Give me the vintage MacOS and Vista designs from the article over whatever the new fad of UI they keep trying to shove down our throats. It was flat UI before, now glass again but this time with raytraced refractions, so we waste compute power to get the glass buttons to look more realistic if you pixel peep.

I could swear we're living in a parody when I hear this being said with a straight face.

Sure but it's never gonna be faster or lower-energy than not doing it

What fascinates me the most is not how bad the most recent one is, but how it now relies on you knowing the prior forms of that icon to know what the current one is conveying. Apple fans actually point this out as an artful homage, but to anyone not already steeped in Apple products, it's just a shitty icon made of basic shapes. I wonder if Apple has reached the point where they don't need the affordances of the past since people are familiar enough with their past, good designs. People point out that liquid glass will be amazing in Vision OS, and that's probably the thinking from Apple. It's just a shame that we have to unify a design language to the worst possible case: a transparent screen taped to your face. In my mind, that's an objectively stupid design decision, but the Apple fanboys will say, "Look at those little colored squares on the address book icon, what a brilliant reference!" And will be able to recognize from memory how the thing should work, all while the entire UI gets more and more melted.

Just how is this NOT just a fresh coat of paint? It is precisely the same controls, providing precisely the same effects, but looking different.

And probably requiring just a little more attention and thought to actually use - so the device becomes slightly more of an attention trap/sink :(