If only users had any power and could simply ignore all that unreadable garbage by simply continuing to use that system-wide theme they installed from less obnoxious designers a few years ago...
There was also an article in Wired about this and I'll just say this: the fact the most discussed thing about the new iOS version is how to make their terrible new UI (that no one asked for) off is telling something about the state of innovation at Apple. It's annoying to see apps adapt to the new design, making a lot of the navigation in the top and the bottom worse (and great to see a couple of holdouts like Bluesky). A design philosophy where the full width of the screen is used is pretty good, not sure we needed Apple to prove it with a counter example.
Can't wait for them to release iOS 27 and announce they've made a useable UI again. "Hey friends, those accessibility settings you've used for a year? You don't need them anymore. Apple is where innovation happens!!"
Isn't this the case for all UI redesigns? When youtube changed to their current design there were posts about browser extensions to restore the old interface. I remember hating it myself at the time yet now I don't have an issue with it and probably prefer it to the old design.
> I'll just say this: the fact the most discussed thing about the new iOS version is how to make their terrible new UI (that no one asked for) off is telling something about the state of innovation at Apple.
I observed that too. Polled a few people I know who upgraded and they all have the same impression that they'd rather turn it off. I shared the accessibility settings with some to help them out. I haven't upgraded my main phone might have to wait a while longer.
This has to be resume driven. I presume designers at Apple have to end the year with a review to justify their salaries. "So Bob, what would you say you do here?". The answer "Well not much, we designed things nicely already, and now we're just chilling, listening to podcasts and having 2 hour lunches" is not going to fly. They want to say something like "That flashy glass thing, we did that!". Except, in this case I wish they'd all just be chilling and having 2 hour long lunches, instead of messing with the interface since they apparently managed to make things worse.
There are a lot of Apple employees here that are going to downvote this but I cannot turn a blind eye to this abomination.
I’ve been an early adapter since my first iPhone in 2009. But the new UI is plain ugly, lacking general accessibility, and full of bugs to the point that it’s just user hostile at this point.
They broke almost all of their design guidelines and make everything useless bubbles, I just cannot believe that Apple released this ugly thing to billions of devices.
A lot of these UI bugs are also of the kind where once I notice them, I can no longer un-notice them. The border around the Home Screen icons being one. When you swipe up from bottom to go back to Home Screen, the app icon doesn't initially have border while the animation is ongoing. Once the animation finishes, the border suddenly shows up. Once I noticed this, it's been annoying me everytime I swipe to go back.
I thought the latest dev beta of iOS would fix this but it's still here.
Exactly. It’s especially bothering because the previous version had a lot of thought put into it, macOS specifically would allow you to drag a file onto terminal to get its path etc. such small but incredibly powerful things all around. It’s the thought behind the design and its consistency that matters.
Instead now we have a phone operating system UI posing as macOS. There’s no proper text alignment, padding, or good margins. It’s just not elegant at all, it feels like a knockoff.
The other day, the keyboard stopped showing up in Safari, I was getting an empty keyboard tray when I click into a text input. How in the frozen hell are they able to achieve this level of incompetence. What’s the goal of this, just extract money from people and enshitify everything. I’m just so tied of macOS at this point that I started enjoying my work computer which is Windows 11.
“We’ve heard a lot of feedback about the incredible design changes we made in iOS 27. In order to meet the challenges set out by our users, we invented a new type of glass that is both transparent and opaque… at the same time! Physically impossible, you say? Not at Apple.”
There is switchable glass that can change between transparent and opaque. It’s used for some car sunroofs and various other applications. While it’s not “at the same time”, as a theme idea for the OS that has analogs in the physical world, it could be done.
I truly, genuinely wanted to like Liquid Glass. I think the default reaction to ANY change in UX, even changes that are generally improvements, is: "I don't like this, it's different!"
I thought that'd be the case for ios 26. But after installing it... yeesh. I can barely see anything. It's just awful.
Overall I don't mind Liquid Glass. I really just want to turn off the borders around the Home Screen app icons. They look okay for white background but very ugly with black or dark background. It looks too chaotic.
These settings are only half interesting. In iOS it's not bad, but on desktop there's really no actually usable set of configuration parameters that result in a sane experience across the board.
It is amazing how much time and effort must have gone into developing this liquid glass and rolling it out across products and platforms, all for a worse outcome in the end.
From what I've seen the Apple apps all have the same radius but 3rd party apps are largely yet to update. Same thing happened when they changed the stoplight window buttons and some 3rd party apps still had the glossy ones years later.
Liquid glass is one thing, but I want my 13 mini to go back to not being janky and glitchy and not suddenly dropping dead when the battery hits 5% again. These are new problems since the update.
That's probably a hardware issue. Old batteries start to drop voltage under high load or on low charge %. This causes the phone to glitch or just hard reboot if the voltage drops below spec. Likely just have to get a battery replacement.
I think it is probably only a hardware issue in the sense that the iPhone 13 mini is probably too old/slow to run iOS 26 as quickly as the old version.
I updated my old/spare phone - an iPhone SE3, which I think has a similar processor and memory (A15 and 4GB). It became a lot more sluggish. I learned my lesson not to upgrade my main phone, also an iPhone 13 mini.
I also noticed a disappointing slow down on a 9th gen iPad, which has even older internals. Actually, perhaps I should be quickly looking into downgrading that if it's possible.
Is looking at notifications from the notification centre on iPhone while it's halfway down a common use case?
I see many critics of Liquid Glass (for iPhone, anyway) use the notification centre half down as an example of how bad Liquid Glass is, but it's way more legible when it's completely down and the background tints significantly.
Yeah a lot of these discussions revolve around half way states or animations in progress which run very quickly. Feels like pausing a movie on a frame that's blurry and declaring the movie unwatchable.
I personally wouldn't rely on the `defaults write -g com.apple.SwiftUI.DisableSolarium -bool YES` preference working for more than another OS release or two. Seems like a temporary stopgap to give third-party developers time to upgrade their apps, not a permanent way to disable Liquid Glass.
If you develop apps, you can add this into your Info.plist file[0]. It turns off LG. Apple says that it's "temporary," but I think they'd be insane to start ignoring it.
Yeah, that would suck. The designer I'm working with, is already projectile-vomiting over LG. I think he'd quit, if I insisted that he help me to transition to it (we're a volunteer team).
I'm hoping that some of the senior management will realize what a clusterf**k this is, and let it stay (they still support ObjC apps, and I will bet that lots of AAA apps can't be easily converted to LG).
The thing that we have to keep in mind, is that some very "strong-willed" folks have staked their egos on LG, and will choose it as their hill to die on. We've seen that happen in many other instances (not just at Apple).
I'd be willing to bet it's more likely entrenched leadership that needs to be replaced. All of the 10x engineers in the world can't fix a bad vision forced on them.
I'm assuming it's because nobody can just leave something alone. It's always gotta change, it's always gotta be made "better". And it probably generates a lot of marketing, good or bad.
If they leave it alone on what else would they be working on? Not on something in somebody's else department so it's either being layed off or convince the board that each year's iteration on the same things is the next groundbreaking invention.
You're describing the classical dichotomy between progressives and conservatives, a dichotomy which extends far beyond the political sphere to which is usually is applied. Whether it is in the arts, in architecture, in engineering, in design or in software development. UI design in particular seems to attract the type of person who is among the first to pull down Chesterton's fence [1] with no though given about what might be lost by this action.
Now that I'm getting older I like to pull out my "curmudgeon card" and blame it on the younger generation. New graduates entering the work grew up spending more time on mobile phones than laptops/desktops, and I wonder if these changes are to cater to this market that's shifting from mostly-mobile screen time to mostly-desktop. I imagine it's not too long before this segment is the majority.
I feel like we saw similar changes with the previous shift where new graduates knew GSuite and MS Office was some the software their parents would complain about. It's my shibboleth for identify my generation of computer users.
A lot of design in the early era of UIs (until sometime mid-~90s~ Edit:: mid-2000s) was based on a lot of research. From academic research to ergonomics to plain old user research. They wouldn't always get it right, but they were learning.
Modern designers wouldn't understand what a book is if one hit them in the face. And their "research" is all vibes: "Quantified factors" are "32% increase in subculture perception", "a 34% boost in modernity" and "a 30% jump in rebelliousness" https://design.google/library/expressive-material-design-goo...
Android is _mostly_ OK. Their stupidest move (so far) was mandating edge-to-edge apps without a way for users and apps to opt out of them.
Otherwise, the UI stays mostly the same, just becoming a bit more bloated ("finger friendly") with every release.
The most annoying thing for me is the waste of screen space from the bubbles around notifications and menu options. Apparently, having stuff floating now gives a "perception of lightness and motion".
[EDIT] I removed an extremely sarcastic comment. It was quite puerile.
I am a bit skeptical that they are "reaching for the best."
Once you start to hire and promote folks with a certain "corporate culture," they start hiring and promoting folks that fit that culture (and driving out ones that don't). I suspect that the problems actually started years ago, and now, those managers are hiring less-than-stellar SWEs, managers, and designers.
The thing about the really good people at Apple, is that they don't need to be subjected to an ugly corporate culture. They'll take their toys and go home (or to other companies), which is pretty much exactly what the less-than-stellar people want. The dichotomy of hiring high-Quality talent, is that they don't need to work for you, so you have to figure out ways to keep them. Often, money isn't the biggest driver. The good ones don't do it [just] for the money, and they'll always be able to make plenty, so, as their manager, you need to figure out what they really want.
Heh funny, I was wondering why after the Tahoe update I wasn't noticing much of a difference and wondered why everybody was complaining about the glass effects - turns out I had checked the 'Accessibility => Display => Reduce Transparency' checkbox already in some earlier update for reasons I forgot.
FYI: The iOS 26.1 beta has an improved Accessibility setting: It replaces Button Shapes with Add Borders, which gives everything a really nice Classic Mac OS look with black lines around grey containers. Helps a lot.
Tbh. after the initial shock I got used to the macOS 26 UI. Seeing Finder in the new UI for the first time is a really interesting experience. But you get used to it. (And the sidebar-over-content style is kinda neat).
I'm currently in the process of adding support for the new UI to my macOS app. The biggest problem is to make it look good on the previous macOS version and on the new one. I still have more than 50% users on pre-glass.
I don't mind the liquid glass itself, but a lot of iOS and macOS seems badly designed when liquid glass is applied. Bright white default backgrounds with transparent panels on top featuring white titels. Misaligned screens for some reason. Unresponsive controls while they're animating. Safari introducing weird viewport bugs because it tries to be fancy with the address bar.
On iOS it feels unfinished, on macOS it feels unpolished. This has the potential to be pretty, or at least usable if you don't like the glass look, but someone needs to finish the process of porting to liquid glass.
I have Tahoe on my personal laptop and the previous release on my work one and tbh I hardly notice any of the differences. It's more noticeable on the iphone where the system UI takes up more of the screen but on the mac it's 99% just the same full screen apps you always had.
I installed Tahoe on my desktop and laptop the day it came out. I really stopped noticing it after the first day or two, there aren't a lot of places that have overwhelming, liquid glassy-blur/transparency on macOS that you run into often. I think the only time I'm reminded that Liquid Glass is "a thing" is in the Apple Music app where they went ham with it.
I have an iPhone SE 2nd Generation. After a recent repair I was forced to upgrade to iOS 26.
My biggest gripe is the buggy keyboard. It shrinks a bit horizontally every time I open it. When using a mobile browser (I tested on a few), website footers and similar elements will get stuck above where the top of the keyboard would normally be, as if there was an invisible keyboard.
These tweaks to minimize the glass effect go a long way, such that I'm not as put off by the overall design as I was in its stock configuration.
Ventura got a security update last month. Sequoia will get updates for at least another 3 years. These glaring issues will get resolved eventually, even if it is the 'Frosted Glass' update.
I recommend leaving it on the default settings. It's fine after a while, and I like a lot of the simplification. But I would rather they function on making their software actually work or be good, even if I like playing with the refraction.
It's worse than that. The Apple apps have all the variance too. It's not about old apps. It's literally by design. It depends on things like whether they have a toolbar. It's bonkers.
exactly my thought. I never made it to Vista. In 2007 I changed WinXP (always used it with the classic grey theme) for OS X Tiger on a MacBook and never went back to Windows since then.
I wonder where a decent alternative will be lurking in the next few years? Apple is losing some grip, but all others are still worse overall.
If only users had any power and could simply ignore all that unreadable garbage by simply continuing to use that system-wide theme they installed from less obnoxious designers a few years ago...
There was also an article in Wired about this and I'll just say this: the fact the most discussed thing about the new iOS version is how to make their terrible new UI (that no one asked for) off is telling something about the state of innovation at Apple. It's annoying to see apps adapt to the new design, making a lot of the navigation in the top and the bottom worse (and great to see a couple of holdouts like Bluesky). A design philosophy where the full width of the screen is used is pretty good, not sure we needed Apple to prove it with a counter example.
Can't wait for them to release iOS 27 and announce they've made a useable UI again. "Hey friends, those accessibility settings you've used for a year? You don't need them anymore. Apple is where innovation happens!!"
Isn't this the case for all UI redesigns? When youtube changed to their current design there were posts about browser extensions to restore the old interface. I remember hating it myself at the time yet now I don't have an issue with it and probably prefer it to the old design.
Some people are always upset with change.
> I'll just say this: the fact the most discussed thing about the new iOS version is how to make their terrible new UI (that no one asked for) off is telling something about the state of innovation at Apple.
I observed that too. Polled a few people I know who upgraded and they all have the same impression that they'd rather turn it off. I shared the accessibility settings with some to help them out. I haven't upgraded my main phone might have to wait a while longer.
This has to be resume driven. I presume designers at Apple have to end the year with a review to justify their salaries. "So Bob, what would you say you do here?". The answer "Well not much, we designed things nicely already, and now we're just chilling, listening to podcasts and having 2 hour lunches" is not going to fly. They want to say something like "That flashy glass thing, we did that!". Except, in this case I wish they'd all just be chilling and having 2 hour long lunches, instead of messing with the interface since they apparently managed to make things worse.
My humble opinion is they took the opportunity to play “look over here!” after the Apple Intelligence (or lack thereof) fiasco.
I assume it's technology driven. The effect is probably expensive to produce so phones with weaker performance can't do it.
There are a lot of Apple employees here that are going to downvote this but I cannot turn a blind eye to this abomination.
I’ve been an early adapter since my first iPhone in 2009. But the new UI is plain ugly, lacking general accessibility, and full of bugs to the point that it’s just user hostile at this point.
They broke almost all of their design guidelines and make everything useless bubbles, I just cannot believe that Apple released this ugly thing to billions of devices.
A lot of these UI bugs are also of the kind where once I notice them, I can no longer un-notice them. The border around the Home Screen icons being one. When you swipe up from bottom to go back to Home Screen, the app icon doesn't initially have border while the animation is ongoing. Once the animation finishes, the border suddenly shows up. Once I noticed this, it's been annoying me everytime I swipe to go back.
I thought the latest dev beta of iOS would fix this but it's still here.
Exactly. It’s especially bothering because the previous version had a lot of thought put into it, macOS specifically would allow you to drag a file onto terminal to get its path etc. such small but incredibly powerful things all around. It’s the thought behind the design and its consistency that matters.
Instead now we have a phone operating system UI posing as macOS. There’s no proper text alignment, padding, or good margins. It’s just not elegant at all, it feels like a knockoff.
The other day, the keyboard stopped showing up in Safari, I was getting an empty keyboard tray when I click into a text input. How in the frozen hell are they able to achieve this level of incompetence. What’s the goal of this, just extract money from people and enshitify everything. I’m just so tied of macOS at this point that I started enjoying my work computer which is Windows 11.
“We’ve heard a lot of feedback about the incredible design changes we made in iOS 27. In order to meet the challenges set out by our users, we invented a new type of glass that is both transparent and opaque… at the same time! Physically impossible, you say? Not at Apple.”
There is switchable glass that can change between transparent and opaque. It’s used for some car sunroofs and various other applications. While it’s not “at the same time”, as a theme idea for the OS that has analogs in the physical world, it could be done.
I truly, genuinely wanted to like Liquid Glass. I think the default reaction to ANY change in UX, even changes that are generally improvements, is: "I don't like this, it's different!"
I thought that'd be the case for ios 26. But after installing it... yeesh. I can barely see anything. It's just awful.
Overall I don't mind Liquid Glass. I really just want to turn off the borders around the Home Screen app icons. They look okay for white background but very ugly with black or dark background. It looks too chaotic.
These settings are only half interesting. In iOS it's not bad, but on desktop there's really no actually usable set of configuration parameters that result in a sane experience across the board.
It is amazing how much time and effort must have gone into developing this liquid glass and rolling it out across products and platforms, all for a worse outcome in the end.
The janky various-radius window borders on mac are crime against design.
From what I've seen the Apple apps all have the same radius but 3rd party apps are largely yet to update. Same thing happened when they changed the stoplight window buttons and some 3rd party apps still had the glossy ones years later.
I looked at those shots for macOS and I'm just baffled by how they thought this was a good idea.
Liquid glass is one thing, but I want my 13 mini to go back to not being janky and glitchy and not suddenly dropping dead when the battery hits 5% again. These are new problems since the update.
That's probably a hardware issue. Old batteries start to drop voltage under high load or on low charge %. This causes the phone to glitch or just hard reboot if the voltage drops below spec. Likely just have to get a battery replacement.
I think it is probably only a hardware issue in the sense that the iPhone 13 mini is probably too old/slow to run iOS 26 as quickly as the old version.
I updated my old/spare phone - an iPhone SE3, which I think has a similar processor and memory (A15 and 4GB). It became a lot more sluggish. I learned my lesson not to upgrade my main phone, also an iPhone 13 mini.
I also noticed a disappointing slow down on a 9th gen iPad, which has even older internals. Actually, perhaps I should be quickly looking into downgrading that if it's possible.
Is looking at notifications from the notification centre on iPhone while it's halfway down a common use case?
I see many critics of Liquid Glass (for iPhone, anyway) use the notification centre half down as an example of how bad Liquid Glass is, but it's way more legible when it's completely down and the background tints significantly.
Yeah a lot of these discussions revolve around half way states or animations in progress which run very quickly. Feels like pausing a movie on a frame that's blurry and declaring the movie unwatchable.
I personally wouldn't rely on the `defaults write -g com.apple.SwiftUI.DisableSolarium -bool YES` preference working for more than another OS release or two. Seems like a temporary stopgap to give third-party developers time to upgrade their apps, not a permanent way to disable Liquid Glass.
That liquid glass really looks like ass. I don't know who thought it was a good idea
If you develop apps, you can add this into your Info.plist file[0]. It turns off LG. Apple says that it's "temporary," but I think they'd be insane to start ignoring it.
[0] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/BundleResources/In...
My understanding is that this will be removed in iOS 27. Given how Apple has behaved in the past, I wouldn't be surprised if they really did it.
Yeah, that would suck. The designer I'm working with, is already projectile-vomiting over LG. I think he'd quit, if I insisted that he help me to transition to it (we're a volunteer team).
My understanding Apple will remove it sometime next year April.
I'm hoping that some of the senior management will realize what a clusterf**k this is, and let it stay (they still support ObjC apps, and I will bet that lots of AAA apps can't be easily converted to LG).
The thing that we have to keep in mind, is that some very "strong-willed" folks have staked their egos on LG, and will choose it as their hill to die on. We've seen that happen in many other instances (not just at Apple).
What a nightmare Apple UI/UX design has become. Are they hiring real bad people now?
I'd be willing to bet it's more likely entrenched leadership that needs to be replaced. All of the 10x engineers in the world can't fix a bad vision forced on them.
Android design is similarly terrible. I'm not sure what's the explanation for UI design being so fucked up across the board for about 10 years now.
I'm assuming it's because nobody can just leave something alone. It's always gotta change, it's always gotta be made "better". And it probably generates a lot of marketing, good or bad.
If they leave it alone on what else would they be working on? Not on something in somebody's else department so it's either being layed off or convince the board that each year's iteration on the same things is the next groundbreaking invention.
You're describing the classical dichotomy between progressives and conservatives, a dichotomy which extends far beyond the political sphere to which is usually is applied. Whether it is in the arts, in architecture, in engineering, in design or in software development. UI design in particular seems to attract the type of person who is among the first to pull down Chesterton's fence [1] with no though given about what might be lost by this action.
[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/w/chesterton-s-fence
Now that I'm getting older I like to pull out my "curmudgeon card" and blame it on the younger generation. New graduates entering the work grew up spending more time on mobile phones than laptops/desktops, and I wonder if these changes are to cater to this market that's shifting from mostly-mobile screen time to mostly-desktop. I imagine it's not too long before this segment is the majority.
I feel like we saw similar changes with the previous shift where new graduates knew GSuite and MS Office was some the software their parents would complain about. It's my shibboleth for identify my generation of computer users.
A lot of design in the early era of UIs (until sometime mid-~90s~ Edit:: mid-2000s) was based on a lot of research. From academic research to ergonomics to plain old user research. They wouldn't always get it right, but they were learning.
Original Apple guidelines started with things like "Simplified Jungian Perception" on page 18 https://archive.org/details/apple-hig
Microsoft collected and analyzed hundreds of thousands of data points about their software. See "No Distaste for Paste" https://web.archive.org/web/20080316101025/http://blogs.msdn...
Now?
Modern designers wouldn't understand what a book is if one hit them in the face. And their "research" is all vibes: "Quantified factors" are "32% increase in subculture perception", "a 34% boost in modernity" and "a 30% jump in rebelliousness" https://design.google/library/expressive-material-design-goo...
More data points for my "everyone is 12 now" theory of the world.
Well, at least they don't change it much
Android is _mostly_ OK. Their stupidest move (so far) was mandating edge-to-edge apps without a way for users and apps to opt out of them.
Otherwise, the UI stays mostly the same, just becoming a bit more bloated ("finger friendly") with every release.
The most annoying thing for me is the waste of screen space from the bubbles around notifications and menu options. Apparently, having stuff floating now gives a "perception of lightness and motion".
[EDIT] I removed an extremely sarcastic comment. It was quite puerile.
I am a bit skeptical that they are "reaching for the best."
Once you start to hire and promote folks with a certain "corporate culture," they start hiring and promoting folks that fit that culture (and driving out ones that don't). I suspect that the problems actually started years ago, and now, those managers are hiring less-than-stellar SWEs, managers, and designers.
The thing about the really good people at Apple, is that they don't need to be subjected to an ugly corporate culture. They'll take their toys and go home (or to other companies), which is pretty much exactly what the less-than-stellar people want. The dichotomy of hiring high-Quality talent, is that they don't need to work for you, so you have to figure out ways to keep them. Often, money isn't the biggest driver. The good ones don't do it [just] for the money, and they'll always be able to make plenty, so, as their manager, you need to figure out what they really want.
I unironically think staying in Cupertino is hurting them.
Heh funny, I was wondering why after the Tahoe update I wasn't noticing much of a difference and wondered why everybody was complaining about the glass effects - turns out I had checked the 'Accessibility => Display => Reduce Transparency' checkbox already in some earlier update for reasons I forgot.
FYI: The iOS 26.1 beta has an improved Accessibility setting: It replaces Button Shapes with Add Borders, which gives everything a really nice Classic Mac OS look with black lines around grey containers. Helps a lot.
Not upgrading to Tahoe for as long as possible.
Tbh. after the initial shock I got used to the macOS 26 UI. Seeing Finder in the new UI for the first time is a really interesting experience. But you get used to it. (And the sidebar-over-content style is kinda neat).
I'm currently in the process of adding support for the new UI to my macOS app. The biggest problem is to make it look good on the previous macOS version and on the new one. I still have more than 50% users on pre-glass.
I disabled liquid glass and most of my menubar icons just didn't appear. I reenabled it and they're back.
There's no winning with this release.
I don't mind the liquid glass
I don't mind the liquid glass itself, but a lot of iOS and macOS seems badly designed when liquid glass is applied. Bright white default backgrounds with transparent panels on top featuring white titels. Misaligned screens for some reason. Unresponsive controls while they're animating. Safari introducing weird viewport bugs because it tries to be fancy with the address bar.
On iOS it feels unfinished, on macOS it feels unpolished. This has the potential to be pretty, or at least usable if you don't like the glass look, but someone needs to finish the process of porting to liquid glass.
I also don’t get the hate. I personally prefer the older one but I also don’t see the big issue.
I have more a problem with the menu structure then the glass effect.
Same here. I don't mind it at all. If I had to choose I'd go for the previous design language, but I don't personally get the hate.
On desktop? Doesn’t it make it harder to see? I used a phone with it recently and I wanted to turn it off immediately.
I have Tahoe on my personal laptop and the previous release on my work one and tbh I hardly notice any of the differences. It's more noticeable on the iphone where the system UI takes up more of the screen but on the mac it's 99% just the same full screen apps you always had.
I installed Tahoe on my desktop and laptop the day it came out. I really stopped noticing it after the first day or two, there aren't a lot of places that have overwhelming, liquid glassy-blur/transparency on macOS that you run into often. I think the only time I'm reminded that Liquid Glass is "a thing" is in the Apple Music app where they went ham with it.
The borders from "increase contrast" look great! I think I'll keep em
I only wish I could get them on iOS as well as macOS.
That was available on previous versions as well. It gives the OS a System 7 vibe.
I have an iPhone SE 2nd Generation. After a recent repair I was forced to upgrade to iOS 26.
My biggest gripe is the buggy keyboard. It shrinks a bit horizontally every time I open it. When using a mobile browser (I tested on a few), website footers and similar elements will get stuck above where the top of the keyboard would normally be, as if there was an invisible keyboard.
These tweaks to minimize the glass effect go a long way, such that I'm not as put off by the overall design as I was in its stock configuration.
Ventura got a security update last month. Sequoia will get updates for at least another 3 years. These glaring issues will get resolved eventually, even if it is the 'Frosted Glass' update.
I recommend leaving it on the default settings. It's fine after a while, and I like a lot of the simplification. But I would rather they function on making their software actually work or be good, even if I like playing with the refraction.
What really annoys me is the variance in corner radius now. Because some apps have released an upgrade and others haven't.
It's worse than that. The Apple apps have all the variance too. It's not about old apps. It's literally by design. It depends on things like whether they have a toolbar. It's bonkers.
> How to Turn Liquid Glass into a Solid Interface
> Looks Inside
> Long Article about how to turn of liquid glass
Well done Apple
Cool!
(get it?)
Liquid Glass on mac is sort of like Apple's windows XP
I feel as if Vista is the best comparison.
XP is sort of like Fisher-Price for Windows, but is usable. Vista ... was something else.
I really liked Windows XP. Do you mean Vista?
exactly my thought. I never made it to Vista. In 2007 I changed WinXP (always used it with the classic grey theme) for OS X Tiger on a MacBook and never went back to Windows since then.
I wonder where a decent alternative will be lurking in the next few years? Apple is losing some grip, but all others are still worse overall.