My question is, how are they gonna fix this? Is it even possible? That’s what’s making me switch right now.

I’m just lucky. I’m a nobody that has nothing to do so I can easily switch over to android.

As negative as it may be, I refuse to update iOS until liquid glass is dead. Apple always gives us something we didn't ask for and don't want, and sometimes takes away things we do like and want.

In my opinion, Bloomberg was being too nice by saying that he was poached by Meta. He was not worth being poached. So I don’t really think this is a dupe.

It's kinda funny that 20 years ago the Mac cases were translucent plastic, and the UI was brushed metal, now it's the opposite, lol.

The other day I had to fire up my decade old 27” iMac to get some files off it and swear to God it felt faster than my two-year-old Mac Studio running Tahoe. I can’t imagine all the stupid bullshit going on behind the scenes to pull off these stupid liquid glass effects.

I don't mind it on my phone, but agreed that the Mac version just is not good. I've never understood the obsession with making sidebars translucent, and the new version made it much worse, and expanded that philosophy to the whole OS. I've been using it since betas (that was a mistake) and I don't like it any better.

Even stuff that uses a more "clear" material now is a bigger obstruction of the content below it than the old translucent gray versions were. The huge play/pause blob over videos looks like a transparent material, but you can't see a goddamn thing through it anymore because they turned it into a crazy lens. For all the talk of the new UI getting out of the way of content, it really is a big shiny attention grabbing blob that blocks your content. You can get a hint of what colors are underneath it, and it's shiny.

The trend in Apple's design for years feels like it's been making things look pretty in screenshots, but less functional and worse to use.

Another recent fuckup is the Apple Watch's redesign where they traded scrolling lists of cards for full screen slideshows, because you wouldn't want to see what's coming or what you've scrolled past. You used to have more than one item in view at a time, and it was a hell of a lot easier to stop scrolling at the exact right spot instead of blowing past the thing you wanted to get to.

Also bad, the System Preferences redesign. The rearrangement of that wouldn't be as bad if the search bar could reliably find and take me to all of the settings, but it can't.

If they put someone in charge who prioritizes usability again, I don't think this is much of a loss for Apple. Heck, maybe he'll bring his design priorities to Meta and help Apple make a comeback with whatever their smart glasses / AR play is.

The change to non-skeuomorphic style at least made it faster. Liquid Glass makes it simultaneously harder to read and slower.

The flat UI trend started at Microsoft and Windows 8.

Flat design was always atrocious, in that it utterly fails to take advantage of our visualization systems extremely effective autonomous recognition and interpretation of any 3D cue at all.

Not meaning we need things to look gratuitously 3D. But that small amounts of 3D effect, edges, shadows and highlighting, greatly reduce the effort of "seeing" what is where and what it means.

And of course, the trend to simply use text for text, buttons, links, ... without very high standards and consistency of differentiation, is truly horrible design.

> I clearly remember the release of iOS7 (or maybe I'm mistaken) with its flat design in the summer of 2013. Users accustomed to the skeuomorphic style for years initially felt this change was terrible.

For the record (not that I'm in any position of note or have any real impact on any of this): I _liked_ iOS7's flat design. It felt to me like it got quite close to its intention: to highlight content, and withdraw the UI only to the bare minimum to get stuff done. It was sparse and clear enough that I didn't think about much. There were some "rules" that apps applied inconsistently (or couldn't actually be rules anyone could follow), such as where the primary action button should be (the "back" button was pretty obvious, but the "new"/"next"/"go"/"submit" would move around all three of the other corners depending on app - maybe there's no one-size-fits-all solution for that.

Sure, it lacked discoverability. I don't have a ready solution that solves for the "content-first" and "discoverable options" that I can offer.

But the flatness, the tidy icons, the slide-over layers that were at sensible and consistent illusions of height above one another all "worked" for me.

I saw someone on Twitter say "the average IQ in both companies just went up"

This may be one of the happiest days of my life (scoped to apple things in the past 15 years). I'm legitimately more excited and invigorated by this news than any of their product announcements in the Cook era.

The general direction of Apple's design has been the opposite of delight. I hope they right this ship. Their lack of leadership in the design space has trickled down to developers. iOS apps used to be a proud showcase of a company's best work but those days are long gone.

One example of Apple's fall from grace in software design was the perceived "design moat" that people thought that liquid glass would impart of apps that adopted it versus apps that didn't. People speculated that developers had to update their apps because those without liquid glass would look terrible in comparison to those with it. In reality, people (a) didn't care or (b) considered liquid glass a regression.

The human interface guidelines (HIG) used to mean something. Now it's a manual of hypocrisy.

...

Alan Dye is gone! Light the beacons!

Margaret to the rescue!

I wish on the iPhone they would at least bring back the option to downgrade. But they took that away a week after liquid glass was released.

For the first time ever, since I got my first mac in 2009, I have not updated to the latest OS when I had the choice, because of this. I'm hoping the next major OS version rectifies the situation.

They basically have been slowly rolling it back with every update, probably because doing it all in one go would have been too much bad PR. iOS 26 right now looks very different from the one that was shown off on stage in June.

If the OS wasn't so damned buggy, the UI would be easier to put up with. But apps freezing, UI glitches, especially with the keyboard popping up or thinking it did, or not popping up. If the UI changed without it being so buggy there would be less to complain about, but while I'm complaining about the bugs, I'm simply going to be critical of the UI changes and not think ooh how pretty when I'm having to restart an app, once again.

The transparency is cool, but everything got turned into bubbly corners, like someone wanted to live the Lost In Space timeline where everyone is computing with circular video monitors controlled by joysticks.

I don't think people really care much about whatever metaverse worlds he is going to build over there.

I’ll be the one to say it:

Liquid Glass is actually very good design that addresses design problems that persisted since the switch to touchscreens in a very comprehensive way.

More specifically, the problem of how to have universally recognizable and standardized UI controls in every app without interfering with their design identity.

To me it’s just a logical conclusion in the UI design field, and I fully expect Google and others to adopt something like it eventually.

The implementation isn’t flawless though.

I’d love if an actual UX designer could comment here.

“Liquid A**”? It’s right there!