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Loving Liquid Glass—but macOS needs to catch up

nickdalzell1 said:
Scott wouldn't have been fired had Steve lived a few more years. Steve LOVED skeuomorphism ("When people see these icons, they should want to LICK them") and him and Scott were pals. If Steve had lived to see the argument during the iOS 6 Maps incident (which was wildly overblown) he would likely have defended Scott. The only reason they got away with firing him was simply because Steve 'conveniently' died shortly before.

If Steve had been in the same room as Ive when Ive had decided to flatten iOS 7 I can imagine he'd frown, say 'Nope' and walk out the room.

All I can imagine is that if skeuomorphic UI would have continued development, it would have made the Vision Pro even more exciting. I can only dream of what it could have evolved into, such as the UI we saw depicted in the first two Iron Man films (I still wanna 'toss' a file into the 'bin' like Stark did)
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Agree a million times over. As long as Alan Dye is left in charge, an apostle of the Ives knows best clan, this mishmash of “design” will continue. As Marco of ATP said of Dye’s history, he loves to throw all useful tools in a junk drawer and obscure them. Only pure ego could allow for some of the absolutely abhorrent UI we are seeing in screenshots. Problem is, who has the “courage” and the acumen to clear the decks of this incompetency and poor execution?

The need to return to the roots of OS X, stripping away the excess, and putting back the human in the interface is what is needed. A little skeuomorphic here and there is a good thing, as well as some 3 dimensional attributes for a 3 dimensional world. I have no issue with whimsy and a lively and animated interface, but blend some aqua in the glass and touch it up with some metal. Ship it Apple.
 
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acrakes said:
What does the pointer look like? Has it been glassed?
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No, the edges have been rounded off and both the pointer arrow and the hand (no longer the Mickey Mouse glove) look decidedly off to me. I have my pointer slightly enlarged for better visibility and it just jars for now. As do the window resizing glyphs. Maybe it'll fade with more use as I acclimatise.
That and the missing compact tab view in Safari are my biggest hurdles. But overall I'd say macOS is suffering at the expense of iOS and iPadOS. I'm all for harmonising between systems but all systems need to be considered equally in that case.

[UPDATE] Having installed the public beta as my daily driver and played with it more, the pointer arrow and the window resizing glyphs are starting to feel more 'normal'. The replacement for the Mickey Mouse glove however still feels amateurish and not in keeping. Hell, the old one had the finger more aligned with the pointer direction - this one, not so much!
I really do miss the compact tabs in Safari - for the most part the reload option within the individual tabs themselves. If they added that back in maybe I could just about accommodate, but I would rather like to see the whole compact tabs environment restored as was. There's no need to change for change's sake and it's not like there's consistency with iOS - that has the URL bar at the bottom!
All-in-all both macOS 26 and iOS 26 public beta are pretty stable. I've had one, maybe two, glitches but nothing requiring a reboot.
I would say that currently the 'glassification' of macOS 26 is way more subdued than iOS 26. I run dark mode and Liquid Glass barely shows up. macOS is either way behind the development focus (more than likely given that iOS and iPadOS are the babies and cover more devices) or they've decided to tone it down in macOS which makes a mockery of the whole 'platform consistency' bit and seems more unlikely.
But then macOS still has 'System Settings' vs the others. Be consistent with consistency please!
Hopefully, macOS - now being the runt of the litter - we might see it catch up nearer release time but overall I'm happy with it so far. YMMV.
 
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turbineseaplane said:
It’s totally insane.

Nobody internally should find that “ok”
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well.. looks like they are fine with it and they even brag about it!
Zrzut ekranu 2025-07-24 o 14.16.03.png
 
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He made the volume slider and the animation in the view I guess, not the illegible glass view background, or maybe he did. Hopefully it will get more legible.
 
galad said:
He made the volume slider and the animation in the view I guess, not the illegible glass view background, or maybe he did. Hopefully it will get more legible.
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I'm having a hard time being excited about the "fun animations and effects" when basic legibility isn't being prioritized here.

The priorities just seem totally off with all this LG stuff.
 
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galad said:
He made the volume slider and the animation in the view I guess, not the illegible glass view background, or maybe he did. Hopefully it will get more legible.
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Looks like he made both. His "I made that" response was directly to Steve's "that playback bar though is wild" and then he also said that he likes how the volume slider turned out.
 
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turbineseaplane said:
I'm having a hard time being excited about the "fun animations and effects" when basic legibility isn't being prioritized here.

The priorities just seem totally off with all this LG stuff.
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I agree. Honestly, even on a 15 Pro, performance is woeful in comparison. The Phone app is sluggish. The Camera app is sluggish (takes a second to even popup the reverse/selfie option). Yes, I know it's a beta, but I've never seen such poor performance at the Public Beta stage. My old iPhone 7 shouldn't feel like a speed machine in comparison to a 15 Pro.

And screw legibility, right?
 
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MDTyKe said:
I agree. Honestly, even on a 15 Pro, performance is woeful in comparison. The Phone app is sluggish. The Camera app is sluggish (takes a second to even popup the reverse/selfie option). Yes, I know it's a beta, but I've never seen such poor performance at the Public Beta stage. My old iPhone 7 shouldn't feel like a speed machine in comparison to a 15 Pro.

And screw legibility, right?
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I have an old iPad Air something-something stuck on iOS12. It's great! Everything is immediate, and the battery lasts for months, if I don't use it. My shutdown MBP will drain its battery in a few days. WTF is it doing? It's shutdown.

I just grabbed the iPad from sack. I've not touched it for two months. Battery is at 51%.

Somewhere along the line, Apple lost its way. And here we are.
 
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I think it's partially because a lot of Linux desktop environments strive to be macOS-like already, but it really does have a Linux desktop environment vibe. Honestly, it feels like GNOME in general, with some aspects of Pantheon from elementary OS thrown in. Lol (Granted, elementary OS has always tried to look like macOS, so I guess that makes it a small jump for the parent OS itself. Lol)
 
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auxbuss said:
I have an old iPad Air something-something stuck on iOS12. It's great! Everything is immediate, and the battery lasts for months, if I don't use it. My shutdown MBP will drain its battery in a few days. WTF is it doing? It's shutdown.

I just grabbed the iPad from sack. I've not touched it for two months. Battery is at 51%.

Somewhere along the line, Apple lost its way. And here we are.
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Yep.
The software has turned veered into the "bloated pig" zone.
 
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CasualFanboy said:
For my personal tastes, this is honestly better than what the UI has become.

View attachment 2531833
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100% with you.

Prioritizing usability is always a major win on an OS, especially on desktop.

I honestly wish they were taking the "naked robotic core" approach to the OS and really leaning in and enabling theming.

The "fun" is all gone from all this, for the most part.
 
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Macbookey said:
Agree a million times over. As long as Alan Dye is left in charge, an apostle of the Ives knows best clan, this mishmash of “design” will continue. As Marco of ATP said of Dye’s history, he loves to throw all useful tools in a junk drawer and obscure them. Only pure ego could allow for some of the absolutely abhorrent UI we are seeing in screenshots. Problem is, who has the “courage” and the acumen to clear the decks of this incompetency and poor execution?

The need to return to the roots of OS X, stripping away the excess, and putting back the human in the interface is what is needed. A little skeuomorphic here and there is a good thing, as well as some 3 dimensional attributes for a 3 dimensional world. I have no issue with whimsy and a lively and animated interface, but blend some aqua in the glass and touch it up with some metal. Ship it Apple.
Click to expand...

These are the roots of Mac OS X, which has plenty of excess. At least we had decent window radiuses though

macosx_009.jpg
 
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tomtad said:
These are the roots of Mac OS X, which has plenty of excess. At least we had decent window radiuses though

View attachment 2532883
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That was pre-Cheetah and all those stripes were gone by the time Panther came around. The Apple menu was moved to the classical left position by the time Cheetah was released.

The improvements came about because Apple users complained. Apple's user base was very niche at the time and very demanding. They expected high levels of usability and quality controls.

Today Apple has a much larger user base and that inevitably means a lot of fools with bad taste demand that Apple incorporate their bad ideas. Not just them but also the snakes on Wall Street who tell all tech companies to make all buttons and windows very heavily rounded to get users used to the idea of AR interfaces.

There is no good reason for macOS, a desktop operating system used by professionals, to have a toy AR glass interface that looks like a cross between Reddit and YouTube but designed by a guy who makes skins for KDE Linux.
 
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I was never a fan of the pinstripes, though I did appreciate the consistency with the hardware designs of the time. Seeing that screenshot does make me want to pick up an old PowerPC Mac for nostalgia.
 
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