Indeed – and it strikes me that the worst time to talk about a new design language is right when it comes out. People don’t like the new (as someone mentioned already), the new stuff tends to be a bit buggy, and so the immediate reaction is often more visceral than it will be after things have matured for a while.
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The Law of Conservation of Complexity (Tesler’s Law)
One interesting element to this law is the suggestion that even by simplifying the entire system, the intrinsic complexity is not reduced, it is moved to the user, who must behave in a more complex way.
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I am not a fan of anything that reduces usability either for consumption or creation. Disappearing scroll bars, Windows without clear places to grab them to move and resize, low contrast (often grey on grey) text. Buttons, drop downs, etc., that look the same as text (generally from lack of borders and other visual cues), all degrade the experience of using a computer for any task. Unfortunately all are common and seem to be getting worse in Apple’s operating systems.
What real benefit does Liquid Glass offer besides (arguably) looking pretty? I’m using and adapting to it on my iPhone, iPad, and Mac, but I can’t say that it has made anything actually better for it’s introduction.
Kevin
While I agree with Adam, there are many, many more people using volume knobs than violins. But improving one should not degrade the other, which is part of the problem here.
Kevin
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I’ve been curious as despite all the comments I’ve read, I’ve noticed very few appearance changes on my iMac, iPad, & iPhone. Other changes have been apparent but visually, all have only slight changes. Finally realized it might be due to System Settings changes I made years ago when I began have some vision difficulties. Just read an article about ways to make Liquid Glass visually easier & when I rechecked my System Settings, saw they were already set that way.
So, if you’re finding Liquid Glass visually difficult, here are a couple suggestions. They obviously won’t help w/all Liquid Glass “complaints” but they might help:
System Settings/Accessibility/Display: Turn On Reduce Transparency
System Settings/Appearance/Icon & Widget Style: Default
System Settings/Appearance/Appearance: Dark (turns the Dock background black)
I know this won’t help everyone w/everything but hopefully it will make things easier for some.
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Yes. You can turn Glass off completely with a tick of a checkbox using TinkerTool (free). Or you can turn it off on a per-app basis using SolidGlass.
Know this though. Both apps work fairly well, but there are anomalies using either. For instance, some transparency issues appear with various drop-down/pop-up menus.
Not users, sorry. For Apple to pay attention to user chatter, it must reach a point where some value of “everyone” is discussing the same thing. From Apple’s perspective—which is very much born out of Steve Jobs’s design arrogance—they know better than we do, and we’re just complaining because we don’t like change.
However, I do think that enough media (defined broadly) attention on a particular topic can draw Apple’s attention. We’ll never learn when or how, but over the years, there have been instances where Apple changed course based on media coverage. The best example that comes to mind is Joanna Stern’s reporting about thieves shoulder-surfing passcodes and then stealing phones, which caused Apple to implement Stolen Device Protection.
Perhaps I’m just being self-aggrandizing here, but I do think that coverage has to be the right combination of reasoned, well-supported, comprehensive, and balanced. Angry posts that essentially say “Liquid Glass sucks!” without explaining how or exploring why won’t resonate with anyone inside Apple.
Hmm… On the one hand, you’re absolutely right about immediate knee-jerk reactions to change. On the other hand, I do think there’s a window of time in which reactions are more seriously considered. If we all just stayed quiet for six months, that might send the signal to Apple that they did a great job, everyone loves it, and no changes need to be made. Plus, Apple is making marketing hay on the fact that it is new, so it seems only fair that criticisms appear alongside Apple’s claims of being the next great thing.
Very interesting thoughts, and I’ll have to ponder. What’s interesting about computers is that they’re general-purpose tools, so their software causes them to change completely from app to app. And of course, apps communicate…
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I’m encouraging seniors where my Mom (and I) live to wait for 26.1 to upgrade their devices.
I know that “under the hood” is mostly the same (ignoring new features) but the visual changes are hugely confusing to most of my neighbors who have auto upgraded.
At times Apple has introduced features that seem to have been rushed because they wanted something new rather than just making iterative changes. The Liquid Glass seems to be something to show off that didn’t take a massive investment in coding, because they haven’t had as much of the AI stuff that they wanted. Anyone remember the Touch Bar, and feel that they miss it on new MacBooks? Probably not.
I installed 26.0.1 in a VM to check it out. I then upgraded it to 26.1b2 to see the differences.
Other than the large rounded corners and general increase in button size, and of course reduction in legibility, the main issue for me is the huge change in performance and thus battery life issues. There is no excuse for Apple to ship such bad code, other than bad management and misguided priorities.
@gingerbeardman Matt could you clarify, are you saying the performance change was between an OS prior to 26 and 26.0.1, or between 26.0.1 and 26.1b2?
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Performance of 26 in any version (point release, beta, macOS, iOS) is worse than anything before it (macOS 15/14 and iOS 18/17 in my case) on the same device (MBP M1 Pro, MBP M4 Max, iPhone 16 Pro).
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I think this cartoon from the latest New Scientist sums up this topic well..
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After finally updating to 26 (well 26.1, actually) I just noticed that my scroll bars are humongous. Turns out, if you, like me, prefer to always see scroll bars you will be getting a fat scroll bar variant everywhere. If you OTOH select to only show scroll bars when scrolling, you get a much more slender and elegant implementation.
I like showing them always since that serves as a visual cue for when there actually is something to scroll. Since otherwise that’s not always clear. Showing scroll bars also indicates how much of a certain page you are actually seeing at any given time.
I just wish I could have them display always and still get the slender variant. Ideal, in my opinion, would be slender for display that then turns fatter when you get close to make it an easier target to hit.
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When scroll bars went invisible til user scrolls, I tried it and stayed with it.
Just now I tried making scroll bars Always visible and will try it for a while but don’t find them to be so much larger than the ‘on scroll’ version. Maybe there is an Accessibility Setting which makes them larger…
I like your idea of Always Slender with Dock Magnification effect though. I’ll bet there are smart enough people at Apple to make that happen, and maybe as an extra bonus, they could be both bigger and darker at first, then slowly fading to lighter color…
Another regression I notice with the Liquid Glass GUI is the new volume slider.
I get why they would want to unify the Control Center widgets. But this change from centered indicator to slider in the corner results in a) a very small widget compared to the well visible previous indicator and b) removes the quantification. I used to always know that adjusting to just 4 blips would set my volume to a reasonable level for myself in my quiet office. And one or two taps on the volume up/dow keys would quickly get me to exactly my personal default.
Now I no longer have a cue as to if my volume is set that way since the slider offers no increments or tics. The best I can do is check to see that the pill on the slider is roughly where the P is in the MacBook Pro Speakers labels shown above. And even that hack breaks immediately when I connect to speakers or some other audio-in device with another name.
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LOL. That actually would be a “liquid glass” effect that makes sense! Maybe the only one!
That said, I am running Tahoe in a virtual machine, and the wide scrollbars are one of the few things I actually like!
Muscle memory has me looking at the bottom of the screen every time I adjust sound levels.
The Music app is worse, flipping the controls from the top to the bottom. Overlaying controls over the artworks is simply making it harder to see and use. Form over function strikes again.
And one more regression with Liquid Glass, this time on iOS.
In Weather, I used to be able to directly tap on a dot in the location indicator at the bottom in order to directly go to a specific one of my saved locations. Now, it appears I can only tap on the left side of the indicator pill to move backward one by one, or tap on the right side of the pill to move ahead one by one. I cannot anymore see a manner by which to jump to a specific saved location within that pill.
I would prefer they used swipe gestures for this kind of ±1 behavior but still interpreted a tap on a specific dot as the instruction to jump straight to that specific dot.
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There’s an easier way:
Tap the list icon on the lower right to get a list of all your favorite locations. Scroll the list to the desired location and tap. If you want a location not in the list, complete the search area at the bottom of the screen. I think that you’ve always been able to access loctions this way.