So I am now living the Liquid Glass Horror, and…it’s not what I expected.
Based on the screenshots and the complaints, I was expecting special effects overkill, a phone trying to look like a PS5 game trying to look like Minority Report.
But…
…it’s not even that. It’s just ugly. Bad layouts. Bad margins. Bad proportions. Awkward animations. Flickers and flashes. Content peeking through all the negative space so that the screen is filled with visual noise. It feels designed by committee. It feels pasted together.
The feel of Apple products has covered a lot of ground over the decades. They’ve felt elegant. They’ve felt basic. They’ve felt bauble-y and cute. They’ve felt futuristic. They’ve felt practical. But this is the first time I can recall an Apple product feeling •cheap•.
Please take a moment to study this horrifying screenshot.
Ask:
- What here is negative space?
- What is information-bearing space?
- What space is neither of the above: usefully conveys no information, but adds visual noise?
And…wtf is that horizontal gray bar doing there?!
Now look at what •should• be negative space around the address bar and X button (highlighted in the second image). Does it add any useful information? No. Does it make the screen visually harder to parse? Yes.
My dudes, what are you even.
Let’s turn those gaps into actual negative space. Better.
The margins are all screwy here still. The layout manages to be waste space •and• still somehow be too tight. And don’t even get me started on having •two• “X” buttons right next to each other that do completely different things! But hey…I’m just some rando with an image editor and 10 minutes, and I’ve managed to bring it halfway back to looking as good as the previous iOS version.
Note that none of the complaints above are about the much-maligned transparency effects (which I have turned off). This is just basic, ground-level 2D design stuff that even this not-a-real-designer rando can pick apart.
The flagship product of one of the wealthiest companies on earth. Seriously.
This is exactly the thing I wonder about. Was it shoved through over internal objections? Was it many teams’ separate good work stuck together too hastily? Was it the wrong kind of pressure from above, or bad taste from below, or what?
It’s frustrating because as a dev I catch glimpses of all the really fantastic engineering work folks at Apple are doing •inside• the box, and they’re feeling very little love for it right now because the •outside•is so clunky.
@[email protected] how many people in a position to make it better had to look at it and says “yes this is good, we should ship it” for us to get here? It’s mind boggling
Say what you will about Steve Jobs, who was •not• a super nice person to work for and a bad role model for management in many many ways, but he did have one superpower that I really miss right now:
He had a stubborn willingness to •not• release things if they just did’t feel right. If it feels wrong, it doesn’t go out the door. With a few notable exceptions (MobileMe!), no deadline mattered as much as that.
Does this all just come down to Tim Cook? I’m congenitally skeptical of “great leader” sorts of theories of success, and now skeptical of myself as I see myself forming one, so huge grain of salt, but:
It’s hard to look at Tim Cook tongue-washing Trump’s shoes with that fake design award, just utterly unable to say no when “no” is the •only• correct response, and then not wonder about his failure to say no to a failed new design direction for his company’s most visible product.
much like boeing and so many other examples of culture rot, when you go from "we make Foo and we want it to be a Foo our customer want" to "what can we tell wall st to pump our stock this quarter" or "how do we convince VCs to dump more money into us", you're firmly on the road to hell.
jobs definitely had his flaws but his own ego wouldn't let him put out something with his name attached that he thought was total shit. current apple execs have no problems with putting out shit.
@inthehands Is it failed? Or will the consumers eat up the slop they are fed?
No one is giving up their iPhones, people are probably even buying into the Neo.
They know their userbase is captured and is going nowhere.
I gave up on Apple in the 80s when they stole UI ideas from Xerox and then sued Microsoft for borrowing from them. That's when we at Sun developed Open Look, together with Xerox and AT&T.
Apple's success is totally based on huge advertizing budgets, in my opinion.
Also, I heard so many horror stories from people working under Jobs back then. (Oh, and horror stories about Trump in the 80s as well).
No offense intended, but if it comes down to relying on one strong man to save a system, thet system was shit to begin with.
@inthehands
Q: What does your company make?
Steve Jobs: We make cool computer stuff!(editor: “cool” not NECESSARILY meaning “useful” or “beneficial”)
Tim Cook(or pretty much any CEO of the general-purpose variety who think any company from soda pop to computers to jet planes is the same thing): We make money.
@inthehands It’s truly horrendous. Not just visually confusing and wasting screen space, but I have (several times, in various contexts) clicked on, even typed into, the wrong thing because of all the overlapping nonsense. Like the edges of things are not where they appear to be so you are actually clicking on the thing behind what you intended.
Do they even use their own products?
I’ve heard they will be making another big set of changes in OS27 — can’t come too soon.
@inthehands Even the PIN entry on the Watch is bad.
I don’t see current leadership walking back any of this in a meaningful way.
For the first time in my life I can say, “Steve would have never allowed this”
It’s just ugly.
2/2
@inthehands I updated a couple of days ago for the same reason.
Holy hell it’s all just so bad. Little things I do multiple times a day require extra steps.
Fuctionally and visually, it all reeks of changes done just to make changes, and then implemented poorly.
It’s death by one thousand cuts.
For example, who exactly thinks *this* radius looks good here?
@inthehands The way you’re asking these hard hitting questions… it’s almost like you are an interface detective. And just like real detectives, you write your notes on clear glass panes in the middle of the office so you can see “through” the notes to the rest of the office or even out the window! That’s what I’ve learned about how real detectives operate from every tv crime drama. I think Apple just finally caught up to best practices (for fictional tv detectives).
🤪🤪🤪
IOS 26 and liquid ass looks more like a "CSS failure blooper reel" than a coherent OS release...
They don't pay software engineers enough and it shows. Or they chose to not hire the people that would keep this from happening. Same thing
@inthehands assuming you've tried setting "reduce transparency" and "increase contrast"? I'm pretty severely visually impaired, and was scared of the new interface, but those two settings seemed to obviate almost all of the liquid glass crap. That said, I completely agree with you that it was a stupid Apple move, and Apple's been de-prioritizing usability for quite a while I think
Edit: also, dark mode may help. Not sure because I can't see the screen enough to tell what's going on unless it's in dark mode, but you might wanna give that a try. I could see enough of your screenshot to tell your screen was in light mode. But again, I completely agree with you: you shouldn't have to screw around with a bunch of settings to avoid all the liquid glass horrors, especially since liquid glass serves no obvious purpose other than to, well I can't figure out what purpose it might serve actually
@inthehands My biggest objection to things like this is less about how things look and more about how unnecessary User Interface changes affect my flow state. For me for iOS 26, this was 95% about Safari.
For anyone else affected this way, the good news is you can quickly make Safari mostly like iOS 18 by switching to "Bottom" layout.
@inthehands macOS since Big Sur has felt cheap. That was where it was obvious that Apple was going full onto form over function.
https://www.andrewdenty.com/blog/2020/07/01/a-visual-comparison-of-macos-catalina-and-big-sur.html
Seems like Liquid Glass is more of the same.
Apple is no different from any other player in the industry when it comes to software now, and possibly even worse because people somehow think that what they do is GOOD, so they copy it and foist it onto the rest of the industry.
Unfortunately, they are just coasting on past glories.
@inthehands There are, of course, edge cases and poor decisions. There always are.
But it’s mostly… fine?
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