Glass is complicated as a design element, give it time

[LexualDesire]

[Deleted]

 

[Pudlo]

I ranted about this in another thread, but Liquid Glass is the final nail in the coffin for me. I've been disappointed with Apple's UI evolution for years now, especially in macOS. Main things I dislike about it:

• It looks tacky and dated, whereas iOS 7-18 looked clean and classy for the most part.
• The liquid animations, whilst cool at first, started becoming distracting and annoying within days.
• Legibility of key UI elements is massively worsened versus the previous design language.
• The main Liquid Glass elements look more like colourless jelly or goo than actual glass. They actually look quite gross, especially if you have a photo or complicated image as your wallpaper (or the UI is floating over images etc).
• The glass concept is very inconsistently applied across the UI. The Settings app, for example, is barely any different.
• Space is less efficiently used to make room for shadows and extra padding (especially in iPadOS and macOS).
• I especially hate the continued obsession with hiding controls in menus and pop-ups! As displays have been getting bigger, fewer controls are being displayed!
• Replacing the bottom tab bar with floating blobs is actually more distracting, as your eyes are drawn to how they're sat on top of the content. An opaque bar at the bottom was cleaner as it felt part of the edge of the display. A great example of this is in Safari, especially with how the UI shrinks to a small pill-shaped blob. That blob feels more like there's something stuck to the screen than an elegant UI that 'gives way to the content'.

i can imagine it being somehow usable maybe in two or three years time, but I have no idea how the hell Apple is pushing an early alpha out in the wild and expecting people to like it. For me it just clearly shows Apple is in a deep S%t and is trying to hide lack of any new improvements with some weird decision like base the release of iphone 16 lineup on AI (so where it is?) and 17 lineup on iOS 26 (probably bc they know they will have no AI so have to cover it up with some new icons) and new icons....like really? The switch from Intel to arm was done 5x times better then this switch of icons and I will not even try to compare how much more difficult it must have been with some deep rooted changes like completely new file system etc.

- yeah it looks a bit dated I agree, like some 2010 gimmick or those cheap android themes from years ago
- animations are crazy inconsistent, some are wavy some are not
- legibility is a crazy thing bc the whole idea was to improve it and it got so much worse
- bottom bar is amazingly bad, for me simple test is to just scroll main macroumors page and look the bubble behaving like a strobe when hitting dark pictures and all of a sudden in half of a second it goes from black bg/white font to black bg/white font, very often it is just white font on white background=zero readability like guys please just decide if you want to change the background of the bubble or the text color bc if you change both you end up with black on black or white on white...like really? If they can't even set good transition, the whole change is pointless and like we don't get muhc other then that so I have no idea what are they working on.

TLDR 100% agree

ps. I bet it won't be release during the iphone 17 premiere.

 

[LexualDesire]

[Deleted]

 

[HouseLannister]

ps. I bet it won't be release during the iphone 17 premiere.

Only way I would consider a 17-series phone is if it launches with iOS 18.6. Give users the choice of upgrading and delay the iOS 26 launch a month or two to fix this stuff. The complete lack of new features in 26 makes this OS a non-starter until the Siri upgrades arrive.

 

[AlanMarron]

Only way I would consider a 17-series phone is if it launches with iOS 18.6. Give users the choice of upgrading and delay the iOS 26 launch a month or two to fix this stuff. The complete lack of new features in 26 makes this OS a non-starter until the Siri upgrades arrive.

Hmmm. My wife needs to replace her 12. Maybe I should buy her a 16 the day the 17 releases and the 16’s price drops? Just to stay on 18!