This new liquid glass will lead to liquid brain, because my brain will be melting trying to process all that visual mess daily.
Now of course, I'll have to experience this new design in practice to be sure, but judging from the screenshots it looks really hard on the eyes. Hopefully they'll allow the translucency to be customized.
Apple had a good run, I've genuinely enjoyed using their platforms daily, but I'm afraid they're dropping the ball now.
I guess on a long enough timeline, every company is bound to disappoint. It's hard to get it right, consistently.
Same. I was kind of slowly preparing myself that I might be switching to android and it seems this might be the final straw. Will wait until Sept to see how new iphone and google pixels will look like but most likely I will do the transition (even though been developing for iOS for more than 10 years.
Sure, it's reasonable to consider a switch. But while Android devices have come a long way in terms of physical design, capabilities, UI/UX, etc, out of the box Apple still offers a more comprehensive, user friendly and privacy focused security solution: lockdown, tighter controls of hardware/software integration, etc. So there's that.
Apple user friendliness only extends as far as you're willing to do things the Apple way. If you want to do something Apple doesn't approve, it's going to be difficult, impossible, or miserable.
Example: file syncing and password management. Possible, but my Nextcloud and Keepass experience was janky. 3rd party Youtube client, impossible. Adblocking - all solutions I tried were terrible to mediocre (around 2020, but I doubt it improved since). On Android I can run any browser I want and install uBlock. Music: I can just dump my collection of mixed format music files (aac, mp3, mpc, flac, wavpack) over USB and play them with foobar2000. Foobar2000 is available on iphone, but needs dumb workarounds to play files not natively supported by Apple. And so on...
If you're balls deep in the Apple ecosystem, you probably have none of these problems. I never allowed myself to get locked in, which also made it very easy to leave ios behind.
Only thing I miss a little is the ios email and calendar clients. They were alright.
I was a diehard Android person for years, and I really really wanted to like it. Even when it dropped calls, failed to even show incoming calls, apps crashed regularly. This was a Google phone on Google Fi, unaltered and supposed to be the "pure" Android experience. My final realization and the impetus for the switch was that Android is an app ghetto; Good apps are designed for iOS first, and half-assedly ported to Android. Android's store has so much trash in it as to make it impossible to find a real app that isn't malware.
I switched to iOS and despite its flaws, the experience is so much better.
Agreed; I will probably be staying with iOS no matter how garish it becomes - Apple has the foundations right.
I can't say I feel the same about macOS before; as a user since the early 1990s, I'm likely moving to Linux rather than Liquid Glass for my personal computer.
It is a shame because Android has everything they need to be just as good but its fragmentation as a whole just gets in the way of its potential.
I have been using android for maybe 11-12 years and once locked down it great for me. But I suspect less than 1% of users would use these things like this.
As someone who has daily driven Pixels since the first one but listens to plenty of Apple users: no, Apple really does have it better for most default experiences. Really, the main thing Android still has going for it is that sideloading is easy and I can have a full terminal.
I've tried to escape the walled garden to Android before, and I've given up. No matter which company's phone or what version of Android, it didn't work well as a phone, alarm, and reliable device that I use for stuff like my home security. Things broke on Android like clockwork, and the clock didn't work.
The latest Google pixel devices are specifically blocked from using Wyze devices right now due to a typo in the pixel's configuration files, for example. Stuff like that happens constantly with any phone in the super fragmented Android ecosystem.
They are both broken in their own ways. However, on one of those, I have some amount of flexibility/freedom to put in my own fixes/hacks/solutions to make it work. I will pick the additional headache that flexibility brings over being in a straight jacket everytime.
The Pixel 9 with Android 16 QPR Beta 1 is working smooth right now, and looks great. Very polished overall. I would recommend Pixel if you go the Android route as Google's implementation is imo the highest quality compared to others'
Reduce Transparency in Accessibility settings removes the glass effect, but I believe has been updated to be closer to the translucent effects in current iOS.
It's sad when so many settings people use to make Apple's products better/more usable seem to always be hidden in Accessibility. I'm sure that says something.
Also this is way better compared to Android, where "remove animations" make apps feel like a dumpster fire, many of them lose parts of UI that were animated instead of showing them statically, feedback for touching gets often lost, things are waiting for animation so you are still stuck waiting a second or two for nothing, etc.
> Apple had a good run, I've genuinely enjoyed using their platforms daily, but I'm afraid they're dropping the ball now.
I haven't owned a (personal) Mac since High Sierra. The UI had been going downhill since Yosemite in my opinion, but gradually; it took a nosedive with Big Sur (I think that's the one that introduced all the SwiftUI apps?) to the point that I realized I probably wouldn't own another Mac until they figured out that a Mac is a computer, not an iPad. Looks like they still haven't yet.
That being said, I believe that 10.5-10.9 is probably somewhere close to what peak computing looks like. It's not perfect but it makes sense to some degree. I had no problem teaching people of any technological skill level how to use Snow Leopard or Lion; and not just getting by, properly becoming competent computer users. On the other hand, I've been watching my parents (both of whom have been using computers since the late 70s) slowly lose the ability to "understand" both modern macOS and iOS, and are more and more frequently struggling to find old and new features and functionality (like being able to see all of their emails on their phone).
It's disappointing really. For a while I couldn't stand using Windows and regular Linux desktop distros were too fiddly to be useful, and Mac really was the best option for "I just want to do X" with the least friction. Nowadays, Windows sucks for a whole host of reasons, and the Linux desktop is more usable but still Linux, and apparently Mac has decided to shoot itself in the head. If my grandmother asked me what computer to replace her Mac Mini with if it died right now, I really don't think I'd have an answer.
That's exactly the thing, that's what I don't get. Apple's brand is all about simplicity and visual clarity.
This is a visual mess. We've gone from clean delineated color areas to... slop?
I really expected them to use subtle glass and shadow effects, but with minimal translucency. Heck, a lot of this is barely even translucency, more like transparency.
I'm really surprised, because I didn't expect Apple to produce a design language that so easily turns into seemingly visual chaos.
> I didn't expect Apple to produce a design language that so easily turns into seemingly visual chaos.
I don't understand how anyone can act surprised anymore. Seriously. The App Store is an absolute mess, and Apple seems to be okay with it because it makes them money. Same goes for Apple News, Apple Music, AppleTV+, Apple iCloud, Apple Fitness+ and Apple Arcade. To say nothing of the quality of these apps (for their benefit), it's brand dilution. Am I supposed to believe that MacOS and iOS are spared from Apple's attention being divided into a hundred pieces? Am I supposed to expect them to invest in high-quality tentpole software when their logo is the only thing required to make people spend money?
At some point, consumers have to distinguish between the identity that Apple markets to them, and what Apple's actual impact is on the carelessness of modern design. People have been saying this since 2013, Apple's new design languages aren't even close to the HIGs from the Macs of yore. Liquid Glass has been destined to fail ever since, it's an iteration on iOS7 and not an interface people actually like.
I like Gnome. I prefer my desktop to be designed around one unifying philosophy instead of a hodgepodge of customizations which don't work well together. The Gnome team has done pretty well at avoiding the classic Linux issues with the latter, though it doesn't win them any favors from people who would've been using KDE or some tiling WM anyway.
> I prefer my desktop to be designed around one unifying philosophy instead of a hodgepodge of customizations which don't work well together.
I agree. It's why I prefer Gnome over KDE, and macOS over Windows.
My main point is: Gnome can't tell simple from simplistic. Terminal cursor blinking. Removing every command until everything fits in one menu and/or title bar. It's so crammed with buttons, I can't tell what is what. But ironically, there's no desktop icons, despite "Desktop" folder being pinned in Nautilus. Everything is so spaced out. Top bar has three interactive elements, but it takes four clicks to log out. There's a dock, but you can't move it to the left/right side, so it takes up even more vertical space. You can fix some of that with extensions, but half of them get disabled on every upgrade.
This is in stark contrast with macOS. If you can't find something in the menu bar, there's a search field in the help menu. If you use some menu bar option often, you can bind it to a custom key. Both of these are provided through standard system APIs, so every application uses them by default. Title bars have buttons, but are spacious enough so that there's always an obvious place to click-to-drag. (Gnome had to solve it by making ordinary widgets draggable... How do you know if you're selecting text in a URL bar, or moving the window?) I could keep going, but macOS has always been more intuitive and more friendly to power users.
Seconded. GNOME is simple and cohesive. Sure, some of the apps are a bit feature light, but I do most of my heavy lifting in the terminal anyways - I really don't need my "core" GUI tools like the file explorer to do a whole lot.
I learned to love KDE, but I understand why people don't default to it. All other alternatives are dead and it makes sense. The scope of something like KDE or GNOME isn't really reasonable these days. I learned to install the most minimal version of KDE.
The (maybe) rising solution is "build-your-own-desktop" options like:
- Hyprland (for Window management and other random tasks like wallpapers and lockscreen)
- Waybar (for task bar/menu bar)
- Rofi/Wofi (for Spotlight/Search&Launch)
Then you a la carte your File Manager, photo editor, browser, and whatever apps you like.
While I find that somewhat appealing, and those solution are flexible enough to pretty much build whatever you like your DE to be like, they are also extremely complex. For most things there is no "defaults". You don't get to do anything "by default" other than boot into a GUI environment. You configure a shortcut to launch your terminal or apps, a task bar that also has an empty default. Things that have defaults are gonna be extremely "basic" (think html no css). Just the data dump, and it expects you to style it. They are entirely configured (and styled) through a series of conf/css/ini/yaml/json files.
These apps/environment pretty much dominate all the Linux desktop discussion these days. (At least discussion I can find on here or reddit or Twitter when I used to check it)
It's really hard to tell if anyone is actually using those things or not. They are extremely tedious and a giant pain in the ass for daily use. Maybe it's early days. It's been about 8-6 years now since all the talk has become about new Wayland compositors. There were dozens of them, but Hyprland seems to have the most mindshare? maybe? hard to tell. It's the youngest, but it would take many years to reach KDE or GNOME maturity
I find that KDE just works like most people expect a computer to work, and it doesn't get in my way, or try to impose a way of doing things. The defaults are reasonable, but you can tweak nearly anything to your liking.
My "favorite" Gnome-ism was something that happened a year or two ago. At work there's a machine in the workshop we use to reference technical drawings, charts and so on. So I wanted to set the display to never turn off, because I got annoyed with having to drop what I was holding (and sometimes walk down a ladder) and wiggle the mouse to wake up the machine.
That is impossible on Gnome. You get a dropdown of a few fixed values, none greater than 60 minutes, and you better like what choices the Gnome devs have granted you. The workaround requires some brain surgery in the terminal.
On KDE I can set the timeout to any integer I want.
> That is impossible on Gnome. You get a dropdown of a few fixed values, none greater than 60 minutes, and you better like what choices the Gnome devs have granted you. The workaround requires some brain surgery in the terminal.
AFAIK what gnome does is not give you any options above 15 minutes, but they do provide a toggle for disabling screen power saving and toggles for other such power saving features.
I've always been able to disable if fine, what irks me is the artificial 15 minutes limit in the drop down menu, forcing you to edit dconf entries to increase it...
> It's really hard to tell if anyone is actually using those things or not.
They do.
You're mostly spend a few days on configuring the basics, then tweak things over the next months. Then you don't touch anything for years as everything is working exactly the way you want. Some programs do better with defaults so you can tweak the shipped config.
I don't need GNOME or KDE maturity because what I need is just a fraction of what they can do. And what I concocted is more stable and don't require clickops to get the same version on another computer.
> The (maybe) rising solution is "build-your-own-desktop" options like
That's not new, people have been doing that with twm, awesomewm, dozens more for over a decade. That's niche though, the majority see Gnome and that's it. They will never even know that there is something else, they probably don't even know that Gnome != Linux.
I am happy as can be running Linux Mint Cinnamon. It just works.
Also there is good old Xfce, in fact there are lot of good alternatives.
This year was the first time I ever used a Mac and I was shocked how bad the desktop was. You can barely be productive without installing ten different apps that allow you to use basic stuff like alt-tab or properly rebind keys..
Linux users have it really good, all things considered.
> The (maybe) rising solution is "build-your-own-desktop" options [...].
This is not a solution for power users, this is a half-hearted non-solution for people with too much time on their hands. As a power user, I need the computer to do the stupid work for me, so I can focus on the more interesting/important stuff, like playing games, recording a song, building an app, or just making a living.
I play guitar. I tried building one. It was terrible. There's a good reason why there's very few luthiers among guitarists.
> Maybe it's early days.
People have been doing this since before KDE. I started using Linux around 2002, and it wasn't long until I was theming Fluxbox.
If you want a decent and hackable desktop environment, start with matching the functionality of OS X 10.4, then work from there.
True. They're stuck in between badly aping Apple, trying too hard to do their own thing, and being toxic to the rest of the developer community.
They're not a trillion dollar company. Sure, many projects would do well with more decisive decision-making, but the strength of free software comes from community and collaboration.
TL;DR: if you want window decorations, link with libadwaita.
SDL ended up linking with libdecor. You know how when you use a Qt app in Gnome, it looks out of place? Now even the window decorations look inconsistent from one another.
I'm well aware of this issue. I don't expect windows to look the same to each other. I like that the title bar can have other content in it other than just the app name and the close button.
For that reason alone I avoid Qt apps, as almost none draw their own title bar. Qt apps aren't even consistent among themselves in theming/style, for example the only apps that look in place on KDE are specifically made with KDE in mind.
I don't understand where the "consistency" obsession comes from, all these apps use different tool kits and will look different regardless.
> I don't understand where the "consistency" obsession comes from [...].
Mental overhead. Sometimes Preferences is Ctrl-P, sometimes Ctrl-[,]; sometimes Copy is Ctrl-C, sometimes Ctrl-Shift-C. Sometimes the menu is a hamburger, sometimes a bar. macOS has none of these problems.
I like it a lot. Reminds me of the OG Mac OS X Aqua theme, except a more reactive/dynamic version of it to account for accessibility.
Refreshing counter to the brutalist styles that were trending. The problem with brutalist styles is that they tend to be busy, which becomes confusing and unintuitive to new users.
This seems like it would help separate elements for easier focus, to make things more obvious.
What I find surreal is that most comments are exactly like those back in the day, too! (Pinstripes, what were they thinking? Glossiness is distracting! Where's my platinum? This is a stupid toy!)
Anyway, this will be refined and fine tuned and we will all be fine.
Platinum's pinstripes and Aqua's glossy buttons didn't interfere with contrast. That's the golden rule - as long as content is legible, you can go off doing whatever sorts of cute baffles you want as a bonus. The pinstripes created texture that defined the titlebar in Platinum, Aqua's color emphasized interactive elements using visual contrast. In my opinion Aqua looks awful, but I do accept that it was an extremely usable interface for people with weak vision or little computer experience. The same can be said for Comic Sans and it's deliberate ugliness.
How will those same audiences react when they see a glassy squircle pop up on their iPhone? What is it a metaphor for? Is it a button? A notification toast? An entry window? An app? A widget? Did they forget to put on their glasses this morning? Is it interactive, are there gestures or buttons to close it? How do you call someone from this screen?
This is objectively bad design. I would argue you don't know what made Platinum and Aqua great if you're comparing those complaints to this clown vomit.
> Aqua's color emphasized interactive elements using visual contrast.
There were loads of complaints about readability with Aqua, particularly of the menus and the windows title bars, both of which were translucent and had pinstripes. Briefly discussed here for example: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2011/05/mac-os-x-revisited/ . There was also the uproar at Leopard’s transparent menu bar and glossy dock, discussed here: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/10/mac-os-x-10-5/ . All these were over the top initially and were toned down and tweaked over time.
> How will those same audiences react when they see a glassy squircle pop up on their iPhone?
It’s a button. It has a shape, some physical character, and when you poke it wiggles and does something. It looks miles better than the label-button-links things that looked all identical in iOS 7 and that still plague modern design.
> This is objectively bad design. I would argue you don't know what made Platinum and Aqua great if you're comparing those complaints to this clown vomit.
I did not really like Platinum (I spent quite a lot of time with Kaleidoscope, which I miss very much). I really liked Aqua, though, despite its occasional brushed metal excesses. I would not mind going back to Lion, when they toned down the glossiness they introduced in Leopard. I think that UI was very elegant. But I have to admit there is a kind of playfulness with the concept of liquid UI that is intriguing. I love how the Dynamic Island reacts and behaves as it splits, grows, and shrink. I think I like it better than iOS 5-era glossy everything, and definitely more than iOS 7+. I am willing to admit that I have bad taste, but I am optimistic about the possibilities with the concepts they showed.
That said, I swear I read the clown vomit but about Aqua back in 2001. Some things never change.
The Apple customerbase never changes. When Apple hypes up a bad update, people apologize and say "wait for the next point release" as a healing salve. When Apple releases a flop like the Vision Pro, everyone has to point out that the Newton failed so the iPhone could run. Maybe, just maybe, Apple's characteristic product management results in blatant failures. Mice that put a charging port on the bottom. Serial cables that are a white-label USB with licensing fees. Lisas that inhabit landfills. We can't always argue that Apple exists independent of other marketing influences and can just do whatever they want as a result - they have to compete! Resting on laurels isn't good enough.
I'm willing to give Apple their credit, where due. Mojave and Catalina was polished to a professional sparkle, it was very believable as a professional OS back then. Big Sur wasted a lot of screen real estate without any good way to get it back, and now Liquid Glass is sacrificing visual clarity to Mammon in hopes that it sells more Macbooks. I don't think it makes sense, any way you cut it. Not everything has to be history repeating itself, Apple has proven more than adept at inventing new ways to fail. Apple Car and Airpower both come to mind - sometimes it just doesn't work out.
> Maybe, just maybe, Apple's characteristic product management results in blatant failures.
I know, I went through a couple of real lemons, like the 2nd-hand PowerBook 5400c I had as a kid, or the early MBP with a bad GeForce, and an overheating late Intel MBP with an awful keyboard. I also still have a hockey puck mouse somewhere. And again, Aqua had its excesses and I strongly disliked their turn to flat design.
All I am saying is that the concept of liquid glass is interesting and I am sure they will iterate over time to fix issues. All the legibility and readability concerns could be addressed by tweaking the opacity of the buttons whilst keeping the dynamic and kinetics aspects of it without throwing the whole thing away.
There are many precedents, it would not be really unexpected.
> Not everything has to be history repeating itself, Apple has proven more than adept at inventing new ways to fail. Apple Car and Airpower both come to mind - sometimes it just doesn't work out.
> There was also the uproar at Leopard’s […] glossy dock
“Seriously, pseudo-3D? Really? If a compulsion for gaudiness must be quenched, at least try to confine such exercises to more obscure features. Don't scribble all over the second-most visible interface element in the entire OS like a nine year-old girl putting make-up on her dollie.”
Agreed. I've used Macs since 1986 and at one point worked for Apple. I used to make the same jokes about Linux on the desktop as everyone and yet I see myself seriously considering it more every day.
I recently switched to Linux Mint on a makeshift PC and it feels a bit like going back to Snow Leopard. It's snappy, pleasant to look at and has all the necessary modern features I need. Very surprisingly and unlike everything I experienced before on Linux desktops, it all worked out of the box (plus a few extra clicks on a GUI to get some proprietary drivers).
I never worked for Apple, but I've used mostly Macs since System 6, and am feeling the same frustration with their software. Unfortunately their laptops are way better than anything else out there, so I'm forced to tolerate it. I ran Linux on a PowerBook for awhile, but it was janky, and it seems like that has not changed. OS X is still basically Unix, so I'll go on running the Unix stuff I need, and turn off the lickable distractions to the extent I can.
This new liquid glass will lead to liquid brain, because my brain will be melting trying to process all that visual mess daily.
Now of course, I'll have to experience this new design in practice to be sure, but judging from the screenshots it looks really hard on the eyes. Hopefully they'll allow the translucency to be customized.
Apple had a good run, I've genuinely enjoyed using their platforms daily, but I'm afraid they're dropping the ball now.
I guess on a long enough timeline, every company is bound to disappoint. It's hard to get it right, consistently.