from Hacker News

Apple introduces a universal design across platforms

by meetpateltech on 6/9/25, 5:09 PM with 1202 comments

by dimal on 6/9/25, 7:01 PM
Oh no. It looks like every button and menu is now a translucent layer, so that any noise from the background shows through and muddles the text. This seems like an accessibility nightmare.
Translucent layers generally make software unusable for me. In the video, I saw several instances that would be really really bad for me, where I’d be straining to understand the text. Looks really cool and futuristic though. Just like a movie. Big whoop.
I’m autistic, but this won’t only affect autistic people. A lot of people are going to have problems with this. I hope there’s a very prominent way to turn it off.
by stalco on 6/9/25, 9:03 PM
I installed it. I really wanted to love it but it’s bad. It’s very busy and the proportions in the Settings app are awful. It’s on the “cozy” side of things (as opposed to “compact”). This means you see less options at one time on the screen and have to scroll more around the OS to get where you need to.
As for accessibility… It’s hell. Have a look: https://imgur.com/a/6ZTCStC
by plainOldText on 6/9/25, 7:18 PM
This looks horrible to be honest.
This new liquid glass will lead to liquid brain, because my brain will be melting trying to process all that visual mess daily.
Now of course, I'll have to experience this new design in practice to be sure, but judging from the screenshots it looks really hard on the eyes. Hopefully they'll allow the translucency to be customized.
Apple had a good run, I've genuinely enjoyed using their platforms daily, but I'm afraid they're dropping the ball now.
I guess on a long enough timeline, every company is bound to disappoint. It's hard to get it right, consistently.
by designerarvid on 6/10/25, 7:35 AM
As a user centered designer I naturally agree with most criticism shared here. Not the direction I would have wished for.
Trying to understand where this is coming from, I guess two sources:
1. It's a fashion update to give GenZ and younger something they haven't seen before. They are too young to remember Windows Vista, and are the most important future target group that spends 12+ hrs / day on their iPhone. Also it is an audience that heavily customizes their UI, and care more for visually communicating cool-ness, than to get work done with efficient UX. Similar to using rainmeter on a desktop PC. Unsurprising, this look a lot like a rainmeter skin.
2. This is a way to communicate unmatched quality. Similar to what AirBnB are doing. When everyone can use icon- and component libraries like material and shadcn to build UI:s, this is a visual language that communicates premium quality is through an interface and iconography that is different and too expensive for others to recreate. Many companies don't have the skill nor the time and money to do custom icons in 3D software, or create elaborate translucent effects. Let's see what multi-plattform apps will look like with this new UI, perhaps the goal is to make them stand out as "outdated"
by nharada on 6/9/25, 5:18 PM
I wonder how much of this transparent/glass design language is setting Apple up for AR interfaces where UI is overlaid on what you're looking at. Since you literally cannot have fully opaque elements with AR glasses this would be a smart way to ensure overall design is unified across platforms.
by stevenhubertron on 6/9/25, 9:24 PM
I don't post here often, but I hope someone at Apple is reading this as this is one of the worst designs I have seen from this company. Even in their own presentation they shows text hard to read, text on top of text. It's an accessibility and usability nightmare. I really don't want to give up iMessage but if what ships looks as bad as this I may jump ship.
by kylehotchkiss on 6/9/25, 6:43 PM
I really dig apple's work. It's so refreshing to get a tech event in 2025 where design is a huge focus and not just duck taping another LLM to everything. Design is expensive and it's clear they've invested a massive amount of resources into liquid glass. It's not perfect, but I think they'll iron out some of the contrast bugs.
Agreed with other commenters that crappy electron apps will look increasingly out of place (... slack ...). Too bad LLM's coding efficiencies haven't been used to try to get us back to native UIs from electron yet. Companies would rather pocket the savings.
by captainmuon on 6/9/25, 6:45 PM
We have these brilliant high resolution displays, and these powerful, energy efficient GPUs that are always running and compositing frames like a game engine 120 times a second.
It's about time we start seeing more physicality in our user interfaces!
We can make things look convincingly like glass, or metal, or even materials that don't exist in reality. One reason for flat design is because it was the lowest common denominator and easy for devs to implement. If Apple makes it easy to implement this liquid glass stuff - Rectangle().background(.glass) or something - then it's going to be really successful.
by kej on 6/9/25, 6:23 PM
This feels suspiciously like the goals of Microsoft's "Metro" design from the Windows 8 era. It will be interesting to see if Apple can do a better job of keeping the same design without damaging the desktop experience than Microsoft did.
by pentagrama on 6/9/25, 8:16 PM
I need to experience it more to have a clear opinion, but looking at those videos, these types of translucent UI layers with a magnifying glass effect feel so annoying when they move; it's distracting.
Knowing that people will be spending hours of the day with these animations, it could be overwhelming. I'm not someone who suffers from videos or video games with photosensitive content warnings, but for many people, this might feel similar, like a friend of mine who can’t play Quake 3 Arena because it gives him nausea. I’m sure there will be an option to turn it off.
I also suspect that Apple, for marketing reasons, felt the need to present something visibly new and eye-catching. They probably turned to flashy design resources meant to impress rather than serve real usability needs. It feels more like a UI concept made for a sci-fi movie than something designed with accessibility and productivity in mind.
by ricokatayama on 6/9/25, 6:57 PM
When Apple introduced the whole skeuomorphic analogy, they did it because they needed to make a new way of interacting with touch-based apps feel tangible. That seemed totally fair.
When Apple brought a spatial analogy to the Vision Pro, it also felt fair they were thinking in terms of volume and dimensions, after all, they were teaching people how to interact with a new reality.
I can even understand Apple wanting to unify their design approaches, but bringing the “liquid glass” look to everything feels like a massive step backward. The interface looks messy, clunky.
It feels like Apple is entering a design hell, and I don’t know how they’ll get out of it.
by earthnail on 6/10/25, 9:59 AM
As an indie app developer, this design update discourages me massively. The previous, minimal design gave the impression of being a platform, even though it was always mostly Apple stuff in Apple land.
The new design is so visually overwhelming that I think the only way for users to deal with it is to reduce complexity. I read a statistic that said the average user had 21 apps on their phone. I think that will reduce to 15 now, or less.
As for my app, this basically throws my whole design system out the window. I don't want to add glass to all my UI elements. Remember the visual noise that translucent window borders introduced in Vista? Why would I do that to my UI?
I like the fact that the new design introduces a sense of hierarchy, and that it has more animations. I also like that transition animations are now interruptible by default (watch the "What's new in UIKit" video for that). But that could've happened without the glass nonsense.
It was hard to feel excited in previous WWDCs, but I just took it as a sign of platform maturity. This year, on the other hand, is outright discouraging.
by gherkinnn on 6/9/25, 6:18 PM
https://www.lux.camera/physicality-the-new-age-of-ui/
This blog's prediction got remarkably close. I've been a sucker for glass UI since the first Longhorn (later Vista) screenshots.
by appleiigs on 6/9/25, 9:29 PM
It's button camouflage.
My 82 year old mother has enough trouble figuring out what is a button vs. what's not. She just taps everything on screen to find out. This is going to make it worse.
by socalgal2 on 6/9/25, 6:52 PM
As someone who's getting old and whose eyesight is getting worse, this makes things strictly harder to read with lower contrast.
The 4th image on the page showing "All Of Me, Nao" is really hard for my eyes to read. I can't read "Nao" at all if I view that page on my iPhone. I can only read it on my Macbook Pro on a large external monitor.
I suppose there will be an accessibility setting to turn it off
by jordansmithnz on 6/9/25, 10:38 PM
Having used it very briefly, I think it’s a reasonable direction. Before you all jump to tell me why I’m wrong:
1. It makes depth and layering extremely clear.
2. It prioritizes focusing on the content.
These are good principles and I think they’ll last the distance. There are plenty of refinements needed, especially for accessibility. I suspect over the next few years we’ll see the direction toned back a little while still retaining the best parts.
by submeta on 6/9/25, 8:32 PM
Good Lord, this concept of „liquid glass“ is ugly. Not visibly distinct, looks blurry, not clear and sharp. And then they overlap with the content. I never liked the overlapping menus in Notability app either.
This is a flop like the flat keyboard design. Making worse by trying to make it better. Verschlimmbessert.
And this from a company with unlimited financial resources.
by Klonoar on 6/9/25, 6:28 PM
Every Electron app is going to feel incredibly out of place.
And for the few that aren’t okay with feeling out of place, the devs of those apps will now have to contend with shipping more macOS specific styles and workarounds.
I’m not looking to discuss Electron performance/etc so please ditch that discussion before it starts. I just find it interesting how comparatively tricky this particular UI styling might end up being for cross-platform developers.
by Jordan-117 on 6/9/25, 6:54 PM
I hate it. The distortions and refractions of every page element in the UI as you scroll (including moving in the opposite direction) would be maddening. I really hope there will be an option to turn this off, or at least tone it down.
by Insanity on 6/9/25, 6:05 PM
Based on the demo and screenshots I don’t quite like this. It seems more distracting and gimmicky than actually nice to use in a day to day setting..
But I’ll probably get used to it.
by dougbrochill on 6/9/25, 6:36 PM
It looks cool, but I'm worried about readability on the phone. The text in some of those menu bars and notifications really blended in with the wallpaper in a few of those screenshots.
by StopDisinfo910 on 6/10/25, 10:36 AM
So, it's official: I'm now old. I have seen the new that became old become new again.
This reminds me a lot on the visual we were saying for Windows Longhorn before Vista was released, peak Apple being their usual trailblazing self.
by jcalx on 6/9/25, 6:40 PM
The children yearn for ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶m̶i̶n̶e̶s̶ Frutiger Aero
(https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frutiger_Aero)
by xnx on 6/9/25, 6:54 PM
This clearly wasn't in dogfooded long enough or the designers would've gotten sick of it themselves.
This is the kind of design that does great in a 15 minute user test, but is annoying 2 months on.
by nottorp on 6/9/25, 6:59 PM
Can they fire all their designers and Cook?
And go back to Mac OS the most easily usable GUI?
I don't want to watch Avatar XXXVI when I pick up my phone to check my messages.
by alberth on 6/9/25, 7:38 PM
Aqua, reminds me of OS X (Aqua theme) from 20+ years ago.
And while it was very pretty, the movement away from translucency was due in large part because of accessibility (for all users).
It's actually quite difficult to see controls (and read text) when not on a flat/solid background.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_(user_interface)
by bitwize on 6/9/25, 6:08 PM
Oh God, it's as I feared.
Apple UI designer #1: Well, the flat design has been largely a success so far, but those darn users -- they can still easily pick out widgets from the background, and with a few tries still reasonably guess what they're for and how they'll respond!
Apple UI designer #2: I know! Let's make the widgets semitransparent. That way they'll be harder to pick out from the background, and Macs and iPhones will become delightfully fun puzzle boxes users will love trying to figure out, much like my dog loves his snuffle mat!
by Lammy on 6/9/25, 8:25 PM
The marketing text feels like it's trying way too hard, to the point that it makes me second-guess my positive first impression. I do think the UI looks cool, and I did like Aero Glass too, but having the headline straight-up tell me that the UI is “delightful and elegant” and having the first-sentence-of-first paragraph “beautiful new software design” hyperlink cheapens the whole thing IMHO.
Yes I know Apple have always been like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nx7v815bYUw (BOOM)
But at least the Stebe Jovs keynotes gave me the chance to be impressed for a moment in my head before laying in to the superlatives.
by zac23or on 6/10/25, 11:36 AM
For those who complain that the old interfaces were better and the current ones are horrible, including this one (I tried using some glass interfaces, transparencies, etc. in the past. It's horrible to use) you're right, and that's not going to change. It's a question of the market.
When nobody used computers, it was necessary to attract people. How? With the bestter interfaces, usability. A graphical operating system running on a CPU of 20 MHz or less was something. It's not fast, but it's the best possible for the time!
And after 2000, everyone is using computers. The market is not expanding as companies expected. It's no longer important to attract people, everything can be done without worrying about the user, he's no longer important. Now, the Android keyboard is bigger than the Windows 95 installation, and my computer crashes from time to time with CPUs operating at GHz.
No, the interfaces of the past were not perfect, but they were made to try to fool people.
Remember Netflix? It used to recommend sharing passwords, now it tries to charge for each different IP. Is the same thing, the stream market is stable now...
The good UI is lost, it's a thing of the past.
by paradite on 6/9/25, 6:53 PM
I hate things that are translucent. I find them very distracting, and hurt my eyes.
I hope Apple gives the option to turn this whole thing off.
I notice the borders now also have shadows / gradients due to reflection, that's also something I'd like to remove personally.
by jauntywundrkind on 6/9/25, 7:40 PM
The style here suggests a split between tools and content, which is something I'd love love love to see emerge. Having one and only one app be both viewer and toolkit feels like a convenience trap, one that NeXT tried to fight (as did OLE) and that feels unlikely to ever be turned back from, but I want to dream. This UI doesn't materially move us towards a more aggregative/accreted system of systems model, but it visually suggests some of the absurdity of there being such heavily coupling, if the UI is really incidental that floats atop. I'd love to see this pushed further, to emerge into a multilayered information world, where Rainbow's End discourse piles up and forms trees out and up.
I hear folks on contrast concerns. I have hope though. I really like the de-emphasis on compute. On tools being less the thing, on the content first, on getting computing out of the way, making it ambient. Unboxing the content, unframing it.
The glass refraction seems like a an amazing leap forward. Material has been around forever and there's all these developer docs showing the stack up of layers, implying the depth of the system, but in the 2d user world everything is flat, composited into indistinction. The visual sepration, allowing semi transparent motion, but using refractive style to clearly separate the layers, adds such clarity that it feels obvious in retrospect immediately to me.
I still lack hope that XR is going to be a huge huge thing, that it will be comfortable over time, but it makes such sense to me that XR would inspire & lead this shift, to depriotizing the UI & emphasizing the content.
I'm stressed a bit trying to imagine the transforms required to make this refraction happen. I don't think CSS is going to be enough. The new CSS Painting API ("Houdini") also seems more generative than able to modify & script what is?
by fidotron on 6/9/25, 5:59 PM
This looks tailor made to be hard to recreate easily in CSS.
Which is just going to make people try even harder.
by jonplackett on 6/9/25, 11:01 PM
The whole event should have been titled:
We completely ignored all the things you actually wanted and did this instead.
by teruakohatu on 6/9/25, 8:32 PM
Looks like Apple (re)discovered Sun's Project Looking Glass from 2003.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Looking_Glass
Liquid Glass looks a lot like coming up with changes for the sake of them.
by weird-eye-issue on 6/9/25, 11:39 PM
Looks terrible. I hope that what he said in the video about "only Apple being able to achieve this" is correct because I don't want this coming to my devices
by pmontra on 6/9/25, 7:51 PM
It's got some KDE 4 vibe https://news.softpedia.com/news/How-to-Install-KDE-SC-4-4-on... which in turn had probably a Windows 7 feel. A random image at https://www.computerworld.ch/software/windows/microsoft-deta...
by fxtentacle on 6/9/25, 6:33 PM
Am I the only one that hates the concept?
I want a good UI to fade into the background. But this one is like a UI designer's promotion fever dream: The UI is at the center, no matter the content. The promotional video says "This material brings a new level of vitality to every experience" and then they show a video player where now the control overlay has more contrast, more movements, and more bright lights than the actual movie. And then the other features are just bull*: "It responds in real-time to your actions". Gosh I hope other UI frameworks would respond to my actions, what a novel idea! And yeah, ever played a video game? Things reacting to user input in real-time isn't exactly groundbreaking. And then they top it off with "a fluidity only Apple can achieve", which is just delusional. Desktop Linux box + RTX 5090 + current video game + 240 Hz screen => a fluidity that exceeds everything that Apple can achieve on a phone.
I mean I like SwiftUI and I like how apps look on the current iOS. But I think it's already borderline intense just to use the OS. It certainly should not have any more additional glitter, blinking, movement, or animations. It might be the direction that GTK could benefit from, but not SwiftUI.
In short, this feels like a step in the wrong direction for Apple to me.
by andersa on 6/9/25, 8:11 PM
It's... awful? Why would I want all this distracting shimmering as I scroll?
Apple really isn't what it once was, this is embarrassing.
by anotherhue on 6/9/25, 6:43 PM
Why, why, why, do all the Apple announcements have the exact same ASIMO stiff hand gestures? Hostage videos have more fluidity.
by seydor on 6/10/25, 5:32 AM
Terawatts of green energy being wasted to make your screen unreadable
by jwilliams on 6/10/25, 1:33 AM
This is Windows Aero all over again - why is this a persistent design?
You can't see or process the information behind the glass - at best it's major cognitive load to do so, at worst it's just very noisy with zero added information.
by sarreph on 6/9/25, 8:59 PM
Perhaps contrarian (here anyway) but I think Liquid Glass looks neat, and represents the next evolution of the "backdrop-filter: blur;" effect that we've been seeing on the web a _lot_ as of late... Which, funnily enough also gained adoption in a large part IMO due to Apple's usage of it in macOS for the past few years now.
I think the new design approach here is a clever nudge towards "Neo Skeuomorphism". Interface design is clearly heading in a much more skeuomorphic direction (see: AirBnB redesign) lately with the rise of AI. Liquid Glass is an apt way to provide more material-realism without devolving back to the objective realism that the old Skeuomorphic style pre-2013 represented.
Time and time again I see people bemoan Apple's UI direction and then sure enough within a year or two it becomes ubiquitous as web designers adopt the patterns for their own work.
The funny part is that the lede is getting buried here. The big story is of course the universal design _across platforms_. We're now ultra-ultra close to a unified OS, something that has been in materializing extremely slowly over the past decade and a half.
by dmix on 6/9/25, 6:29 PM
The icons look pretty bad and the glass reflection/blurring during scrolling looks distracting. But I do like the focus on fluid animations, transparent bgs by default for overlaid controls, and smaller contextual control areas.
by quyleanh on 6/9/25, 7:16 PM
More distractions, making the text difficult to read, and increased resource consumption from rendering these unnecessary animations.
by 0xCE0 on 6/11/25, 2:01 AM
So, the design language of 2025+ is wobbly "organic" 3D'ishly morphing UI elements, either translucent or not. Surely it was hard work after engineering round-cornered windows and centered taskbars. Can't wait to see the future innovations of these $1T+ companies.
- https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/06/apple-introduces-a-de...
- https://m3.material.io/blog/building-with-m3-expressive
- https://fluent2.microsoft.design/design-principles
by danielvaughn on 6/9/25, 11:05 PM
I love designing and building UIs, but one thing that really depresses me is how you’re often pressured to keep changing things just to justify your continued employment.
It feels like that’s what happened here, to be honest.
It’s okay for a product to stay the same, if the current design is the right one. I just can’t imagine what problems they’re trying to solve with this update.
by jamsterion on 6/9/25, 10:26 PM
After 16 years on iPhone and Mac, I’m finally making the switch. Apple’s latest design choices are not just aweful, they reflect a broader decline in the company’s direction across the board. I’ve considered moving to Linux, Windows, and Android for years. Now feels like the right moment.
by joeguilmette on 6/10/25, 6:05 AM
I’m old enough to remember iOS7. It was dog ugly and universally reviled.
This is new update is dog ugly and universally reviled. They’ll fix the most egregious stuff in beta, and then in a year or two dial it in.
This is a big, bold move. I’m happy to see them do something that takes some courage and also ship it.
Most of the really bad/unreadable screenshots I see are people customizing things so they look terrible. All the defaults look great.
I think it’s great we have deep customization options coming. That’s good. To people that say you shouldn’t be able to make it look bad… No. My desktop OS is infinitely configurable and I can absolutely break it. I’m happy to see at least the most surface level guard rails coming off of iOS.
This is good.
by chakintosh on 6/9/25, 6:42 PM
Interesting how it seems now Apple's realized they should have marketed visionOS for Enterprise from the beginning. Nobody was gonna be a $3k AR headset to edit text. The Enterprise is where the use cases are. And now seems Apple has pivoted towards that.
by bowsamic on 6/9/25, 6:38 PM
It seems over the top to me, fatiguing even. Like I might have to take breaks from being so overwhelmed from using these interfaces. I have been mac exclusive for a long time now but I recently installed xubuntu for an intern and it made me quite jealous
by nipperkinfeet on 6/10/25, 1:20 AM
It looks cheap and tacky. Apple really lost its way. Who thought this was a good idea?
by throw03172019 on 6/9/25, 9:32 PM
Did any user or developer ask for this? This looks absolutely awful and I’m a huge Apple fan. I can’t get behind it. :/
by voidUpdate on 6/10/25, 1:27 PM
> It combines the optical qualities of glass with a fluidity only Apple can achieve, as it transforms depending on your content or context
Is there a reason only Apple can achieve this look, or is it just marketing crap?
by karel-3d on 6/10/25, 12:30 PM
If this ships in the current iteration, I will seriously consider jumping ship to Galaxy.
AirTags are still holding me in Apple ecosystem but now Androids have their own tracking thingies, maybe it's time.
by brailsafe on 6/9/25, 7:57 PM
I don't use iOS in any capacity, but I'm sure anything they do will only improve what has always felt like a clumsy OS.
On the Macos side, I'm open to the new aesthetic, but I just hope to god they've been actually investing in performance improvements when it comes to SwiftUI, which has only barely been viable in some cases thus far. If MacOS gets a full UI update, but the Settings screen still lags when navigating between sections, someone's doing something wrong.
by CivBase on 6/10/25, 1:16 PM
I have a hard time reading the text in a lot of their examples.
The artist name "Nao" on the music player. The zoom level "1x" on the camera. The tab "Library" on the gallery. And even the URL "floralarrangem..." in the browser.
Seems to be a consequence of low-contrast, busy backgrounds, and overly aggressive use of transparency. Maybe a "tinted glass" approach and more considerate color/contrast choices would help.
by markpapadakis on 6/10/25, 8:15 AM
This looks like a disaster. It is like it was fast-tracked based on the oomph factor because seriously, how come you didn't notice how hard it is to read text or even notice overlapping objects/controls? Maybe once we use it for some time, we will all get it - it is possible - but as it now stands, I hope there will be an option to turn all that off, _especially_ on MacOS which is what I use to get work done.
by settsu on 6/10/25, 4:31 PM
I would've loved to have been a fly on the wall throughout the various discussions as this idea made its way across the Apple org.
That this was the dominant topic during the keynote of their annual developer event doesn't seem to bode well for the state of the ecosystem. Especially combined with how cutting the sarcasm was for the new version numbering and new macOS name announcement(s).
by dexterlagan on 6/11/25, 8:54 AM
This is one possible elegant and esthetically pleasing solution to keeping readability/visibility as high as possible while allowing dark/light modes AND complex backgrounds. It has the advantage of having the exact same visibility properties in both modes, no matter what you have as background. The downside... well everything is blurry and glassy.
by crossroadsguy on 6/10/25, 3:04 AM
Maybe a better iCloud+, a better iCloud (maybe version/history/logs?), a better way to operate/control two different seems (hint: "differently"), easy import/export of data from various services, less software opacity etc etc?
But instead we got this.
Does this how a massively large and rich company's intellectual bankruptcy begin?
by replete on 6/10/25, 7:31 AM
There are some horrific looking UI on the screenshots, e.g. Acorns floating toolbar with integrated traffic lights - it looks awful and with a bevel emboss - remember that? Yes, the ugly Photoshop effect option that only looked cool in the early 2000s. Some of this looks very cheap and amateur Photoshop like.
It''s not terrible, but I will avoid it for a while. My biggest issue is the system resources this will require. I just don't care for the pretty, as much as I care for fast UI. Thinks Windows 11 delayed right click context menu.
Unifying their operating system design language makes sense, but ugh do we really need yearly operating system revisions like this. It is obvious that the engineers struggle with the marketing led pace judging by how many issues there are every major release of macOS. I don't upgrade to a new major until a .3 usually because of this.
by __MatrixMan__ on 6/9/25, 8:21 PM
Every now and then my macbook will hide all of my windows so that I'm just looking at my wallpaper. It is a pretty wallpaper, but I don't really understand why I need a hotkey or gesture or whatever is happening just to allow me to gaze at it.
I guess this is more of the same? Some pretty picture can shine through at you because... pretty?
by rogerthis on 6/9/25, 8:09 PM
It's weird the amount of not asked/not needed things we do.
by Bondi_Blue on 6/9/25, 6:24 PM
It is weird that they acted as through the design system hasn't changed much since iOS 7. They've overhauled and tweaked it every year since 2011- increasing font weights, using slower floaty/bubble animations, increasing corner radiuses and adding more negative space, adding depth and shadows to icons, etc. Control Center, for example, looks nothing like it did in iOS 7. iOS 7 was much more minimal, the least skeuomorphic, and a bit more geometric than the "neumorphic" changes they've made since then.
This updated design language seems to have similarities to Microsoft's Material/Fluent design system that brought more of that same glass material to Windows 11, with the more 3d-looking edge outlines on ui elements. So the glass metaphor seems to be a trending metaphor in these UIs, for better or for worse.
by sneak on 6/10/25, 11:18 AM
I’m very sad that Apple lost their main “no” guy.
It doesn’t seem like they have anyone who can say “we’re not shipping/announcing that” with ultimate authority.
The AVP never should have shipped in its current state. Then there was/is the Siri 2/AI debacle. Now macOS, too.
This is to say nothing of the butterfly keyboard.
by dluan on 6/9/25, 11:26 PM
everything is mid 2000s again. this really feels anti-apple even though the design polish is top notch, but to just abandon accessibility for shinyness feels like something steve would have obviously been against.
but it definitely takes me back to endlessly tweaking with linux mint skins in my college dorm.
by scdnc on 6/10/25, 7:45 AM
I like the idea of using a more glass-like UI, but the implementation is horrible. It looks like a school project rather than work from the biggest company in the world. I generally don't understand the idea of making every UI look more like a children's toy.
by minhoryang on 6/10/25, 7:50 AM
Curious how much the work environment would deteriorate if an expert program with a large amount of information were redesigned with Liquid Glass. It's a bit perplexing that I have to look for a way to turn off this type of UI change under the accessibility menu.
by willio58 on 6/9/25, 7:55 PM
I agree with those saying this feels like a step back toward skeuomorphic design for Apple. I personally think it looks nice visually, but I do have some concerns: - Accessibility. I don't see good examples in their promotional videos about how contrast of text is ensured to be in an acceptable range. Even for those without visual impairments, this is important for UX. - Performance. I'm usually the guy in the room saying "Apple is not making devices slower over time on purpose", but this sort of graphical intensity is basically needless and I hope they have something in the plans around automatically disabling more complex visual animations if the phone is showing signs of slow-down.
by y42 on 6/9/25, 7:58 PM
At what point do we reach this attitude, where we do not rage against everything that's new?
by throwaway2562 on 6/9/25, 8:00 PM
This is what a company running out of ideas looks like
by botanical on 6/10/25, 12:26 PM
This translucent 3D look doesn't feel like they took usability into consideration. They just wanted to force a glass-look. At least the Aero look was frosted, this makes it so you have to strain to differentiate buttons and text on it.
by RedShift1 on 6/9/25, 6:36 PM
Anything that moves away from flat colorless rectangles is a good thing, I welcome this change.
by solardev on 6/9/25, 7:27 PM
I guess Windows Vista gets the last laugh, after all.
by joduplessis on 6/10/25, 2:58 PM
Aside from the (glaring) accessibility issues, the aesthethic doesn't look great.
by meindnoch on 6/9/25, 6:46 PM
Looks awful to be honest.
by HenriTEL on 6/10/25, 9:03 AM
Apple already had serious contrast issues that have been adding up over the last few years, notably yellow text on white background or grey text on dark grey background. This liquid glass design will make the issue ubiquitous.
by piyush_soni on 6/13/25, 11:37 AM
Man. They way they market and sell 'average' stuff which won't even raise an eyebrow if it came from any other company is remarkable.
by raydenvm on 6/9/25, 7:33 PM
Funnily enough, a lot in Liquid Glass is inspired by older design systems from Microsoft : Fluent Design (Win 11) and Windows Aero (Win 7). It shows how real tough it is now to come with something really new these days in design.
by nake13 on 6/10/25, 4:17 AM
I’ve noticed something no one has mentioned yet: Liquid Glass is natively HDR.
by bix6 on 6/9/25, 8:48 PM
Feels very Walt Disney / multiplane camera to me.
Wanted to hate it but looks kind of cool so we’ll see how bad the accessibility is.
They call it a material so this is a new type of glass? Can I actually use a loupe on it or that’s just for fun?
by hotmeals on 6/9/25, 7:16 PM
Only Apple could call an Aero-esque water based design "Liquid Glass".
by 827a on 6/9/25, 9:04 PM
Running the iOS beta now. There's structural elements to this redesign that I think are generally great. Mostly, they've moved the search bar to the bottom of many of their apps (messages and settings are the most obvious). The centered island-style navigation bar feels better than the old boxy-style one.
The transparency effect is a nightmare. Its so fascinating to me how this made it through to an official iOS release. We'll see how it plays on GA. I think we're going to see some major changes to the way its designed before GA.
by dodo_is_dodo on 6/10/25, 7:45 AM
I'm curious about the 'new hardware has enabled us to' part. I know they have full control over software, hardware stacks(A,M chip, Metal, OS), so I can easily imagine they do their best to optimization.
Is it possible to do the same job with same performance on Android? or Windows or any general target OS and software stack?
Seems that shader itself does not costs too much(normal map? lookup table?). What really matters is their UI/Shader job scheduling in realtime constraints on any CPU/GPU load state.
by rifty on 6/10/25, 3:23 AM
I like the glassy shader effect and concept even if lacking a bit of discipline in all of the places where it's applied at the moment. Though I think the real test of differentiation for this redesign is how approachable the 'liquid' animations will be for developers to implement outside of the UIKit elements. Will be interesting to see how this design language system changes how they approach elements of the experience as they get more used to thinking through it.
by whytaka on 6/9/25, 6:55 PM
I only caught a glimpse but what I saw for iOS Safari concerns me.
The browser navigation overlaps the viewport. I wonder if this'll break websites/apps that anchor a menu to the bottom.
by dev1ycan on 6/10/25, 3:58 PM
Transluscency has always been a beautiful effect I don't care what brainwashed "UI/UX"designers post ~2013 think, they are literally conditioned to just repeat mantras.
The original reason for dropping transluscency was that "old people can't tell apart things", well we're way past the era of "no phone" generations, are we forever going to have things stay ugly?
Vista was the best looking OS ever with Aero on.
by bigyabai on 6/9/25, 6:16 PM
Honestly? It lacks the visual contrast that made skeuomorphism so popular. Material You gets this right by using accent colors to break up the uniform interface. It feels cohesive and well-made without feeling clinical or hard-to-read.
It's also, somewhat curiously, not neumorphism. All the interface layers appear distinct, which makes me worry if things like Dynamic Island and Control Center will be mistaken for app controls and not distinct phone controls.
by amegahed on 6/9/25, 8:00 PM
I wonder how long this will take to trickle down into webdev, automotive dashboards, embedded systems, and every other thing with a GUI? It's probably already happening.
p.s. If you like Aqua, you might enjoy playing around this open source glass rendering CSS library: https://www.specularcss.org/#materials/glass
by amegahed on 6/9/25, 8:04 PM
I wonder how long this will take to trickle down into webdev, automotive dashboards, embedded systems, and basically every other thing with a GUI. It's probably already happening.
p.s. If you like Aqua, you might like this open source glass rendering CSS library: https://www.specularcss.org/#materials/glass
by thenaturalist on 6/9/25, 11:12 PM
They butchered the swipe actions on iOS it seems.
Open notes or messages, swipe left on an item.
In iOS 18, the options (silent/delete in Messages or share/ delete) were simply icons, cleary delineated as buttons with color matching backgrounds, no text.
Now the options have descriptive text under each button which of course is cut off 99% of the time as it exceeds the tiny width these action buttons have - and the buttons are harder to hit.
How? Why?
by pardner on 6/10/25, 9:02 PM
Yet more glossy 'form over function' nonsense from Apple in my opinion. Was hoping '26 would be the release that tackled their massive technical debt around broken/reduced functionality. I did see a Reddit post that summarized it nicely, a screenshot of a Youtube video where the play button overlaps the name so it reads Liquid*ass
by crooked-v on 6/9/25, 6:56 PM
Thanks, I hate it.
Floating menu bars over the content at the bottom is a great way to make it impossible to actually use the bottom of web pages.
The "liquid glass" stuff, even in their handpicked promo screenshots, has functionally unreadable text and illegible controls.
The vanishing buttons are going to make app UIs even more obtuse and undiscoverable.
by mosdl on 6/9/25, 6:15 PM
Seems overly distracting, and not a lot of contrast.
by satvikpendem on 6/9/25, 7:11 PM
This is essentially Microsoft's Fluent UI [0], right down to the translucent glass rectangular prisms (not to say that there haven't been glassmorphic UI systems since forever, including Apple's own Aqua).
[0] https://www.youtube.com/@microsoftdesign/videos
by basisword on 6/9/25, 8:38 PM
After installing the betas I'm very surprised at how much a departure this is on the Mac. Feels like using an iPad all of a sudden. There are some nice bits but they're going to have to tweak it significantly over the next couple of months. Safari tabs are an abomination. On other hand Spotlight has some great improvements and Launchpad is gone.
by oidar on 6/9/25, 10:15 PM
From an accessibility point of view, this seems unusable for those with visual deficits. I sincerely hope that this can be made non-translucent. The ability to distinguish between icons is already hampered with all icon artwork being the same color, with this translucent "glass", it will be the hardest to use iOS, MacOS design ever.
by croes on 6/9/25, 6:25 PM
So Apple goes Windows Aero?
by bandoti on 6/10/25, 1:02 PM
It’s going to be really interesting to see how this UI paradigm pans out. I think this captures a shift toward the extreme in responsive, fluid, convergent, whatever-you-want-to-call-it, design.
We’ve had books/scrolls for thousands of years, laid out in beautiful proportion, and now it has all melted in the oven!
by beached_whale on 6/9/25, 7:43 PM
I hope I can disable the transparency, nothing makes it harder and slower to read than that for me. Distracting too.
by charamis on 6/9/25, 7:04 PM
Really wish that this sets a trend like iOS 7 did and move forward from this bland flat design that exists everywhere
by Traubenfuchs on 6/10/25, 2:15 PM
Change for the sake of change. Because otherwise, there would be no news and we would stay at: "things are pretty good, besides the bad ui and ux in some parts".
Absolutely nothing interesting or innovative on the horizon, besides AI snake oil that they apparently just can't get right...
End stage big tech.
by SwiftyBug on 6/9/25, 10:32 PM
All I wanted was an option in settings that allows me to turn off all animations on macOS. How hard can that be?
by drooopy on 6/9/25, 6:11 PM
Here's hoping that they'll keep the options to disable unnecessary transparencies and animations.
by Bengalilol on 6/9/25, 8:31 PM
From Aqua to Liquid Glass (AKA it will change over time and at some point ... disappear). I am just sad that it's the first feature announcement for Apple OSs 26. I understand Apple's point of view to communicate on that, but I have a big hollow feeling this is not enough.
by antoniuschan99 on 6/9/25, 7:48 PM
In order for any of that glass design to look like glass there needs to be a background with a mix of at least 3 colors. I implemented the glass design in an app last year and afterwards thought it was ok. It makes some text difficult to read depending on the background.
by mjmas on 6/10/25, 2:21 AM
Windows at least did it (at least conceptually) in a way that should be fairly performant with their Mica material (just showing the desktop background and nothing else with a large blur and filters).
This looks far more complex and something almost like real time ray tracing.
by microflash on 6/9/25, 8:18 PM
I'm all for great design but I hope that reduce transparency and motion settings just tone this thing down. I want my devices to be boring and subtle. I want to get them do what I want quickly, fade away and disappear. This redesign does the exact opposite.
by alberth on 6/9/25, 7:49 PM
Unpopular opinion: considering that last year’s WWDC was all about Apple’s vision for deep AI integration (still not yet released), and this year’s event mostly focused on a fresh coat of paint for iOS/macOS, it raises a fair question: "What has Apple actually been working on for the past two years if the AI still isn’t here and the main update is just new paint"?
Note: not being a hater and appreciate the complexities of working on huge platforms as Apple ecosystem. Just genuinely wondering, since it feels like maybe 2 years of start/stops/changing priorities.
by waffletower on 6/10/25, 4:08 PM
I wonder if 'Liquid Glass' would have been less crass looking to me if Jonny Ive was still at the company and somehow approved it. It almost has the consistency of gummy candy, which isn't something I like to touch either.
by LAC-Tech on 6/9/25, 9:31 PM
Transparency has been around for a while - I remember playing around with it on linux desktops back when I was still using CRT monitors.
I turn it off now. Turns out the instances where I want to see through a window are basically nil. They make for nice screenshots though.
by poisonborz on 6/9/25, 8:44 PM
What's the point of a translucent taskbar? I might understand in a taskbar of a desktop wallpaper to not disturb the scene, but what information does it hold if the search bar over a map or a link list is translucent? It's just useless noise.
by ksec on 6/9/25, 7:06 PM
It seems the "Universal Design" across platforms was the only thing new in this WWDC. There are lots of little Apple Intelligence features sprinkled everywhere, but most of them dont interest me.
I guess we will have to wait for State of Union.
by shayway on 6/9/25, 7:19 PM
Visually very reminiscent of Win7 Aero, yet the 'unified' approach plus low information density is much more Win8 Metro (with some modern/Apple tweaks). A charming era of design but not one that deserves revisiting in such a big way.
by clueless on 6/9/25, 7:17 PM
so let's use up those extra CPU cycles and update the UI to slow everything down again.
by cmdtab on 6/9/25, 6:45 PM
There is no contrast. Wow! Why?
by j45 on 6/9/25, 6:36 PM
This looks nice, but I can’t say it’s clear how a touch interface can be sent to macOS when MacBooks continue to not have touchscreens.
Maybe this is the start of replacing macOS with some form of iPadOS experience in the medium to long term.
by deergomoo on 6/9/25, 8:09 PM
I am incredibly annoyed that they’ve hidden all the camera controls behind an overflow button. Hiding functions is not the same as simplicity any more than shoving all the dirty laundry under your bed is cleaning.
by sjs382 on 6/10/25, 2:20 PM
This could be a GREAT design if it implemented head/eye tracking to create a true layered/3d feeling with depth.
That's something that would have been VERY doable for them on the iPhone/iPad, too.
by WhyNotHugo on 6/9/25, 9:01 PM
Last time they redesigned the Home Screen they dropped most of the features which I used—except showing the time, and being able to open the camera.
I hope the funky animated time can be disabled and I can still open the camera.
by chungy on 6/9/25, 8:55 PM
So I guess 19 years is the ideal time to wait before copying Windows Vista.
by smcleod on 6/10/25, 9:58 AM
One of the first things I do on app with transparent interfaces is disable transparency as it usually impacts battery life / performance and results in very low contrast UI hinting.
by pier25 on 6/9/25, 7:01 PM
I like it a priori. Let's see how it holds up in practice.
by lyu07282 on 6/9/25, 8:29 PM
I think years ago I made a joke that the reason we need compute shader support in WebGL was so we could do fluid dynamic simulations for our button hover effects. Nobody is laughing now..
by tyleo on 6/9/25, 11:38 PM
Glass UI can look good but you need to frost it pretty heavily for usability and accessibility. I’m not seeing that here. Hopefully they turn that up before this is fully rolled out.
by ambyra on 6/9/25, 6:31 PM
Would be cool if they started using displays with multiple layers, kinda like the looking glass 3D display, to get actual 3d layering of UI. Would look amazing with this new UI design.
by username223 on 6/9/25, 8:55 PM
They can't even make a webpage that doesn't have janky scrolling in Safari. And it prompts me to enable notifications? I'm not so optimistic about their new UI design.
by m3kw9 on 6/9/25, 6:50 PM
First thing i thought is that they will have a setting to turn down the behind the last see through, the legibility is worse if you have a lot of graphics morphing wildly behind texts
by tropicalfruit on 6/10/25, 10:57 AM
Apple OS marketing updates exist for 2 reasons:
1. new wallpaper to differentiate yearly identical hardware increments
2. CPU bloat to hog resources, slow your device and push people to update their HW
these tick both boxes.
by montag on 6/10/25, 12:48 AM
It's really beautiful, but I don't want it on my device.
by nytesky on 6/9/25, 7:06 PM
I like the clear transparent apps and widgets. I feel like that’s less stimulating like running my phone on grayscale. Mostly just a pretty picture with tools if I seek them out.
by rickdeckard on 6/10/25, 9:48 AM
Can I have all that, but without the gaudy blurs and dynamic reflections?
Without all that glassy thing. A neutral consistent flat design without too many shades.
You know..., like Material design?
by tootie on 6/10/25, 11:57 AM
Can anyone convince me of why I should care about OS U8 design? Don't people spend 98% of their time inside an app that doesn't follow the system UI?
by LightBug1 on 6/9/25, 10:04 PM
All I could think about is how beautiful those treetops are inside the Apple spaceship ... glorious view.
Still rocking a budget Android though ... don't see a reason to change.
by seydor on 6/10/25, 9:05 AM
They are also apparently doing away with tabs. Now tabs will appear as buttons and pills. Just to make sure that you are entirely and unmistakably confused
by mrcwinn on 6/10/25, 2:08 AM
My bet is the new iPadOS does nothing to quiet the gripes about the iPad. Window management isn’t the main issue. The main issue is that the iPad doesn’t do enough of what a Mac does when you need it, and so you bring your laptop just in case.
Oh and the Magic Keyboard? Great. Now my thin 13” iPad Pro feels literally as heavy as a MacBook Pro.
Someone tell me what is the point?
by valleyjo on 6/9/25, 9:57 PM
There’s a reduce transparency setting in accessibility. Wonderful what this will look like if that’s on. I’ve been using it for years as I don’t like frills.
by JKCalhoun on 6/9/25, 7:40 PM
Looks like something you could do with a clever displacement map — or several mappings that would include a specular highlight map, etc. The tech is clever.
by jakub_g on 6/9/25, 6:49 PM
> iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS Tahoe 26, watchOS 26, and tvOS 26
Bumping from iOS 18 / macOS 15 etc. towards year-based naming, nice. I wish more projects followed this.
by 3cats-in-a-coat on 6/10/25, 6:32 AM
It's the worst UI design I've seen from Apple, ever.
Makes everything harder to read, far more expensive on your battery. No benefits.
WTF.
That's the final nail in the coffin for me.
by xg15 on 6/10/25, 11:05 AM
The time display on the lockscreen is hilarious. Who doesn't want a towering, gargantuan "9:41" implanted into their photos?
by gchokov on 6/10/25, 9:02 AM
This design is terrible. Also... no hope in Apple changing their mind. First time in 15 years that I am not looking forward to such changes.
by laweijfmvo on 6/10/25, 12:21 AM
the most usable UIs are, i guess “not attractive” anymore. but they are productive, and a joy to use when you need to get something done. these new UIs are a pain to use, but they trick our depressed ADHD brains to keep flipping through the screens and menus with fancy colors and animations. AND THAT IS THE GOAL. screen time. because you are nothing but a target for ads and subscriptions.
by nsonha on 6/9/25, 11:39 PM
This looks like Windows 11's promotional video but we know Apple's UI is going to look exactly like it, for real and not just for show.
by DrScientist on 6/10/25, 11:20 AM
From the way they present it it looks like a 'looks' led, rather than usability led interface design.
Grrr...
Hard to tell for sure until you have hands on though.
by dayvid on 6/10/25, 2:07 PM
They're betting big on AR. This is for their glasses, but they'll have to split the design from AR/VR and non AR/VR
by unethical_ban on 6/9/25, 11:27 PM
I didn't mind the preview of it on a play button or lock screen.
But why would a slider button suddenly become translucent when you move it? Awful.
by pfortuny on 6/9/25, 7:09 PM
What is the purpose of the windshield in a car?
What is the purpose of text in a screen?
Does something really help that purpose? Anything that does not is WRONG.
by nprateem on 6/10/25, 5:04 AM
They should call the next macOS "KDE" and give credit where credit's due.
Apple designers: Please copy wobbly windows too.
by 9d on 6/9/25, 7:30 PM
It's the candy look from the early 2000s, from Mac OS X 10.1, turned up to 11.
Did Apple learn nothing from Windwos Vista and Compiz?
by IAmGraydon on 6/9/25, 8:38 PM
Oh right - I almost forgot we’re in the timeline where the “experts” always make the worst choice available to them.
by w-hn on 6/9/25, 6:47 PM
Huh, this reminds me of the Photos app. Apple completely broke iOS Photos in the last update.
I really hope apps like Ente can step up and get better and native, offer desktop backup + sync both as well. But then there's always the chance that Apple will just find a way to shut them down. or reject their updates, just like they did in the past.
Anyway, I guess we'll have to wait and see what else they manage to screw up with this "move."
by squidsoup on 6/9/25, 9:45 PM
This is going to be awful for the large proportion of greybeards reading HN, but the kids are going to love it.
by crawsome on 6/10/25, 2:31 AM
Every time Apple reinvents the wheel, they release it like it's the very first time it happened.
by stackedinserter on 6/10/25, 1:45 PM
Please make that iphone doesn't start playback when I sit in my car I'm dying.
by SebastianKra on 6/9/25, 6:12 PM
Eh, it could be worse. It looks like the over-the-top effects are limited to a few top-level elements such as the Navigation View, Homescreen, and Control Center. I wouldn't be surprised if these get dialed back in the future - especially the elements that break all contrast guidelines.
Many elements are still completely flat or more subtle. So, to me, it feels more like a new tool to convey hierarchy, rather than a complete new design: Secondary < Primary < Glass.
Also, the Safari-Redesign is back for round 2? It'd be funny if it runs into the exact same backlash again.
by neya on 6/10/25, 7:24 PM
Did Apple just do
```
   *{
      opacity: 0.36
   }
```
And call it revolutionary?
by gastonmorixe on 6/9/25, 8:43 PM
Windows Vista vibes gone wrong. What happened to Apple's design lead and taste? jeez
by wseqyrku on 6/10/25, 11:13 AM
With this glassy schmlassy design everyone should forget about Siri right?
by tencentshill on 6/10/25, 1:49 PM
It's like one of those terrible Winterboard skins I used on iOS 6.
by sitzkrieg on 6/9/25, 8:45 PM
this ui is cosmically horrible. power users are seeing the end of the tunnel
by raspasov on 6/9/25, 11:29 PM
I like it, I think it will be great after ironing out a few obvious issues.
by jama211 on 6/13/25, 7:52 PM
I’m going to go against the grain here (please don’t shoot!) and say I think it’s kinda pretty. They probably overstepped the mark here a bit, but likely they’ll dial it back over the betas and the actual release will be a little more tame.
I get there are accessibility concerns, but apple has the best track record of any os building company at making sure accessibility options exist and work well, so I hope that will address that. As for people here saying it’s ugly… how do I out this delicately. They do huge amounts of product research and market research as a company, it’s likely this will go down very well with the public even if it doesn’t go down well with the average HN reader… if you catch my drift.
It’ll be fine, IMO at worst it’ll be a bit ugly and they’ll be forced to walk it back a bit. The way people here talk about it it’s like this design kicked their dog or something.
by blablabla123 on 6/10/25, 6:10 AM
Wow, they've been really slowly moving towards this. I remember when I heard this for the first time, must have been more than half a decade ago, sounded like a logical step. I'm surprised they didn't want this to happen any faster though
by thewileyone on 6/12/25, 5:20 AM
Windows Vista Aero: "What took you so long?"
by cyberax on 6/10/25, 3:51 AM
Can we get universal APIs then? E.g. no restrictions on JITs on iOS?
by tangomama on 6/10/25, 3:10 PM
Alright, I'm officially turning off iOS automatic updates.
by t1234s on 6/9/25, 9:03 PM
Did they introduce an easy way to remove the bloatware from MacOS?
by normie3000 on 6/9/25, 7:51 PM
How much battery life could you save by disabling these effects?
by BonoboIO on 6/10/25, 2:36 AM
I'm honestly shocked at the new interface. It's like Windows Vista all over again - everything's broken. The whole thing looks like a broken HTML page with CSS slapped on top of macOS Finder. Text readability is terrible and I really hope you can disable most of the glass effects in accessibility settings.
This'll probably stick around for years until Apple decides to switch design languages again, and they'll never admit the old one was bad - classic Apple.
It's unbelievably broken... like an Android phone with 30 themes installed at once.
iOS 18 actually looks good and is readable, which makes this worse. That's the thing about peaking - it's a long way down. Feels like they had to ship something because their AI isn't just behind - it's absolutely broken like shit. Siri's been stale for 15 years, and they're not even polishing features that others have half-baked into their products. They've got... nothing.
by richardlblair on 6/10/25, 1:41 PM
Someone at apple spent too much time on r/unixporn
by Woodi on 6/10/25, 8:23 AM
Transparent glass UI will be good for UI in glasses :)
by replwoacause on 6/10/25, 4:27 AM
That’s it. I’m finally switching to Linux and Android.
by julienfr112 on 6/9/25, 7:15 PM
something funny would be a kind of Erotic sake cups, when a safe image reveal something completely different when transformed by the the glass upon it.
by mwkaufma on 6/9/25, 8:35 PM
my kingdom for usable bevel-gray toolbars and controls
by cwizou on 6/10/25, 1:31 PM
Installed iOS, iPad and macOS yesterday, some things are quickly obvious :
- In general, it always looks worse on dark mode
- The glass transparency effect is too local. It looks only at what's exactly below, so if you have two icons side by side in Control center on iPhone, one may show dark and the next one light, making you think one is active and the other one is inactive. It's pretty clear they wrestled with icons being too transparent so they blurred them a bunch, but it just makes it worse in those cases.
- It does have sensible defaults for (most) 3rd party icons that are flat, by adding some reticule on the flat logo to make it pop and look less out of place.
- The textfield contrasts can be horrendous. If you try to add a sky background to macOS messages (the first choice), the textfield is white text on lightly colored background. In Safari, if you have one of the default desktop background, you can get grey text on blue grayish background. There's absolutely no contrast and it's clear that they will have to address it.
- Safari for macOS takes the contrast issue above and pushes it to 11. It tries to reintroduce the universally hated concept of "the webpage takes over your browser window" but makes it worse. It's horrible enough to have your tabs and icons change color from white to black if you tab from say hacker news to github, but they've added a very slow (and buggy) animation for the UI on top. So while the tab switches immediately, the UI on top slowly morphs from white to black. Absolutely infuriating (and can't be disabled in beta 1). You also can't really see the selected tab in dark mode on a webpage with a black background.
In summary, some things look ok but in general it's really rough. The finder icon sums it best, they had a concept (transparent layers), and tried hard to shove everything through it, never stopping to question if maybe the concept needs adjusting when it clearly didn't work. I expect a bunch of changes, as is it's really rough.
by butlike on 6/10/25, 5:00 PM
It's nice to see the Mac getting some love
by idle_zealot on 6/10/25, 2:53 PM
I'm generally not a fan of the new design. I prefer my interface to be functional, consistent, and get out of my way rather than be flashy or attention-grabbing.
That said, I do greatly appreciate how the new guidelines and redesigned UIs make interactive buttons actually look like buttons. Each tappable element is visually distinct and represented in a consistent way. I just wish that Apple didn't insist on moving/hiding buttons in response to unrelated actions (ie WHY do I lose my action buttons when I scroll down, and why do they poof into existence when I scroll up? Why can I search on the root page of Settings but not on any subpage? Why does tapping a button that reveals a submenu hide that button?) Just stop moving things around, please.
by bamboozled on 6/9/25, 6:17 PM
Looks great, looking forward to trying it...
by gausswho on 6/9/25, 8:37 PM
Same response I had for iOS 7: Clown vomit.
by 9d on 6/9/25, 6:15 PM
> "... and a fluidity that only Apple can achieve ..." (from the promo video on https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/06/apple-introduces-a-de... )
I'm excited to see this effect turned into a WebGL library in literally a week by some smart devs out there, and then adapted by Material Design in another month. Really? Only apple? This kind of rhetoric might have worked on me 20 years ago, but today it's just sad how obviously false it is.
by boars_tiffs on 6/9/25, 8:37 PM
im having flashbacks from when apple introduced flat design in ios 7. i refused to upgrade for 2 years...
by elAhmo on 6/9/25, 9:03 PM
I thought this was an April 1st joke.
by wizee on 6/10/25, 4:27 AM
The excessive translucency makes contrast much worse and complex backgrounds poke through to distract from the test. Readability suffers severely. This is a terrible design direction. Kill it with fire.
by hajile on 6/10/25, 12:09 AM
I want another Snow Leopard update with less glamor and a lot more bugfixes.
by Groxx on 6/10/25, 12:26 AM
Google and Apple are both on some weird bouncy shrooms or something this year. What the heck.
Both new UIs look truly awful, and seem like accessibility nightmares. I will continue enthusiastically disabling animations.
by dankwizard on 6/10/25, 4:52 AM
Apple have done it again - This is further proof that they are miles ahead of the competition. Kudos Apple.
Stunningly beautiful.
by Hard_Space on 6/10/25, 5:33 AM
Oh please God let there be some way of turning this off or at least dialing it down. Maybe worse than the dreaded glass performance hit on CPU/GPU is the promise that elements 'get out of the way', for instance tabs disappearing while scrolling. As someone who thought Word 2003 was aok, I have hated this convergence upon an 'empty square' as a design goal. Show me all the settings, please, and don't hide them in an ellipsis either.
by absurdo on 6/10/25, 4:12 AM
The death and return of Aero.
by realcul on 6/9/25, 7:53 PM
looks like windows vista aero feature. wow.. we have come a full circle indeed!
by vlark on 6/10/25, 2:35 AM
It's just clear Aqua.
by amelius on 6/9/25, 10:26 PM
Most of these effects are happening under your finger.
But maybe on the desktop you can see them if you use a mouse.
by prmoustache on 6/9/25, 10:19 PM
So this is MacOs Vista?
by barrenko on 6/10/25, 5:40 AM
This is why Ive left.
by padjo on 6/9/25, 8:30 PM
Well that looks awful
by sirwhinesalot on 6/10/25, 8:25 AM
As someone who loved aero glass and aqua, this looks like absolute dogshit.
There was a reason nobody layered barely readable icons directly onto the glass surface in aero. Even the text in the title bar had a glow to increase the contrast at least!
Fire all the design team. Should have done it back when iOS7 came out but clearly it wasn't a one off.
by bilekas on 6/10/25, 10:50 AM
This is such a nothing burger and what happens when you let UI take control of your whole business model.
"Look at our presentation, UI updates"
What happened to actually innovating?
They really are promoting "set your alarm without closing your streaming video"
... I mean. Great. My life is gonna be so much easier.
> Users love widgets
MMmm Apple. Time to stop with the mushrooms
by Group_B on 6/10/25, 1:35 AM
The idea of this transparent UI is so dumb. How could anyone at apple think this would be a good idee? Sure, let’s make it 100x harder to read and navigate the UI. Genius decisions being made at Apple here. I hope they do a lot of tweaking with this before it’s forced onto my device.
by sakesun on 6/10/25, 1:02 AM
The Liquid Glass terrified me as someone started in green monochrome CRT days. Software people really have endless creative ways to spend hardware resource quota.
Perhaps human should be less obsessed in twisting nature to serve our comfort, and just adapt ourselves more to what nature provides.
by epanchin on 6/9/25, 8:41 PM
So, windows Aero?
by dexterlagan on 6/13/25, 11:17 AM
...funny how it coincides with the Android 16 release. now that Android has the same UI as Apple... the replication is complete and Apple has to differentiate itself again.
by leoh on 6/9/25, 8:57 PM
Awful everything
by blinding-streak on 6/10/25, 5:09 AM
Touch bar 2.0.
by cynicalsecurity on 6/9/25, 6:16 PM
This gives Windows Aero vibes, but somehow even worse.
by steele on 6/10/25, 3:30 AM
Windows 7 Aero
by mock-possum on 6/10/25, 4:31 AM
> The new material, Liquid Glass, combines the optical qualities of glass with a fluidity only Apple can
God this marketing copy is sickening
Literally who wrote this, and who did they write it for??
by gherard5555 on 6/10/25, 10:13 AM
Aero 2.0
by gigatexal on 6/10/25, 3:41 AM
The biggest most coolest thing is new windowing and tiling controls for the iPad. Really cool stuff.
The glass stuff I am meh on but let’s see it in practice.
by protocolture on 6/10/25, 1:20 AM
Apple has invented Windows Vista
by tolerance on 6/9/25, 9:44 PM
Dude in that one video needs to go ahead back home and put on the sweater and slacks he deserves.
by Someone1234 on 6/9/25, 7:01 PM
I'm really showing off my age here, but it has been all down hill since skeuomorphic design; because the focus was primarily on usability and teachability as first-class concepts. Heck, companies were spending millions on usability research at the time, much of which was used.
I taught people to use computers in the 90s and early 2000s, and having those concepts matching to real world objects helped immensely. Recently I had to teach my kids to use a PC (they no longer teach that in "computers" at school, by the way, iPads only), and everything was arbitrarily designed without even internal rules/consistency let alone building on real-world metaphors.
You've also had this ongoing trend of content density getting consistency worse, and now Apple is accelerating a trend to make UI elements difficult to see/harm discoverability further. Liquid Glass is going to be a painful period, and all the clones that do it even worse are going to be pure hell.
by hulitu on 6/10/25, 5:09 AM
> Apple introduces a universal design across platforms
Looks like shit.
by ksec on 6/9/25, 7:26 PM
The whole thing is Windows Vista Aero Glass and iOS 7 all over again. Repeating all the SAME mistakes with 3D translucent design.
Right now I really want skeuomorphism back.
Much like iOS 7 they will have to spend another 2 - 3 years "tweaking" or basically walking back some of these design decisions.
I believe the problem is when Tim Cook decided to merge "Design" under one umbrella. So the Design team now takes over both Hardware and Software Design when they kicked Scott Forstall out. A lot of Apple's UX went down hill from there.
by eviks on 6/9/25, 6:29 PM
The form over function school of design continues its grim march towards decreasing usability.
Look at the most basic UI interaction - text cursor movement - and note how this new liquid glass adds more confusing visual noise by adding text reflection for no good reason, which makes, for example, an empty line appear as a line with some text due to this reflection, thus making it harder to see that your cursor is located at the top line.
> more focus to content
it's the opposite, you dilute focus on content by manufacturing non-existent noise.
And the claim to being "natural" in the video falls flat - compare to the actual physical movements a few frames before - the lens doesn't change in width or height! So the digital animation noise is unnatural!
Similarly with the menu sheet adding new rubberband effect in the corner- what underlying natural interaction does it reflect? What signal does that jiggly noise send?
But yeah, if you live in a "lively delight" fantasy of design, nothing would stop you.
by paxys on 6/9/25, 5:23 PM
Some Windows Vista designer is shedding a tear right now. Got such a huge nostalgia hit watching the "liquid glass" demos during the keynote. Installing a leaked "Longhorn" OS on a PC back in 2005 and seeing all the translucent refractive glass really felt magical and futuristic. 20 years later, everything old is new again.
by vijucat on 6/10/25, 10:55 AM
I got a minor amount of hate for it, but to repeat what I wrote here [1]:
"Slowly, I'm coming to the conclusion that designers should never be employed, only consulted on a per-project basis. If they sit around 8 hours a day, they end up changing something or the other to justify their existence. But human beings are not used to change at such a rapid cadence. Humans take time to settle into a design and establish patterns of usage."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44103131#44105292
by arnaudsm on 6/9/25, 5:58 PM
On top of wasting GPU cycles, such low-contrast graphics are terrible for older users. The Apple Music navbar is hilariously unreadable and distracting.
by jvreeland on 6/9/25, 5:50 PM
Awesome I wasn't having enough trouble figuring out what I could tap and not now everything has this crappy distorted look.
by leakycap on 6/9/25, 5:22 PM
Apple's new video presentation style is so cloying, it really didn't help with the letdown this software is.
by mikeortman on 6/9/25, 6:09 PM
Apple claiming that Liquid Glass is a technique only Apple can achieve, will be replicated, or at least indistinguishably replicated, in pure CSS... within 48 hours of today, out of spite
by devmor on 6/9/25, 10:17 PM
Oh god this looks like a horrible, visually indistinct mess.
by vid on 6/9/25, 9:58 PM
That video. This is why I can't take Apple, and, sorry, many of their fans, seriously.
by ypeterholmes on 6/9/25, 5:58 PM
Liquid glass is gorgeous. But it's hard to reconcile next level design like this with complete disasters like Apple TV. Maybe spend some time on getting the fundamentals right too, before inventing the future
by koiueo on 6/9/25, 7:13 PM
You people are funny, trying to reason about readability and distractions. Go drink your americanos in your skinny jeans (or whatever is the most recent thing falling out of fashion in favor of the next big thing).
Apple products are gonna be perceived as the icon of the beauty and usability regardless of the actual qualities. Be sure, Xiaomi and Huawei (and probably even Samsung) will try mimicking the newest Apple design language. Like it was before with crippled keyboards, enormous touchpads, glossy reflective screens, notches, etc..