The purpose is to look different, "fresh", and stylish. Because people think it's stale and complain when things look the same for ten years. It's like fashion. And yeah I don't like it either.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
6 visionOS-Inspired Design Elements Coming to iOS 26
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
We're in 2032, iOS 18.5 was 2025. What do you think the year is??
I don't buy that Apple would do a visual overhaul like this purely to make it look fresh. Even when they did the big redesign in iOS 7, it was partly to look new, but it also reduced the visual overhead and design burden on devs and encouraged a more uniform look for apps across the platform. There has to be another side to this, I just can't work out what it is.
I totally buy it. IOS 7 was also primarily because Flat Design had become all the rage at the time, after Microsoft and Android started it in 2010/2011. Apple didn't come up with it by themselves, they were sort-of late with it in 2013.
Android is also getting a substantial redesign this year (https://blog.google/products/android/material-3-expressive-android-wearos-launch/), so Apple probably wants to do something, and they have the visionOS design to draw from.
We somewhat got that with iOS 7, but it was more flat and frosted. This design appears to incorporate some neumorphism-style outline and depth to buttons. This should enable them to push further into glassmorphic navigation and windowing, while also reducing the blur effects.
I’m cautiously optimistic but my biggest concern is how easy it will be to read text and what this means for the Mac. I imagine floating bars on iOS is a minor change from what we currently have, but this could be huge shift for MacOS. I personally love the menus on the top and the side tool bars. The worst thing Microsoft ever did was remove the toolbar and has been nothing but frustration
Glass UI is not particularly new. I do, however, have concerns it's going to be legible in a 2d environment, and my faith in Apple to implement correctly and not break things that have worked for a long time is at an all time low.
I hope Apple gives us the option to keep icons the the way they are more squared off or round like how we can customize Home Screen or colours and light vs dark icons etc
Absolutely! Anything that is translucent I consider to be blurry...I wear glasses so things are not blurry. I see a future where my iphone and ipad never leave ios/ipados 17 if translucents cannot be turned off.
The Vision Pro initial pin number pad is terrible! The 3 degrees of opaque used (bacground, unselected button, and selected button, are all too close to be of use. If you have to look away from your selection to confirm that it was selected that is a problem
Hopefully they won’t break all OS like they messed up the Photos app
Reduce translucency is already an option in the accessibility settings, no doubt it will be adapted for the new interface.
I totally agree with you., but we live in an era where the new generations quickly get bored with everything and want new things for the sake of having something new to look at. They don’t care about functionality, they just want fancy icons in 1000s of colors and shapes that bounce up and down so they don’t get anxious when looking at a regular icon because of their ADHD.
It is what it is…
Hopefully this new GUI design brings better usability and new functionality, not just fancy blink-blink.
How about a NO on #2. These phone screens aren’t getting smaller. Moving all of the toolbars to the top of the screen is a dumb idea. It was incredibly welcomed when they moved the safari toolbar to the bottom. Made so much more sense. They should continue that throughout.
Also #5 was done in a previous version of iOS where certain elements (volume and brightness sliders, iirc) would have a parallax effect or shimmering effect when you tilted the phone.
Also #5 was done in a previous version of iOS where certain elements (volume and brightness sliders, iirc) would have a parallax effect or shimmering effect when you tilted the phone.
These translucent designs make a lot of sense on Vision OS, but I can imagine it looking terrible on iOS.
I want my interfaces DARK, with bright fonts and lots of contrast, not wishy-washy greys and poor contrast.
Please don't screw it up, Apple!
I want my interfaces DARK, with bright fonts and lots of contrast, not wishy-washy greys and poor contrast.
Please don't screw it up, Apple!
They probably wouldn’t do this, and it would work better on the iPhone than a lot of devices. But what if they added a pinhole style, low resolution, low power camera to the back of the iPhone, like 195x90 pixels to match the aspect ratio, and it informs the blurred out background of the OS? So it’s like you’re seeing through the phone somewhat. This effect would be more striking, I think, on something thin like the iPhone Air where it would feel more like a slab of thin glass. I’m just unsure of the effect on battery life, because it would always be running, and even if the camera doesn’t use much power, the effects might tax the GPU a bit more than normal. Perhaps they could use some tricks with the accelerometer to make it update less frequently when there isn’t much movement, or at all when locked.
I like everything BUT the round icons about this. The first thing I change on an android device are the default round icons. I personally think it just looks strange on a square display
I wonder how much more CPU/GPU hungry this new UI will be compared to the old UI?