps never fails.

Going from Apple Maps to Google Maps is now like going from ublock origin to a stock browser. Crap everywhere that you didn't ask for, slowing you down as you try to locate what you're actually trying to find.

Meanwhile the maps/data quality is quite good, probably 95% there for the things I care about. I've been able to use it full-time for years now.

This might be true in the US but it's close to worthless in a lot of the rest of the world.

It's true in most rich countries at this point. Apple's been steadily launching more of their capabilities in new countries. I just used Apple Maps across eight countries in Europe. I did send a few problem reports, but they're better than Google now everywhere I went.

At this point if I lived somewhere they weren't great, I'd submit improvements for all the places I went

Just checked my commute to work on the west coast. It found 1 of 3 public transit options, doesn't know that my company has an office at that location (public info), and doesn't list the cost. I also just finished a driving trip through Central Europe with an apple map user, where it got stuck in construction Google knew about (+1h), didn't have good traffic info at other times, and also chose the most boring route. The trip improved once we switched to routing with Google.

Apple maps is adequate now, but as a map power-user it's been pretty far from great every time I've tried it. I'm happy they finally managed to get an accurate basemap though.

In asia it is still unusable. I have to re-download Google Maps (I abhor using Google products) every time I travel to that part of the world.

My experience too. Here in Bangkok I never bother to even open it anymore.

I've found it to be excellent in Japan. Like I said... rich countries.

It’s pretty much equal to Google maps in Australia. It’s mostly lacking in reviews.

Normally I don't have strong opinions on UI design but that just looks wrong.

That could be fixed I feel by decreasing the background opacity.

That does not look good and I can already see my elderly parents having trouble with just how messy and confusing the colors from the homescreen bleed into the foreground.

Looks like a soup sandwich. Layers of mixed together colors with no distinction

Good lord, I started getting a headache just looking at that image for a few seconds. Apple has always preferred form over function but this UI change takes it to a whole other level.

I mean I really don’t like it either, but I have to say, it screenshots 10x worse than it really looks. There’s enough ‘glow’ that things look largely distinct.

I would still prefer 5x the blur; I really, really, really hate the shapes of the tab switchers; and they use space so inefficiently I feel like I’m using an iPhone SE… but the liquid glass is ok. Gimmicky and ugly but it is mostly usable

Holy shit. That has to be a joke. It looks like some bad UI mockup from Jon Prosser

Straight from early 2000s. The early photoshop effects everyone applied on their geocities webpages.

please please please, everyone, submit feedback at https://www.apple.com/feedback/

I was ok with the system settings redesign, could get used to it. But this whole new design is a different level of bad.

Ugh oh god

That evokes an immediate visceral reaction hah

That screenshot! Terrible

Yikes…

Wow ! That is ugly.

Wonder if Apple has any Quality Control department at all.

I mean, a designer comes up with a proposal, someone else ought to check it.

Sad thing about Apple is that this was designed by a huge design team and about a million keynote presentations to execs that sounded exactly like this.

Funny, I'm pretty sure glass on glass is one of their guidelines no-no situations. Nice of them to implement it on their own control centre to prove how bad it is.

This looks horrible to be honest.

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.

Even the non transparent stuff looks bad - a plain Finder window: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/macos-tahoe-26-0-beta-1...

Here I was, thinking it couldn't get any worse than Big Sur like a fucking moron.

Did they "squircle" the window? I've been enjoying the look of the liquid glass thing but this looks unserious, toy-like.

Oh dear...

That's worse than I expected.

Same. I was kind of slowly preparing myself that I might be switching to android and it seems this might be the final straw. Will wait until Sept to see how new iphone and google pixels will look like but most likely I will do the transition (even though been developing for iOS for more than 10 years.

Sure, it's reasonable to consider a switch. But while Android devices have come a long way in terms of physical design, capabilities, UI/UX, etc, out of the box Apple still offers a more comprehensive, user friendly and privacy focused security solution: lockdown, tighter controls of hardware/software integration, etc. So there's that.

Apple user friendliness only extends as far as you're willing to do things the Apple way. If you want to do something Apple doesn't approve, it's going to be difficult, impossible, or miserable.

Example: file syncing and password management. Possible, but my Nextcloud and Keepass experience was janky. 3rd party Youtube client, impossible. Adblocking - all solutions I tried were terrible to mediocre (around 2020, but I doubt it improved since). On Android I can run any browser I want and install uBlock. Music: I can just dump my collection of mixed format music files (aac, mp3, mpc, flac, wavpack) over USB and play them with foobar2000. Foobar2000 is available on iphone, but needs dumb workarounds to play files not natively supported by Apple. And so on...

If you're balls deep in the Apple ecosystem, you probably have none of these problems. I never allowed myself to get locked in, which also made it very easy to leave ios behind.

Only thing I miss a little is the ios email and calendar clients. They were alright.

I was a diehard Android person for years, and I really really wanted to like it. Even when it dropped calls, failed to even show incoming calls, apps crashed regularly. This was a Google phone on Google Fi, unaltered and supposed to be the "pure" Android experience. My final realization and the impetus for the switch was that Android is an app ghetto; Good apps are designed for iOS first, and half-assedly ported to Android. Android's store has so much trash in it as to make it impossible to find a real app that isn't malware.

I switched to iOS and despite its flaws, the experience is so much better.

> app ghetto

Meanwhile the main reason I stay with Android is because of the ability to sideload, write your own apps, etc. without paying a subscription fee.

Agreed; I will probably be staying with iOS no matter how garish it becomes - Apple has the foundations right.

I can't say I feel the same about macOS before; as a user since the early 1990s, I'm likely moving to Linux rather than Liquid Glass for my personal computer.

Liquid Glass looks better on iPad and iPhone.

On the Mac it is offensive. Vulgar. Disgusting. Loathsome.

I agree. I installed the beta and after just a few hours, I can tell this won't work for my eyes.

It's like staring into a chrome bumper while trying to use your computer. But also, it's see-through.

It is a shame because Android has everything they need to be just as good but its fragmentation as a whole just gets in the way of its potential.

I have been using android for maybe 11-12 years and once locked down it great for me. But I suspect less than 1% of users would use these things like this.

Try getting a device like a foldable phone that has no i-land analogs! That will provide a nice way to get benefits from the transition.

Wasn’t there a rumour that the next iPhone will be foldable?

Yeah, since the first foldable Samsung phone 6 years ago.

Lmao. Just some wildly untrue, especially with Pixel phones.

As someone who has daily driven Pixels since the first one but listens to plenty of Apple users: no, Apple really does have it better for most default experiences. Really, the main thing Android still has going for it is that sideloading is easy and I can have a full terminal.

I've tried to escape the walled garden to Android before, and I've given up. No matter which company's phone or what version of Android, it didn't work well as a phone, alarm, and reliable device that I use for stuff like my home security. Things broke on Android like clockwork, and the clock didn't work.

The latest Google pixel devices are specifically blocked from using Wyze devices right now due to a typo in the pixel's configuration files, for example. Stuff like that happens constantly with any phone in the super fragmented Android ecosystem.

>it didn't work well as a phone, alarm, and reliable device

If you google "ios alarm not working" you'll find out alarms on iOS are absolutely not reliable, they are often silent.

Thats interesting. The clock stuff on android has always been the most reliable thing for me. But milage may vary by user.

I cannot imagine what it would be like to jump out of the Apple ecosystem nowadays. I left in 2012 and it was difficult even then.

They are both broken in their own ways. However, on one of those, I have some amount of flexibility/freedom to put in my own fixes/hacks/solutions to make it work. I will pick the additional headache that flexibility brings over being in a straight jacket everytime.

The Pixel 9 with Android 16 QPR Beta 1 is working smooth right now, and looks great. Very polished overall. I would recommend Pixel if you go the Android route as Google's implementation is imo the highest quality compared to others'

Reduce Transparency in Accessibility settings removes the glass effect, but I believe has been updated to be closer to the translucent effects in current iOS.

It's sad when so many settings people use to make Apple's products better/more usable seem to always be hidden in Accessibility. I'm sure that says something.

That building for accessibility helps more than just disabled people?

I find the "reduce motion" toggle to be a more pleasant experience on iOS as well.

Also this is way better compared to Android, where "remove animations" make apps feel like a dumpster fire, many of them lose parts of UI that were animated instead of showing them statically, feedback for touching gets often lost, things are waiting for animation so you are still stuck waiting a second or two for nothing, etc.

> Apple had a good run, I've genuinely enjoyed using their platforms daily, but I'm afraid they're dropping the ball now.

I haven't owned a (personal) Mac since High Sierra. The UI had been going downhill since Yosemite in my opinion, but gradually; it took a nosedive with Big Sur (I think that's the one that introduced all the SwiftUI apps?) to the point that I realized I probably wouldn't own another Mac until they figured out that a Mac is a computer, not an iPad. Looks like they still haven't yet.

That being said, I believe that 10.5-10.9 is probably somewhere close to what peak computing looks like. It's not perfect but it makes sense to some degree. I had no problem teaching people of any technological skill level how to use Snow Leopard or Lion; and not just getting by, properly becoming competent computer users. On the other hand, I've been watching my parents (both of whom have been using computers since the late 70s) slowly lose the ability to "understand" both modern macOS and iOS, and are more and more frequently struggling to find old and new features and functionality (like being able to see all of their emails on their phone).

It's disappointing really. For a while I couldn't stand using Windows and regular Linux desktop distros were too fiddly to be useful, and Mac really was the best option for "I just want to do X" with the least friction. Nowadays, Windows sucks for a whole host of reasons, and the Linux desktop is more usable but still Linux, and apparently Mac has decided to shoot itself in the head. If my grandmother asked me what computer to replace her Mac Mini with if it died right now, I really don't think I'd have an answer.

> trying to process all that visual mess daily.

That's exactly the thing, that's what I don't get. Apple's brand is all about simplicity and visual clarity.

This is a visual mess. We've gone from clean delineated color areas to... slop?

I really expected them to use subtle glass and shadow effects, but with minimal translucency. Heck, a lot of this is barely even translucency, more like transparency.

I'm really surprised, because I didn't expect Apple to produce a design language that so easily turns into seemingly visual chaos.

> I didn't expect Apple to produce a design language that so easily turns into seemingly visual chaos.

I don't understand how anyone can act surprised anymore. Seriously. The App Store is an absolute mess, and Apple seems to be okay with it because it makes them money. Same goes for Apple News, Apple Music, AppleTV+, Apple iCloud, Apple Fitness+ and Apple Arcade. To say nothing of the quality of these apps (for their benefit), it's brand dilution. Am I supposed to believe that MacOS and iOS are spared from Apple's attention being divided into a hundred pieces? Am I supposed to expect them to invest in high-quality tentpole software when their logo is the only thing required to make people spend money?

At some point, consumers have to distinguish between the identity that Apple markets to them, and what Apple's actual impact is on the carelessness of modern design. People have been saying this since 2013, Apple's new design languages aren't even close to the HIGs from the Macs of yore. Liquid Glass has been destined to fail ever since, it's an iteration on iOS7 and not an interface people actually like.

I agree that it seems to be a move toward lower contrast. I prefer higher contrast.

I think it's time for me to look back at Linux.

(*Looks at Gnome.*)

Hm, they're getting worse faster than Apple does. Never mind.

I like Gnome. I prefer my desktop to be designed around one unifying philosophy instead of a hodgepodge of customizations which don't work well together. The Gnome team has done pretty well at avoiding the classic Linux issues with the latter, though it doesn't win them any favors from people who would've been using KDE or some tiling WM anyway.

> I prefer my desktop to be designed around one unifying philosophy instead of a hodgepodge of customizations which don't work well together.

I agree. It's why I prefer Gnome over KDE, and macOS over Windows.

My main point is: Gnome can't tell simple from simplistic. Terminal cursor blinking. Removing every command until everything fits in one menu and/or title bar. It's so crammed with buttons, I can't tell what is what. But ironically, there's no desktop icons, despite "Desktop" folder being pinned in Nautilus. Everything is so spaced out. Top bar has three interactive elements, but it takes four clicks to log out. There's a dock, but you can't move it to the left/right side, so it takes up even more vertical space. You can fix some of that with extensions, but half of them get disabled on every upgrade.

This is in stark contrast with macOS. If you can't find something in the menu bar, there's a search field in the help menu. If you use some menu bar option often, you can bind it to a custom key. Both of these are provided through standard system APIs, so every application uses them by default. Title bars have buttons, but are spacious enough so that there's always an obvious place to click-to-drag. (Gnome had to solve it by making ordinary widgets draggable... How do you know if you're selecting text in a URL bar, or moving the window?) I could keep going, but macOS has always been more intuitive and more friendly to power users.

Seconded. GNOME is simple and cohesive. Sure, some of the apps are a bit feature light, but I do most of my heavy lifting in the terminal anyways - I really don't need my "core" GUI tools like the file explorer to do a whole lot.

I use Niri, but I like Gnome. How are they getting worse?

The damage Gnome does to the reputation of Linux is surreal

And there are no alternatives.

I learned to love KDE, but I understand why people don't default to it. All other alternatives are dead and it makes sense. The scope of something like KDE or GNOME isn't really reasonable these days. I learned to install the most minimal version of KDE.

The (maybe) rising solution is "build-your-own-desktop" options like:

- Hyprland (for Window management and other random tasks like wallpapers and lockscreen)

- Waybar (for task bar/menu bar)

- Rofi/Wofi (for Spotlight/Search&Launch)

Then you a la carte your File Manager, photo editor, browser, and whatever apps you like.

While I find that somewhat appealing, and those solution are flexible enough to pretty much build whatever you like your DE to be like, they are also extremely complex. For most things there is no "defaults". You don't get to do anything "by default" other than boot into a GUI environment. You configure a shortcut to launch your terminal or apps, a task bar that also has an empty default. Things that have defaults are gonna be extremely "basic" (think html no css). Just the data dump, and it expects you to style it. They are entirely configured (and styled) through a series of conf/css/ini/yaml/json files.

These apps/environment pretty much dominate all the Linux desktop discussion these days. (At least discussion I can find on here or reddit or Twitter when I used to check it)

It's really hard to tell if anyone is actually using those things or not. They are extremely tedious and a giant pain in the ass for daily use. Maybe it's early days. It's been about 8-6 years now since all the talk has become about new Wayland compositors. There were dozens of them, but Hyprland seems to have the most mindshare? maybe? hard to tell. It's the youngest, but it would take many years to reach KDE or GNOME maturity

I find that KDE just works like most people expect a computer to work, and it doesn't get in my way, or try to impose a way of doing things. The defaults are reasonable, but you can tweak nearly anything to your liking.

My "favorite" Gnome-ism was something that happened a year or two ago. At work there's a machine in the workshop we use to reference technical drawings, charts and so on. So I wanted to set the display to never turn off, because I got annoyed with having to drop what I was holding (and sometimes walk down a ladder) and wiggle the mouse to wake up the machine.

That is impossible on Gnome. You get a dropdown of a few fixed values, none greater than 60 minutes, and you better like what choices the Gnome devs have granted you. The workaround requires some brain surgery in the terminal.

On KDE I can set the timeout to any integer I want.

> That is impossible on Gnome. You get a dropdown of a few fixed values, none greater than 60 minutes, and you better like what choices the Gnome devs have granted you. The workaround requires some brain surgery in the terminal.

AFAIK what gnome does is not give you any options above 15 minutes, but they do provide a toggle for disabling screen power saving and toggles for other such power saving features.

I've always been able to disable if fine, what irks me is the artificial 15 minutes limit in the drop down menu, forcing you to edit dconf entries to increase it...

> It's really hard to tell if anyone is actually using those things or not.

They do.

You're mostly spend a few days on configuring the basics, then tweak things over the next months. Then you don't touch anything for years as everything is working exactly the way you want. Some programs do better with defaults so you can tweak the shipped config.

I don't need GNOME or KDE maturity because what I need is just a fraction of what they can do. And what I concocted is more stable and don't require clickops to get the same version on another computer.

> I understand why people don't default to it.

Can you explain why KDE shouldn't be the default?

> The (maybe) rising solution is "build-your-own-desktop" options like

That's not new, people have been doing that with twm, awesomewm, dozens more for over a decade. That's niche though, the majority see Gnome and that's it. They will never even know that there is something else, they probably don't even know that Gnome != Linux.

> And there are no alternatives.

I am happy as can be running Linux Mint Cinnamon. It just works.

Also there is good old Xfce, in fact there are lot of good alternatives.

This year was the first time I ever used a Mac and I was shocked how bad the desktop was. You can barely be productive without installing ten different apps that allow you to use basic stuff like alt-tab or properly rebind keys..

Linux users have it really good, all things considered.

should have have mentioned Wayland is what I was considering. Mac is pretty rough I agree.

Yeah, using Wayland is the mistake. X11 works.

Wayland will probably still need a few years to mature and actually be viable.

no thanks

> The (maybe) rising solution is "build-your-own-desktop" options [...].

This is not a solution for power users, this is a half-hearted non-solution for people with too much time on their hands. As a power user, I need the computer to do the stupid work for me, so I can focus on the more interesting/important stuff, like playing games, recording a song, building an app, or just making a living.

I play guitar. I tried building one. It was terrible. There's a good reason why there's very few luthiers among guitarists.

> Maybe it's early days.

People have been doing this since before KDE. I started using Linux around 2002, and it wasn't long until I was theming Fluxbox.

If you want a decent and hackable desktop environment, start with matching the functionality of OS X 10.4, then work from there.

Dunno if you missed it but Linux Mint team forked libadwaita into libadapta to enable theming

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44230914

True. They're stuck in between badly aping Apple, trying too hard to do their own thing, and being toxic to the rest of the developer community.

They're not a trillion dollar company. Sure, many projects would do well with more decisive decision-making, but the strength of free software comes from community and collaboration.

I've found GNOME developers to be pleasant to work with & I enjoy the experience I have with the DE.

<https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217>

TL;DR: if you want window decorations, link with libadwaita.

SDL ended up linking with libdecor. You know how when you use a Qt app in Gnome, it looks out of place? Now even the window decorations look inconsistent from one another.

I'm well aware of this issue. I don't expect windows to look the same to each other. I like that the title bar can have other content in it other than just the app name and the close button.

For that reason alone I avoid Qt apps, as almost none draw their own title bar. Qt apps aren't even consistent among themselves in theming/style, for example the only apps that look in place on KDE are specifically made with KDE in mind.

I don't understand where the "consistency" obsession comes from, all these apps use different tool kits and will look different regardless.

> I don't understand where the "consistency" obsession comes from [...].

Mental overhead. Sometimes Preferences is Ctrl-P, sometimes Ctrl-[,]; sometimes Copy is Ctrl-C, sometimes Ctrl-Shift-C. Sometimes the menu is a hamburger, sometimes a bar. macOS has none of these problems.

Did you look at KDE?

.... and I'm pretty sure KDE did the glass everywhere theme maybe 20 years ago

I like it a lot. Reminds me of the OG Mac OS X Aqua theme, except a more reactive/dynamic version of it to account for accessibility.

Refreshing counter to the brutalist styles that were trending. The problem with brutalist styles is that they tend to be busy, which becomes confusing and unintuitive to new users.

This seems like it would help separate elements for easier focus, to make things more obvious.

> Reminds me of the OG Mac OS X Aqua theme

What I find surreal is that most comments are exactly like those back in the day, too! (Pinstripes, what were they thinking? Glossiness is distracting! Where's my platinum? This is a stupid toy!)

Anyway, this will be refined and fine tuned and we will all be fine.

Platinum's pinstripes and Aqua's glossy buttons didn't interfere with contrast. That's the golden rule - as long as content is legible, you can go off doing whatever sorts of cute baffles you want as a bonus. The pinstripes created texture that defined the titlebar in Platinum, Aqua's color emphasized interactive elements using visual contrast. In my opinion Aqua looks awful, but I do accept that it was an extremely usable interface for people with weak vision or little computer experience. The same can be said for Comic Sans and it's deliberate ugliness.

How will those same audiences react when they see a glassy squircle pop up on their iPhone? What is it a metaphor for? Is it a button? A notification toast? An entry window? An app? A widget? Did they forget to put on their glasses this morning? Is it interactive, are there gestures or buttons to close it? How do you call someone from this screen?

This is objectively bad design. I would argue you don't know what made Platinum and Aqua great if you're comparing those complaints to this clown vomit.

> Aqua's color emphasized interactive elements using visual contrast.

There were loads of complaints about readability with Aqua, particularly of the menus and the windows title bars, both of which were translucent and had pinstripes. Briefly discussed here for example: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2011/05/mac-os-x-revisited/ . There was also the uproar at Leopard’s transparent menu bar and glossy dock, discussed here: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/10/mac-os-x-10-5/ . All these were over the top initially and were toned down and tweaked over time.

> How will those same audiences react when they see a glassy squircle pop up on their iPhone?

It’s a button. It has a shape, some physical character, and when you poke it wiggles and does something. It looks miles better than the label-button-links things that looked all identical in iOS 7 and that still plague modern design.

> This is objectively bad design. I would argue you don't know what made Platinum and Aqua great if you're comparing those complaints to this clown vomit.

I did not really like Platinum (I spent quite a lot of time with Kaleidoscope, which I miss very much). I really liked Aqua, though, despite its occasional brushed metal excesses. I would not mind going back to Lion, when they toned down the glossiness they introduced in Leopard. I think that UI was very elegant. But I have to admit there is a kind of playfulness with the concept of liquid UI that is intriguing. I love how the Dynamic Island reacts and behaves as it splits, grows, and shrink. I think I like it better than iOS 5-era glossy everything, and definitely more than iOS 7+. I am willing to admit that I have bad taste, but I am optimistic about the possibilities with the concepts they showed.

That said, I swear I read the clown vomit but about Aqua back in 2001. Some things never change.

The Apple customerbase never changes. When Apple hypes up a bad update, people apologize and say "wait for the next point release" as a healing salve. When Apple releases a flop like the Vision Pro, everyone has to point out that the Newton failed so the iPhone could run. Maybe, just maybe, Apple's characteristic product management results in blatant failures. Mice that put a charging port on the bottom. Serial cables that are a white-label USB with licensing fees. Lisas that inhabit landfills. We can't always argue that Apple exists independent of other marketing influences and can just do whatever they want as a result - they have to compete! Resting on laurels isn't good enough.

I'm willing to give Apple their credit, where due. Mojave and Catalina was polished to a professional sparkle, it was very believable as a professional OS back then. Big Sur wasted a lot of screen real estate without any good way to get it back, and now Liquid Glass is sacrificing visual clarity to Mammon in hopes that it sells more Macbooks. I don't think it makes sense, any way you cut it. Not everything has to be history repeating itself, Apple has proven more than adept at inventing new ways to fail. Apple Car and Airpower both come to mind - sometimes it just doesn't work out.

> Maybe, just maybe, Apple's characteristic product management results in blatant failures.

I know, I went through a couple of real lemons, like the 2nd-hand PowerBook 5400c I had as a kid, or the early MBP with a bad GeForce, and an overheating late Intel MBP with an awful keyboard. I also still have a hockey puck mouse somewhere. And again, Aqua had its excesses and I strongly disliked their turn to flat design.

All I am saying is that the concept of liquid glass is interesting and I am sure they will iterate over time to fix issues. All the legibility and readability concerns could be addressed by tweaking the opacity of the buttons whilst keeping the dynamic and kinetics aspects of it without throwing the whole thing away.

There are many precedents, it would not be really unexpected.

> Not everything has to be history repeating itself, Apple has proven more than adept at inventing new ways to fail. Apple Car and Airpower both come to mind - sometimes it just doesn't work out.

Yes indeed. I am not arguing otherwise.

> There was also the uproar at Leopard’s […] glossy dock

“Seriously, pseudo-3D? Really? If a compulsion for gaudiness must be quenched, at least try to confine such exercises to more obscure features. Don't scribble all over the second-most visible interface element in the entire OS like a nine year-old girl putting make-up on her dollie.”

It's funny because Apple very brazenly ripped off the glossy 3D Dock from Project Looking Glass: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Looking_Glass

You can't "fine tune" fundamental flaws away

Apple learned a lot of lessons with Aqua and eventually dialed back the translucency. Unfortunately, they seem to have forgotten those lessons.

Agreed. I've used Macs since 1986 and at one point worked for Apple. I used to make the same jokes about Linux on the desktop as everyone and yet I see myself seriously considering it more every day.

I never worked for Apple, but I've used mostly Macs since System 6, and am feeling the same frustration with their software. Unfortunately their laptops are way better than anything else out there, so I'm forced to tolerate it. I ran Linux on a PowerBook for awhile, but it was janky, and it seems like that has not changed. OS X is still basically Unix, so I'll go on running the Unix stuff I need, and turn off the lickable distractions to the extent I can.

I recently switched to Linux Mint on a makeshift PC and it feels a bit like going back to Snow Leopard. It's snappy, pleasant to look at and has all the necessary modern features I need. Very surprisingly and unlike everything I experienced before on Linux desktops, it all worked out of the box (plus a few extra clicks on a GUI to get some proprietary drivers).

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'll quickly correct you as a zoomer: Gen Z is too young to remember windows vista, but just old enough to have enough fuzzy memories of skeuomorphism to be nostalgic for it (think of it like millenials liking vaporwave despite being very young in the 80s).

This makes far more sense as #2 with a flavor of cashing in on zoomer nostalgia.

> millenials liking vaporwave

From context, I'm assuming this is a misnomer and not a jab. XD (Although, admittedly, I'm not sure what the reference is actually to...)

I'm not sure what you mean; vaporwave is neither a misnomer nor a jab. Did you think they meant vaporware?

The vaporwave aesthetic is that neon, retro-futuristic, laser-beam-y type look.

*facepalm* You're correct. I misread it every time, including the first time I scanned your comment. (A truly strange experience since that is not a common occurrence for me. I simply never saw a "v" there.)

Browser/webview have had iOS 7+ style blur for a while now, but won’t have an answer to emulating Liquid Glass shaders for a while.

EDIT: although perhaps this will allow emulation in webview if performance isn’t abysmal https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/SVG/Reference/E...

It's already been imitated in CSS https://twitter.com/bbssppllvv/status/1932325303273271727

I think the hard part is the droplet animation when expanding/contracting controls, dragging, etc.

Plenty of those on Twitter too today

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.

Right before the unveiling, Craig specifically said visionOS was the driver for these changes. So the new UI is literally because Apple is still betting on visionOS.

The thing I find really weird there is that visionOS panes and windows are more opaque than this. They have some transparency, but it's a heavily tinted frosted glass effect with entirely readable contrast. This may be "inspired" by visionOS, but this looks like somebody really just threw out that design and the usability with it.

It’s more likely because the visionOS designers needed something to move on to, so Liquid Glass is just their next project, and it’s less work to do a similar thing as they did on visionOS. The new look also isn’t actually the same as visionOS, just adopts some design elements.

good god. this never ends well.

It could be worse, at least they didn’t rename the company over their VR headset.

TBF it is a less prejudiced name than the one they used before.

I think they really wanted to change their image, and the metaverse thing happened to also be a decent candidate for that.

Bingo. It seems like the same mistakes made by MS in the 2000s when they prioritized a touch interface onto devices without them... why is Apple so desperate to make Vision happen?

Because it's the only thing they have that even has a chance of being "the next big thing".

So they're gambling everything on it; Steve would have shitcanned it a year ago and fired everyone involved.

I think asserting that there is no consumer product to be had in the realm of AR/spatial computing is shortsighted.

And if so, then why not work on it? The research in AR has already improved the phones as well.

I don’t be grudge I’m trying. I do be grudge them, forcing every other workable component that they make to pretend that it’s a really good idea.

Same thing Microsoft did with their tablet UI forced on all of their operating systems.

And I don’t think that’s happening. The keynote was not about how great this UI is for AR.

but they can work on it without ruining ios. no?

They can't even work on iOS without ruining macOS, so, no.

This idea is not in the comment I am replying to.

Also a great way to speed up hardware upgrades. Each new os update can add more computationally expensive frills to make the older phones slow down.

This was also my first thought, "imagine how many who think their device is too old after installing this "everything transparent" OS update". I bet shareholders will love it though.

We had operating systems with transparent windows 20 years ago. I have a hard time believing this UI will stress any device released in the last 5 years.

One of the more common “problems” people have is that their devices are so much more powerful than they will ever use.

Go look at videos of the current UI. It's not just doing an alpha blend between two static images. It's doing real time effects to mimic refraction and color separation the way you except to see through glass.

Also, 20 years ago you're talking about desktops connected to the wall, or laptops with no expectations of battery life. The name of the game for phones is use the hardware as little as possible a down clock asap. The fancier the UI, the longer older hardware need to stay upclocked and the more they have to work to hit 60fps (or more) smoothly.

I love the switcheroo thought experiment: imagine we have always had transparent glassy user interfaces; for whatever reason, that's what the techology allowed. And in 2025 we have made a breakthrough and finally achieved opaque buttons. Would this change be just as controversial?

No, it would be a massive net positive. Everyone would love these new opaque buttons that obscure the noise underneath so that you can easily read foreground text.

In light of AR glasses, this thought experiment is even more relevant...

You are incorrect. Apple’s (current) AR system uses cameras and video feeds, not translucent/transparent displays. You absolutely can have fully opaque elements; when the AVP is worn, all you see are displays. When it’s off, you see nothing but pure black.

> Since you literally cannot have fully opaque elements with AR glasses

Why not?

Because AR glasses, by definition, overlay an interface onto the real world that you are seeing through the transparent glasses.

VR glasses like the VisionPRO can add a video stream of your surroundings, but they are physically opaque and thus don't suffer from this limitation.

But why does the interface have to be transparent? Why can't it just be opaque then disappear when not needed and/or be placed in the periphery?

If we're still speaking about AR glasses, no current technology can make the images more opaque than the screen itself. So if the screen itself is transparent, whatever you draw on it with light will be at best as opaque as the screen - so, still transparent.

Wouldn't that be a crazy bet, given how much AR has flopped? Or do people still think it's more than a fad of the early 2020s?

It seems to be largely based on the visionOS stuff.

This is 100% for that reason.

I had the same thought as soon as they announced quartz. I'm really happy with the new GUI. I think it really demonstrated the flaws of the previous design.

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.

They are probably used to the outrage. Apple removed the floppy disc drive, optical drive, headphone jack. Most people don't care. I don't think that buttons people pressed a thousand times before that are now slightly less readable are a big issue.

truly contender for the worst redesign of the decade. It's hard to see how a trillion dollar company would stumble so bad here. They must be real zealots on AR to even go here.

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.

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.

I don't want to make this an Apple vs. Google comment (Mac user since 2007, iPhone user since 2009), but Google spend a good chunk of time on their Material Design 3 Expressive redesign at the Android event a few weeks ago.

MD3 feels pretty tame in comparison, though. Mostly still the same flat look but with more roundness and louder colors. I think it’s going to end up dated looking much, much more quickly than MD1/MD2 did.

Tame is what Apple should have shipped instead of this liquid glass disaster.

to be fair, i'd take tame over horrendous and unparseable screen any day.

Apple didn't talk about AI or Siri because they're currently flailing and so behind it's concerning.

This was design-focused because skin-deep was all they accomplished.

There were a ton of tweaks across their ecosystem that I think are great. What I would truly have preferred, however, is a feature freeze and bug fix while Apple Intelligence improves…

When they announced Apple Intelligence, I had hopes that it would come with Siri supporting more languages.

These features, that duck taping llm as parent comment says looks nice but not when your language isn't supported. 13 years pass by since Siri was introduced and I still can make use of it beyond setting timers and managing music playback.

They did still have a lot of AI features, just not AI chat.

Users can now use AI in Shortcuts, developers can use the various on-device models, I assume the call and text screening uses AI. Those are a few things off the top of my head. We need to some thinking the start and end for AI is a text field with a submit button.

The AI features they promised 1 year ago are still not here. And they are not even close to shipping it. End of story as far as i’m concerned.

But yes, it is nice to see some incremental AI improvements with suggestions in various apps, etc. Better than nothing.

To be fair, they did say it was going to be a decade long arc to move to more AI stuff.

We have a lot of other options for generic AI chat, so I’d rather them get it right than rush out something that isn’t any good.

yeah i’m less upset about it now, i just want them to deliver something that works. I agree with that. But their entire product launch was confusing and i’d be embarrassed if i was apple.

Normal people (not techies) see software updates that mention “apple intelligence”, they update, and then everything looks almost the same lol. It’s SO confusing and the average person thinks siri is still garbage.

This topic comes up every holiday i kid you not. An aunt or uncle asks “why does siri still suck?” It gets a bit old.

They need clear and concise product messaging explaining what apple intelligence is, and what is coming soon for siri. Because clearly apple see’s those things as completely different, but complimentary to the same goal.

A company with thousands of developers can focus on multiple things at once. I'm happy they are trying to improve all parts of the operating system and not just AI features I personally will never use.

Mission accomplished: Users are now angry about something else?

only concerning if you have major investments in apple, and rely on ai hype to drive the stock up. I don't know if it's because I watch so much sports but to see someone fall behind doesn't really make me believe they lack the ability to catch up

I don't want the AI features, either -- but I do want a company that can deliver on what they promise.

Apple has fallen behind before; I don't doubt they can recover I just hope it's a good Apple that we get to live with on the other side of what they're going through.

Apple of the last few years hasn't been consumer or developer friendly; their privacy promise being one of the big standouts in their favor.

> Apple didn't talk about AI or Siri because they're currently flailing and so behind it's concerning.

Either concerning or reassuring depending on your perspective. I for one will be glad if there's a platform left that hasn't been invaded by AI.

I wouldn't find the company's inability to deliver on their own top priorities something to take a sigh of relief about.

What internal issues is a company like this also failing to deliver? A problem like this doesn't come about in isolation.

Eh. Apple have always been good at products and bad at services.

If you're here to make excuses for them, that's totally fine. I'd like to see Apple do better.

> I for one will be glad if there's a platform left that hasn't been invaded by AI.

There's always Linux! ;)

> because they're currently flailing and so behind

...behind what? Siri doesn't have a meaningful competitor on iOS. Nothing else even has access to my personal data.

As far as I know, Siri cannot (by Apple's design) have a competitor on iOS.

Unless you consider unlocking your phone, opening an app like Amazon, and tapping a microphone to talk to Alexa as a fair access for competition.

Sure, but that raises the question of what siri is falling behind if nobody else can fill that void.

Now I haven't owned an android in many years, but I haven't heard a peep from google about how they're using AI to improve their basic apps.

I recommend trying an Android device with an assistant -- they can just do so much more I'm not sure how to tell you in words, other than Siri is in its own league and it isn't the big league. The things Apple lauded yesterday were on my Blackberry-branded Android. Let that timeline sink in.

I appreciate Siri's privacy features. Full stop. Nothing else about Siri is even close to what Google delivered 2+ years ago. Definitely try Google Assistant and others if you wish to be informed on this; Apple isn't going to be a good source of setting the bar for user experience with automated assistants for a long time.

I've installed the beta, and I really like how it looks and works. Like you said, it's not perfect, but I expect the small gripes I have so far will be ironed out before long.

Not sure a massive misallocation of resources is something to celebrate.

> Agreed with other commenters that crappy electron apps will look increasingly out of place

Aesthetics is the smallest problem I've had with Electron (or generally non-native) apps.

What makes you so convinced it's a misallocation?

Looking at it.

Did you mean 2007 when Windows Vista was released"?

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.

Just because we can doesn't mean we should. Using this new design language as an example, things are now harder to read, identify, and understand. That's a huge loss to productivity and ease of use.

> things are now harder to read, identify, and understand

What makes you think that? Do you have a specific example from the keynote in mind?

There must be something since you've never actually used this design system yourself. Or is this just your pre-judgement?

Even in their animations on this page there are things where the user scrolls the interface and the part under one of these glass buttons looks more exaggerated and draws the eye in an unpleasant way, and depending on where they land with it, the text on the button isn't particularly readable.

In the keynote, they showed an app, I think it was Messages, where the UI at the bottom was illegible because it was translucent and the background image and text were showing through too much. There are other examples that I was able to find were legibility was negatively impacted.

Just the short demo videos on their website.

Their example of the music app. You have a translucent bar showing the currently playing music app.

It gets harder to read when it overlaps with the background music album covers. I can very easily see a situation where you need to scroll to an empty bit, just to be able to read what it is actually playing.

Now, imagine you have a visual impairment. It's already hard to read with mostly normal eyes. This will be impossible for anyone with bad vision, probably even worse if colorblind.

It is genuinely unreadable, and a mess visually.

> What makes you think that? Do you have a specific example from the keynote in mind?

Almost every button and menu they showed was harder for me to read than the ones on my current generation Apple gear. The icons on buttons are indistinct, the text is hard to read. The buttons themselves seem to sink into the content "below" making both the buttons and the content hard to see.

Some examples:

- the tabs at the bottom left of the photos app

- the address bar in Safari (what a complete mess... you can't see the content beneath because the address bar blurs it, but you also can't read the address bar because the glass effect destroys contrast

- in the colourless "translucent" colour way, all the icons look the same

- the (admittedly cute) "squish" effect when tapping menus and some of the buttons looked like it would slow down all interactions

- the highlights and light/colour bending effects are utterly distracting, catching your eye when you really want to be skimming the content or overview to orient yourself in the UI

True, I've not used it... but I was watching along with the launch video with rapt Apple fan-boi attention and I was surprised by how uncomfortable the new UI seemed to be. I've never felt that before.

This new design style is certainly "fun", but it looks like it'll get in the way of fast use of the tools.

I want my OS to promote clarity of affordances, and then to recede away from my attention so I can get on with doing what I was trying to do. This new design style looks like it's trying to hold on to my attention all the time I'm using the devices. (Admittedly today's keynote was an ad for the new design, so that sense of attention grabbing was hopefully accentuated over day to day use... but I'm skeptical.)

Looking at Apple's curated headline hero image on https://www.apple.com/os/ios/

Every single example of the five are hard to read, especially the second.

At least half of the example screenshots and videos I've seen in the keynote and on various Apple website pages are hard to read. The lense effects, only visible in the animations/videos, are technically impressive, visually stimulating, but terrible from a utilitarian perspective (unless you consider convincing people to buy iPhones using attractive visuals in a cinematic sort of way but not actually trying to use the devices as some sort of utility to Apple).

See this from another comment in the thread https://imgur.com/a/6ZTCStC

Look at the notifications in the middle of the landing page for iOS 17. https://www.apple.com/os/ios/ It is immediately awful. I hadn't even seen the keynote yet when I went to apple.com to see what had been announced and my very first thought was "Oh no"

There's literally dozens of examples being presented. Are you doing this on purpose to provoke a response?

I gotta be honest, I don’t find it particularly hard to read. I like how it makes it feel like there is “depth” to the screen, and when I focus on the top layer (eg Notification Center) the background falls away.

I can personally see how others would find it hard to read, just really doesn’t bother me. I can imagine being unconvinced that anyone really finds it to be that bad, and thinking it’s just HN contrarians being annoying, as usual.

Reminds me of when they added more transparency to the UI around Mac OS X 10.9 where they argued that it "helps you focus on what's important". Huh? By showing me what's behind what I'm trying to look at? The first thing I do when I setup a new machine is to go to accessibility settings and turn on "reduce transparency". Hoping there is a way to do something similar with this.

Similar with how MS brought 'glass' into their Aero theme for vista or win7. There was exactly no benefit to being able to see some blurry version of the background window if I'm trying to read the foreground. I don't think a version that lets background detail through clearly will do any better outside of flashy demos.

> That's a huge loss to productivity and ease of use

Have you used it yet?

I have looked at the screenshots and videos. I can tell from those that text is hard to read and icons are hard to differentiate. iOS has a long history of these gaffes.

Well at least you didn't come into it with any bias.

What makes you think this opinion is biased? They clearly and concisely explain the problem. Can you address it?

I’ll try to address this:

> That's a huge loss to productivity and ease of use

They haven’t used it and haven’t lost any productivity because of it (outside of the time they’ve spent complaining about it online).

I can tell from a photo of a book that uses dark gray ink on light gray paper that that book would be hard to read, without actually having a copy of the book in my hand. As far as I know, there's nothing about the physical display of the iPhone that would make this easier to read in person. If it were 3D (like the Nintendo 3DS), with text popping off the screen, I think that would make it even harder to read.

Agreed. That should be the focus of any user interface.

> Using this new design language as an example, things are now harder to read, identify, and understand

Wait until we have some real feedback to complain, at least.

Microsoft did glass with windows 7, maybe even vista. Can't remember.

Kinda old hat at this point tbh.

And just because we have all this powerful hardware, does not mean we need to waste it on physically accurate glass surfaces on UIs.

If this rolls out to all iDevices, how much energy (in other words CO2) will be expended worldwide on rendering things like this?

> that are always running and compositing frames like a game engine 120 times a second

Which is complete idiocy if you ask me. Why update a static screen at 120 fps? Are our batteries too large?

> Why update a static screen at 120 fps?

Good thing it doesn't do that then, variable refresh rate displays that go down to 1 Hz are fairly standard now on phones as well as other displays.

Even before that, mobile UI frameworks are retained mode GUIs, not immediate. They aren't drawing to a blank framebuffer 120 times a second if they don't have to. Redraws only happen when something changes (e.g. "Dirty" rects).

Oh even immediate UI framework don't paint non-stop. If the UI has not been interacted with, or if there are no animations/gifs, it has no blimey reason to repaint, and it will not. It will repaint the whole screen, of course, but that's already a win.

They don't. GPU rendering only happens when something changes. Even composition only happens when something changes thanks to panel self refresh (this is independent of the more recent VRR that also lowers refresh rate when idle, this is a relatively small savings compared to the other two)

By this token, why not add particle systems and fancy explosions to every button click? Why stick to squares or rounded squares etc, when you can use voxel shading to generate complex n-gons with thousands of edges?

The problem with all this - and 'liquid glass' as well - is that far from adding anything to the experience, they take away from it. They muddy and visually complicate what should be a visually clear and simple interface, one that gets out of your way as much as possible while allowing you to reach what you really care about - the content in your apps.

only if each iOS app experience wasn't worse with each release. SwiftUI apps feels much slower than UIKit. My iPhone 13 experience with latest iOS overall feels very sluggish to old iPhones. This design feels not bringing much benefits but only drawbacks - more energy wasted, slower performance on older iPhones (apple want you buy new phone) and IMHO is just worse UX.

> It's about time we start seeing more physicality in our user interfaces!

It's actually quite resource intensive to have translucency, in many implementations across the web and mobile.

apple need to persuade people somehow to buy new iphone.

Highly dynamic frames makes sense for an immersive game. It doesn't make sense when I'm trying to read my email or what the name of the song that is currently playing is.

>It's about time we start seeing more physicality in our user interfaces!

I'm not sure if this is a joke or not.

We had that, it was called skeuomorphism: https://miro.medium.com/v2/da:true/resize:fit:1200/0*6DRkHp3...

Then we got rid of it because it looked too 2010 now we are bringing it back because flat looks too 2020.

so what you're saying is that we need to resurrect skeuomorphism?

I get the sense that the Scandinavian minimalism thing has worn too heavy on everyone and now we're taking a collective step back to explore things that are a bit more fun and maximalist. So yeah, maybe a little more skeuomorphism but done differently? That was a fun era!

> I get the sense that the Scandinavian minimalism thing has worn too heavy on everyone

As a Scandinavian: I don't feel like we tried that since Braun. Apple has tried to mimic a Scandinavian sort of minimalism, but only in appearance. The iPhone UI is way to busy and is to hard to navigate for me to classify it as minimalism.

Skeuomorphism in the sense of exactly mimicking existing physical interfaces probably mostly not, but skeuomorphism in the sense of using physically-inspired visual effects to add depth to a virtual interface I think so for sure. Liquid glass is so damn pretty.

I think modern skeuomorphism must be in a weird spot compared to a few decades ago. Right now our real world devices designers would be inspired are less likely to have physical controls, so the virtual versions are pulling from a more distant original source that's already been through a few degrees of separation. If the original industrial design that computer interface graphics was pulling from was the rise of industrial and consumer electronics through the 20th century (the various switches, dials, indicators, tuning knobs, etc), what new physical design is there to inspire that isn't feeding on itself.

I would be happy with that. After years of using iOS with the current design it still takes me a few moments before I’ve found the Photos app with its meaningless icon that looks way too much like some other icons.

yes, I think this is exactly what's happening.

From one point of view, this design language is a type of skeuomorphism, by it mimicking pieces of rounded glass laid on top of one-other.

The problem with skeuomorphism in iOS' first design language was that resemblance to real-world objects was taken too far — at the expense of legibility. Users attributed affordances to virtual objects that they didn't have.

The problem with iOS 7's flatter interface was that the anti-skeumorphism went too far in the other direction, again at the expense of legibility. Users couldn't see what controls were supposed to do.

... And now the pendulum has swung back in the other direction, again too far, and missed the goal.

This is the Jevons paradox [1] in full display here. It's much easier to take advantage of hardware to run software at 120 FPS, so why not?

And I agree about liquid glass being successful iff they make the developer tooling for this as easy as additional modifiers to components, or even the default for SwiftUI.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

I don't mind physicality, but not glass. Please.

There are reasons why most controls are NOT made of glass in real life.

There are myriads of glass controls around you, just pay attention to it. From car interiors to elevator buttons, it's there.

Glas actually makes sense, given its an extension of the device's hull.

Probably the main reason is because they have ugly electronics behind them instead of pretty dynamic colors.

I mean probably because they would break, no? I think glass-looking buttons are great (think Sony's Dualsense controller, Xbox controllers, tbh many controllers have glass-ish buttons)

I think it's a nice aesthetic. It obviously needs some tuning (contrast, transparency, etc.), but the idea is nice! I've installed the beta, and it isn't as bad as it looks, just takes some getting used to.

I also theorize this may be some grand transition phase to prepare everyone for the visionOS future apple wants to happen, but that could just be a stretch.

> One reason for flat design is because it was the lowest common denominator and easy for devs to implement.

The 3D buttons in Windows 98 (Start button, for example) must have be harder to develop due to the animation involved. Yet, that was perfectly fine on hardware much older than those on which flat UIs were developed. I think you are missing the main point, which is that designers maul designs every season exactly like in the fashion industry due to merely being employed to do so and feeling a need to produce something new all the time (, which is sub-optimal for the humans who have to bear the UX consequences, to say the least).

https://copy.sh/v86/?profile=windows98

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.

It’s terrible and an unsolvable “problem” that many have tried before and there’s no way of getting this right.

Transparent UI components always add noise by nature, especially glass that is intended to be realistic - see all the refractions shown in the keynote.

Aqua was also playful and suggested the same feel but never got in the way of clarity and was beautifully implemented almost feeling revolutionary at the time.

What is on point for VR use cases where this is taken from, unfortunately ruins a desktop or handheld experience.

A massive loss of precision, focus and a big step backwards.

> It’s terrible and an unsolvable “problem” that many have tried before and there’s no way of getting this right.

except apple dictates to its fans whats right. i feel apple has already begun a slow process of making them similar;

what im more curious about is how they will improve the settings app (it seems the desktop settings is the worst its been design and flow wise - ive never liked the ios settings design - i do hope they change both of these for the better)

edit: more newlines

They've already started ruining the desktop experience with the macOS 11 redesign and there's no sign of them stopping. For example, the recent settings app redesign that no one asked for broke the fundamental desktop UI design rule that controls never scroll, only content does.

one of my favorite examples of how bad the System Settings app is: find where the Default Browser setting is, without using search.

Oh wow. Took me several minutes of aimlessly poking around.

Actually, even without that, the grouping and the hierarchy don't make sense. Why are some things top-level items and other under "general"? Same for "privacy and security" (I assume that's what it's called in English), for some reason "passwords", "lock screen" and "touch ID and password" are separate top-level items even though they do very much belong to "privacy and security".

The more you look at it, the less sense it makes.

Your smoking gun is to not use the app in the most intuitive and obvious way?

> Your smoking gun is to not use the app in the most intuitive and obvious way?

Search isn't the most intuitive and obvious way to everyone. Just adding a search function also isn't an excuse to just totally ignore good UX design and information hierarchy.

I've been a sysadmin my entire career, and still do end-user support occasionally. You'd be surprised how few people use the search function, for anything, on their computers. Just opening the windows start menu and showing them they can search there is like black magic to a frighteningly large amount of people.

I've met fellow Mac users that don't even know spotlight exists, and navigate through the OS and every app via mouse and clicking around.

So yeah, just throwing a search box in your app as an excuse for ignoring the experience of navigating it any other way is bad UX design.

There's a search bar in the System Settings app, you don't need to know what Spotlight is.

I'm staying with family and just handed my 64 year old mother who has never used a Mac my Macbook Pro with the settings app open, and after explaining the concept of default browser in non-leading language (not mentioning the word default), her first thought was to click Display.

When nothing familiar was there her next thought was to click Search and then type in Browser and she made the connection of "Default Browser" to the concept I mentioned immediately.

-

Non-techies are not going to learn the groupings for OS settings any easier than they'll figure out a UX pattern that's been widely accepted for decades: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/search-visible-and-simple/

Of course, who don't know anything about UX tend to assume personal anecdotes map to a much larger sample size than they actually do.

yeah, I'm one of those who usually ignores any built in search option. I just default to assuming that it's an adware infested trap that will provide no value, only "engagement". Windows and Google conditioned this behaviour in me over the years.

By the way, macOS has a super useful search field under "help" in the menu bar. It searches among all menu items in the current app and even shows you where they are. Very non-obvious, but once you try it, you don't understand how you lived without it.

This is one of my favorite features of macOS. It's actually coming to spotlight in 26

Different people may approach the same UI differently. A good practice in UX design is to put things where people expect to find them — and duplicate them if different people go looking in different places. So a working search function doesn't absolve you of having to make the structure of your screens/menus/whatever make sense.

Life is not smoking guns, objective truths, or us and thems.

I do find it amusing how disorganized the app has become, and that has become my favorite example.

I find it even more amusing that you think citing search as a primary UI path is your “smoking gun” of good information hierarchy and interface design.

It's just a bad example. Sorry you're upset I called it out.

The original settings app had a nondescript "General" label for this same setting: neither tells me to expect a default browser setting.

Overall the old UI was just the current UI with lower information density.

> A setting's placement in the menu hierarchy "is a bad example" of the Settings app's being bad because search is available.

> Search is always available while the app is open, across all menus and functions.

> Therefore no placement or layout can be singled out as better or worse in the Settings app. All possible hierarchies or arrangements are equal.

> I unroll my Apple UX Researcher Toolkit (contents: blindfold, dart, dartboard, crack pipe), and use it to make my decision: I put the dropdown 3 levels deep under Touch ID, safe in the knowledge that I cannot be criticized, because we've also included a search bar.

It's just bad thinking. Sorry if you're upset I've called it out.

Search is... bad, generally.

How is that setting spelled? What synonym did they use? Are there multi-work linking hyphens? Will it work with or without them? Is the search fuzzy?

And then localization comes in. Take any translated UI and the search often falls short. Did they translate the setting name? Did they translate it right, or did a google-translate of their localization plist? Will it find the setting if I spell it without accents? Which dialect does it use? Wait I don't know how to say this specific technical work in my native language because nobody actually uses it?

So yeah, please keep categories that make sense.

I couldn't search System Settings when I setup my laptop for over an hour because it was indexing files I migrated from my old Mac. It made for a frustrating user experience trying to set this thing up.

Search only works if you know what you're looking for and what it's called. Horrible for discoverability.

I mean, by your logic the whole settings app should just be a search box when you open it. Clearly there’s a use case for browsability in a settings app, so that you can discover what settings exist. Given that, it’s probably important for the location of each setting to be intuitive.

Metro on phones worked so well but MS failed to translate it to desktops.

As for the second part, Apple does a remarkable job at updating all of the OS to a new design language. Unlike Windows, which last time I used it, had three different settings panels and UI controls resembling archaeological layers going back to pre XP.

You can still get the Windows 3/NT 3.5 directory picker if you dig around enough.

The biggest problem with Metro is how little effort was put into properly adapting it to desktops. It tried to handle everything from smartphones to tablets to non-touch PCs with 27” monitors with the same UI. It’s an understatement to say that it was awkward to use with a keyboard and mouse, because it almost acted like those forms of input ceased to exist.

If Apple makes the right platform-specific affordances (which they have a much better chance of doing) I think it can work.

> It tried to handle everything from smartphones to tablets to non-touch PCs with 27” monitors with the same UI

That was a big part of the problem, but the issues with the UI/UX went far beyond that.

For exemple, if you used the search bar in the "start menu" to get something from the control pannel, it would ONLY show the new W8 Metro dialog box that barelly has 1/5th the features and would refuse to show you the real one. It also took multiple years before the metro apps inlcuded in the OS (eg. pdf viewer) could be used in windowed mode (they were fullscreen mode like a video game, without taskbar), even the ipad at the time had better multitasking than the W8 Metro apps.

And as I understand it, much of that sort of problem comes down to the “warring factions” model found at Microsoft internally where the whole company is never on the same page, a problem that Apple doesn’t suffer from as badly.

It isn't quite as simple as that. The guy that ran the windows org during that time thought himself the Steve Jobs of Microsoft and didn't hear anything different (to the point of having multi-page public blog posts about how much the launched windows 8 US was the best thing ever and if you didn't agree, you were just wrong).

During that time they also instituted "anti-leak" measures so teams would develop and commit features internally and keep them behind hidden flags that required special permissions from the org to change (via an app they called "red pill"). That means that by the time many teams saw what was happening with the UX in various places in the OS, it was too late to come to consensus.

The entire cycle for the OS was empire building and emperor has no clothing from start to finish. It wasn't until he was ousted that they started to try and pull things back with 8.1 and eventually 10.

Apple is a lot better at eating their own dogfood than microsoft. They had UI designers working on macbooks at the Microsoft office, that alone probably explains a lot of issues with the OS

Office 365 is completely batshit in that dimension - let's just do totally different affordances and modals from the rest of the system we're running on top of, because people love change.

Window's problem has always been their legacy systems. I believe to this day you can bring up windows 95 era dialogs somehow in Windows 11?

It’s also a much deeper and broader ui. In the past 20 years of using windows I don’t recall one time that I needed to bring up the command line to do something. Linux on the other hand is a constant battle with random commands with close to zero discoverability. macOS sits somewhere in between, but definitely a way more ui friendly system compared to the various Linux desktop distros

Guess you never needed to use ipconfig. Jokes aside, you're right. It never had a power system underneath which is why macOS started to dominate in the 2010s.

You seem out of touch with the current trends, as it is right now you have to open a command line window during the installation of windows and run some commands just so you have the privillege of being able to install the system without the requirement of an online account. (And it's now a mandatory procedure if you have no internet access! You are locked up from even proceeding with installation until supplying access to the internet, unless you do that CLI kung-fu) Also, make sure you have the correct incantation because Microsoft keeps changing it from time to time!

I've also noticed a lot of solutions to issues in windows now adopting the usage of power shell one liners as an easy way to fix it, and some times even the only way to change a setting or disable something in the system.

Meanwhile in Linux land with the more recent distros running Gnome I've noticed less and less need to use the command line. Can still be annoying though, but I guess it's the price to pay when you roll the OS of your choice on a system that wasn't really validated for it. (it's amazing it works as well as it does honestly)

Very meandering comment. You've highlighted a very stupid reason for introducing CLI at install albeit a real situation. Didn't know there was a command for bypassing it and I freely admit, it made me see red.

The true difference between Windows and other OSes is that the CLI was thought out. I imagine there are still people out there running headless OSes. The UI is optional. Though this isn't the case for macOS, it tries to pretend it is IMO.

Everything is deep down beneath all this W11 acrylic translucency. MS did a good work around W7 when they patched majority of old icons and resources and then made widgets flatter in W8 and W10 so they would fit better. That gray 9x legacy is here and will stay - for compatibility reasons

That would be a surprise, since Windows XP and newer are based on Windows NT, not the Windows 9x family (Windows 95, 98, and Me).

He did say era. It actually NT3/4 UI.

Though this doesn't really count, there are definitely Windows 3.1 icons still there. Windows 95's Offline Web Pages folder is alive and well in Windows 11.

Definitely in the minority here but I liked Metro, I always felt it was just a decade ahead of it's time (as was Windows 8 generally)

The esthetic wasn't bad, the problem is that it was a massive reduction in functionality. For example, the fact that Metro apps included on windows could only be use in fullscreen mode and only one copy of it could be used at the same time. The new Metro settings they included to replace the ones from the control panel had only like 10% of the functionality of the old one and they actively tried to prevent you from finding the old one. The content density was significantly lower and dialogbox/dropdownmenus couldn't be resized to display more items (eg. list of keyboard layouts that can only display 3 items at the same time)

The issue with Metro, imo, is that it was dizzying to use as you were swept away into new interfaces and for many tasks we lost a lot of usability.

Yes especially given that XP was the most useable version of Windows ever. They just threw it all away and expected people to relearn the basics of interacting with their PC.

XP was good but I’m partial to 7. It was like a refined Vista that brought proper alpha blending support and a number of QoL improvements without setting the core experience on fire.

I really liked metro on windows phone but I did not understand it on desktop. It didn’t help that they took away the usual UI

Right but go a decade ahead when many more people use their phones as their primary computer, much less of a problem

Familiarity was not the only problem. A good UI for a small touch screen is a bad UI for a large screen, keyboard, and mouse.

Then they should have waited for a decade? Literally what does that have to do with anything. No shit, design decisions are very different when teleported literally a decade later

Metro was terrific on mobile - especially for older people who had no issues reading information from tiles or navigating sharp interface. Once my mother's HTC 8S broke and she had to temporarily switch to iPhone she complained how the interface was small and barely readable. It's the desktop where it failed - you can't just force users into a mobile interface, at the same time remove the most recognisable element of your product (start button and menu) and believe people will adapt.

What I find wild is that there were internal W8 releases with a proper start menu but they abandon it at some point to fully embrace Metro.

A Win8 tablet on Snapdragon X Elite would be a wonderful thing. Also, Metro on phones was amazing.

Metro was, and is, my favorite UI ever.

Do you mean Aero Glass from Windows 7? Metro is a flat design that looks nothing like this.

I assume they might be talking more to the "universal design" aspect.

Though Apple has long had a universal design across platforms. Not always in lockstep, but visual traits and behaviours and traits and appearances end up in all of their platforms, which even if it wasn't logical from a design perspective, there is loads of shared code so it's inevitable.

But really a lot of what they showed today reminded me most of Aqua from 25 years ago.

As a followup on this, it's notable that Apple has changed the title of the linked post to "Apple introduces a delightful and elegant new software design", making the subtitle "A universal design across platforms brings more focus to content and a new level of vitality while maintaining the familiarity of Apple’s software"

Everyone was keying on the universal design thing, and the seeming importance of "introduces" as if this is a first, and it was such an odd thing for Apple to denote given that they have been using a universal design for a long, long time.

Do you mean Aero Glass from Windows Vista?

Windows Mojave strikes again. Vista really got the short end of the stick

I was referring to the idea of having a universal design across mobile and desktop, which was one of the goals of Metro, rather than the specific visual style.

Metro never had this much transparency ingrained in the UX - and where it had, it was tastefully done with no/minimal accessibility concerns - doesn't seem like a valid comparison. Windows 8, especially 8.1 was a very pretty piece of software, the whole gesture- and card-based interface fiasco ruined its good name.

I didn't mean the visual style so much as the "let's use the same design on phones and on giant desktop monitors" philosophy.

Not Metro, which was flat, but their newer Fluent UI, shown in their design videos [0].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/@microsoftdesign/videos

It doesn’t look like Apple changed how the desktop fundamentally works. Microsoft put a touch-first UI on the server, and replaced the start button with a hot corner. Using that with RDP was a horrible experience.

If anything, we saw the iPad make serious roads towards functioning like macOS.

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.

Even the antialiasing is bad.. this is below Apple usual slickness.

I tried the beta on my phone and the antialiasing is mostly fine - the video was downscaled in resolution so it has more aliasing in it

(I hate the update by the way)

oh interesting, thanks

a "clear" opinion... :)

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.

> 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.

Skeuomorphism was on the Apple Lisa in 1983, and they didn't invent it. Apple's first touch device wasn't until ten years later in 1993 in the Newton MessagePad. The MessagePad didn't really have "apps," that wasn't until like 2008 when it was added to the iPhone, but now we're twenty-five years after Apple's first usage of Skeuomorphism. The Xerox Star was in 1981 and had Skeuomorphic elements.

So I'm not really following what you're trying to say in that sentance.

You are right, I believe skeuomorphism was basically the first approach for graphical user interfaces when they came out. The "save" icon being a floppy disk has been around for literal decades.

I can be argued that the Xerox Alto (1973) had skeuomorphic elements to it's GUI.

You're comparing multi-touch technology to the experience of the MessagePad? Also, do you know a bunch of people who were big Xerox Starheads? It doesn't count if you don't have mass adoption.

Likewise, I'm not really following what you're trying to say in that sentence.

> You're comparing multi-touch technology to the experience of the MessagePad?

Nobody mentioned multi-touch at all. We're talking about Apple's first usage of skeuomorphic UI design, and or their first usage on a touch device in particular.

> Also, do you know a bunch of people who were big Xerox Starheads? It doesn't count if you don't have mass adoption.

I genuinely don't understand what you're responding to or trying to say. I'm not following the relevance nor what you mean by "count" (or not-count).

I feel like you're trying to have a conversation about something else, but I'm really not sure what or what it is you thought you read.