More stray observations — on Liquid Glass, on Apple’s lack of direction, then zooming out, on technological progress

What sparked my long-form article on Liquid Glass, and all the criticism I’ve posted on Mastodon since the WWDC25 keynote is just that the Liquid Glass redesign made me angry. Yes, there are better things to get angry about in the world right now, and I want you to know that I’m very angry about them all.

In the past, technology used to be my coping space. A place for a knowledge worker like me to nerd about his tools and related passions — user interfaces, UI/UX design, typography, etc. And if I have developed these passions and interest is largely because of Apple. Apple had a huge impact on my life ever since I started using their computers. I carried out my apprenticeship in Desktop Publishing on a workstation that was comprised of a Macintosh SE, a Bernoulli Box external drive, and a LaserWriter printer back in 1989. I’ve always appreciated the care and attention to detail Apple put in their hardware design but also in their UI design.

But it’s true — something important died with Steve Jobs. He was really Apple’s kernel, for better and for… less better. This Apple has been dismantling Mac OS, as if it’s a foreign tool to them. They’ve bashed its UI around. And they seem to have done that not for the purpose of improving it, but simply for the purpose of changing it; adapting it to their (mostly misguided) idea of unifying the interface of different devices to bring it down to the simplest common denominator.

And this Liquid Glass facelift just makes me almost irrationally furious. Everything I’m seeing of Liquid Glass — at least on Mac OS — is a terrible regression. And I don’t want it on my production Mac. I do not want to look at that shit 14 hours a day. It’s ultimately that simple.

When Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone in January 2007, speaking about the software powering the iPhone, he said:

Now, software on mobile phones is like baby software. It’s not so powerful, and today we’re going to show you a software breakthrough. Software that’s at least five years ahead of what’s on any other phone. Now how do we do this? Well, we start with a strong foundation. iPhone runs OS X.

Now, why would we want to run such a sophisticated operating system on a mobile device? Well, because it’s got everything we need. It’s got multi-tasking. It’s got the best networking. It already knows how to power manage. We’ve been doing this on mobile computers for years. It’s got awesome security. And the right apps. It’s got everything from Cocoa and the graphics and it’s got core animation built in and it’s got the audio and video that OS X is famous for. It’s got all the stuff we want. And it’s built right in to iPhone. And that has let us create desktop-class applications and networking. Not the crippled stuff that you find on most phones. This is real, desktop-class applications.

Now it’s all going backwards, with Macs running a version of Mac OS that feels more and more simplified and fossilised iteration after iteration. The process isn’t yet complete, but I dread what’s coming next: Macs running something that is more iOS than Mac OS. Functionally interchangeable. To reuse Jobs’s words above, Macs running the crippled stuff that you find on most phones and tablets. Macs running smartphone-class applications (this is, sadly, already happening, as I’m painfully reminded every time I open an app whose interface and interaction design were clearly meant for a phone or tablet).

I’ve often wondered why we’ve come to this. Why Apple has come to this. On one side we have developers and expert users asking for more functionality, versatility, and features, while on the other side Apple just adds a few little things here and there, seemingly more interested in continuously retouching the Mac’s user interface at a cosmetic level — and doing that with a kind of awkwardness (incompetence?) that still manages to interfere with the UI’s functionality.

Francisco Tolmasky, during an exchange we had on Mastodon, expressed with great clarity a sinking feeling I’ve had for a while, a feeling I was actually trying to verbalise for an upcoming article (emphasis mine):

Well I think it is very clear that Apple does not believe there are new ideas to be had. This is a much deeper discussion, but to me all of their actions are representative of a company that believes technology is ‘mature’ and all that is left to do, at best, is polish. Setting aside whether one agrees with Apple’s decisions/taste/whatever, I think it is not up for discussion that while these changes may be disruptive, they are not, nor are intended to be, “transformative”.

Baked into the explanation that Liquid Glass “frees your content from the tyranny of the UI” is the inescapable admission that you have determined that the highest priority item left for iOS is to “return roughly 40px of screen real estate, or 3% of the vertical space of an iPhone, to users”. That is the important part here. Not whether Liquid Glass does or doesn’t deliver, but rather that Apple did not find, and thus does not believe there exists, anything more interesting to do in all of 2025.

This is the thing that should actually be concerning about Apple. Not whether or not they’ve lost their design skills, but whether they no longer believe they have any good new ideas. This better explains all their recent behavior than ‘greed’ or ‘hubris’. They waste time on redesigns because they don’t know what else to do. They fight so hard for recurring revenue and the App Store cut not because they’re dicks… but because they think there probably isn’t another Mac or iPhone in their future.

By the way, that ‘freeing the content from the tyranny of the UI’ is just tragicomic to me, and a sign that content for Apple is just something you consume passively or stare at. The act of creating things on a computer, working with them, interacting with them in any way, very much implies the reliance on a UI. And when I’m writing, translating, switching between documents, editing photos, engaging in a written conversation with someone, extracting information from a web browser, etc., I don’t want the UI to ‘recede’, I don’t want affordances out of my way.

Tolmasky then makes another valid point, bringing up something I admit I hadn’t even noticed:

Image: Apple, Inc.

This screenshot from their marketing page told me everything I needed to know about this year’s iPadOS update. No one plans a trip, reads a recipe, emails, and… learns violin at once. This is nonsensical. Cartoonish multitasking is not what multi-window support is for. But then you realize… they don’t know what it’s for. They don’t know why people keep asking for it. They actually have no idea why anyone would want it. There’s a reason the Mac is more single-window every day.

This screenshot is not some anomaly. It’s true across all their marketing materials and the keynote. You quickly realize that there isn’t a single mildly interesting example, let alone a ‘killer use case’. The entire pitch is, “You asked for it, here it is”. They make no effort to appeal to someone who didn’t already want this. During the keynote they play off the absurd demos as part of the ‘jokey act’, but notice they can come up with practical uses for the iPhone features that they show.

I’ve been sifting through my blog’s archives looking for a particular piece where I’m sure I expressed my concern towards Apple’s seemingly lack of direction (and ideas). After a couple of hours I still haven’t found it, but I found a lot of breadcrumbs of the same nature — quick notes, passing observations before or after past WWDCs. To bring the discourse back to user interface concerns, there’s this bit from This nine-year chasm (October 2020):

As I’ve repeatedly stated in my observations about Big Sur now that I’ve been testing the betas since August, the next version of Mac OS shines when it comes to performance, responsiveness, and stability — that’s my experience, at least — but when we examine the look and feel of its user interface, it mostly feels directionless. Where is the purpose? Why these changes? Is it to make the interface more usable? Is it to make that interaction work better or to make that element just look sleeker? It’s often hard to see the intention or even the logic behind some of them. The background colour of the System Preferences pane has subtly changed at least three times in the course of five betas. Things you used to make with one click, now take two or more clicks, just because someone at Apple felt like touching up a certain part of the interface for no apparent reason other than ‘trying something different’ or ‘fixing a previous, equally arbitrary cosmetic change’.

Ah, I think I found the article I was looking for. It’s from July 2021, but for the most part I could have written it last week: Habits, UI changes, and OS stagnation. It’s hard to extract brief quotes from it, so I urge you to read it in full when you have time. Here are a few bits that hopefully can stand on their own, with the last one being perhaps the closest to what Tolmasky was saying:

Under Cook and the new executive branch, Apple has app-ified Mac OS. Forgive the atrocious expression, but that’s how it feels to me. While I don’t deny that there have been significant innovations under the bonnet […], Apple’s approach when presenting the last few major Mac OS releases has always felt as if the most important thing to work on an operating system were its look & feel, rather than how this foundational tool can actually improve people’s work or tasks.

[…] I’ve had a lot of experience dealing with regular, non-tech-savvy users over the years. What some geeks may be shocked to know is that most regular people don’t really care about these changes in the way an application or operating system looks. What matters to them is continuity and reliability. Again, this isn’t being change-averse. Regular users typically welcome change if it brings something interesting to the table and, most of all, if it improves functionality in meaningful ways. Like saving mouse clicks or making a multi-step workflow more intuitive and streamlined.

But making previous features or UI elements less discoverable because you want them to appear only when needed (and who decides when I need something out of the way? Maybe I like to see it all the time) — that’s not progress. It’s change for change’s sake. […]

The self-imposed yearly OS update cycle doesn’t help, either. Apple feels compelled to present something ‘new’ every year, but you can’t treat Mac OS development as iPhone hardware development. […]

I’ve also been thinking that this self-imposed yearly update cycle is ultimately an obstacle to a deeper kind of development — the kind that makes an operating system evolve as a tool. In a recent discussion on Twitter, note Léo Natan’s response, the reason he gives as to why older operating systems were essentially less user-hostile than what we have today:

That’s because they were trying to make a difficult concept, computing, easier for the mass public. That has, to a large extent, been achieved. Now you have overpaid “““designers””” that need to show “““impact””” every year, so they have to reinvent the wheel over and over.

This act of ‘reinventing the wheel over and over’ has been incredibly stifling and has, in my opinion, largely led to operating system stagnation. Roughly since Mac OS X 10.7 Lion onward, Mac OS has gained a few cool features, but it has been losing entire apps, services, and certain facilities — like Disk Utility — have been dumbed down. Meanwhile the system hasn’t really gone anywhere. On mobile, iOS started out excitingly, and admittedly still seems to be moving in an evolving trajectory, but on the iPad’s front there has been a lot of wheel reinventing to make the device behave more like a traditional computer, instead of embarking both the device and its operating system in a journey of revolution and redefinition of the tablet experience in order to truly start a ‘Post-PC era’.

And with Mac OS it feels like its journey is over, the operating system has found a place to settle and has remained there for years. Building new stuff, renovating, rearranging, etc., but always on site, so to speak.

In other words, if we look at Mac OS as a metro railway line, it’s like Apple has stopped extending it and creating new stations. What they’ve been doing for a while now has been routine maintenance, and giving the stations a fresh coat of paint every year. Only basic and cosmetic concerns, yet sometimes mixing things up to show that more work has gone into it, a process that invariably results in inexplicable and arbitrary choices like moving station entrances around, shutting down facilities, making the train timetables less legible, making the passages that lead to emergency exits more convoluted and longer to traverse, and so on — hopefully you know what I mean here.

However, at every yearly iteration of all operating systems and platforms Apple maintains, it’s starting to become clearer and clearer to me that Mac OS isn’t the only one in trouble. The atrophy is spreading. And if your next objection is, Rick, it’s virtually impossible to make technological leaps and bounds every year. You can’t expect innovation at every corner, then re-read the quoted passage above.

When you self-impose timelines and cadences that are essentially marketing-driven and do not really reflect technological research and development, then you become prisoner in a prison of your own making. Your goal and your priorities start becoming narrower in scope. You reduce your freedom of movement because you stop thinking in terms of creating the next technological breakthrough or innovative device; you just look at the calendar and you have to come up with something by end of next trimester, while you also have to take care of fixing bugs that are the result of the previous rush job… which keep accumulating on top of the bugs of the rush job that came before, and so forth.

This is what I mean when sometimes I say that Apple feels progressively more directionless to me. Rather than actually going somewhere, they’re moving in circles more and more often. The very shape of Apple Park is hugely symbolical here.

Of course the classic pushback I get after many of my long-form critiques is people asking me for solutions, people asking me what kind of technological innovation I want to see.

Instead of merely copy-pasting a quote from a piece I wrote more than five years ago, I’ll rephrase it. From what I’ve understood by examining the evolution of computer science and computer history, scientists and technologists of past decades seemed to have an approach that could be described as, ‘ideas & concepts first, technology later’. Many figures in the history of computing are rightly considered visionaries because they had visions — sometimes very detailed ones — of what they wanted computers to become, of applications where computers could make a difference, of ways in which a computer could improve a process, or could help solve a real problem.

And sometimes there were no detailed plans, but intuitions, insights, that were enough to point towards a direction. When a technological advancement was achieved, such as the microprocessor, it made previously-theorised designs and applications happen for real. Ideas were tested, put in practice, re-tested and refined. But no one sat on their laurels. There was always the urge of ‘what’s next?’ — ‘what kind of opportunities and avenues this stage has opened now?’

The reason I published the revised transcripts of the interviews with Larry Tesler, Steve Jobs, and Alan Kay (Part 1, Part 2) of the 1992 documentary series The Machine that Changed the World; the reason I published the annotated transcription of the lecture Origins of the Apple human interface, given in 1997 by Larry Tesler and Chris Espinosa at the Computer History Museum in California, is because I wanted my readers to understand how these people thought and worked. And to realise just how dramatically things have changed in tech.

What I’m seeing today is more like the opposite approach — ‘technology first, ideas & concepts later’: a laser focus on profit-driven technological advancements to hopefully extract some good ideas and use cases from. Where there are some ideas, or sparks, they seem hopelessly limited in scope or unimaginatively iterative, short-sightedly anchored to the previous incarnation or design. The questions are something like, How can we make this look better, sleeker, more polished?

Steve Jobs once said, There’s an old Wayne Gretzky quote that I love. ‘I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.’ And we’ve always tried to do that at Apple. Since the very, very beginning. And we always will. If I may take that image, I’d say that today a lot of tech companies seem more concerned with the skating itself and with continuing to hit the puck in profitable ways.

Today I don’t see many thinkers, visionaries, technologists asking questions like, What’s next? Where do we go from here? How can we circumvent these interface limitations? How can we meaningfully change the way X is done? Can we create new advanced methods to achieve X, to actually make things better? — and so forth. You know, general questions, larger in scope, not tied to a single product or even the previous iteration of the same product. Not tied to what can make them the most money in the shortest term.

Today, both manufacturers and users have this fascination for the product, the gadget, the tool. People want the faster horse, tech companies give them faster horses and focus almost exclusively on how to make the next horses even faster. It’s why so many people appear fascinated by all the ‘AI’ hype and tech companies — utterly starved for ideas and mostly atrophied when it comes to actual research and development — are happy to play along and try to make the most out of that.

Perhaps I’m being hopelessly idealistic here, but I would like to see more fascination for the purpose, for the exploration of different ways to do things and achieve goals, for the end more than the mere means to an end. For things that help us evolve rather than making us dumber and ever-entertained. (Please go and watch, or rewatch, WALL·E).

Related reading:

In case of emergency, break glass — A few observations after Apple’s introduction of the Liquid Glass user interface at the WWDC25 keynote.

More assorted notes on Liquid Glass — Discussing icon design, and commenting on some passages of Apple’s Adopting Liquid Glass document.