In case of emergency, break glass

A few observations after Apple’s WWDC25 keynote

The title of my article obviously refers to the new UI Apple presented on 9 June, which they call Liquid Glass. I won’t beat around the bush: my very first impression is that we’re in UI emergency territory, but we won’t be able to break this particular glass. Only Apple can, and obviously they won’t because they’re very proud of it.

I truly don’t know where to begin with my observations, as I’m still trying to rein in my many reactions to what I’ve seen of this new UI. Let’s see if I can break it down in sections.

Consistency and depth

Apple’s UI ‘reset’ is also accompanied by the decision to homogenise all version numbers for their platforms, so that instead of having iOS 19, watchOS 12, tvOS 19, Mac OS 16, visionOS 3, and iPadOS 19, the next iteration of all these operating systems will indicate the year (or maybe season) of their release, so we’ll have iOS 26, watchOS 26, tvOS 26, Mac OS 26, and so forth. When I first heard about this, my immediate reaction was something like, Well, it goes to show just how Apple cares about the feedback of developers, pundits, and power users. All of them have pointed out repeatedly, ad nauseam even, that Apple’s software keeps being too buggy and that Apple should really rethink the yearly release approach. And Apple’s response has been to rebrand all their platforms’ versions so that they’ll be identified by year, to reflect their yearly releases. Sigh.

Anyway, the decision to reset the version numbers and to introduce the new Liquid Glass UI design for all platforms has seemingly been taken to emphasise consistency and boost visual familiarity across these platforms. Something I’ve been always opposed to, for reasons that should be obvious by activating one’s common sense. Here’s a quick example. Among other things, Bosch manufactures washing machines, dishwashers, and microwave ovens — why do their interfaces differ? They’re all appliances made by the same brand! Because they have different purposes and you use them in different ways. Appliances made by the same brand may have some similar design choices — e.g. they all feature touch buttons — so you know that if you choose that brand, you’ll expect touch buttons instead of switches or knobs or regular push buttons. But that’s it.

Back in March 2021, in Follow-up: the feedback on my articles about Snow Leopard, and more about user interface design, I wrote:

What I’ll never tire of pointing out is that the mere fact of altering Mac OS’s interface to make it more similar to iOS and iPadOS’s works against its very usability. If the idea behind this insistence on homogenising these interfaces is to bring new users to the Mac — that is, people who only know and use Apple’s mobile devices — and welcome them with a familiar interface, then Apple is not really doing them a favour.

By having a Mac OS release (Big Sur) with an interface that superficially resembles iOS’s interface and sometimes behaves in a similar way, is less user-friendly than it seems. Because when behaviours do differ — due to the fact that a traditional computer with an interface that revolves around the desktop metaphor and mouse+keyboard as input devices, is different from a phone or tablet with a Multi-touch interface — then you actually add an amount of that cognitive load you originally wanted to remove by making the two UIs (of Mac OS and iOS) more uniform. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, but then it barks, then things may get a bit confusing.

With this premise, it’s easy to think that making Mac OS also behave more like iOS is the necessary next step. This is likely what Apple has in mind for the future of the (Apple Silicon) Macs. But if you think about it, a design method that starts from the visuals and then has the visuals influence the workings of a system, is a method that works backwards with respect to what’s typically considered good design. The interface of a Mac, an iPhone, and an iPad should be focused on being the best for each specific device.

In the case of Liquid Glass, several design cues appear to be borrowed from visionOS, and that is hugely ironic to me if you want to bring consistency and familiarity, given that the user base of Apple Vision Pro is the smallest of all Apple’s platforms at the moment.

Also talking about ‘depth’ and ‘physicality’ when discussing the visuals of Liquid Glass is something I find rather amusing. As a material, glass is commonly used to reduce both depth and physicality. You use glass to make objects feel lighter. If you put a similarly-sized glass jar and a wooden container side by side, the wooden container will feel bulkier and more ‘present’ than the glass jar; it may even be perceived as heavier while actually being the lighter of the two. If you put a glass layer over a surface, you won’t really add depth to it, at least visually. To do so, you have to at least simulate a thick, textured layer of glass, like Nothing does with their wallpaper Glass effect for the Nothing Phone’s lock screen:

‘Depth’ in Liquid Glass reminds me of the way Apple talked about depth when introducing iOS 7 in 2013:

Source: Apple website, September 2013

In practice, of course, there’s barely any depth. Just very thin layers:

And when you invoke Search, what you see is hardly depth, but a very 2D space divided between the search field, the virtual keyboard, and what little remains of the home screen:

Control Centre in iOS 26 beta looks like the transparent door of one of those chest freezers you see in supermarkets:

Source: Craig Grannell, Apple’s Liquid Glass looks like it’s beamed in from the movies. I don’t think that’s a good thing — Stuff.tv

And this isn’t depth either:

Source: Danielle Foré on Mastodon. Check the whole thread starting here; she makes some insightful remarks I fully agree with.

Those notifications look like transparent stickers applied over a window pane. The distance between background and foreground elements appears minimal exactly because these are glass effects with too much transparency and very little opacity and contrast. The separation is very faint.

In iOS 6, depth was achieved through ‘material’ textures and by visibly blurring or obscuring the elements that had to lose focus, in a sort of exaggerated camera depth-of-field effect. Look what happens when I select a folder in iOS 6 — you can clearly see what’s in focus and what is not. You can easily distinguish the hierarchy of layers. You can perceive depth. It’s almost tangible.

In Mac OS, Liquid Glass does an even worse job at conveying depth. For starters, Finder windows look amorphous, the differentiation between active (in focus) and inactive (not in focus) windows is barely noticeable, and some details are still rough around the edges (no pun intended), as highlighted in my annotation of Mario Guzmán’s screenshot here:

In general, the treatment of Finder windows looks like a terrible ‘flat’ port of a VR experience — in this case, the visionOS environment.

How the fixed UI elements in a Finder window interact with its contents is also worth noting, and it’s worth pointing out that this is an atrocious way of conveying depth:

Source: Niki Tonsky on Mastodon

The visual hierarchy is muddled: why have a seemingly 3D toolbar, but the three semaphore controls on the left keep being flat and 2D? Here, it seems that the sidebar area of the window is flat, and the area on the right with the toolbar and the window’s contents is 3D and layered, while the area on the far right, with the additional info on the selected item, has thin layers that make it appear as a sort of intermediate state between 2D and 3D:

Safari’s UI also looks bizarre, in general, but in this other screenshot by Niki Tonsky the weird mix between flatness and depth is pretty on the nose:

It reminds me of the Impossible trident:

In past versions of Mac OS, depth and visual hierarchy were handled much better. This is a screenshot I took on my iBook G4 running Mac OS X 10.4.11 Tiger:

You can easily see a semi-transparent Dock (probably the best Dock Mac OS had in all its history) that is above the elements placed on the Desktop (icons, windows), in the same plane as the menu bar. Finder windows and app windows have visible depth, thanks to their drop shadows. And the different amount of drop shadow also clearly indicates the order in which the windows overlap (here it’s obvious because we only have two windows, but imagine a messier Desktop on a bigger display).

Also, within a window, it’s very clear which elements are contained and which are the containers. The window chrome is well defined. Buttons have depth. Active/inactive states are unequivocal.

Which brings me to the next point.

The obsession with dynamic UI elements

I’ll never tire of citing this quote from Alan Dye, Apple’s VP of Human Interface, who said at WWDC 2020:

We’ve reduced visual complexity to keep the focus on users’ content. Buttons and controls appear when you need them, and they recede when you don’t.

This epitomises the visual downward spiral of Mac OS from Big Sur onwards. In my article A retrospective look at Mac OS X Snow Leopard (February 2021), after mentioning this quote, I wrote:

I still believe this is not a good approach in general, and especially for essential elements like scroll bars, which should always be visible by default, because they are UI elements whose usefulness isn’t limited to when you use them or interact with them — they signal something even when not strictly needed. In the case of the scroll bars it’s a visual estimate of how many elements a folder contains, how long a list of items is, and more importantly your current position when scrolling.

The first time I discussed this quote by Dye, back in July 2020, I wrote this:

And that’s one of the main things that bother me about Big Sur’s UI. I’m not a VP of Human Interface, but I’d say that a desktop operating system you interact with using complex and precise input methods and devices, can in fact afford a certain visual complexity without getting in the user’s way. Which is what I (and I suspect many other people) have always loved about Mac OS. An operating system characterised by a user-friendly, easy-to-use, but not-dumbed-down interface. I’d hate to see a progressive oversimplification of the Mac’s UI that could potentially introduce the same discoverability issues that are still present in iPadOS.

I’ve always considered the look of an operating system to be a by-product of how it works, rather than a goal to achieve, if you know what I mean. If something is well-designed in the sense that it works well, provides little to no friction during use, and makes you work better, it’s very rare that it also ends up being something ugly or inelegant from a visual standpoint. How it works shapes how it looks. If you put the look before the how-it-works, you may end up with a gorgeous-looking interface that doesn’t work as well as it looks.

Followed by this, which rings even truer today:

The renewed insistence on transparency and the alarming amount of reduced contrast present in many places of the UI makes the experience look as if it was designed by twenty-somethings with perfect vision for twenty-somethings with perfect vision. The Accessibility preference pane looks more and more like a place that is not devoted to people with physical impairments, but to people who are not on Apple’s design team or who are not within the trendiest segment of the intended target audience.

The more time passes, the more I see Mac OS’s interface simplify and degrade before my eyes, the more it’s apparent that that ‘visual complexity’ Alan Dye hates so much is what makes Mac OS a distinctive and very functional desktop operating system, but since it clashes with Apple’s agenda of ‘making Mac OS more like iOS’, that’s something to be reduced or effectively eliminated.

And let’s be perfectly honest while we’re on the subject: what visual complexity? Well-defined chrome windows with distinguishable areas like a title bar, a toolbar, a sidebar, a status bar and a list of the contents? Always-visible scroll bars? Prominent drop shadows? A clearly-delimited menu bar? Are these problematic UI elements that give the user cognitive overload? Give me a break.

On the contrary, these are all elements that help make the user interface more usable, more predictable, less ambiguous, with fewer discoverability issues. Go and have another look at Mac OS 26 beta UI. Visual complexity has been replaced by a systematic (and system-wide) blurring of the lines of the entire UI structure, making it utterly amorphous and shallow. And all for the sake of ‘the looks’, all for the sake of ‘familiarity with iOS and iPadOS’. The designers at Apple today seem to forget that there are people out there who have to work with this interface for many, many hours a day. The regular and professional users are not the actors in Apple’s marketing videos who just look, starry-eyed, at the interface as if they’re window shopping.

Here’s the same Finder window, in Mac OS 15 Sequoia (with button shapes turned on and always-on scroll bars) and in Mac OS 26 beta with a few annotations. (Source: Jonathan Fischer on Mastodon)

Notice how in the Sequoia Finder window, the window is clearly divided into two main areas, the sidebar on the left, and the ‘information area with controls’ on the right. While not as good as the Finder window design in past Mac OS versions (see Leopard below) — which divided the window in more distinguishable areas more prominently — it’s still a better implementation than what is proposed in Mac OS 26, where different parts of the window are treated as thin layers floating on top of the window’s base surface creating varying degrees of separation.

In Sequoia, at least with button shapes enabled, the row of buttons on the top still retains a toolbar semblance. In Mac OS 26, those buttons become little isolated blobs, and are given a certain tridimensionality by the use of drop shadows. They hover over the window’s contents… but also over the folder name? But also over the sidebar? This layer hierarchy looks random and arbitrary. And it messes with my sense of depth, because this assembly of UI elements looks like a mishmash of 2D and 3D effects, as I pointed out earlier.

Contrast is off, too. Notice how in Sequoia, the selected Home folder in the sidebar has more prominent highlighting than in Mac OS 26. Conversely, the scroll bar in Mac OS 26’s Finder window look almost too contrasty compared with the rest of the elements. They jump at you from this expanse of white and faint grey. In general, it looks like a mix of too little contrast with too much contrast.

Apparently, with Mac OS 26, we’re back to having monochrome sidebar elements. At least in Sequoia you have colours that help visually differentiate the various sections listed in the sidebar.

And here’s a similar Finder window in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. The difference between how things were and how they have become is staggering. It is pretty evident how the window chrome, the hierarchy of the various areas and UI elements, and the general window structure has degraded, even dissolved, over time. From a functional and usability standpoint, this isn’t progress.

In Leopard — but also in other versions of Mac OS that came before and after, at least until the Big Sur redesign — the Finder window structure and hierarchy is well defined and self-evident: the main chrome is the area above and below the window’s contents, represented by the title bar, the toolbar below it, and then the status bar at the bottom of the window. The chrome clearly frames the Finder window. Then, inside, we have the sidebar on the left, and the folder contents on the right; it’s more or less the same structure as a Web browser. The folder contents are the Web page, the sidebar shows a lists of places (or bookmarks if you like), the status bar on the bottom works in a similar fashion as a browser’s status bar. It’s a clear representation of what is content versus what are controls. Content and controls don’t bleed into each other’s territory.

But in the world of Alan Dye, it’s all content inside roundrects with thin bezels, and controls hover above it in quasi-borderless states, options become little treasures hidden behind ‘More…’ icons (the circle with three dots in it), panels and windows get deconstructed like those ‘designer dishes’ you see in fancy restaurants.

You could argue that there’s nothing wrong in updating a user interface design every now and then, and I would agree with you. But one thing is updating its visuals, another is dismantling its solid foundations, of tried-and-trusted principles and paradigms, that always made Mac OS the better, more user-friendly operating system.

I already talked about the fundamental problem behind the dumbification of Mac OS, in Safari 15 on Mac OS, a user interface mess (July 2021)

The utter user-interface butchery happening to Safari on the Mac is once again the work of people who put iOS first. People who by now think in iOS terms. People who view the venerable Mac OS user interface as an older person whose traits must be experimented upon, plastic surgery after plastic surgery, until this person looks younger. Unfortunately the effect is more like this person ends up looking… weird.

These people look at the Mac’s UI and (that’s the impression, at least) don’t really understand it. Its foundations come from a past that almost seems inscrutable to them. Usability cues and features are all wrinkles to them. iOS and iPadOS don’t have these strange wrinkles, they muse. We must hide them. We’ll make this spectacular facelift and we’ll hide them, one by one. Mac OS will look as young (and foolish, cough) as iOS!

I have little hope this trend will stop, because things have only got worse since Big Sur.

Looks first, usability later (if ever)

Craig Federighi, talking about the new look for Mac OS:

The menu bar is now completely transparent, making your display feel larger.

My first reaction when I saw this was, of course, You know what could actually make the display feel larger here? Removing that stupid notch! But really, this is an unnecessary change that only makes the icons and information on the menu bar more difficult to read or distinguish with most wallpapers, whether static or dynamic. And it also doesn’t help with apps that may put colourful icons in the menu bar e.g. to accentuate different app states.

I still think the best way to introduce translucency was in Snow Leopard:

First of all, having a translucent menu bar was an option, and secondly, even when the translucency wasn’t that subtle with certain wallpapers, the menu bar identity and space were preserved and identifiable. And — translucency or not — colourful menu extras could happily coexist with monochromatic ones. Whether transparency was enabled or not, all elements in the menu bar maintained a high degree of legibility.

(Yes, I’m aware that that Siri icon in the Mac OS 26 menu bar is in colour, but I actually realised it after a double take. I rest my case.)

When the new Control Centre appears during the keynote, the legibility issue is even more acute:

No depth, no opacity, very little contrast. I bet that, with a clearer wallpaper behind it, some of the text on these labels becomes barely visible.

And if you want even more confusing visuals and an even more amorphous look, you can choose what Federighi calls ‘clear look’:

As I was watching the keynote and these examples popped up, I got mad. This is not a matter of personal taste, it’s a matter of common sense: how can those at Apple who looked at this and approved it think it can be a functional design? It looks good (enough) in an arranged screenshot meant for show, but in day-to-day use? How could you want the icons in the Dock to be all the same non-colour? Apple has already forced third-party developers to create app icons with the same identical shape (squircle); if you also take their colours away with this setting, you’ll definitely have a hard time distinguishing app icons from one another. Not to mention the text in the widgets or in Control Centre (imagine them appearing over a stack of open Finder windows).

Let’s get back to Control Centre and look at when you want to customise it:

Relying on excessive visual subtlety to distinguish UI elements — especially if you rely on a background’s colour to be the sole provider of contrast — is a dangerous route. In this image taken from the keynote, the background colour is good enough for contrast, but what if you like more subdued colours or images for your wallpapers? What if there are multiple Finder and app windows behind that frosted glass panel?

When it comes to user interface and user interaction, I’m just an enthusiast who has perused the relevant literature for the past 30 years, I don’t have a degree on human-computer interaction, I just had some professional involvement in it in the past. But when I see stuff like this, I think that the least one can do when designing a new system-wide look is to test that look in all possible situations and evaluate whether it actually works or not. It seems such a basic step in the design process to me.

Instead, as revealed by a lot of screenshots of iOS 26 beta and Mac OS 26 beta I’ve seen on social media after the keynote, it appears that such testing has been minimal at best. Barely readable text inside icons/buttons, continuous and distracting colour changes to maintain contrast and legibility, the constant obsession with blurring the contours between fixed UI elements and content, the constant obsession with removing affordances and unambiguous elements that help users interact and manipulate objects in Mac OS’s environment and workspace. All in the name of prioritising looks over substance. It’s design at its shallowest. The ‘how it looks’ part without the ‘how it works’. It’s the affluent, elderly woman who goes to an art gallery and wants to buy that painting with a lot of beige and orange in it because it matches the colour scheme of her living-room decor.

And these issues are not new, either. It’s the iOS 7 situation all over again, with added glass effects. It’s a slightly different kind of flatness, but it’s flatness all the same. In every sense.

Other assorted remarks

1.

Generally speaking, what mostly disheartens me is the progressive crippling treatment Mac OS has been receiving for the past 6–7 years. Many directions and approaches could have been taken. For example, the transition to the vastly more powerful Apple Silicon chips could have been accompanied by a similar boost in the system software department, creating more sophisticated first-party tools and applications to take advantage of all that power. Another direction could have been to finally realise that to have the best of both worlds (Mac OS and iOS/iPadOS), the more sensible path would be to develop each platform’s OS in distinctive ways and with user interfaces and interaction models that are more appropriate for each platform and for each device, considering their different uses and, well, interfaces.

Instead, Apple is clearly opting for convergence at all costs. And it’s not just from a visual standpoint, but also a functional one. Instead of enhancing each operating system’s strengths, they’re working towards the lowest common denominator. Instead of striving to make Mac OS, iOS, iPadOS excellent each in its own environment and user experience, they’re levelling them down, and we’re reaching a point where Mac OS will become virtually interchangeable with iOS/iPadOS, which is just a terrible outcome.

2.

Regarding the most obvious flaws and misguided UI choices in Liquid Glass, a common sentiment I’ve seen on social media is something like, Well, this is just the first beta. Hopefully things will improve by the time the official releases are out. While I understand this, I also implore people to stop cutting Apple so much slack in these matters. It’s not a two-year-old startup. This is one of the richest companies in the world, with resources and (supposedly) more than 40 years of experience in UI/UX design. Has nobody at Apple — at any stage of design development — noticed all the issues we’ve been noticing since the Liquid Glass reveal? And if they have and approved them, shouldn’t that be worrying? Isn’t it tiring and exasperating that, still after all these years, developers and end users get to be Apple’s free beta testers, when the lion’s share of issues should be studied and resolved internally before even showing things publicly? This drives me up a wall every single time. C.M. Harrington on Mastodon rightly observes:

It’s especially egregious because, sure, this is the first dev beta. But it’s also 30 days before a public beta. Considering their cadence for releasing a new OS every year (ugh), they really can’t just pop something like this out in a half-baked state, as there are fundamental issues with the premise that need to be fixed… and won’t be before it ships ‘for real’.

3.

Another frustrating aspect of these periodical ‘resets’ and ‘redesigns’ from Apple is that, to me, this looks more and more like a strategy to sweep older bugs and issues under the rug, forcing developers — and to a less pronounced extent, users — to focus on the new look, the new features, and especially on the new requirements these ‘resets’ and ‘redesigns’ mandate. Really, it’s iOS 7 and Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite all over again.

Or maybe even slightly worse — the Liquid Glass aesthetic is the most rushed-out-the-door and amateurish endeavour I’ve seen from Apple in forever. And forcing developers to adopt this style is, indirectly, a way to degrade their work. I’m not a developer, but I can imagine a developer asking themselves, “What if these glass effects don’t work at all with the distinctive style of my app?” — What about those developers who don’t like and don’t want to give their apps the glass treatment because maybe it conflicts with the design of their apps (they may have opted for opinionated solutions or for certain distinctive textures and effects)?

Whether they like it or not, all developers will be forced to reexamine their apps in a way or another, and that kind of overhead is all on them, while Apple smiles, rubs its hands, and thanks them for their cut in App Store revenue.

And what about the end users? Don’t like the new Liquid Glass UI? Can’t work with it because its visuals are all over the place, it’s more difficult to parse, etc.? Well, it sucks to be you seems to be the attitude of Apple’s designers. They’re evidently all in their 20s and 30s, with perfect vision, and yet can’t see past it — ironically enough.

This kind of opinionated redesigns have impact. And this new UI aesthetic, in my opinion, has the same impact as stopping to produce a smaller phone. Do you have small hands? Do you prefer a more pocketable device? Do you yearn for a comfortable device that can be operated one-handed? Well, it sucks to be you. Take this 6.1” slate and be on your merry way. Oh, you want a more ‘pro’ iPhone? It comes in 6.3” and 6.9” sizes. Bye now!

But everybody loves futuristic interfaces, right? Craig Grannell, in his piece at Stuff.tv, says it best:

Apple’s interfaces now look like they’re auditioning to cameo in Minority Report or The Avengers. You know the look: transparent displays with see-through elements sliding around. All very futuristic, until you actually use one.

Of course, in the movies, glass makes practical sense, because you can see the stars, even if the camera is behind the screen. The goal is to see Tom Cruise’s mug, not for Tom Cruise to read his to-do list. In the real world, however, there are – for good reason – distinctly few interfaces comprising sheets of overlapping glass.

Still, Apple went to extraordinary lengths to convince everyone (including, I suspect, itself) that Liquid Glass was the new black. There was endless talk of dynamic animations and reflected light. In one memorable moment, we were shown tvOS and told how “playback controls refract the content underneath, beautifully complementing the action without distracting from the story”. Because nothing says ‘not distracting’ like James Bond’s face reflected in a pause button.

4.

If this article ever ends up on Hacker News or some similar site, I bet there will be some smart-arse — it wouldn’t be the first time — who’s going to comment, Who is this dude, anyway? Who does he think he is? Does he know better than Apple’s designers and engineers? I don’t think so!

This dude (I’m pointing my thumbs at myself) may not be a developer or a designer by trade, but has worked with developers and designers in the past; has studied plenty of UI/UX literature for the past 30+ years; started using computers in 1981; has examined the user interfaces of the majority of operating systems out there, past and present, desktop and mobile; has conducted usability tests with sample groups on behalf of a few software studios; has been involved in the gaming industry consulting on game UI and UX (can’t name names, unfortunately, what with NDAs and the like)… Do I need to continue?

I hate to be spewing out this stuff (a friend of mine uses the expression ‘flashing the badge’, like in a display of authority) but I also hate when people don’t take me seriously. I constantly do my homework and make an effort to be as detailed and articulate in my observations as possible, in a way that should convey I know a thing or two of what I’m talking about. I’m not always right and I don’t pretend to be. I welcome corrections and listen to people I know they know more than I do. And yet, these comments — which I have seen on Hacker News, and received privately on social media and via email — either reveal poor reading skills, lack of critical thinking, or come straight from a place of misguided fanboyism: “Apple is infallible — who are you to criticise?”

5.

Speaking of reading skills, I hope it’s clear that what I have talked about and criticised in this article is limited to my first impressions on the first iteration of the Liquid Glass UI Apple announced on 9 June. I have not discussed any particular new feature in iOS 26 or iPadOS 26 or Mac OS 26 Tahoe. Feature-wise, I did see some interesting things during the WWDC25 keynote, and maybe I’ll talk about them in a future piece. This was especially about Liquid Glass and my criticisms, for now, are mostly about that.