it’s very easy to dunk on liquid glass for looking like shit and being inaccessible trash but now that I’ve been forced onto a new version of iOS and have first-hand experience with it, I feel it’s important to tell the truth:

it works like absolute shit too. who the fuck’s idea was it to make notifications work like this? who fucking sat there and decided what I wanted from the keyboard was for someone to fuck with its layout for no apparent reason?

not since the 90s have I interacted with a system UI whose animations were apparently designed to be as distracting as possible. I just looked at a masto notification and wondered why it had a weird tattoo (it was the UI of my active app showing through in bright blue, and I’ve got liquid glass on the “tinted” setting)

all my icons are fucking ugly now but the updated ones are worse. the calendar widget is a weird blob now. everything on my widget page is a weird blob.

I’d ask who the fuck did this but we know who, and that entire team left Apple for Facebook right after the public backlash against liquid glass started

what in the fuck did they do to the calendar, in general

who in the fuck is this for

holy fucking shit they made the CarPlay UI’s buttons smaller and made the daytime theme a set of colors that maximizes reflections and glare

I’d ask who decided this but “our users want smaller controls, more buttons, somehow also more whitespace, and less visibility for their driving interface” is a thoroughly LLM-brained decision

so who prompted ChatGPT and followed its instructions? I just want to talk (I’m going to run you over with my fucking car)

here I am severely disliking Apple’s UI for being materially the worst modern UI I’ve ever personally used (none of my computers run windows 11 and none of them ever will) and also disliking the macbook neo for being, by the numbers, a bad deal for everyone except Apple

maybe we can stop rewarding this company that’s doing a shit job of everything but increasing their share price with lipservice and thonkpieces about how the neo is great actually?

(I submitted the previous post too early because of liquid glass jank!)

maybe when we see a company like Apple capitulate to fascists in front of our own eyes and fuck up on security (the exploit kit that pushed me onto liquid glass) we shouldn’t reward any of that?

and like, you can punish Apple without leaving their ecosystem if you must stay. I get it. buy a used device. they’ll fucking hate if you buy a used macbook and it’s better and cheaper than the neo.

@zzt I liked The Verge's comparison: right now a MacBook Air M5 has as much punch as a MacBook Pro M1 Pro at the moment. So if a MacBook Pro M1/M2 Pro catches your eye, $700 used may be tempting. Yes, there is a shot that they'll leave Apple's OS Upgrade soon, but even then if you get one today, it likely has another 4 years of security updates before it is fully put to pasture.

So if you see a used MacBook Pro from any year back than the current (14" and 16" sold from 2021 forward) remember: every dollar of it isn't going back to Apple, that is unless you buy their refurbs or an authorized suppliers.

@Tock @zzt

"it likely has another 4 years of security updates before it is fully put to pasture."

... at which stage you'll be able to install Linux and get better performance for the stuff that matters than Apple even gave you.

@bigiain @zzt If when they kill Rosetta 2, my apps stop working, I might jump to Asahi sooner than even that!