Liquid Glass - Where Is It

[Buadhai]

I upgraded my base model M1 MBA to Tahoe yesterday. It went fine, if a bit slow. Even the MacPorts migration did well with no intervention needed.

Based on the comments and complaints I'd seen and read I was prepared for huge changes in the UI. But, it all looks pretty much the same to me. Yeah, the menu bar is now transparent and the dock has some different looking icons.

But that's it. I checked System Settings and see that I am still at all defaults in both Appearance and Accessibility > Vision.

So, what do I need to do to actually see an instance of Liquid Glass? Or, is my low powered machine incapable of actually displaying this futuristic feature?

 

[Starfia]

The effect is not nearly as active and animated on the Mac as on iOS, but it's there.

There's a sort of edge-glistening effect around:

• Toolbar buttons
• App icons
• Widgets
• App sidebars

The refracting effect is present in the backgrounds of:

• System notifications
• The Dock
• The housing for desktops and full-screen apps within Mission Control
• The buttons in Control Center

One of the only cases of actual glassy animation is in Spotlight. To see that, summon Spotlight (perhaps by pressing Command-Space) to show an empty search field with "Spotlight Search" in it. (If it's not empty, try pressing escape.) Moving the cursor with a mouse or trackpad causes the main row of buttons to emerge from the field in that animated fashion.

Beyond that, it's not much.