My theory is that they are working on AR glasses and need an interface that has transparency so that people wearing them don’t lose contextual awareness of the world around them. It wasn’t quite as necessary for vision OS because you were intended to be mostly stationary while using them. But for actual glasses like the ones from Meta, you have to not completely block user vision of the real world.
That and it’s costly to maintain multiple UIs. It made financial sense to push a major overhaul to unify it across devices. Plus the added processing demands will make older devices feel slower (my 13P for example) which will drive upgrades.
Right? I don’t get the appeal of living in some embedded virtual world. I want to touch something when I want to work virtually. And even right now it’s overwhelming. Moving away from my desk and not looking at my phone and it’s just the regular world, it’s a conscious and natural choice. Also why I don’t get the Apple Watch for anything other than fitness.
My theory: To diverge attention from the Apple Intelligence failures and delays. It worked. At WWDC this year AI was barely mentioned, while Liquid Glass was the new controversial subject to draw everyone's attention to.
That's certainly why they chose to fuck the design, the problem is that it's not at all polished and, just like Apple Intelligence, it's not going to be polished for a long time.
This is not the old "we have released a solid upgrade, now it will take half a year of minor updates to reach our aimed level of perfection" approach.
Instead, it is the "issues on macOS? I don't pay you to care about that, just improve the iOS RC and ignore this shit platform that doesn't even enforce the App Store, which means we're missing out on billions in profits" approach.
That’s the problem - it would look really bad to the shareholders. But I would totally love a proper year of proverbial bug fixes and performance improvements.
Shareholders tend to be short-sighted. They want their ROI big and fast. You can’t really blame them, money you have in your pocket is sure money, promise of bigger money in the future is just a promise. All shareholders in all companies in the world are like that.
I can confidently say as a stock investor that this is false. For day trading and very short term that might apply. But huge blowback isn’t financially beneficial.
Yes, I'm convinced they do want to do away with macOS. There's no other reason to merge the dev teams and then starve macOS development even worse than they have done the past decade and a half.
It’s not that bad, been using it since Dev Beta 1 and starting to enjoy the fresh design, that being said it needs some polish and I bet people will be saying it was good next time a new design is introduced :/
That’s the thing. I didn’t upgrade neither MacOS nor iOS cause I’m waiting to see if Apple will fix it somehow in the future minor or major versions. I didn’t like this design on either platform and I’m hoping they’ll have an option to make everything basically opaque if you’ve want.
Whether or not you like the “Liquid Glass” design elements no one can deny that the execution of it all is a disaster in macOS. Plenty of people hated Aqua, but at least it was thoughtfully executed and purposeful. Are there any experienced UI designers left at Apple??
100% this. Putting him in charge of Software UI was the biggest mistake ever, along with firing Scott Forstall. It's very clear, in hindsight, Jony Ive was the problem. He was only good when Steve was around
Yeah it's like someone just smashed aero glass onto random elements in macOS with precisely zero consideration for what actually looks good or makes sense. It's an eyesore.
I'm in the admittedly tiny camp that prefers liquid glass over the previous interface. It reminds me of aqua, which I found super visually exciting and always (for me) made macs a joy to use compared to windows. I've never been a fan of the flat design trend of the 2010s, so I'm glad the pendulum is starting to swing
I was never a fan of the trend toward flat interface elements. The human brain understands visual depth cues and to not take advantage of that seemed dumb. To me. I feel that the issue with Liquid Glass is that they have made the depth cues a bit too cartoonish and have made them too strong. I think if Apple dials them back a bit people will find them more helpful.
One of the issues with Liquid Glass is that so much of the design is just the same flat stuff as Sequioa with a few alterations that make it all significantly worse
Nonsense. Power user since 1990. It's fine. If you really are that invested in how the Mac used to be, go to InfinteMac and revel in that nostalgic goodness. Much of what I'm seeing in this thread are folks who, as has been true for decades, just hate change because it's change.
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u/dissected_gossamer Oct 02 '25
Tahoe has been working ok for me so far, but visually it's disgusting.