Im sorry. But Liquid Glass looks cheap.

[ThomasJL]

Wiki entry on Susan Kare, from the original Mac team: "Susan Kare is an American artist and graphic designer ... She graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in art from Mount Holyoke College ... She received an M.A. and a Ph.D. in fine arts from New York University in 1978 ..."

The point is, what macOS needs isn't software engineers but artists. Apple needs people who understand balance, contrast, color, texture and other principles of art and graphic design.

Excellent point. It doesn't take much graphic artist-type talent to make flat design. And that partially explains why skeuomorphism (which is what Susan Kare's designs were) is user-friendly and intuitive whereas flat design is user-unfriendly and unintuitive. It also explains why skeuomorphism is thoughtful whereas flat design is dull. Apple has been using flat design since 2013-present. Apple has used three different variations of flat design: regular flat design, followed by neuomorphism, followed by glassmorphism (aka Liquid Glass).

Apple needs to return to skeuomorphism. They can start with rehiring Scott Forstall and bringing back all of the exact same skeuomorpic designs used in iOS 6 and Mac OS X Mountain Lion, but with increased resolution for today's higher-resoultion screens, while adding new iOS 6-style and Mac OS X Mountain Lion-style graphics for everthing that did not exist when when those were released.

 

[Apple Knowledge Navigator]

… bringing back all of the exact same skeuomorpic designs used in iOS 6 and Mac OS X Mountain Lion, but with increased resolution for today's higher-resoultion screens, while adding new iOS 6-style and Mac OS X Mountain Lion-style graphics for everthing that did not exist when when those were released.

This is the irony for me: they continue to release greater and greater quality screens, but then design an interface that does it no justice.

 

[MacHeritage]

This was 2009, Apple switched to Intel in 2006.
The Intel transition had been several years passed by then.
It just so happens that the first several versions of snow leopard were extremely buggy, and all you have to do is look at apples archived release notes for the first several updates to it to see that.
Or just read this excellent article made a couple years ago…

The myth and reality of Mac OS X Snow Leopard

Apple had an absolute ton of UI inconsistencies, bugs, broken features with updates, rough X.0 launches (iPhone OS 2.0 was especially a big mess) back in the day.
It’s just simply that people don’t remember that, because nostalgia allows the struggles, bugs, glitches, and inconsistencies to be forgotten to time.
I remember iOS 4 on my iPod touch, I remember just how fast and fluid and light it felt, how simple compared to today’s operating systems it was.
But the second I actually think about it critically I also remember that… I had to force restart that iPod touch at least twice a day, and holding the home button to force quit an application was pretty much an occurrence every couple hours. Plus the battery life on that thing makes an iPhone 12 Mini look like a 17 Pro Max in comparison.

I lived through all that as well on the Mac side only.

With Snow Leopard, it was rough for the first 3 updates for sure but I also remember that Snow Leopard re-wrote the Finder which was a huge undertaking. I am surprised that there were not more bugs with such major re-writing going on for the main parts of an OS. I waited until 10.6.2 before upgrading the MacBook Pro and then got the Mac Pro to replace the iMac G5. It started at 10.6.3 and stayed on 10.6.8 until 10.9 came out. That was the first Mac OS upgrade many pros moved to, from Snow Leopard and I followed. Had Mountain Lion on the laptop. No one wanted to leave 10.6.8! I so remember that one. Shake 4 was also supported under 10.9 so all the pro apps worked still which was not the case after that.

Until Lion came out, I always upgraded very new version of Mac OS X as soon as I could. The yearly upgrade and then free, after that, really slowed the excitement level and willingness to install an OS that could have lots of bugs. Every two or so years was fun, every year major upgrades that started to slow things down and cause needed apps to stop working, grew tiring. Software and third party hardware started to get left behind because of all the changes every year and that also took its toll. I prefer slower large upgrades than every year ones. And looking back... still do.

 

[MacHeritage]

Excellent point. It doesn't take much graphic artist-type talent to make flat design. And that partially explains why skeuomorphism (which is what Susan Kare's designs were) is user-friendly and intuitive whereas flat design is user-unfriendly and unintuitive. It also explains why skeuomorphism is thoughtful whereas flat design is dull. Apple has been using flat design since 2013-present. Apple has used three different variations of flat design: regular flat design, followed by neuomorphism, followed by glassmorphism (aka Liquid Glass).

Apple needs to return to skeuomorphism. They can start with rehiring Scott Forstall and bringing back all of the exact same skeuomorpic designs used in iOS 6 and Mac OS X Mountain Lion, but with increased resolution for today's higher-resoultion screens, while adding new iOS 6-style and Mac OS X Mountain Lion-style graphics for everthing that did not exist when when those were released.

I did not like the flat design of iOS 7 but 10.9 didn't have the same issue and was more balanced. Mountain Lion I just looked at in my old VM I had setup back then and... it looks nice and consistant compared to Liquid Glass. I think somewhere between the two would be more appealing to everyone at large (neuomorphism?). Skeuomorpic design is more intuitive compared to pure flat. Pure flat is like looking at a desert landscape. Everything looks the same and you start seeing hallucinations of things that are not there. LOL