I wonder how much of this transparent/glass design language is setting Apple up for AR interfaces where UI is overlaid on what you're looking at. Since you literally cannot have fully opaque elements with AR glasses this would be a smart way to ensure overall design is unified across platforms.
I had the same thought as soon as they announced quartz. I'm really happy with the new GUI. I think it really demonstrated the flaws of the previous design.
Right before the unveiling, Craig specifically said visionOS was the driver for these changes. So the new UI is literally because Apple is still betting on visionOS.
The thing I find really weird there is that visionOS panes and windows are more opaque than this. They have some transparency, but it's a heavily tinted frosted glass effect with entirely readable contrast. This may be "inspired" by visionOS, but this looks like somebody really just threw out that design and the usability with it.
It’s more likely because the visionOS designers needed something to move on to, so Liquid Glass is just their next project, and it’s less work to do a similar thing as they did on visionOS. The new look also isn’t actually the same as visionOS, just adopts some design elements.
This was also my first thought, "imagine how many who think their device is too old after installing this "everything transparent" OS update". I bet shareholders will love it though.
We had operating systems with transparent windows 20 years ago. I have a hard time believing this UI will stress any device released in the last 5 years.
One of the more common “problems” people have is that their devices are so much more powerful than they will ever use.
Go look at videos of the current UI. It's not just doing an alpha blend between two static images. It's doing real time effects to mimic refraction and color separation the way you except to see through glass.
Also, 20 years ago you're talking about desktops connected to the wall, or laptops with no expectations of battery life. The name of the game for phones is use the hardware as little as possible a down clock asap. The fancier the UI, the longer older hardware need to stay upclocked and the more they have to work to hit 60fps (or more) smoothly.
Bingo. It seems like the same mistakes made by MS in the 2000s when they prioritized a touch interface onto devices without them... why is Apple so desperate to make Vision happen?
If we're still speaking about AR glasses, no current technology can make the images more opaque than the screen itself. So if the screen itself is transparent, whatever you draw on it with light will be at best as opaque as the screen - so, still transparent.
I love the switcheroo thought experiment: imagine we have always had transparent glassy user interfaces; for whatever reason, that's what the techology allowed. And in 2025 we have made a breakthrough and finally achieved opaque buttons. Would this change be just as controversial?
No, it would be a massive net positive. Everyone would love these new opaque buttons that obscure the noise underneath so that you can easily read foreground text.
In light of AR glasses, this thought experiment is even more relevant...
You are incorrect. Apple’s (current) AR system uses cameras and video feeds, not translucent/transparent displays. You absolutely can have fully opaque elements; when the AVP is worn, all you see are displays. When it’s off, you see nothing but pure black.
Some Windows Vista designer is shedding a tear right now. Got such a huge nostalgia hit watching the "liquid glass" demos during the keynote. Installing a leaked "Longhorn" OS on a PC back in 2005 and seeing all the translucent refractive glass really felt magical and futuristic. 20 years later, everything old is new again.
That's exactly what I thought. Look, they invented Windows Aero. Bet the John Gruber types who laughed at Aero and called it an Aqua ripoff are going full "two soyjaks pointing meme" over this.
Was Aero trying to look like Quartz? The big improvement I see is that the plumbing has better integration and with Continuity it's really impressive. Even if it looks like Aero the functionality the OS is providing is the real feature.
Aero wasn't trying to look like Aqua. Steve Jobs would have launched a devastating hypercombo of legal action if it were. But it was clearly a response to Aqua: use 3D acceleration to provide fancy effects and shiny widgets. The previous release, Windows XP, still did everything with lines, solid-fill rects, and blitted bitmaps and was starting to look long in the tooth compared to Mac OS X.
Liquid glass is gorgeous. But it's hard to reconcile next level design like this with complete disasters like Apple TV. Maybe spend some time on getting the fundamentals right too, before inventing the future
Why do you view Apple TV as a disaster? I don't own any Apple devices other than an Apple TV, since IMO it's better than basically all of the alternatives: it has no ads and it's extremely fast.
There are pre-installed apps like Apple Fitness+. When you scroll over that app the top part - maybe 1/4 of the screen - is a picture of a workout. This is an ad for Apple Fitness+. Similarly if you use the Apple TV app you’ll see an ad for Apple TV+ shows.
I don't think a preview of the app, that displays only when you select that app in the UI, really qualifies as an "ad."
If you do, I suppose what I would amend my statement to is: it doesn't show ads for apps I don't explicitly select in the UI. Either way, that's much better than most competing products... And it's incredibly fast, with the lowest latency of any streaming device.
I don't like Apple's locked ecosystem, and avoid most of their products. But the Apple TV is just head and shoulders above anything else on the market, so I own one and am quite satisfied with it.
You didn’t select to have Apple Fitness+ pre installed on the Apple TV and have placed in such a way that you will scroll over it occasionally.
They made it so almost everyone uses the Apple TV app for at least some viewing and there you get ads for Apple TV+ shows and their suggestions include shows that require a subscription to a service you may not already have. Or the suggestion will sometimes require a rental or purchase through the iTunes Store. These are ads.
I can place the Apple Fitness+ app wherever I want, and can place it last in the list such that I never scroll over it. In fact, this is exactly what I do, since I don't use it. Thus, I never see any app-specific UI from it. I don't think hovering on an app, and seeing app-specific UI from that app, is an ad; it's just app-specific UI. Some apps may use that to show ads, but that doesn't mean the OS has ads, and you are free to not use apps that do that.
I have no idea what you mean by "they made it so almost everyone uses the Apple TV app." You mean, they made an app that many people like, and that app has ads in it (but not the OS)? That doesn't mean the OS has ads.
Personally, I never use the Apple TV app: I use Netflix, Crunchyroll, HBO Max, and the Criterion Collection apps. And I never see what I would consider to be ads in the OS, and I never see content previews for apps I don't use.
If you mean "some apps have ads in them," that is true. What I mean is the OS doesn't have ads, unlike Google and Amazon's competing products... And unfortunately even Roku now.
You are free to never open apps that have ads in them on the Apple TV.
(If you mean: installed apps are allowed to show content previews when you hover on them in the UI — I think that's pretty different from an ad, and it's a feature I personally like, since it means I can easily resume a show I was previously watching without even having to open the app-specific UI. That's quite different from my perspective than showing ads for services and apps that I've never used, that I can't remove.)
I always find this take amusing, because there are ads. They're just for Apple services and they do a better job of blending in.
Case in point, the largest screen in the lead image in the linked article does nothing to showcase this new UI, but it does promote Fountain of Youth, a show on Apple TV.
These are ads. How much money would Paramount+ pay to have such a “preview” shown to Apple TV users? Whatever this number is it is certainly much larger than $0. Therefore it is an ad.
No, not quite. "Content previews", not "ads". A distinction with a difference.
When you 'hover' over an app on an Apple's tvOS, the app populates that preview section with whatever content it wants. In the linked article's screenshot, the Apple TV app is being hovered over, so the 'preview' section is populated with content from Apple TV.
If the user swiped right, to hover over the Arcade app, that preview would change to show some Arcade game. Hover over Netflix, Max, Hulu, Spotify apps, and you'll get content previews from them.
So yes, they are "ads", in a hyper-literal sense, but not strictly, not facilitated by the operating system, and not in any way that matters.
Product placement in movies and tv shows are ads. Product placement on Apple TV are ads. Previews for new movies at a movie theater are ads. We live in a society where filling up your car with gas subjects you to ads. They are everywhere. We are so inundated with ads that people think what Apple does are not ads.
Okay, to fit this definition of content previews for an app when hovering on that specific app as an ad: I like that my Apple TV does not show ads for apps I don't explicitly select in the UI, unlike almost every competing device which shows intrusive ads for unrelated stuff that I haven't selected in the UI, and may not even have installed or subscribed to. (I also like that it's the lowest latency streaming box.)
Apple TV is AFAIK the best device in its category.
I also think your definition is overly broad and doesn't reflect what an "ad" is. For example, if Apple cut the feature from iOS that allowed you to control your music from your lock screen, Spotify would also be willing to pay Apple to be able to control specifically Spotify from your lock screen. Does that mean "being able to control music from your lock screen" is an ad for Spotify? No. Does iOS allowing app-specific widgets on the homescreen count as ads, since if it didn't exist, companies would be willing to pay to be on people's homescreens? No, widgets are not by definition ads (even if some widgets may be ads!). Similarly, the Apple TV OS providing the ability for installed apps to show interactive app-specific UI on hover (i.e. the user has chosen to interact with this app, or has chosen it as their primary app in the OS), does not mean the OS itself has ads.
No, dude. What Apple is doing is providing an API [0] that app developers can do whatever the hell they want with. Apple is delivering ads in the same way that your web browser is (giving other people a blank canvas to draw on).
The OS does not have ads. Some apps can contain ads. This is in stark contrast to other streaming box OSes, which contain ads built into the OS and have apps that have ads in them.
I get the crux of what you're saying -- the Apple TV homepage has a giant ad banner at the top; just another billboard in a world covered by them.
What I dislike about internet discussions is that we've gone back and forth over pedantic definitions of what "ads" are, rather than discussing your more interesting meta-point.
People say Apple has not innovated much lately but they’ve innovated in the advertising space. They have just enough services and products to make it worthwhile for them to covertly advertise them to their customers. They don’t feel like ads and it seems natural the way they do it. To me it is quite clever. I never noticed it until it was pointed out to me.
Nobody is claiming otherwise. They’re just pointing out that this isn’t what people are asking about when they ask if it has ads. You, like GGP, are being pedantic.
Genuine question, what happened to Apple TV to make it a complete disaster? I feel like I probably missed something. (There's no good way to ask that without sounding like a fanboy, sorry haha. I just genuinely don't know.)
I'm not sure what you call it, but the "unified view" thing where you're supposed to be able to view content across providers is a complete nightmare. I'm not actually sure how I end up there -- I think it happens after I finish watching a program on AppleTV+ (oh, yeah, the naming is a disaster too). I'm not sure how I'd launch it if, for some reason, I _wanted_ to use it, and the navigation is just incredible strange.
Figuring out which elements are selected in the UI is often hard.
The trackpad on the remote is not good -- I've tried setting it to disable trackpad and click on, but then I'll inevitably find an app that needs a trackpad.
Overall I'm quite happy with the AppleTV as a device, but the UI could use quite a bit of help.
Can you share what you don’t like about Apple TV? I have one and really like it. I very much prefer using an Apple TV over using apps built into the tv.
It's an excellent device overall, but getting content onto the device to view is frustrating. Apps like VLC can have local storage, but the OS periodically purges locally stored content inside app storage.
It's definitely better for streaming, but the scenario you describe requires two other components (network attached storage and an Infuse subscription). It would be nice if you could just airdrop to device storage and play with an on-device Quicktime app.
+1 for Infuse. I tried to make Plex work for me, many times over the years, and it's always been so frustrating. From needing a server that can do transcoding, to demanding that I name my files in the way it wants them to be named, it just feels so incredibly constraining.
On top of wasting GPU cycles, such low-contrast graphics are terrible for older users. The Apple Music navbar is hilariously unreadable and distracting.
The URL bar at 02:11 in the video looks awful, with all the background shining through making the text hard to read from a distance. This is sort of hidden by the video having 3x zoom, making the text thicker, but unless they tweak the transparency it's gonna be a real visual mess on a real device.
Similar thing happened in iOS7(?) where they released glassy panels. Not far from that `-webkit-backdrop-filter` was added that allowed similar effect, I expect similar will happen. For new glassy effect it seems you need a separate filter for border, or maybe it's just gradient + blend mode.
Refraction effects like that require a surface normal, even inferred from something like a bump map, or the result of a blur filter used as a bump map. I'm not aware of any CSS filter that could take a normal and do the appropriate ray redirection.
The lighting is depending on the devices' orientation to which a web site running in safari on iOS has no access to due to fingerprinting protection. Maybe you need to request permissions to the gyroscope, but doing that for a reflection in the UI is a bit overkill.
We already have "standards" to implement this the web-standards way, but they don't have wide compatibility yet.
1. Use CSS Images Module Level 4's element() function to capture an image of the layer below. (currently only implemented in firefox)
2. Feed that image into an offscreen canvas.
3. Use a shader to distort the image as needed. This can be done in a paint worklet so it doesn't slow down or hold up the main thread.
4. Use CSS Painting API Level 1's paint() function to paint the contents of the canvas onto the background of the button. (currently only implemented in blink based browsers)
How can you use element() to "capture an image of the layer below" and pass it to a canvas?
I might be wrong, but without more context, that sounds like it'd defeat browser protections to avoid leaking your browser history via the color of :visited links.
I got confused between the <image> css type (that `element()` produces) and the image type used by canvases. But they're different on purpose to try and make things one way to handle privacy/security concerns. (canvases can go in the other way, but they can end up "tainted" and you have to mess with CORS which a whole bunch of devs can't handle)
We can:
- declaratively render <image> css types onto elements from css land using `background`
- declaratively get the finished render of an element back into an <image> css type using `element()`
- programmatically make whatever changes to bitmap data inside a canvas
- programmatically copy the contents of a canvas through Houdini's paint worklets into an <image> css type that is declaratively accessible using `paint()`
We just don't have a non-CORS way to directly get an <image> css type into a canvas' bitmap data in the first place.
I haven't checked, but there could be a way to draw an <image> css type into an svg, then draw that svg in the canvas. Assuming that doesn't break the element() link, you could do the CORS headers dance to make the canvas' data accessible again.
So, you could probably make it work on your own website, but you couldn't release it as a library because each server would need to be set up correctly to allow it to work.
It'd probably be much easier to just skip the canvas entirely and do the distortions entirely declaratively in svg using filter effects (e.g. svgDisplacementMap, or maybe feConvolveMatrix) so there's no privacy leaking.
Ironically, that'd probably mean that the effect could be completely implemented right now in firefox without waiting for new features to be released, but with firefox's poor svg filter effects performance, it'd run at seconds per frame instead of frames per second.
I’m not sure what you mean. I turn on the flashlight with two touches: drag from the top right corner to bring up the control center, then click on the flashlight icon.
It's not like it's even that useful, I never heard of any phones letting you adjust the beam width/strength like that before but it was quite fun to play with that the first time I discovered it.
Apple UI designer #1: Well, the flat design has been largely a success so far, but those darn users -- they can still easily pick out widgets from the background, and with a few tries still reasonably guess what they're for and how they'll respond!
Apple UI designer #2: I know! Let's make the widgets semitransparent. That way they'll be harder to pick out from the background, and Macs and iPhones will become delightfully fun puzzle boxes users will love trying to figure out, much like my dog loves his snuffle mat!
Apple claiming that Liquid Glass is a technique only Apple can achieve, will be replicated, or at least indistinguishably replicated, in pure CSS... within 48 hours of today, out of spite
It's just a shader, so maybe not in pure CSS, but you could probably achive something like that in WebGL.
About "only Apple can achive that": It would be pretty simple for MS to do something like this in Windows. DirectComposition (or whatever it is called nowadays) could set the appropriate shader when drawing windows. You cannot do it as a normal user, because you can only pick from a select set of backdrop shaders (but if some hacker wants a challenge, you could inject the code into dwm.exe to do so :-)).
Apple Music on Mac ignores the 'Reduce Motion' accessibility setting for their very distracting animated playlist covers, while apps like Weather respect it.
I have had both of those disabled for the last five years but I am really wondering what it is going to look like now with so much transparency everywhere.
Eh, it could be worse. It looks like the over-the-top effects are limited to a few top-level elements such as the Navigation View, Homescreen, and Control Center. I wouldn't be surprised if these get dialed back in the future - especially the elements that break all contrast guidelines.
Many elements are still completely flat or more subtle. So, to me, it feels more like a new tool to convey hierarchy, rather than a complete new design: Secondary < Primary < Glass.
Also, the Safari-Redesign is back for round 2? It'd be funny if it runs into the exact same backlash again.
I'm excited to see this effect turned into a WebGL library in literally a week by some smart devs out there, and then adapted by Material Design in another month. Really? Only apple? This kind of rhetoric might have worked on me 20 years ago, but today it's just sad how obviously false it is.
Don't get me wrong. I'm all for people sharing what they created with joy. And I'll even rejoice with you if it's genuinely cool. But to say "only we can do this" is like saying "we're the best, all of you are beneath us, and you always will be" and is just really off putting. I get that it's a marketing tone, but you could have just omitted those words "only apple can achieve" and just showed off the really cool thing you had and got us excited about that, rather than putting focus on the company itself. It's like how in movies they say show don't tell. Just show us the product, don't tell us how great you are.
Honestly? It lacks the visual contrast that made skeuomorphism so popular. Material You gets this right by using accent colors to break up the uniform interface. It feels cohesive and well-made without feeling clinical or hard-to-read.
It's also, somewhat curiously, not neumorphism. All the interface layers appear distinct, which makes me worry if things like Dynamic Island and Control Center will be mistaken for app controls and not distinct phone controls.
zoomed out they look blurry and unrefined, but when viewed zoomed in and large (like how a designer probably created them) they look kinda nice. Too bad they will all be small on iphone.
I find the assumption that these icons were designed huge and never tested at smaller sizes kind of baffling. There may be a difference in taste, but to think that Apple wouldn't look at their icons at different sizes is really, uh, something.
I think your parent said that they look good at some sizes and bad at others, and pointed out that this could be explained by their only being tested at the larger sizes, but didn't say that they necessarily believed that's what happened. The alternative, "tested but don't care," may be worse. (Or maybe you're disagreeing with the aesthetic judgment?)
Fair enough. I should wait to test it on iphone. Although sometimes concept ideas get mandated from above and the designers are left to figure it out the best they can.
I mean, that just blog sums up the whole attitude issue here.
"It’s an exciting time to be a designer on iOS. My professional universe is trembling and rumbling with a deep sense of mystery."
This person is excited that their job designing iOS apps will be more interesting (and the prospect of plenty of work in the pipeline doesn't hurt either).
Fuck the end users who need to adapt to this needless change, suffer newly slow devices or invest in new ones, and put up with a hodge-podge of different UIs. Fuck the orgs who need to fund all this rework if they want their app on new devices. Fuck the waste of energy spent in the extra client-side cycles rendering all the needless new bling.
Indeed. This attitude is found throughout the tech industry. It stinks from a product manager's spreadsheets down to the infrastructure that runs it all. The design is just what is immediately obvious.
In this case I am lucky, as I find glassy UIs visually appealing.
This feels suspiciously like the goals of Microsoft's "Metro" design from the Windows 8 era. It will be interesting to see if Apple can do a better job of keeping the same design without damaging the desktop experience than Microsoft did.
Then they should have waited for a decade? Literally what does that have to do with anything. No shit, design decisions are very different when teleported literally a decade later
Yes especially given that XP was the most useable version of Windows ever. They just threw it all away and expected people to relearn the basics of interacting with their PC.
XP was good but I’m partial to 7. It was like a refined Vista that brought proper alpha blending support and a number of QoL improvements without setting the core experience on fire.
The esthetic wasn't bad, the problem is that it was a massive reduction in functionality. For example, the fact that Metro apps included on windows could only be use in fullscreen mode and only one copy of it could be used at the same time. The new Metro settings they included to replace the ones from the control panel had only like 10% of the functionality of the old one and they actively tried to prevent you from finding the old one. The content density was significantly lower and dialogbox/dropdownmenus couldn't be resized to display more items (eg. list of keyboard layouts that can only display 3 items at the same time)
Metro was terrific on mobile - especially for older people who had no issues reading information from tiles or navigating sharp interface. Once my mother's HTC 8S broke and she had to temporarily switch to iPhone she complained how the interface was small and barely readable.
It's the desktop where it failed - you can't just force users into a mobile interface, at the same time remove the most recognisable element of your product (start button and menu) and believe people will adapt.
What I find wild is that there were internal W8 releases with a proper start menu but they abandon it at some point to fully embrace Metro.
They've already started ruining the desktop experience with the macOS 11 redesign and there's no sign of them stopping. For example, the recent settings app redesign that no one asked for broke the fundamental desktop UI design rule that controls never scroll, only content does.
Different people may approach the same UI differently. A good practice in UX design is to put things where people expect to find them — and duplicate them if different people go looking in different places. So a working search function doesn't absolve you of having to make the structure of your screens/menus/whatever make sense.
> Your smoking gun is to not use the app in the most intuitive and obvious way?
Search isn't the most intuitive and obvious way to everyone. Just adding a search function also isn't an excuse to just totally ignore good UX design and information hierarchy.
I've been a sysadmin my entire career, and still do end-user support occasionally. You'd be surprised how few people use the search function, for anything, on their computers. Just opening the windows start menu and showing them they can search there is like black magic to a frighteningly large amount of people.
I've met fellow Mac users that don't even know spotlight exists, and navigate through the OS and every app via mouse and clicking around.
So yeah, just throwing a search box in your app as an excuse for ignoring the experience of navigating it any other way is bad UX design.
There's a search bar in the System Settings app, you don't need to know what Spotlight is.
I'm staying with family and just handed my 64 year old mother who has never used a Mac my Macbook Pro with the settings app open, and after explaining the concept of default browser in non-leading language (not mentioning the word default), her first thought was to click Display.
When nothing familiar was there her next thought was to click Search and then type in Browser and she made the connection of "Default Browser" to the concept I mentioned immediately.
By the way, macOS has a super useful search field under "help" in the menu bar. It searches among all menu items in the current app and even shows you where they are. Very non-obvious, but once you try it, you don't understand how you lived without it.
yeah, I'm one of those who usually ignores any built in search option. I just default to assuming that it's an adware infested trap that will provide no value, only "engagement". Windows and Google conditioned this behaviour in me over the years.
Life is not smoking guns, objective truths, or us and thems.
I do find it amusing how disorganized the app has become, and that has become my favorite example.
I find it even more amusing that you think citing search as a primary UI path is your “smoking gun” of good information hierarchy and interface design.
> A setting's placement in the menu hierarchy "is a bad example" of the Settings app's being bad because search is available.
> Search is always available while the app is open, across all menus and functions.
> Therefore no placement or layout can be singled out as better or worse in the Settings app. All possible hierarchies or arrangements are equal.
> I unroll my Apple UX Researcher Toolkit (contents: blindfold, dart, dartboard, crack pipe), and use it to make my decision: I put the dropdown 3 levels deep under Touch ID, safe in the knowledge that I cannot be criticized, because we've also included a search bar.
It's just bad thinking. Sorry if you're upset I've called it out.
How is that setting spelled? What synonym did they use? Are there multi-work linking hyphens? Will it work with or without them? Is the search fuzzy?
And then localization comes in. Take any translated UI and the search often falls short. Did they translate the setting name? Did they translate it right, or did a google-translate of their localization plist? Will it find the setting if I spell it without accents? Which dialect does it use? Wait I don't know how to say this specific technical work in my native language because nobody actually uses it?
I couldn't search System Settings when I setup my laptop for over an hour because it was indexing files I migrated from my old Mac. It made for a frustrating user experience trying to set this thing up.
I mean, by your logic the whole settings app should just be a search box when you open it. Clearly there’s a use case for browsability in a settings app, so that you can discover what settings exist. Given that, it’s probably important for the location of each setting to be intuitive.
Oh wow. Took me several minutes of aimlessly poking around.
Actually, even without that, the grouping and the hierarchy don't make sense. Why are some things top-level items and other under "general"? Same for "privacy and security" (I assume that's what it's called in English), for some reason "passwords", "lock screen" and "touch ID and password" are separate top-level items even though they do very much belong to "privacy and security".
Metro on phones worked so well but MS failed to translate it to desktops.
As for the second part, Apple does a remarkable job at updating all of the OS to a new design language. Unlike Windows, which last time I used it, had three different settings panels and UI controls resembling archaeological layers going back to pre XP.
It’s also a much deeper and broader ui. In the past 20 years of using windows I don’t recall one time that I needed to bring up the command line to do something. Linux on the other hand is a constant battle with random commands with close to zero discoverability. macOS sits somewhere in between, but definitely a way more ui friendly system compared to the various Linux desktop distros
You seem out of touch with the current trends, as it is right now you have to open a command line window during the installation of windows and run some commands just so you have the privillege of being able to install the system without the requirement of an online account. (And it's now a mandatory procedure if you have no internet access! You are locked up from even proceeding with installation until supplying access to the internet, unless you do that CLI kung-fu) Also, make sure you have the correct incantation because Microsoft keeps changing it from time to time!
I've also noticed a lot of solutions to issues in windows now adopting the usage of power shell one liners as an easy way to fix it, and some times even the only way to change a setting or disable something in the system.
Meanwhile in Linux land with the more recent distros running Gnome I've noticed less and less need to use the command line. Can still be annoying though, but I guess it's the price to pay when you roll the OS of your choice on a system that wasn't really validated for it. (it's amazing it works as well as it does honestly)
Very meandering comment. You've highlighted a very stupid reason for introducing CLI at install albeit a real situation. Didn't know there was a command for bypassing it and I freely admit, it made me see red.
The true difference between Windows and other OSes is that the CLI was thought out. I imagine there are still people out there running headless OSes. The UI is optional. Though this isn't the case for macOS, it tries to pretend it is IMO.
Guess you never needed to use ipconfig. Jokes aside, you're right. It never had a power system underneath which is why macOS started to dominate in the 2010s.
Though this doesn't really count, there are definitely Windows 3.1 icons still there. Windows 95's Offline Web Pages folder is alive and well in Windows 11.
Everything is deep down beneath all this W11 acrylic translucency. MS did a good work around W7 when they patched majority of old icons and resources and then made widgets flatter in W8 and W10 so they would fit better. That gray 9x legacy is here and will stay - for compatibility reasons
It’s terrible and an unsolvable “problem” that many have tried before and there’s no way of getting this right.
Transparent UI components always add noise by nature, especially glass that is intended to be realistic - see all the refractions shown in the keynote.
Aqua was also playful and suggested the same feel but never got in the way of clarity and was beautifully implemented almost feeling revolutionary at the time.
What is on point for VR use cases where this is taken from, unfortunately ruins a desktop or handheld experience.
A massive loss of precision, focus and a big step backwards.
> It’s terrible and an unsolvable “problem” that many have tried before and there’s no way of getting this right.
except apple dictates to its fans whats right. i feel apple has already begun a slow process of making them similar;
what im more curious about is how they will improve the settings app (it seems the desktop settings is the worst its been design and flow wise - ive never liked the ios settings design - i do hope they change both of these for the better)
The biggest problem with Metro is how little effort was put into properly adapting it to desktops. It tried to handle everything from smartphones to tablets to non-touch PCs with 27” monitors with the same UI. It’s an understatement to say that it was awkward to use with a keyboard and mouse, because it almost acted like those forms of input ceased to exist.
If Apple makes the right platform-specific affordances (which they have a much better chance of doing) I think it can work.
> It tried to handle everything from smartphones to tablets to non-touch PCs with 27” monitors with the same UI
That was a big part of the problem, but the issues with the UI/UX went far beyond that.
For exemple, if you used the search bar in the "start menu" to get something from the control pannel, it would ONLY show the new W8 Metro dialog box that barelly has 1/5th the features and would refuse to show you the real one. It also took multiple years before the metro apps inlcuded in the OS (eg. pdf viewer) could be used in windowed mode (they were fullscreen mode like a video game, without taskbar), even the ipad at the time had better multitasking than the W8 Metro apps.
And as I understand it, much of that sort of problem comes down to the “warring factions” model found at Microsoft internally where the whole company is never on the same page, a problem that Apple doesn’t suffer from as badly.
Apple is a lot better at eating their own dogfood than microsoft. They had UI designers working on macbooks at the Microsoft office, that alone probably explains a lot of issues with the OS
It isn't quite as simple as that. The guy that ran the windows org during that time thought himself the Steve Jobs of Microsoft and didn't hear anything different (to the point of having multi-page public blog posts about how much the launched windows 8 US was the best thing ever and if you didn't agree, you were just wrong).
During that time they also instituted "anti-leak" measures so teams would develop and commit features internally and keep them behind hidden flags that required special permissions from the org to change (via an app they called "red pill"). That means that by the time many teams saw what was happening with the UX in various places in the OS, it was too late to come to consensus.
The entire cycle for the OS was empire building and emperor has no clothing from start to finish. It wasn't until he was ousted that they started to try and pull things back with 8.1 and eventually 10.
Office 365 is completely batshit in that dimension - let's just do totally different affordances and modals from the rest of the system we're running on top of, because people love change.
I assume they might be talking more to the "universal design" aspect.
Though Apple has long had a universal design across platforms. Not always in lockstep, but visual traits and behaviours and traits and appearances end up in all of their platforms, which even if it wasn't logical from a design perspective, there is loads of shared code so it's inevitable.
But really a lot of what they showed today reminded me most of Aqua from 25 years ago.
As a followup on this, it's notable that Apple has changed the title of the linked post to "Apple introduces a delightful and elegant new software design", making the subtitle "A universal design across platforms brings more focus to content and a new level of vitality while maintaining the familiarity of Apple’s software"
Everyone was keying on the universal design thing, and the seeming importance of "introduces" as if this is a first, and it was such an odd thing for Apple to denote given that they have been using a universal design for a long, long time.
I was referring to the idea of having a universal design across mobile and desktop, which was one of the goals of Metro, rather than the specific visual style.
It doesn’t look like Apple changed how the desktop fundamentally works. Microsoft put a touch-first UI on the server, and replaced the start button with a hot corner. Using that with RDP was a horrible experience.
If anything, we saw the iPad make serious roads towards functioning like macOS.
Metro never had this much transparency ingrained in the UX - and where it had, it was tastefully done with no/minimal accessibility concerns - doesn't seem like a valid comparison. Windows 8, especially 8.1 was a very pretty piece of software, the whole gesture- and card-based interface fiasco ruined its good name.
It is weird that they acted as through the design system hasn't changed much since iOS 7. They've overhauled and tweaked it every year since 2011- increasing font weights, using slower floaty/bubble animations, increasing corner radiuses and adding more negative space, adding depth and shadows to icons, etc. Control Center, for example, looks nothing like it did in iOS 7. iOS 7 was much more minimal, the least skeuomorphic, and a bit more geometric than the "neumorphic" changes they've made since then.
This updated design language seems to have similarities to Microsoft's Material/Fluent design system that brought more of that same glass material to Windows 11, with the more 3d-looking edge outlines on ui elements. So the glass metaphor seems to be a trending metaphor in these UIs, for better or for worse.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 466 ms ] threadI think they really wanted to change their image, and the metaverse thing happened to also be a decent candidate for that.
One of the more common “problems” people have is that their devices are so much more powerful than they will ever use.
Also, 20 years ago you're talking about desktops connected to the wall, or laptops with no expectations of battery life. The name of the game for phones is use the hardware as little as possible a down clock asap. The fancier the UI, the longer older hardware need to stay upclocked and the more they have to work to hit 60fps (or more) smoothly.
So they're gambling everything on it; Steve would have shitcanned it a year ago and fired everyone involved.
And if so, then why not work on it? The research in AR has already improved the phones as well.
Same thing Microsoft did with their tablet UI forced on all of their operating systems.
Why not?
VR glasses like the VisionPRO can add a video stream of your surroundings, but they are physically opaque and thus don't suffer from this limitation.
No, it would be a massive net positive. Everyone would love these new opaque buttons that obscure the noise underneath so that you can easily read foreground text.
In light of AR glasses, this thought experiment is even more relevant...
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/winmsg/windo...
See recent "Breaking down why Apple TVs are privacy advocates’ go-to streaming device":
* https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/06/all-the-ways-apple-t...
If you do, I suppose what I would amend my statement to is: it doesn't show ads for apps I don't explicitly select in the UI. Either way, that's much better than most competing products... And it's incredibly fast, with the lowest latency of any streaming device.
I don't like Apple's locked ecosystem, and avoid most of their products. But the Apple TV is just head and shoulders above anything else on the market, so I own one and am quite satisfied with it.
They made it so almost everyone uses the Apple TV app for at least some viewing and there you get ads for Apple TV+ shows and their suggestions include shows that require a subscription to a service you may not already have. Or the suggestion will sometimes require a rental or purchase through the iTunes Store. These are ads.
I have no idea what you mean by "they made it so almost everyone uses the Apple TV app." You mean, they made an app that many people like, and that app has ads in it (but not the OS)? That doesn't mean the OS has ads.
Personally, I never use the Apple TV app: I use Netflix, Crunchyroll, HBO Max, and the Criterion Collection apps. And I never see what I would consider to be ads in the OS, and I never see content previews for apps I don't use.
You are free to never open apps that have ads in them on the Apple TV.
(If you mean: installed apps are allowed to show content previews when you hover on them in the UI — I think that's pretty different from an ad, and it's a feature I personally like, since it means I can easily resume a show I was previously watching without even having to open the app-specific UI. That's quite different from my perspective than showing ads for services and apps that I've never used, that I can't remove.)
Case in point, the largest screen in the lead image in the linked article does nothing to showcase this new UI, but it does promote Fountain of Youth, a show on Apple TV.
When you 'hover' over an app on an Apple's tvOS, the app populates that preview section with whatever content it wants. In the linked article's screenshot, the Apple TV app is being hovered over, so the 'preview' section is populated with content from Apple TV.
If the user swiped right, to hover over the Arcade app, that preview would change to show some Arcade game. Hover over Netflix, Max, Hulu, Spotify apps, and you'll get content previews from them.
So yes, they are "ads", in a hyper-literal sense, but not strictly, not facilitated by the operating system, and not in any way that matters.
Apple TV is AFAIK the best device in its category.
I also think your definition is overly broad and doesn't reflect what an "ad" is. For example, if Apple cut the feature from iOS that allowed you to control your music from your lock screen, Spotify would also be willing to pay Apple to be able to control specifically Spotify from your lock screen. Does that mean "being able to control music from your lock screen" is an ad for Spotify? No. Does iOS allowing app-specific widgets on the homescreen count as ads, since if it didn't exist, companies would be willing to pay to be on people's homescreens? No, widgets are not by definition ads (even if some widgets may be ads!). Similarly, the Apple TV OS providing the ability for installed apps to show interactive app-specific UI on hover (i.e. the user has chosen to interact with this app, or has chosen it as their primary app in the OS), does not mean the OS itself has ads.
[0]: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
We agree then that the Apple TV has ads in it.
What I dislike about internet discussions is that we've gone back and forth over pedantic definitions of what "ads" are, rather than discussing your more interesting meta-point.
Figuring out which elements are selected in the UI is often hard.
The trackpad on the remote is not good -- I've tried setting it to disable trackpad and click on, but then I'll inevitably find an app that needs a trackpad.
Overall I'm quite happy with the AppleTV as a device, but the UI could use quite a bit of help.
Infuse just lets you... play a file. How novel!
Which is just going to make people try even harder.
In raw shader code it's verging on trivial, like old school environment mapping. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflection_mapping
It's not at all a concern for Apple, nor should it be.
1. Use CSS Images Module Level 4's element() function to capture an image of the layer below. (currently only implemented in firefox)
2. Feed that image into an offscreen canvas.
3. Use a shader to distort the image as needed. This can be done in a paint worklet so it doesn't slow down or hold up the main thread.
4. Use CSS Painting API Level 1's paint() function to paint the contents of the canvas onto the background of the button. (currently only implemented in blink based browsers)
I might be wrong, but without more context, that sounds like it'd defeat browser protections to avoid leaking your browser history via the color of :visited links.
I got confused between the <image> css type (that `element()` produces) and the image type used by canvases. But they're different on purpose to try and make things one way to handle privacy/security concerns. (canvases can go in the other way, but they can end up "tainted" and you have to mess with CORS which a whole bunch of devs can't handle)
We can:
- declaratively render <image> css types onto elements from css land using `background`
- declaratively get the finished render of an element back into an <image> css type using `element()`
- programmatically make whatever changes to bitmap data inside a canvas
- programmatically copy the contents of a canvas through Houdini's paint worklets into an <image> css type that is declaratively accessible using `paint()`
We just don't have a non-CORS way to directly get an <image> css type into a canvas' bitmap data in the first place.
I haven't checked, but there could be a way to draw an <image> css type into an svg, then draw that svg in the canvas. Assuming that doesn't break the element() link, you could do the CORS headers dance to make the canvas' data accessible again.
So, you could probably make it work on your own website, but you couldn't release it as a library because each server would need to be set up correctly to allow it to work.
It'd probably be much easier to just skip the canvas entirely and do the distortions entirely declaratively in svg using filter effects (e.g. svgDisplacementMap, or maybe feConvolveMatrix) so there's no privacy leaking.
Ironically, that'd probably mean that the effect could be completely implemented right now in firefox without waiting for new features to be released, but with firefox's poor svg filter effects performance, it'd run at seconds per frame instead of frames per second.
But I’ll probably get used to it.
This. The animations on iOS are already a bit too much—now they've taken it to the next level.
It's not like it's even that useful, I never heard of any phones letting you adjust the beam width/strength like that before but it was quite fun to play with that the first time I discovered it.
God forbid software be a little bit fun.
Apple UI designer #1: Well, the flat design has been largely a success so far, but those darn users -- they can still easily pick out widgets from the background, and with a few tries still reasonably guess what they're for and how they'll respond!
Apple UI designer #2: I know! Let's make the widgets semitransparent. That way they'll be harder to pick out from the background, and Macs and iPhones will become delightfully fun puzzle boxes users will love trying to figure out, much like my dog loves his snuffle mat!
About "only Apple can achive that": It would be pretty simple for MS to do something like this in Windows. DirectComposition (or whatever it is called nowadays) could set the appropriate shader when drawing windows. You cannot do it as a normal user, because you can only pick from a select set of backdrop shaders (but if some hacker wants a challenge, you could inject the code into dwm.exe to do so :-)).
Many elements are still completely flat or more subtle. So, to me, it feels more like a new tool to convey hierarchy, rather than a complete new design: Secondary < Primary < Glass.
Also, the Safari-Redesign is back for round 2? It'd be funny if it runs into the exact same backlash again.
I'm excited to see this effect turned into a WebGL library in literally a week by some smart devs out there, and then adapted by Material Design in another month. Really? Only apple? This kind of rhetoric might have worked on me 20 years ago, but today it's just sad how obviously false it is.
It's also, somewhat curiously, not neumorphism. All the interface layers appear distinct, which makes me worry if things like Dynamic Island and Control Center will be mistaken for app controls and not distinct phone controls.
This blog's prediction got remarkably close. I've been a sucker for glass UI since the first Longhorn (later Vista) screenshots.
https://www.lux.camera/content/images/size/w2400/2025/05/Mai...
zoomed out they look blurry and unrefined, but when viewed zoomed in and large (like how a designer probably created them) they look kinda nice. Too bad they will all be small on iphone.
"It’s an exciting time to be a designer on iOS. My professional universe is trembling and rumbling with a deep sense of mystery."
This person is excited that their job designing iOS apps will be more interesting (and the prospect of plenty of work in the pipeline doesn't hurt either).
Fuck the end users who need to adapt to this needless change, suffer newly slow devices or invest in new ones, and put up with a hodge-podge of different UIs. Fuck the orgs who need to fund all this rework if they want their app on new devices. Fuck the waste of energy spent in the extra client-side cycles rendering all the needless new bling.
In this case I am lucky, as I find glassy UIs visually appealing.
What I find wild is that there were internal W8 releases with a proper start menu but they abandon it at some point to fully embrace Metro.
Search isn't the most intuitive and obvious way to everyone. Just adding a search function also isn't an excuse to just totally ignore good UX design and information hierarchy.
I've been a sysadmin my entire career, and still do end-user support occasionally. You'd be surprised how few people use the search function, for anything, on their computers. Just opening the windows start menu and showing them they can search there is like black magic to a frighteningly large amount of people.
I've met fellow Mac users that don't even know spotlight exists, and navigate through the OS and every app via mouse and clicking around.
So yeah, just throwing a search box in your app as an excuse for ignoring the experience of navigating it any other way is bad UX design.
I'm staying with family and just handed my 64 year old mother who has never used a Mac my Macbook Pro with the settings app open, and after explaining the concept of default browser in non-leading language (not mentioning the word default), her first thought was to click Display.
When nothing familiar was there her next thought was to click Search and then type in Browser and she made the connection of "Default Browser" to the concept I mentioned immediately.
-
Non-techies are not going to learn the groupings for OS settings any easier than they'll figure out a UX pattern that's been widely accepted for decades: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/search-visible-and-simple/
Of course, who don't know anything about UX tend to assume personal anecdotes map to a much larger sample size than they actually do.
I do find it amusing how disorganized the app has become, and that has become my favorite example.
I find it even more amusing that you think citing search as a primary UI path is your “smoking gun” of good information hierarchy and interface design.
The original settings app had a nondescript "General" label for this same setting: neither tells me to expect a default browser setting.
Overall the old UI was just the current UI with lower information density.
> Search is always available while the app is open, across all menus and functions.
> Therefore no placement or layout can be singled out as better or worse in the Settings app. All possible hierarchies or arrangements are equal.
> I unroll my Apple UX Researcher Toolkit (contents: blindfold, dart, dartboard, crack pipe), and use it to make my decision: I put the dropdown 3 levels deep under Touch ID, safe in the knowledge that I cannot be criticized, because we've also included a search bar.
It's just bad thinking. Sorry if you're upset I've called it out.
How is that setting spelled? What synonym did they use? Are there multi-work linking hyphens? Will it work with or without them? Is the search fuzzy?
And then localization comes in. Take any translated UI and the search often falls short. Did they translate the setting name? Did they translate it right, or did a google-translate of their localization plist? Will it find the setting if I spell it without accents? Which dialect does it use? Wait I don't know how to say this specific technical work in my native language because nobody actually uses it?
So yeah, please keep categories that make sense.
Actually, even without that, the grouping and the hierarchy don't make sense. Why are some things top-level items and other under "general"? Same for "privacy and security" (I assume that's what it's called in English), for some reason "passwords", "lock screen" and "touch ID and password" are separate top-level items even though they do very much belong to "privacy and security".
The more you look at it, the less sense it makes.
As for the second part, Apple does a remarkable job at updating all of the OS to a new design language. Unlike Windows, which last time I used it, had three different settings panels and UI controls resembling archaeological layers going back to pre XP.
I've also noticed a lot of solutions to issues in windows now adopting the usage of power shell one liners as an easy way to fix it, and some times even the only way to change a setting or disable something in the system.
Meanwhile in Linux land with the more recent distros running Gnome I've noticed less and less need to use the command line. Can still be annoying though, but I guess it's the price to pay when you roll the OS of your choice on a system that wasn't really validated for it. (it's amazing it works as well as it does honestly)
The true difference between Windows and other OSes is that the CLI was thought out. I imagine there are still people out there running headless OSes. The UI is optional. Though this isn't the case for macOS, it tries to pretend it is IMO.
Transparent UI components always add noise by nature, especially glass that is intended to be realistic - see all the refractions shown in the keynote.
Aqua was also playful and suggested the same feel but never got in the way of clarity and was beautifully implemented almost feeling revolutionary at the time.
What is on point for VR use cases where this is taken from, unfortunately ruins a desktop or handheld experience.
A massive loss of precision, focus and a big step backwards.
except apple dictates to its fans whats right. i feel apple has already begun a slow process of making them similar;
what im more curious about is how they will improve the settings app (it seems the desktop settings is the worst its been design and flow wise - ive never liked the ios settings design - i do hope they change both of these for the better)
edit: more newlines
If Apple makes the right platform-specific affordances (which they have a much better chance of doing) I think it can work.
That was a big part of the problem, but the issues with the UI/UX went far beyond that.
For exemple, if you used the search bar in the "start menu" to get something from the control pannel, it would ONLY show the new W8 Metro dialog box that barelly has 1/5th the features and would refuse to show you the real one. It also took multiple years before the metro apps inlcuded in the OS (eg. pdf viewer) could be used in windowed mode (they were fullscreen mode like a video game, without taskbar), even the ipad at the time had better multitasking than the W8 Metro apps.
During that time they also instituted "anti-leak" measures so teams would develop and commit features internally and keep them behind hidden flags that required special permissions from the org to change (via an app they called "red pill"). That means that by the time many teams saw what was happening with the UX in various places in the OS, it was too late to come to consensus.
The entire cycle for the OS was empire building and emperor has no clothing from start to finish. It wasn't until he was ousted that they started to try and pull things back with 8.1 and eventually 10.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/@microsoftdesign/videos
Though Apple has long had a universal design across platforms. Not always in lockstep, but visual traits and behaviours and traits and appearances end up in all of their platforms, which even if it wasn't logical from a design perspective, there is loads of shared code so it's inevitable.
But really a lot of what they showed today reminded me most of Aqua from 25 years ago.
Everyone was keying on the universal design thing, and the seeming importance of "introduces" as if this is a first, and it was such an odd thing for Apple to denote given that they have been using a universal design for a long, long time.
If anything, we saw the iPad make serious roads towards functioning like macOS.
This updated design language seems to have similarities to Microsoft's Material/Fluent design system that brought more of that same glass material to Windows 11, with the more 3d-looking edge outlines on ui elements. So the glass metaphor seems to be a trending metaphor in these UIs, for better or for worse.