Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Do you like Liquid Glass on Mac?

  • Yes

  • Meh…

  • No


Results are only viewable after voting.
This is quite a usability regression for a desktop OS meant to be used for getting things done.
It seems like productivity isn’t in the companies lexicon.
Whoever came up with that trend should be punished by pinapple on pizza for 24 months.
Great idea, yet this crew may love pineapple.
Like WTF? Who wants that!?

The fact they didn't kill this concept IN the design room shows a really ominous problem inside Apple.
Ominous is the word!
 
  • Love
Reactions: turbineseaplane
Just to again illustrate a bug/shortcoming (26—26.0.1), why would one Mac app window (Audio Midi Setup) be in dark mode while the others(and whole System) are in light mode? [Toggling, or setting to Light or Auto have no effect.] I'm sure it 'slipped by someone' but the point is that this shouldn't happen.

PS> is anyone seeing this in Audio Midi Setup on their Mac?

Screenshot 2025-09-30 at 11.30.29 AM.jpg
 
Last edited:
I am 100% certain that if Apple were to make a car with windows like this, droves of Apple fans would buy it and celebrate the revolutionary innovation.
How funny…

Yet not funny and sadly quite true!

Reminds one of “Apple knows what’s best”
 
I think I found a needle in a haystack.. I checked all the other apps in Utilities and even a restart, none show this anomaly—so a minor bug but no excuse for lack of diligence on 's part.


What irks me the most is, look at the shadow the dark window cast on the App's surrounding light windows. That messes with my (already poor) eyesight. Another example of what @thebart and I have been pointing out in other posts.
 
Last edited:
  • Love
Reactions: turbineseaplane
Buffoonery from Apple. Worse than the Apple Maps launch fiasco IMO.

I could defend technical bugs, but I can't defend Tahoe UI/UX.

Hell, I could defend Apple's Apple-knows-best attitude, if they were putting out the best UX/UI design. They aren't anymore.

This forum likes to dump on "user-made Linux themes" but in all honesty some third-party KDE themes are so much better than Tahoe.
 
Liquid Glass looks amazing in the Mail app while scrolling over light emails. The buttons on the menu (bar?) put on a nice light show before they land on 'opaque milk white'. Luckily emails with light background are super rare:

Screenshot 2025-09-30 at 4.29.05 PM.png


Apple's GUI designers who 'agonize over every little detail' must've spent weeks deciding on how to make an icon placed in those courageous rounded corners look as uneven and too-close-to-the-edge as possible:

Screenshot 2025-09-30 at 5.51.54 PM.png


Create a lot of PDFs as well? Don't worry, page corners are now rounded too, and the Liquid Glass lighting illusion absolutely does not look like buggy UI artifacts. No, I can totally see the light hitting all that glass:

Screenshot 2025-09-30 at 10.35.34 PM.png


Editing your latest playlist? Has the nighttime edible kicked in yet? You're about to go on a trippy journey while honing in on the song currently playing, then clicking on the tiny scrubber bar to activate scrub mode, where you can then scrub to another part of the song in 3 easy steps and just some minor eye squinting:

Screenshot 2025-09-30 at 10.30.04 PM.png


Apple touts Tahoe as an OS that doesn't get in the user's way, and I have to agree as adjusting your eyes to see what was once clear, and the need for an additional click or two in some apps certainly justifies these claims.

And sure, the control bar looks like you can move it, and you feel compelled to do so, but you can't. Apple wants you to see that Liquid Glass in action. But, in their defense, it's not like there would be any other place within the Music app to place it, right?

Screenshot 2025-09-30 at 10.54.15 PM.png


And, we can't really complain about the new Contacts App in Tahoe with its 'placeholder' and or 'empty template' aesthetic, it's not Apple's fault that we didn't create Contact Posters for the hundreds (or thousands) of contacts that we've accumulated since 2007:

Screenshot 2025-09-30 at 10.37.21 PM.png


Another example of how that Liquid Glass effect really gives a clean and airy vibe to your desktop. You can spot the control you're looking for instantly. Perfect for those with mild OCD:

Screenshot 2025-09-30 at 10.48.09 PM.png


Not really last, and certainly not least, so it's worth mentioning that Apple did an amazing job creating 'Dark Mode' versions of Liquid Glass icons for their own iWork suite of apps:

Screenshot 2025-09-30 at 10.44.35 PM.png
 
Last edited:
Well... as of now (after getting into it yesterday) I don't hate it. These round corners look a bit comical while some apps still have old-school corners - and "comical" can be somewhat amusing, which is not all bad...

Control center has had a big overhaul and now I can get rid of useless "Now playing" widget which is good. Glass-look of control center on the other hand is not a good idea what comes to visibility of items in it.

P. S. I think I get where this new window corner radius is taken from - it is suspiciously similar to corner radius of Macbook screen upper corners, bezels and corners of the body itself.

P. P. S. While not exactly related to liquid glass, new UI has a problem with font size (in)consistency - best example is here
1759314971472.png
 
Last edited:
No, I still hate it. It's been a week and it has made my laptop very sluggish, and the Liquid Glass is horrible for my ADHD, it's like I don't recognize the place. It's horrible, it looks like a giant step backwards to the 2000s where everything is round and falsely volumetric, like a 2.0 interface. That was a step up from bad austere interfaces in the 1990s, but nowadays, UIs are flat, readable and functional. So Apple had to break everything.
Funny how I'm not liking it after it was forced on me.
 
Well... as of now (after getting into it yesterday) I don't hate it. These round corners look a bit comical while some apps still have old-school corners - and "comical" can be somewhat amusing, which is not all bad...

Control center has had a big overhaul and now I can get rid of useless "Now playing" widget which is good. Glass-look of control center on the other hand is not a good idea what comes to visibility of items in it.

P. S. I think I get where this new window corner radius is taken from - it is suspiciously similar to corner radius of Macbook screen upper corners, bezels and corners of the body itself.

P. P. S. While not exactly related to liquid glass, new UI has a problem with font size (in)consistency - best example is here
View attachment 2561952
I noticed that trash icon too. Surely it defeats the point of having a new UI when there are still left-over elements like this that they considered acceptable.
 
I noticed that trash icon too. Surely it defeats the point of having a new UI when there are still left-over elements like this that they considered acceptable.
Problem is that text on Empty button is too small and that font size does not match other elements of UI.

Safari seems to be the other end of this - tab title font has got uselessly big as whole top part of Safari window...
 
  • Like
Reactions: Basic75
Nothing objective, it's all opinion. And saying nay is always the easy path. Sure it is change, but it is refreshing. Apple never innovates, oh no they changed something!

It is great now :)

And that is objective.

I disagree. Apple does innovate, often with user experience and hardware.

The Vision Pro is absolutely insane in terms of a headset UI blending in with the real world. Nothing comes close to it. I haven’t seen much talk, if any, about how visionOS 26 has a bad UI.

Very few people are seriously critical of Tahoe for the rounded corners. It’s the difficulty of parsing what’s on the screen, odd decisions that don’t improve user experience, and straight up sloppy design (misaligned icons, transparency glitching out, and memory leaks).

So let’s not get back on this stupid discussion of “hehe that’s an opinion please present 5 scholarly articles to back up your point” and actually look at where the UI works, where it doesn’t, and hopefully sharing more interesting articles about UI design and concepts. Not to influence Apple, rather to expand our collective knowledge and understanding of the tools that have become integral to our everyday lives.
 
after the public launch...my MacBook Air m1 is okay with liquor glass effects,
as the mini M1 is better visually for some strange reason,
maybe the display or keyboard?
 
I wish anybody at Apple cared.

I think they do. We can't assume that individual designers or even teams have a say in what their priorities are, and I don't think anyone who produces public-facing work wants their name attached to work that has many clearly unintended errors.

I'm curious if the new UI's engine that changes the opacity/frosted level of the elements is giving them trouble. It's difficult to make a container equally legible with a single layer of transparency/opacity when the backgrounds are complex and changing, like scrolling through a list.

The UI for video controls avoids this problem by just being large symbols, but text is gonna be an ongoing challenge if things remain the way they are.

That’s not silence, it’s the sound of a $3,500 headset gathering dust. VisionOS 26’s UI isn’t debated because most people skipped the hardware entirely.

true, the headset is stupid expensive but I imagine that there is a vocal set of users. I don't think someone would spend $3,500 on a headset, keep it, and not use it. Maybe people have more disposable income than I thought, but I also believe that Apple wants to keep the early adopters of their new hardware platform happy.
 
Last edited:
Sounds about right for this "design" team.

View attachment 2562119
Yeah well, obviously... Apps that received a Liquid Glass overhaul already have toolbar button shapes by default so there’s nothing to enable there. Apps that still use the older interface style introduced by macOS Big Sur do not and the setting works for those. Pages, Numbers and Keynote per example.
 
  • Like
Reactions: turbineseaplane
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.