dude are you serious ? When inside the company a good and fresh climate no-one will leave it, cuz all happy! apparently it is not about apple in current state of company
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Apple UI Design Chief Alan Dye Leaving for Meta
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I genuinely wonder if he jumped before he was pushed? The leadership at Apple are not blind, they must have their own design sensibilities and aside from the public opinion of the new OS design language. They’re obviously people with critical opinions and we know all the departments at Apple seem to be more fractured than ever. I know this has been debated to death, but please indulge a short rant of mine after starting to use Apple Music the other day:
I just moved from Spotify and boy, can anyone genuinely say the screenshot below is a good and legible UI? It's just 6 randomly sized and aligned lozenges. No clarity to the interaction zones and they even remove half the playback icons for no reason. I even knocked back the translucency by turning on 'reduce motion' in the accessibility options to try and make it a bit more clean. Layering windows becomes illegible too but maybe that's my fault for trying to use the iPad in a more mac-like manner.
I absolutely wish I never hit 'install' in Software Update. Whoever designed this should be fired ... oh
EDIT, reduce motion AND selecting tinted in the Liquid Glass option, that’s a way to make it slightly more legible. That doesn’t change the random mis-placed floating UI though.
I just moved from Spotify and boy, can anyone genuinely say the screenshot below is a good and legible UI? It's just 6 randomly sized and aligned lozenges. No clarity to the interaction zones and they even remove half the playback icons for no reason. I even knocked back the translucency by turning on 'reduce motion' in the accessibility options to try and make it a bit more clean. Layering windows becomes illegible too but maybe that's my fault for trying to use the iPad in a more mac-like manner.
I absolutely wish I never hit 'install' in Software Update. Whoever designed this should be fired ... oh
EDIT, reduce motion AND selecting tinted in the Liquid Glass option, that’s a way to make it slightly more legible. That doesn’t change the random mis-placed floating UI though.
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I don’t think Apple will ditch Liquid Glass anytime soon, as bad as it is, but hopefully this indicates a future change of direction.
But a big ship like Apple takes a while to turn with regards to changes like this.
But a big ship like Apple takes a while to turn with regards to changes like this.
Why do you think that? I think the ‘Something is Rotten in Cupertino’ was better because it wasn’t driven by the dislike of one person. I think Gurman is right that Apple isn’t going to get rid of someone because the Apple podcast/pundit clique doesn’t like Liquid Glass. I mean we saw what they did after the ‘rotten’ piece. They shunned Gruber and started doing interviews with others.
They never ditched iOS 7. They pulled back a bit and tweaked here and there which is what I suspect they’ll do with iOS 26.
I think you seriously underestimate the number of people who find Liquid Glass horrible. Sure you can find settings to make it more readable. The average user does not want to monkey with settings. The average user doesn't even know what settings exist.
I needs to be said this is a guy who designed packaging and somehow ended up in charge of UI design. He should never have been there in the first place.
He's getting out before the imminent new CEO fires him IMO.
He's getting out before the imminent new CEO fires him IMO.
Best writing since that piece, yes.
And no, I don’t think it’s:
Dye is gone = bye bye liquid glass
I think they’ll make it better & probably continue to tone down the “liquid’ part of it.
Personally I don’t dislike Liquid Glass at all - on iOS. On macOS it seems to be more of a beta.
It’s more the general feeling that so many ‘WWDC keynote’ features have been crammed into Apple’s platforms each year, that they are starting to feel unnecessary complex.
I’d prefer them to now take time to do a UX rethink - instead of the UI lick of paint that was Liquid Glass.
People leave for many reasons, financial gain, boredom, office politics, etc. The sky is not falling, key people even more icon have left either due to forced departure, starting-up their own company or project or due to illness/retirement, the world and corporate world goes round.
Sounds like people are trying to shake the stock price over nothing, well better buying opportunities for some I guess.
What an utterly simpworthy comment. Also your writing style is so desperately clawing at sounding erudite it's painful.
Even more reason to wait for the 27 OSes now.
I’m really hopeful a stern direction change comes.
So many things about the current software versions were a huge misstep.
I’m really hopeful a stern direction change comes.
So many things about the current software versions were a huge misstep.
I don’t love it but I also don’t think it’s as bad as the Apple punditocracy/engagement bait crowd thinks. This is just one anecdote but my 83 year old mother recently upgraded to an iPhone 17. The previous phone she was using was running iOS 18. She’s had the phone for about a month or so and not once has she said anything to me about the software. And believe me if she hated it or was having problems using it I’d hear about it.
I feel like there is a lot of projection going on and people will make all kinds of assumptions based on not much more than what they hope is going to happen i.e. wishcasting. And even the slightest change in any of the operating systems will be attributed to Dye leaving.
Let's just say that I welcome any improvements, changes, or complete roll-backs that can be made to the GUI of all three of the major OS versions currently shipping. 😜
That MacOS screenshot does a great job of showing how Liquid Glass is ugly and impractical at the same time. Just dumb. It’s in the same category as the iPhone Air: a poorly conceived product that anyone outside of Apple could clearly see was a bad idea. Apple needs new leadership at every level, and if that means some instability, then good. It could use some instability.
They should have just updated Aqua, which was liquid in the right way.
Good screenshots. It's just horrible, in seemingly countless ways.
It's design by people who don't know what they are doing beyond "make a cool concept".
I have this unshakable feeling that the Liquid Glass design language was pulled forward to 2025 because of the catastrophe of Apple Intelligence - Purely speculative, but perhaps iOS 26 was meant to expand on Apple Intelligence features, but since they still have no AI foundations they had to rush out the visual re-design which was meant to 'cook' for a little longer and get introduced alongside the iPhone XX?
Hence it's riddled with bugs and basic UI mistakes?
Yeah. I think it’s probably too late even for the 27 series for anything approaching a rethink.
I think we’ll see refinements of what we have, plus some low hanging fruit ie making many of the new icons look better. I’d expect a lot more work on improving LG on macOS.
I don’t think that Apple will reverse course on Liquid Glass though just because Dye is gone.
And any significant reorganisations of the UI will likely be a 28 thing, as all the rumours point to 27 being the consolidation ‘snow leopard’ cycle - plus a tonne of Google powered AI!