All the Liquid Glass Changes in macOS Golden Gate

[Dust-by-Monday]

This doesn't look bad. Why do the icons match the window corners on this screenshot but not the one posted to twitter?

 

[jinnyman]

Finally! I don't have to see a guy defending this mess-up every !@#$ing time!

 

[McNoise]

All this faffing about and fiddling with the interface is just ridiculous. Apple would be well advised to start from scratch and drop this glassy rounded nonsense.

 

[jinnyman]

I've been saying the same thing all along. For this UI or theme stuff, Apple should instead offer options to change between. This kind of stuff are highly personal and forcing whatever changes without any concrete reasoning other than sake of changes bounds to cause issues among people.

If all these liquid glassy stuff was offered as one of the options for theme, nobody would complain it.

 

[jimmy_john]

God I hope they added a 17th different window management feature

 

[jon9091]

Liquid Gas 💨 was a bust.

🥴

 

[Deliro]

Am I in a minority of people that don’t care about such trivial UI tweaks? Rounded corners folks!

 

[turbineseaplane]

Please just add the option for us to have solid toolbars 🙏

Looking at the shot below, I'm gaining nothing but visual clutter by having blurred colors/shapes sliding under my toolbars.

Here are dark/light mode shots 👇 from an older version of Reeder I still run.
This would be great please (solid toolbar, no need for "capsules" around every button)

 

[apple contributor]

I actually kinda like the ultraclear liquid glass. Oh well, ill get used to it again i guess

 

[ignatius345]

No Mac has an OLED display.
So basically only people who bought a third-party monitor will be able to take advantage of HDR 😂

Huh? MacBook Pros have HDR support.

 

[Mr Todhunter]

View attachment 2636741

Aqua is BACK, baby!

Horrible UI design. This is an input field, not a BUTTON. Are there any interaction designers left at Apple? I bet not.

 

[teaneedz]

Horrible UI design. This is an input field, not a BUTTON. Are there any interaction designers left at Apple? I bet not.

the adults left the room and the babies are running amuck. well, I guess one baby got kicked over to Meta.

liquid glass was a form follows emotion endeavor. it put looks ahead of solid UI principles that favors opaque (which is data supported). in a way, LG separates the design amateurs from the experienced pros.

 

[AndiG]

the adults left the room and the babies are running amuck. well, I guess one baby got kicked over to Meta.

liquid glass was a form follows emotion endeavor. it put looks ahead of solid UI principles that favors opaque (which is data supported). in a way, LG separates the design amateurs from the experienced pros.

Back in the day, before skeuomorphic design disappeared, we had the same sh*t. Apple designers wanted to make everything look perfectly real. And if you wanted to see the next page of the address book or calendar, you had to sit through a one-second page-turning animation. But as a user, I wanted to see the next page - not a page animation.

Today, it's the same sh*t all over again. You want to operate the toolbar buttons and get a quick overview of the toolbar's functionality. But what you actually see are glass animations and distracting transparency all over the place. Controls of a lower window shining through, while Apple is showcasing how cool it can implement transparency - while a user looking at might just say "awesome, how can I disable it?".

Perfect for kids who own a Mac just to take it to the coffee shop and look important while scrolling through the web. But if you want to get work done, the glass UI distracts you at every turn. Even with GG it's better but not as good as it was before Tahoe.

 

[turbineseaplane]

Back in the day, before skeuomorphic design disappeared, we had the same ****. Apple designers wanted to make everything look perfectly real. And if you wanted to see the next page of the address book or calendar, you had to sit through a one-second page-turning animation. But as a user, I wanted to see the next page - not a page animation.

Today, it's the same **** all over again. You want to operate the toolbar buttons and get a quick overview of the toolbar's functionality. But what you actually see are glass animations and distracting transparency all over the place.

Perfect for kids who own a Mac just to take it to the coffee shop and look important while scrolling through the web. But if you want to get work done, the glass UI distracts you at every turn. Even with GG it's better but not as good as it was before Tahoe.

Yep.
In some ways, much of this harkens all the way back to the days of "flashy Mac OS X effects I played with on the CompUSA demo Mac"

 

[yabeweb]

View attachment 2636962

This is the Music App with Reduce Transparency turned ON. Half the time the Music app can't figure out that setting and you get this nightmare at the bottom of the window. I guess you never use the Music app or scroll Finder windows or the Photos app. They all have awful transparency errors thanks to the half-baked Liquid Glass.

Safari is quite a mess with liquid glass..

 

[rjsmith2007]

They definitely touched up the actual appearance of glass components a ton. They look way closer to the original WWDC25 previews and the edges feel like they're actually refracting light now. Much less of the "floating bubbles that cast a weird drop shadow" that Tahoe had. Heavy aqua vibes and it's borderline lickable.

View attachment 2636815
View attachment 2636816
View attachment 2636817

Wish they had some shadows. Looks half baked at the moment (it is). I am curious to see how they change it in the next release or 2.

 

[mikeschr]

In my opinion even Sequoia is already too rounded. While mostly tolerable, I believe if you are going to round windows at all it should be at an absolute minimum or the rounding should be applied only to a window frame (like Windows 7, where the inner window contents are still squared off).

What informs my opinion here is that there are programs I use at work to remote into Windows and Linux systems, and the rounded corners cause the bottom corners to be clipped off, in Tahoe it got bad enough that the Start button on the left was shrunken to a very small clickable area. When some fullscreen programs are in use, I have been actually unable to use some buttons altogether in Tahoe. This was always a problem though, even in Catalina days but then the losses were only a few pixels and effectively cosmetic in issue.

Of course I understand why people like some degree of rounding but Tahoe took it way too far, GG is a massive improvement. At least things won't feel so cramped anymore.

I'm having the same problem, where the rounded corners cut off my content. It looks like the problem will still exist in Golden Gate. I let one of my Macs move to Tahoe, but I still have two on macOS 18, and that isn't going to change until they stop the corners from cutting off so much content.

 

[Starfia]

I wish they would have actually refined Liquid Glass instead of going back to the old sidebar and corner radius. The new (old) sidebar feels completely out of place with the rest of Liquid Glass. I also liked how the content next to the sidebar changed its colors.

The different window corner radius was there for a reason and I think Tahoe looked more consistent. The old corner radius feels out of place with the buttons of the toolbar.

Is it confirmed that macOS 27's corner radius matches the "old" corner radius, or is it merely tighter than 26's?

26's design seemed to be based on concentric circles with increasing radii, and the sidebar seemed like scaffolding for that construction with a sort of median radius. Without the inset sidebar, there's not much left to sustain that idea.

If we still want consistency between toolbar elements and window corners, I'd be delighted if the toolbar buttons were also somewhat de-circularized and adopted the window's corner radius instead.

Also I feels sorry for the developers who put in so much work in order to make Liquid Glass work for their application.

As a developer, I was sort of just shocked into holding off committing my apps to 26's design until this week's announcements. The quiet optimism paid off.

 

[Starfia]

Starfia, you responded to me a few weeks ago in another thread with a very thoughtful response. I took your opinion to heart and waited to see if there really were people still within Apple that cared about macOS.

Now that the WWDC keynote is over, I want to say thank you for that reply. While I think that Apple still needs to sweat the small details in the macOS UI, Golden Gate has restored a little of my lost confidence in Apple’s ability to design a user-centric OS.

How kind; it's rare enough on MacRumors to perceive anything but short-term conversational memory. ^ ^

I was impressed at how clearly and immediately they acknowledged the new revisions were borne of user feedback. "Apology" was more of an interpretation, but that's pretty close for Apple. I'm just glad we can all move on. (And I hope the few who loved Tahoe aren't too disappointed – at least this year they have the same option we had not to upgrade last year.)

 

[Starfia]

I am super disappointed. I’m happy about the corner radius, but I’m mad about the sidebar design, and a lot of the rest of the changes. Apple has given up, they’ve caved in to the haters. Now macOS is design by whinge.

Well it's killed mine. This is such a weak move from Apple. They had an idea, and instead of iterating it until is was awesome, they immediately started walking it back. This sucks now.

I'm sorry to hear that, Luftkopf. As you might have read, I'm simply relieved – and, to speak for myself: I can assure you that while I was disappointed and concerned, commented and sent feedback through most of last year, I was not feeling any variety of hatred. I just thought the Mac had previously arrived at a great place and saw overzealous changes that were perhaps unwittingly hampering that long-earned achievement.

We all have the summer to think about it. I had the option not to upgrade to Tahoe, but I took the plunge and endured. I'm at least consoled you'll have the same option before you this fall. And of course, please keep sending your own feedback if you haven't been. I at least hope the "since when does Apple listen to users" crowd quiets a little.

(And for what it's worth, Apple did explicitly call these updates "iterating.")

 

[Evil Lair]

Need to go further and add a slider for the corner radius, give me the ability to have sharp corners that don't crop my content please.

 

[Luftkopf]

I'm sorry to hear that, Luftkopf. As you might have read, I'm simply relieved – and, to speak for myself: I can assure you that while I was disappointed and concerned, commented and sent feedback through most of last year, I was not feeling any variety of hatred. I just thought the Mac had previously arrived at a great place and saw overzealous changes that were perhaps unwittingly hampering that long-earned achievement.

We all have the summer to think about it. I had the option not to upgrade to Tahoe, but I took the plunge and endured. I'm at least consoled you'll have the same option before you this fall. And of course, please keep sending your own feedback if you haven't been. I at least hope the "since when does Apple listen to users" crowd quiets a little.

(And for what it's worth, Apple did explicitly call these updates "iterating.")

I'm sorry I was a bit too mad, I don't usually react that strongly. I remember how Tahoe changed over the course of the betas, so I'll be watching GG with curiosity, and will reserve judgment for the Golden Master at least. Now the sharp edge of my frustration has worn off, I can see all the non-interface work Apple is doing on GG that looks really good. So I will make the move to GG, most likely with the public betas, and while I may still be disappointed with the interface, I will still have a lot to appreciate.

My disappointment comes from my perspective that the appleOS 18 interfaces were stale and tired having been built upon a flawed idea. While I was very ready to move away from Aqua, the whole flat interface got real old, real quick. Now we have so much low contrast, white-on-white stuff with no dept, and it's getting harder to use. I am ready for another big shift, had hoped that Liquid Glass would be the start of a one, but it's turning into more of a 'new rugs and curtains' change.

 

[MacBH928]

this is so interesting to me. what toy does it make it look like? why a toy? and if it does make it look like a toy, how does that impact you and your work?

it affects brand image. The more they "dumb down" the apps they less capable they become. IIRC correctly they did this with Apple Pages where it had more features before then the merged it somehow with iOS version now its less capable. making it look silly and toy like gives it the impression of less capable. Good UX/GUI ≠ toy looks. On the other end it doesn't have to look as dry and horrific as Gimp. There is a nice middle ground between beautiful and functional and its an art.

 

[Dust-by-Monday]

Not gonna lie, the more I see of Golden Gate, the more I hate it. It looks even sloppier than before. It doesn't really look like iOS at all. It's more like they tried to take Sequoia and put bubble buttons on everything. It's not pleasing to the eye and the ultra rounded buttons look weird against the tighter window corners.

 

[Le0M]

Huh? MacBook Pros have HDR support.

Non of them have an OLED display. How's that even possible?