The other problem is that the effect is so subtle everywhere until it gets in your way. Even on a system with actual binocular screens, the Liquid Glass effect is barely noticeable and has been since visionOS 1.0.

It's like a horrible compromise between the indulgences of early 10.2-era Aqua and the worst flat boring low contrast bullshit "mimimmumunlism" crap from iOS 7-18 and macOS from Big Sur onwards.

In addition to this, glass also reflects light from around you, thus there is not the slightest chance of realistically recreating a glass effect on any device without having some sort of ambient vision which is incorporated into a real time rendering.

This is wrong on so many levels and I sincerely hope there will be an option for not just choosing less transparency but an entire UI-skin that is mature, clean and above all: legible.

> When looking at glass in real life, your left eye and your right eye see slightly different refraction patterns since they're looking at the surface from slightly different angles

But if you close one eye, you can still make out the depth. Brain is still able to tell what is glass, what is on top of glass or below it.

We already have eye tracking in phone. Add a lenticular screen.

Honestly, the effect I don’t really mind. I don’t really get it in the way I understood the idea behind skeuomorphism or the initial material design but then again I’m not sure I really got the grand concept behind the previous flat interface either.

What I do mind is some of the puzzling UX choice they made like the new Safari UX on iOS. It’s somehow even less discoverable than before and iOS was already doing pretty poorly.

I was planning to part way with Apple products for separate reasons but that surely doesn’t make me regret the decision.

The big problem is that it’s shit and terrible UX. We should stop complicating feedback :)

so maybe the future folding iphone with double screen will mimic binocular vision

I'd love to see 3DS-style lenticular 3D display with the power of modern Apple hardware + FaceID hardware eye tracking. I bet they'd be able to do it seamlessly.

I don't see it said enough, but liquid glass slowed my M3 noticably.

Odd I got the update 2 weeks before M5 launch.

Software as a means to obsolete hardware.

Trillion dollar company

Apple product managers are falling into the trap Microsoft did in the run up to Windows 8: a belief that unifying across Mac, iOS, Apple TV and Vision Pro will make them all stickier. In truth it really does just make everything obnoxiously bad.

Not to roll it back, no - rather to give the user a choice between things being bad (the default) or a bit better ;)

Exactly what happened with iOS 7 as well. 7.0 make all the text incredibly thin and light and then 7.1 made it darker and bolder.

I immediately disabled transparency effects and liquid glass hasn't bothered me since.

that's why liquid glass is more resource intensive, apple's gotta sell new iphones next season

TBF

- they made and are still making the headlines for how many months ?

Any press is not always good press, but in this case it's not like their users were going to flock to android anyway. So same deal as the orange iPhone: they kept a pretty big place in the news cycle.

- not doing any changes to the OS appareance for more decades would make it exponentially harder the more it goes on.

Doing a shit job at it is still fine in that respect, they get leeway to fix it, and people will still praise Apple for having seen the light at the end.

As a parallel we had the port situation and the keyboard on MacBooks. They did a shit job and reversed it, and during that time sales didn't specially tank. They could afford to do two or three cycles of "here we fixed it", to scrap it all at the end, and people still love their MacBooks the same.

I seriously doubt they're doing anything more than a boring shader with some decent approximation.

We can stimulate light, but that's just a waste of ray tracing and introducing annoying complexities.

I feel like this is a big miss for them. Am I really supposed to believe that the company making its flagship phones burn at 14W to simulate the travel of light through glass for a UI actually cares about the planet?

I'm not sure how but it doesn't seem to use that much processing power. My 5 year old apple watch seems to render the glass UI fairly well and I assume this thing has the bare minimum processing power.

Yes but that wouldn't slow down their older devices enough to make people buy new ones

They received a lot of bug reports and negative feedback from developer and public betas. Guess what, they’ve still released the glass almost unchanged. “We know better than you” is a fundamental part of Apple’s mentality

I would’ve killed it even before user testing. It’s borderline malicious that this thing was shipped in the first place

Apple relies on internal feedback and executive reviews rather than user testing. They likely received a lot of different feedback internally, but the execs decided to ship it anyway. I think they would rather ship something half-baked than change the yearly release process that has been continuously operating since the early days of iOS, and at the scale of the whole platform, it's hard to turn back once you've committed to making the changes.

Apple does zero user testing and AB testing, and has always worked that way.

Reminds me of when Google brought out a revised Maps app some years ago. Everyone hated it; there was a website for comments, with literally 10,000 comments, and everyone I read except for one was negative--and that one was a parody. Did Google revert back to the earlier look? Are you kidding? The only company I've ever seen do that is Microsoft, after the Win8 debacle.

Keep in mind the people complaining are more than likely the loud minority. Personally I had some issues in the early betas (too much opacity causes readability issues) but I haven't had any issues since July. Unfortunately Apple is listening to feedback when they should ignore it and continue improving their work (which is what they usually do).

I heard about this story when BMW was designing the 1300GS, they had a bag of 40 lbs of sand hanging in the engineers' office. Engineers who developed weight savings got to do a ceremony where they removed that amount of sand from the bag.

In the car industry this is the case because there is a direct incentive for the company to make a vehicle lighter.

A single kg is enormous likely saving tens of dollars per car, which sounds like nothing, but if a million of these cars are made the cost saving are in the tens of millions.

What does a software company save by their software running 10% faster on user hardware. Exactly nothing. In the case of apple they even have some incentives to make their software worse to get people to buy new devices.

The curse of software engineering has always been that there is very rarely a reward for your software being better. Software companies mostly make it on features and "good enough" stability.

You forget that HN is incapable of detecting even the most obvious sarcasm

I dont mean to impugn, but that sounds like how someone would describe a toddler being given an ipad. I turn off animations and use apps with an OLED theme.

It's surprising how they managed to instantly spawn liquids inside of the screen. I love Liquid Ass.

But wait, have you noticed that it's named "Liquid Glass(TM)", but none of the glass is actually liquid, or even flowing? Everything is solid pieces of glass. You fooled us again, Apple!

I mean I do remember the feeling of switching over to KDE from Windows around.....2005-2010 era and just being blown away by how pretty everything was. I yearn for that feeling again. But I have both android and iOS devices at home and the liquid glass is just......not that nice(imho). I hope I'll get that feeling of awe with computers at some point again.

> give me proper theming support

This is sort of like walking into an art gallery and demanding they hang different art.

Apple has always been visually opinionated. That’s fine. Not everything needs to be customisable. The problem is their aesthetic historically varied between daringly great and daringly fucked. Nothing about Liquid Glass, on the other hand, screams daring, thought or even vision. It’s just a random new effect, completely unjustified, whose only genuine utility for me has been making app icons less engaging.

I feel that Apple succeeds because it isn't customizable, although I do think a completely customizable phone operating system (that wouldn't be Linux or Android-based) could be successful with a niche crowd.

Disable animations? How else would you know how old your phone is?

There are settings under the accessibility heading that let you adjust transparency and some other things.

They’ve also gotten less effective over time.

And they don’t get rid of rounded corners currently.

But it still does have a positive impact on the busyness of the os

What I really need them to give me is a way to disable the border around the Home Screen icons. They look ugly whenever a black or dark background is applied. Probably because glass itself doesn't look good in darkness.

I think you may be missing the forest for the trees?

I don’t think this was posted because folks are thrilled with the brilliance of Apple’s UI designers; it’s noteworthy because it shows they’re backpedaling on a pretty radical interface shift they made in iOS 26.

Believe it or not, whether people care about something is completely unrelated to whether you personally care about it. What a wild concept!

It's gonna last as long as people will buy this crap. And it doesn't seem to be the end for this delusion of "progress".

There were/are some horrible bugs with Reduce Transparency mode in iOS 26, let's hope this new mode gets added to the fully-tested set of configurations.

I’ve found “Increase Contrast” to be a better setting. Still a little bit of transparency but most elements now have borders and much more readable text. Not too many rough edges.

Unfortunately “Reduce Transparenxy” does a bunch of other stuff too, like remove your background/wallpaper.

Not when it comes to profit extraction. This is enshittification in full swing, done by professionals.

All of this baloney they added to their OS they now need to support for who knows how many years across who knows how many devices. What a waste.

I'd like to see Apple pull a Jaguar with their marketing department. Might clean the sewer enough to get them toward a that sweet middle ground of "users like us" and "shareholder profits."

It's @3x these days.

Apple has stopped signing older versions of IOS shortly after releasing a new version since IOS 4 or so, this isn't anything new.

I’m doing the same - and also for the fact that I can finally turn off the lock screen’s swipe for camera that I seem to activate too often when my phone’s in my pocket

There's been a "reduce transparency" toggle under Accessibility settings forever and it's exactly what you want.

Not to be that guy but I switched to Android a few months back for the first time in my life.

It took some getting used to here and there, but over all I've been happy with doing something new on this front.

I suspect I'll be looking at hopping back over a couple summers from now when they figure out how to make this design language work.

The Liquid Glass aesthetic isn't bad, it's just rough around the edges. It'll be a nice effect once reality reigns it all in. That's what happened around a year or two following iOS7.

> I was the same way, couldn’t pay me 10k to switch from my iPhone. For 10 years. Then, liquid ass came along and made me consider ditching Apple more seriously than I ever have

Same. First it was unnecessary tinkering with phone shape which was introduced in apple way in no less as "revolutionary". I laughed but still used the iphone.

Now they started to break UX with their stupid "liquid glass" and I am contemplating switch to android. At least you can switch off unnecessary garbage there.

It works beautifully with MacBooks and horribly with anything else. I think Apple view that as a feature.

Same (though a slightly newer version).

I'm an Android person, but I got an iPhone 4S for her first cell phone because it was straightforward and hard to mess up.

Now there are double-secret swipes, all other kinds of anti-user "features" that almost make her cry because she can't figure out her phone anymore.

Now I am thinking about getting an Android and finding a home app ("launcher") that makes it impossible to screw things up and lock down everything else that I can.

Edit: Crap. She does have an Apple Watch that she loves though. And Apple is not only a piece of shit company about their UI, they also don't allow their watch to play nice with Android. (Except that answering a call on the watch pipes the audio to her watch and not her hearing aids. Fuck Apple.)

You should try it if you're only a step into their ecosystem. Kiddo got some airpods for use with his android phone. Registered them with 'find my' on an iPhone SE I have for work that sits on my desk, so that when they get lost, we have a chance of finding them. Now, we get to be alerted to potential trackers every time when travel with him... even he gets the alerts, because he travels with his airpods frequently.

I've heard good things about Apple TV devices, but given what a pain Airpods are without the rest of the ecosystem, there's no way I'm going to try it.

Talking about core functionality, iOS `UISlider` api is broken in iOS 26. A lot of my users emailed me last few days how the font sizing menu in my hacker news app is broken because the sliders don't do anything. Turns out it's a bug many developers are facing.

This bug somehow went through the beta releases and still exists:

https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/797468?login=true

And I really want the easy-to-understand, information-dense iOS 6 UI back. Too bad all the boring and lame hate for skeuomorphism led to "the great flattening" and "the great paddening".

Agreed! No one asked for liquid ass!