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.

https://sfba.social/@scm/116296203532915798

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.