The Seven Voyages Of SteveDec 6

Ugh my phone updated to iOS 26 last night. Whoever thought Liquid Glass was a good idea needs a slap. Yeah let’s make buttons with text on them transparent, that will be suuuuper legible. Idiots. And to think they’re burning GPU time to make their UI worse. Who runs UX at Apple these days anyway? They clearly don’t know what they’re doing.

Luckily found Accessibility > Display & Text > Reduce Transparency so most of it is gone now

Show threadThe Seven Voyages Of SteveDec 6
So apparently the person responsible for this nonsense has now left Apple for Meta. The fact that they’re willing to work for that garbage company says it all really. Hire better in future Apple
Show threadThe Seven Voyages Of SteveDec 6
Let’s be clear though - this decision to make UI elements less readable because you want to do fancy glass effect for no reason other than pretty posturing despite the clearly obvious edge cases wasn’t just one guy. Multiple people must have signed off on Liquid Glass. I hope all of them are getting torn a new one and learning a hard lesson from this: pretty pictures don’t matter if it makes the thing worse to use.
Show threadThe Seven Voyages Of SteveDec 6
In a more general sense this sends a worse message to me: that Apple didn’t listen to the people who *must* have pushed back against this internally. They *must* have. But instead it seems that some clique of glass sickos overruled them. How did that happen? Fixing that must be a priority now. I get the impression Tim Apple is mostly a money & logistics guy who has let design control get into the hands of the wrong folks
Show threadThe Seven Voyages Of Steve
My advice to Apple (and anyone else making OS’s that are stable) would be: make 2026 a Snow Leopard year. Just spend some time making things faster, more stable, better. I still think Snow Leopard was the best OS release ever made on any platform. People absolutely loved it. No-one actually wants yearly feature releases; new things every 2 years with refinements in between would be much better than this treadmill
Dec 6 at 10:59amWeb