More assorted notes on Liquid Glass (2025)
75 points by bt
75 points by bt
I just upgraded to macOS 26. It's 26.2 now, so they've had two point releases to fix the worst things. I assumed there was a degree of hyperbole to the criticism of Liquid Glass. But it's shockingly bad. It reminds me of the worst excesses of the early 2000s, when teenagers with no understanding of usability created 'cool' desktop themes and showed them off. None of the changes have any basis in psychology, they're all just 'some failed artist somewhere in Apple thought they looked cool'.
You're giving me Enlightenment desktop flashbacks. I'll postpone updating for now.
Enlightenment desktop flashbacks
This must be the most brutal take on Apple Glass I've seen to date.
Yup, it's very like Enlightenment, except that the graphics technology in Enlightenment was impressive for its time.
Enlightenment is frequently a combination of genius and insanity.
The first time you use their terminal emulator, Terminology, it presents a slider up front and center and asks you to adjust it until the text is a readable size.
Why doesn't everyone do that?
The internals were terrifying. There’s a Daily WTF about it and it barely scratches the surface.
I remember attending a talk at FOSDEM by one of the Enlightenment folks who was proud of the layer they’d built to do FFI. I really struggled to explain to him that void* and char*is actually not sufficient type information on an argument to be able to do useful bridging from higher-level languages. I need to know the difference between a string and a data buffer, between an input and output parameter, between a pointer where the callee takes ownership or doesn’t, and so on.
At least we can be vaguely confident that the Apple window manager’s approach to passing data around isn’t just “Pass a void*, God will know his own”. Never quite recovered from trying to read that code.
For decades already, we've been living under the yoke and tyranny of "designers" who haven't even studied introductory human-computer interface material. It is shocking to see the incompetence that is promoted to dictatorial power within companies.
It used to be that they were easy to spot: they were the ones who talked about UX instead of HCI. But then some people who knew what they were talking about started saying UX.
From TFA:
No, seriously, how does one align in a concentric context? Is that a matter of picking a circle, an arc, a shape? All snark aside, this just sounds poorly worded to me. I get what Apple means here: in your app design, you should pick shapes that resemble the contours of the hardware — the shape of a MacBook’s display and bezel, for example — and the typical shapes that you find in the system’s UI. Pretty obvious stuff that’s wrapped in ‘pretentious designer vocabulary’.
I remember when I first came across this type of communication (pretentious designer vocabulary), and interpreted it to be a personal quirk of that specific designer. As the years passed, I've seen that many designers in the industry are affected, and then it dawned on me that these people are artists wanting to express themselves artistically, not interaction engineers. They aren't enthusiastic about reading anything on HCI, human anatomy, computer hardware, etc., that's not in their purview. Wrong people in the wrong place.
And yes, like you say, we computer users are living under their yoke and tyranny, a situation not unlike the one that makes the "fashion" industry so toxic.
I found it's less bad if I go into Accessibility and tell it not to use transparency.
It's still very bad though.
That's been the case for a long time now. I ran Big Sur with high contrast, reduced transparency and whatever the low-animation setting was called. I mean, unlike Tahoe, it was kind of usable without high contrast and reduced transparency, it just looked like crap. Low-animations made transitions between spaces less nauseating but that was the only animation that was actually annoying.
Tahoe is something else though. I am speechless, it's like someone ported all of it to GTK and stuck the biggest, brightest, flattest, rounded corner-est theme they could find on xfce-look.org on it, and then installed the blandest icon theme they could find there, too. It's so bad it makes Adwaita look good. If there's any setting that's going to mitigate this disaster, it's not going to be under Accessibility, it's going to be under Self-Destruct and Disposal.
Low-animations made transitions between spaces less nauseating
But sadly not less slow! Whether it's the default slide animation or the reduced motion fade, animation between spaces takes seconds to fully complete on 120Hz displays, and focus only shifts to a window in the new space once the animation fully completes. It's infuriating and, IMO, means spaces are really only usable on 60Hz monitors. Apple completely broke spaces for me with this 120Hz bug and haven't fixed it. Why should the animation speed depend on frame rate??
same, I had to use:
I didn't turned them back since I set these settings.
On the bright side, doing this also seems to have made my phone snappier and I think the batter lasts longer (based on gut feel).
Well-put. I was so put off by it, that it made me leave MacOS altogether, and switched over to Linux. Then my iPhone didn't make as much sense without the Mac, so I switched to Android too.
So Liquid Glass was bad enough to get me to leave all things Apple.
some failed artist
please let's not punch down. More likely case, a phalanx of design directors and product managers gunning for promotions
A friend of mine has realised that the G and L in glass are silent. English really is a weird language.
Apple’s positioning of the text under the YouTube play button was spectacular https://www.techaholic.gr/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/www.techaholic.gr-apple-liquid-glass-youtube.jpg
With all it's limitations, Skeuomorphism was so much better that I'd have switched back to iOS 6 looks in a tick if given a chance. The ways of water is not good for universal UI; for a game maybe, but not everyday use.
Liquid Glass makes sense if you assume that Apple designers thought VisionOS and AR/MR would be the big push of the future, instead of the flop it turned out to be (so far at least). A Liquid Glass UI would be desirable in an AR context where you want to mostly focus on the 'content' and have the UI pull up unobtrusively when you need it.
I find it mildly insulting that Apple offered an 18.7.3 security update to old iPhones (like the iPhone XS), but only offered the same security patch to newer iPhones, like the iPhone 13 mini, as iOS 26.2
They did the work to create the patch release for 18.7.3, 18.7.2 ran fine on iPhone 13 devices, so surely it's not that much work to make 18.7.3 available for iPhone 13s, not just ones that can't run iOS 26, right?
They also surely know that the performance of iOS 26 on old iPhones is notably worse, and liquid glass has mixed reception, so it seems weird to withhold a security patch from the many people that are holding out on 18.x.
There's no soul in major OSes these days - Windows is a big bloatware and macOS's aesthetics is the result of design for the sake of the design instead of any practical use. No wonder we're seeing this sentiment for an alternative growing.
While I agree, it bothers me that the nicest, most intuitive and usable alternative to this year's macOS continues to be last year's macOS. The best thing is still the best, it's just not as good as it used to be. That should cost them dearly, but I'll still their customer if I buy a computer today. I wish other OSes would compete on that same core competency. I think it would be easier to get users now than ever.
I really find gnome to be very simple to use, and very unobtrusive.
And the app ecosystem feels like what OS X's was in the Leopard era. Lots of people are building actual useful, empowering tools with neat polished UIs.
It certainly is those things, but I think it isn't trying to compete directly. Maybe I just haven't used it enough to know, but to me Gnome 4 feels oversimplified almost to the level of iPadOS. Pervasive hamburger menus I think are a failure to use both the large screen and Fitts's Law. I think it's still not polished enough to compete. Drag and drop seems like it's not a priority. The mouse wheel gets caught during scrolling on controls like sliders and changes them, and I don't know what they used to be set to. Apps don't feel like learning one teaches you about the others; rather each app seems to do so little even when you progressively disclose it all that there's not much common ground between them anyway. And copy and paste still don't get the same keys everywhere.
You could argue I'm espousing Mac values specifically, not GUI values, but Windows 95 to XP or so did not have the bulk of these problems.
I don’t think that will happen until Linux desktop development becomes more sustainable at a larger scale and less dependent on Red Hat for development muscle.
I’m gonna be contrarian here and say that I like quite a bit about Liquid Glass, but I don’t think it’s so revolutionary as to build an OS around it, and my god it’s full of bugs. But perhaps I’m being overly charitable, maybe what I think of as bugs is actually intentional behaviour?!
I do think this is the worst MacOS release I’ve ever encountered (and I still have the public beta CDs for MacOS X), and my iPhone still seems to need a midday charge.
My middle of the road opinion is that LG is fine UI/UX for Shell/Desktop/Notifications; media players; etc. Even somewhat an improvement to the previous state, assuming bugs are gone. It doesn't belong in the actual productivity apps design.
