You know, you are, as a company, moving to the wrong direction, when you read more and more articles how to disable new functionality. Apple Intelligence was the first major one, now liquid glass.
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Hate iOS 26's Liquid Glass Design? Here's How to Tone It Down
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This new glass look is already wearing thin with me, and it hasn’t even shown up yet. After 41 years as an Apple fanboy, I’m now finding the competition more interesting than Apple.
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I'll reserve judgement until it is out of beta and I update to iOS 26, but word around the web hasn't been overly positive so far.
Ah, thank you. I’m happy to hear that, I said I may be wrong.
You'll grow to like them
Haters are gonna hate, no matter how good something is... or gets over time.
Disagree. It reflects more on the state of many humans these days... resistant to change, closed-mindedness, etc.
Liquid Glass is a beautiful, modern new approach to interface design, and will only get better.
As others have said I can see them providing an easy to find ‘frosted glass ‘ option at an initial x26 splash screen & then in the appearance settings.
What they showed at WWDC is obviously the coolest and most extreme version for publicity - I mean good luck using the all pink macOS setup - but I doubt that they’d foist this on us…
…Like they did with the macOS safari tabbed bar UI that was only provided with the ability to go back to the previous layout at the last minute.
Ulp. Let’s hope that they learnt from that.
What they showed at WWDC is obviously the coolest and most extreme version for publicity - I mean good luck using the all pink macOS setup - but I doubt that they’d foist this on us…
…Like they did with the macOS safari tabbed bar UI that was only provided with the ability to go back to the previous layout at the last minute.
Ulp. Let’s hope that they learnt from that.
Apple Fan Boy here for 20 years. This is absolutely ridiculous and only degrades my user experience. I hate to say this, but this will be the first iOS update I will completely skip. Will not upgrade until iOS 27 comes around....
Debatable. I've never really liked the glossy, shiny look. I don't like it on physical objects, I don't like it on digital ones, I don't think seeing it more is going to change that now.
I could maybe get on board with the glass concept if they made it less translucent, but the sharp rim lighting or whatever they call it makes it look like cheap acrylic buttons to me.
This is sad: Apple cannot make meaningful headway with AI, so they try to add GUI shine instead.
macOS Vista - this would be funny if it wouldn't be so sad.
I honestly think that the promised Siri and apple intelligence was meant to work hand in hand with the liquid glass interface.
I think that increasingly the idea was/is you’d be asking Siri to find and do things and it would present it to you. Plus lots of proactive stuff presented to you with AI and ML. ‘Do you want me to do xyz?’
So if you’re suddenly not spending as much time swiping etc, having an interface that gets out of the way makes total sense.
I'm guessing they are waiting to clean up the accessibility part until they've really nailed down how they want the regular design to look. It would be much harder to develop two looks in parallel than developing the default and then adapting it for accessibility, in my opinion. All this to say, I think that "Reduce Transparency" will look much better by the time this OS is public
You're not wrong in that it was and apparently still will be... an annoying oversight by Apple.
At this rate, I half expect a ‘Vintage iOS’ toggle in Accessibility soon 😅. Curious to see how much Apple tones this down in the next betas.
I like your post and have an aside to add: "skeuomorphism" usually references real-world objects, which doesn’t quite map to liquid glass. The "skeuo" part refers to a tool, a physical thing that exists in real life, so I find the term lacks precision.
Liquid glass does mimic natural physical properties of light, so perhaps something like "physiomorphism" would better highlight its connection to the real world 😅
Despite some amped up beliefs - and proclamations from Apple - to the contrary, there is so far little indication that Vision Pro is the future of computing. Hype about witnessed 3D cyberspaces and virtual realities has been a reoccurring “thing” since at least the 1990 - and few of it has ever materialised.
Regardless of that (somewhat off-topic) discussion, design elements and paradigms for VR/AR glasses do not need to be tacked on existing form factors.
Perhaps this is a bit philosophical for Macrumors, but I see Apple's shift as part of the same trajectory that Google's Material UI followed. Not a criticism of Apple (quite the opposite) - I think Apple has taken a solid step forward here, with the potential to make it uniquely Apple through animation and reactivity as UI elements float over content.
At a high level, both Apple and Google have followed the same decade-long trend: clawing back a bit of physicality into otherwise abstract UIs. Material used layers, shadows, and depth to mimic how surfaces interact with light. Liquid Glass takes that further, focusing on translucency and the dynamic behavior of light through materials. But it's the same core instinct behind both: grounding digital interfaces in real-world physics. And I like that direction.
It'll probably shift again in 10 years. That's fine - there's value in alternative approaches. For example, I also appreciated the strict typographic flatness of the Microsoft Zune design, or the bold flat colors of their mobile UI. Or maybe full-on skeuomorphism will return (though to me that inherently feels tacky as it undermines the necessary abstractions UIs need to work). But for now I'm looking forward to trying Liquid Glass.
At a high level, both Apple and Google have followed the same decade-long trend: clawing back a bit of physicality into otherwise abstract UIs. Material used layers, shadows, and depth to mimic how surfaces interact with light. Liquid Glass takes that further, focusing on translucency and the dynamic behavior of light through materials. But it's the same core instinct behind both: grounding digital interfaces in real-world physics. And I like that direction.
It'll probably shift again in 10 years. That's fine - there's value in alternative approaches. For example, I also appreciated the strict typographic flatness of the Microsoft Zune design, or the bold flat colors of their mobile UI. Or maybe full-on skeuomorphism will return (though to me that inherently feels tacky as it undermines the necessary abstractions UIs need to work). But for now I'm looking forward to trying Liquid Glass.
i am ok with this glass bulshit buut please, they should improve readiness of the text and buttons, i feell soory to those with eyes disorders etc.