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dimal
austinl
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.
ricardobeat
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.
miffy900
> 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.
mholt
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.
p_l
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.
andrewmcwatters
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.
DecentShoes
iOS 7 made the iPhone 4 practically unusable.
loloquwowndueo
“Supported” and “works well” ain’t the same. Do you remember how your iPhone 4 crawled when that effect was enabled?
rjmunro
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?
kevingadd
Anyone who's ever written a blur shader knows that blurs aren't cheap.
nikeee
> Wirth's law is an adage on computer performance which states that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster.
raydev
> 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.
lxgr
> Apple loves their battery life numbers
For devices currently being sold, primarily.
Cthulhu_
> 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.
WhyNotHugo
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.
p_l
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.
krferriter
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.
Cthulhu_
20 years later and they're building the start menu in React Native.
slt2021
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
cosmic_cheese
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.
dkarl
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.
mikestew
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.)
inquirerGeneral
[dead]
dmix
No matter what happens in the world someone will blame it on a top down conspiracy decided in some smoke filled back room.
sanswork
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?
RollingRo11
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”
mminer237
How can you get overheating and better performance? Is it just using the big cores for basic OS functions now?
dmix
> 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
andrekandre
> It’s in beta so ofc I’m getting a ton of frame hitches, overheating
c-hendricks
These transparency effects have been in macOS, ipadOS, iOS, and tvOS for years though?
landl0rd
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.
blinding-streak
The reality distortion field is back, it seems.
david-gpu
> 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.
coastalpuma
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.
jorvi
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
rafram
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.
steve-atx-7600
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.
robotresearcher
The section on macOS only used the name Tahoe, like the 26 idea hadn’t made it to the copy for that section.
coastalpuma
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.
cardanome
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.
carlosjobim
You know something that almost never has rounded corners? Glass.
armchairhacker
"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.
bsder
> 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."
monkeyelite
What is the reasoning behind this comment?
highwaylights
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.
tshaddox
> 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.
swores
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.)
thenaturalist
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.
ultrarunner
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.
thenaturalist
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?
delfinom
>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
georgebcrawford
What does autism have to do with it?
dimal
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.
thenaturalist
Check the parent comment.
andrepd
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.
surgical_fire
> , 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.
yuehhangalt
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.
nlarew
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.
candiddevmike
I think you're holding it wrong
ben_w
> 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.
flohofwoe
> 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.
soulofmischief
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.
surgical_fire
> 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.
delfinom
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.
cosmic_cheese
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.
layer8
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.
brookst
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.
lurking_swe
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. :(
Arkhadia
[dead]
burntalmonds
I'm hoping that's true and there's still an option for a flat, minimal look.
dylan604
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
adastra22
I hope it removes the shading and gloss too. Literally nothing in this design update is an improvement to accessibility.
kmfrk
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.
diabllicseagull
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.
stalco
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
weird-eye-issue
This looks like a screenshot from one of the jailbreak themes from like 15 years ago, and not one of the good ones
bigyabai
As a former Cydia user, my 12-year-old self takes that as validation that I was living in the future after all!
xandrius
Cydia would be the only way I'd ever go back to using an iPhone as my main driver. Good days.
jama211
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?
arvinsim
Glasklart?
ARandumGuy
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.
Vegenoid
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.
hbn
Remember this is the first developer beta. I’m pretty sure a lot of iOS 7 was dialed back between announcement and release
Micrococonut
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.
ljsprague
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.
makeitdouble
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.
seemaze
oomph, looks like this might finally be (my) year of the linux desktop..
hokumguru
I switched two months ago and it’s surprisingly usable. Come a long way in the last 10 years.
kazinator
Nice; mine was in 1995!
rubslopes
Not yet for me, still waiting for a 8-hour battery...
odo1242
year of the linux mobile?
adastra22
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.
debo_
You might want to look at the new design language that Android is going for:
eertami
Somewhat amusing after this how the top comment mentions "Apple ... never makes marketing content like this about its design language"
reaperducer
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.
adastra22
Ugly and a definite regression. But at least my eyes don’t hurt.
throwaway290
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....
dotancohen
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.
jama211
It’s a developer beta, don’t assume the release version will look like this mess.
CoastalCoder
That screenshot had the same effect on me.
Baffling choice.
ilt
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.
GenerocUsername
Holy cow that's bad. 2 slightly different grids overlaid with transparency feels like a joke but here t is
FinnKuhn
This kinda looks like a fake "iOS" skin for Android from 2018... nasty
hn_throwaway_99
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.
the_other
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.
chrismorgan
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.
plainOldText
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.
xmddmx
Even the non transparent stuff looks bad - a plain Finder window: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/macos-tahoe-26-0-beta-1...
bigyabai
Here I was, thinking it couldn't get any worse than Big Sur like a fucking moron.
Clamchop
Did they "squircle" the window? I've been enjoying the look of the liquid glass thing but this looks unserious, toy-like.
runlevel1
Oh dear...
That's worse than I expected.
pzo
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.
plainOldText
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.
encom
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.
baggachipz
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.
leakycap
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.
SlowTao
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.
cyberax
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.
nixosbestos
Lmao. Just some wildly untrue, especially with Pixel phones.
leakycap
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.
ragazzina
>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.
SlowTao
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.
noisy_boy
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.
PKop
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'
prashnts
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.
thepryz
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.
Gigachad
That building for accessibility helps more than just disabled people?
stock_toaster
I find the "reduce motion" toggle to be a more pleasant experience on iOS as well.
folmar
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.
jmb99
> 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.
crazygringo
> 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.
bigyabai
> 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.
JKCalhoun
I agree that it seems to be a move toward lower contrast. I prefer higher contrast.
rollcat
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.
cayley_graph
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.
rollcat
> 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.
colonial
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.
christophilus
I use Niri, but I like Gnome. How are they getting worse?
lyu07282
The damage Gnome does to the reputation of Linux is surreal
eddythompson80
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
rollcat
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.
pseudalopex
Did you look at KDE?
Taniwha
.... and I'm pretty sure KDE did the glass everywhere theme maybe 20 years ago
vFunct
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.
kergonath
> 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.
bigyabai
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.
eviks
You can't "fine tune" fundamental flaws away
yuehhangalt
Apple learned a lot of lessons with Aqua and eventually dialed back the translucency. Unfortunately, they seem to have forgotten those lessons.
designerarvid
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"
throw28198
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.
settsu
> 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...)
apetresc
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.
jitl
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...
msephton
It's already been imitated in CSS https://twitter.com/bbssppllvv/status/1932325303273271727
jitl
I think the hard part is the droplet animation when expanding/contracting controls, dragging, etc.
nharada
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.
chakintosh
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.
crooked-v
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.
layer8
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.
copperx
good god. this never ends well.
al_borland
It could be worse, at least they didn’t rename the company over their VR headset.
r00fus
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?
bombcar
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.
monkeyelite
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.
_aavaa_
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.
diggan
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.
al_borland
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.
montag
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...
sneak
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.
mulmen
> Since you literally cannot have fully opaque elements with AR glasses
Why not?
tsimionescu
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.
mulmen
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?
tsimionescu
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?
basisword
It seems to be largely based on the visionOS stuff.
stevenhubertron
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.
__m
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.
wraptile
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.
kylehotchkiss
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.
microtonal
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.
cosmic_cheese
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.
testfrequency
Tame is what Apple should have shipped instead of this liquid glass disaster.
lazharichir
to be fair, i'd take tame over horrendous and unparseable screen any day.
leakycap
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.
BirAdam
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…
pndy
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.
al_borland
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.
lurking_swe
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.
Manfred
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.
lxgr
Mission accomplished: Users are now angry about something else?
rebasedoctopus
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
leakycap
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.
nicoburns
> 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.
leakycap
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.
brenns10
> I for one will be glad if there's a platform left that hasn't been invaded by AI.
There's always Linux! ;)
MangoToupe
> 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.
leakycap
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.
tiltowait
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.
lxgr
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.
seydor
Did you mean 2007 when Windows Vista was released"?
captainmuon
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.
cosmotic
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.
nlarew
> 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?
zerocrates
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.
yuehhangalt
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.
Prickle
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.
the_other
> 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.)
cosmotic
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).
CactusRocket
See this from another comment in the thread https://imgur.com/a/6ZTCStC
Micrococonut
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"
fortyseven
There's literally dozens of examples being presented. Are you doing this on purpose to provoke a response?
avidphantasm
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.
keyringlight
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.
paulcole
> That's a huge loss to productivity and ease of use
Have you used it yet?
cosmotic
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.
dwayne_dibley
Agreed. That should be the focus of any user interface.
kergonath
> 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.
beAbU
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?
nottorp
> 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?
satvikpendem
> 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.
Pulcinella
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).
kllrnohj
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)
tsimionescu
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.
pzo
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.
satvikpendem
> 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.
pzo
apple need to persuade people somehow to buy new iphone.
snarf21
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.
noosphr
>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.
kej
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.
whiteboardr
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.
out-of-ideas
> 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
grishka
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.
n42
one of my favorite examples of how bad the System Settings app is: find where the Default Browser setting is, without using search.
grishka
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.
BoorishBears
Your smoking gun is to not use the app in the most intuitive and obvious way?
gherkinnn
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.
kevin_thibedeau
You can still get the Windows 3/NT 3.5 directory picker if you dig around enough.
cosmic_cheese
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.
max51
> 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.
cosmic_cheese
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.
bluSCALE4
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?
whatever1
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
bluSCALE4
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.
amlib
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)
pndy
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
jmkni
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)
max51
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)
jhickok
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.
herbturbo
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.
bowsamic
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
jmkni
Right but go a decade ahead when many more people use their phones as their primary computer, much less of a problem
pndy
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.
BirAdam
A Win8 tablet on Snapdragon X Elite would be a wonderful thing. Also, Metro on phones was amazing.
moralestapia
Metro was, and is, my favorite UI ever.
wmf
Do you mean Aero Glass from Windows 7? Metro is a flat design that looks nothing like this.
llm_nerd
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.
llm_nerd
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.
basisword
Do you mean Aero Glass from Windows Vista?
anonymars
Windows Mojave strikes again. Vista really got the short end of the stick
kej
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.
ilt
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.
kej
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.
pentagrama
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.
agumonkey
Even the antialiasing is bad.. this is below Apple usual slickness.
oofbaroomf
a "clear" opinion... :)
ricokatayama
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.
Someone1234
> 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.
beAbU
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.
mrcwinn
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.
Someone1234
> 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.
thinkingemote
It's probably to train the users for augmented reality UI. We will probably all see some kind of floating transparent user interface over a camera background. That the "liquid" transparency is dynamic and can change depending on the thing underneath and the thing being shown seems to directly point to this.
glkindlmann
It does indeed feel like a step backward - I was also weirdly reminded of the Forstall skeuomorphism era of UIs.
The video says: "It beautifully refracts light, and dynamically reacts to your movement, with specular highlights"; ugh, why? Why add dynamic==distracting high-frequency details that supply zero information?
The recent super flat UI aesthetic bugged me for awhile for its apparent lack of affordances, but when used consistently it made sense. Now it seems we still get zero affordances, but also visual noise.
metadat
> It feels like Apple is entering a design hell, and I don’t know how they’ll get out of it.
Improvement is always only a single update away! Potentially..
asciimov
I’m all for a new design esthetic, even if they have to iterate it a few times to improve usability.
kevin_thibedeau
> Apple introduced the whole skeuomorphic analogy
IBM was doing it 10 years earlier.
earthnail
As an indie app developer, this design update discourages me massively. The previous, minimal design gave the impression of being a platform, even though it was always mostly Apple stuff in Apple land.
The new design is so visually overwhelming that I think the only way for users to deal with it is to reduce complexity. I read a statistic that said the average user had 21 apps on their phone. I think that will reduce to 15 now, or less.
As for my app, this basically throws my whole design system out the window. I don't want to add glass to all my UI elements. Remember the visual noise that translucent window borders introduced in Vista? Why would I do that to my UI?
I like the fact that the new design introduces a sense of hierarchy, and that it has more animations. I also like that transition animations are now interruptible by default (watch the "What's new in UIKit" video for that). But that could've happened without the glass nonsense.
It was hard to feel excited in previous WWDCs, but I just took it as a sign of platform maturity. This year, on the other hand, is outright discouraging.
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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.