- 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.
If you cannot wait, you can already substantially reduce the transparency effect via Settings -> Accessibility -> Display & Text Size -> Reduce Transparency.
This new setting and the existing "Reduce Transparency" look a little different but same idea overall.
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.
Meanwhile, core functionality like “Find My” is completely and utterly broken. Leaving behind my stuff at a new place gets me at least two different messages on my Apple Watch at different timing. One for my devices, one for my Apple tags. One only has a “dismiss” button, the other has a “trust location” button that when I click, it says “content unavailable”, and if it works (which is only! over Wi-Fi), then it only works for that one device. I always need to go through the find my app at every new place since it’s an absolute UX disaster.
That’s what I get for carrying only Apple gear in the thousands of euros with me.
I just want to pile on, to any Apple engineers here that might have some say: PLEASE STOP with the Liquid Glass. My god, what an unbelievably stupid ‘feature’. Warren Buffett famously talked about how Apple is so valuable because their moat is so strong. That if you were to pay someone 10,000$ to switch from iPhones - they wouldn’t. No other brand is like this.
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. This redesign is apple’s most colossal failure of the last decade and I desperately hope they keep moving in the direction of rolling back these changes. It’s not just that everything is blurry and tinted. They made the buttons across the UI far less space efficient, widening and making cartoonish random elements that worked fine before. They added animations that slow down my iPhone 15 Pro and have tanked its battery life (don’t tell me it’s indexing either it’s been weeks!). They completely broke my “dumb phone” layout for my home screen by adding these incredibly ugly borders to everything.
Every day I curse myself for updating to this slop and for not quickly rolling back while they were still signing the old iOS. It is so unbelievably stupid that they decided to do this.
> 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.
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.
In big engineering programs engineers are paid bounties for every kg they remove from the design. We need software developer bounties for removing CPU cycles and memory.
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.
Allow me to disable all animations, rounded corners, opacity, white space and whatever else I don't need. Imagine how snappy and productive it could be!
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.
I switched from Android to iOS exclusively because of Liquid Glass. It's amazing. I'll just sit there and drag the glass back and forth over different things on my screen and stare in awe.
It’s technically impressive that they’re simulating the way light travels through glass. But a lot of the time it’s so subtle that I wonder if they could have just used simple semi-opacity and it would have had 85% of the same effect at a fraction of the CPU cycles.
I had to change my iOS wallpaper because of how bad the liquid glass distortions looked when swiping my home and lock screens. I get that Apple wants to control the experience, but ruining my own wallpaper ... a thing that is a very personal touch to many users ... felt beyond hostile.
I wish settings like these would also increase UI performance in a way that would prolong battery life. UX is far more important to me than FX, I would run XFCE on iOS if I could.
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.
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.
IMO a big problem with Liquid Glass is that you're trying to recreate an effect that's highly reliant on the sense of depth we get from binocular vision in a 2D screen.
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. It might be minimal, but light refraction patterns can change a lot when looked at from slightly different distances. This is depth information our brains automatically interpret, and it makes easy to tell what is "the glass" vs what is "on the glass".
On a 2D screen both eyes see the same refraction pattern— your eyes are receiving no depth information. It's just up to color contrast and semantics to figure out what's part of the glass vs laid on top of it, so things that might look legible or easy to tell apart on physical glass will look messy on the screen.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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."
Upgrading randomly broke my ultrawide second monitor. Now macos can’t figure out what resolutions it supports and the only two options look awful and stretched. Can’t figure out the refresh rate either and defaults to less than half the correct value.
This should have been in place from the beginning. The current state of large technology companies is really quite depressing. The intellectual capabilities of these companies have become completely stagnant.
My mother iphone is still on iOS 18, I'm honestly afraid to make her update because I know she will be lost and I'll have to come to the rescue a thousand times.
I can't understand how they decided to work on that, they must know that a significant part of their customer is boomers that want things simple and intuitive. Liquid glass make everything hard unintuitive, how are you going to know that this button is important if you can't use contrast because everything is transparent ?
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
72 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 72.2 ms ] thread- 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.
This new setting and the existing "Reduce Transparency" look a little different but same idea overall.
That’s what I get for carrying only Apple gear in the thousands of euros with me.
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. This redesign is apple’s most colossal failure of the last decade and I desperately hope they keep moving in the direction of rolling back these changes. It’s not just that everything is blurry and tinted. They made the buttons across the UI far less space efficient, widening and making cartoonish random elements that worked fine before. They added animations that slow down my iPhone 15 Pro and have tanked its battery life (don’t tell me it’s indexing either it’s been weeks!). They completely broke my “dumb phone” layout for my home screen by adding these incredibly ugly borders to everything.
Every day I curse myself for updating to this slop and for not quickly rolling back while they were still signing the old iOS. It is so unbelievably stupid that they decided to do this.
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 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.
The original liquid glass was my favorite UI ever, and I love to customize my UI.
Also, all the hate is really boring and lame.
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.
Allow me to disable all animations, rounded corners, opacity, white space and whatever else I don't need. Imagine how snappy and productive it could be!
Are they so paranoid about secrecy that they can't do event the most basic of UX design processes?
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. It might be minimal, but light refraction patterns can change a lot when looked at from slightly different distances. This is depth information our brains automatically interpret, and it makes easy to tell what is "the glass" vs what is "on the glass".
On a 2D screen both eyes see the same refraction pattern— your eyes are receiving no depth information. It's just up to color contrast and semantics to figure out what's part of the glass vs laid on top of it, so things that might look legible or easy to tell apart on physical glass will look messy on the screen.
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.
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.
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.
I can't understand how they decided to work on that, they must know that a significant part of their customer is boomers that want things simple and intuitive. Liquid glass make everything hard unintuitive, how are you going to know that this button is important if you can't use contrast because everything is transparent ?