There is one way to avoid it. Don’t update your OS. I’d been holding off for the 26.1 releases but you’ve convinced me to avoid this OS set completely.
I’ve been my parents’ primary tech support for years. When they were in their early 80s, I watched as both grew increasingly exasperated by the annual changes Apple pushes out. Menus, settings, and their most used apps changed for dubious usability improvements. Really what’s going on is Apple designers chasing fashion, creating trends that trigger impulse purchases, and generally justifying their ongoing employment. Users actually don’t benefit from having to relearn processes every year.
This constant change for change sake could grow to be a significant issue as the population continues to age. My parents went from each actively using a Mac, iPad, and iPhone to never touching any of them. While we lost my mother to dementia last year, my father who will celebrate his 90th birthday in a few months is still vital and active (we’re planning an Alaska adventure for May) but Apple devices are too intricate and opaque for him. Instead he’s happy with his Kindle and Roku TV.
Agree with you. My Dad had the same problem with the pointless changes and switched to a simpler phone. I doubt I will be upgrading to iOS26 myself and will be looking at one of the new less complex smartphones. Don’t see why I should twist my brain into a pretzel trying to outsmart these never-ending and most dubious design decisions. Really a shame.
macOS settings help restore usability, but heck does it make it ugly — I spot about 4 different filthy grays.
What bugs me about this is that I am now apparently faced with this choice: pretty but unusable vs. usable but ugly. It should be $3T-Apple’s plethora of professional UX experts’ sworn duty to figure out how to give me both at the same time rather than forcing upon me an either/or. This dichotomy is tantamount to admitting UX mission failure.
Apple’s pretentious overpriced goggles failed and instead of moving on, now everybody, even desktop professionals, are being forced to adopt a UX designed for AR goggles and leisure/consumption. @ace is right that this is not going away. And that makes it even more infuriating. Instead of looking forward to an updated macOS with a fresh new appearance, we’re trying to see how far we can delay the inevitable while we exchange tinkering tricks and tips to mitigate the damage. This is not progress. And joy it certainly does not spark either. Shame for the missed opportunity.
You’re certainly welcome to do that, but I don’t think you’re doing yourself any favors.
Liquid Glass will be largely the same for OS 27 and so on. It’s not going away, so skipping OS 26 is merely a delaying tactic.
Unless you plan never to buy another Mac again (which may be out of your control if your current one dies), you will have to use whatever is current when you next upgrade. macOS 15 will never again be installable on a new Mac.
Even if you don’t upgrade your Mac, if you need to buy a new iPhone, iPad, or Apple Watch, it will come with whatever is current then, and although it might work backwards with macOS 15, there’s no guarantee.
In September 2027, macOS 15 will cease to receive security updates, rendering it at least theoretically unsafe to use. The longer you stick with it, the more like there are to be unpatched vulnerabilities, software incompatibilities, and eventually loss of functionality with Web browser security certificates and the like.
You’re suggesting that the cognitive load of adapting to something new is largely the reason to avoid upgrading. Assuming that’s true, the longer you wait to upgrade, the greater the cognitive load—very few people become more technically proficient and adaptable as they age through retirement years. In other words, it will only get harder, so it makes sense to devote the learning time now, while you’re as capable as you ever will be.
It is indeed an issue, and I grasp at the hope that the constantly changing tech ecosystem we’ve created will also create opportunities for companies to provide basic functionality at a more understandable level. As much as Apple tries to create systems for everyone, there are always people on the edges of the audience who won’t be able to keep up. If there are enough of them, we’ll see more apps and devices aimed at those niche markets.
Everyone vs. the edges, eh? I don’t subscribe to this modern tech faith that Apple has it dialed in for the vast majority and that the few for which that doesn’t work are the oddball outliers. Rings more dismissive than optimist to me, assuming that is what you were after. Just because Apple is a hugely profitable megacorp makes them neither infallible nor clairvoyant. And just because we remain hopeful for betterment shouldn’t give them a pass for various missteps along the way.
I’m not saying that Apple necessarily has it dialed in for the vast majority; I’m saying that Apple focuses on the vast majority. There’s a difference between “tries” and “succeeds.”
But in the context of @mark7’s post, where he was talking about his parents having more trouble using Apple devices in their 80s, I think it is safe to say that Apple is not focusing on the needs of that audience. I set my paternal grandmother up with an orange iMac back when those were new. I forget how old she was then, but she was able to do basic email and other things with no problem for a few years. However, well before dementia forced her to move to an assisted living facility, we had to take the iMac away because it just caused stress for her when she could no longer deal with anything that wasn’t exactly the way we’d shown her (and wow, could she mess things up in ways I couldn’t always figure out).
The eventual solution may have to be an abstraction of user interface so different people can engage with devices at their cognitive and experiential level. One size does not fit all when it comes to interface.
Whatever happened to “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”? I stayed on Snow Leopard until the browsers would no longer work on modern web sites. I still have an installation running on a Mac Mini that I connect to with Remote Access for applications that never updated to the latest Apple “improvements”. Looks like I’ll be staying on Sonoma for the foreseeable future. I had hoped we left these eye candy improvements behind when Jony (sic) Ive left.
Within a day of updating to Liquid Glass, I was not liking it, so I combed through Settings and used a lot of the settings mentioned by Adam “improve” it. Then, in another TB thread about liquid glass, one person, suggested a period of adjustment might be needed, so I switched back to the defaults, and have been adapting.
I owned the first Mac and was a zealous advocate of its graphical user interface (GUI) over the PC. As a programmer (as we were called in those days) and interested in GUIs I learned about the principles behind the Mac GUI from the writings of Bruce Tognazzini and Don Norman. To me they were the giants who laid down many principles in the new field of user interface design. So when I read an article about Liquid Glass on their website (though not by them), it held a lot of weight for me and made logical sense.
The arguments in this article convinced me that no amount time spent adapting to liquid glass, will be as good as just minimizing it as much as possible right now. So Adam’s article will be a big help in tailoring out what’s wrong with Liquid Glass.
I find it disturbing that Apple is releasing this “update” when there is so much changed that does not improve the user experience. As the old but tru comment states, “Just because you can does not mean that you should make these changes”.
Thanks to ACE for the suggestions on methods to mitigate this change.
I haven’t seen Liquid Glass yet, just like I have not tried Apple Vision or Apple Intelligence. On one hand, I really should try them to see how the technology is changing. But on the other, it’s not easy now to find find someplace where I could spend an hour or more testing those features to see if they would work for me.
Just before the Mac came on the scene, I drove up to a long-gone computer store a few files away to do just that. I sat down and tested the keyboard and tried typing with the three-finger commands required back then. I am a fast but erratic touch typist and quickly found that the cumbersome commands slowed typing to a crawl. I had set out to buy a computer, but the ones they had did not work for me. Several months later, I took my younger daughter, then 6 or 7, to the Boston Computer and watched her sit down and use one of the first Macs on display. She took to it swiftly and easily. Her experience – and my own testing of the Mac – sold me on the Mac.
There are 3 or 4 Apple Stores within a dozen miles of me in the Boston area, but they are busy places and I haven’t seen a place to sit down and test out the new features. I’m an old guy, and I’ve had enough experience with Macs to know things can go wrong that – if I’m lucky – may take hours or days to fix. I also know that my eyes don’t like tiny type on small screens. After cataract surgery, I no longer need glasses to see the world, but I need reading glasses for anything closer than two or three feet from my eyes. And having lived long enough to learn my limits, I’m cautious about adopting new technology without having a chance to learn how it works.
The most disappointing thing about these changes is that we already went through a period with transparency in MacOS that was (thankfully) abandoned. Seems Apple didn’t learn from that era of stripes, invisible menu bars, and illegible drop-down menus.
Most 3d party apps misbehave when you turn on a lot of these accessibility settings, especially in iOS. Lots of text gets cut off, menus get truncated, and things just look ugly. And many web sites are another awful experience with tiny fonts that the system can’t enlarge.
I primarily just enable Reduce Transparency on all devices. On the Mac, I also drop the display resolution on my monitor to get bigger text.
I wish Apple would address readability across all of their first-party apps. Final Cut Pro has some particularly awful tiny, dark purple text and icons on dark gray backgrounds.
Thanks for a great topic. For me, it just shows Apple, while claiming to be very attentive to accesability issues, and to a good degree they are, they seem to prize beauty over functionality. As someone with eye issues it is so frustrating to try to be able to read items that are far too light against bright backgrounds that seem pretty but are horrendous to read even using the accessibility resources.
I’ve a 2024 m4 Mini, still on Sequoia. But…
I also have “an experimental copy” of Tahoe on an external SSD.
The liquid glass paradigm doesn’t do much for me. I wouldn’t be surprised to see it “melt away” into something else after one or two more OS iterations.
I tend to stick with things I like, including OS versions.
My 2018 Mini is now moved over to “the back table”, and it STILL runs Mojave – the OS it originally came with when I took it out of the box six+ years ago…
Over the last two days, Acam’s article has gotten write-ups in Daring Fireball and 9 to 5 Mac, recommending it as the place to go to mitigate some of the effects of Liquid Glass:
My experience was that after a log out/log back in, all the third-party menu bar controls disappeared. Quitting and restarting the various apps made no difference. Boolean to NO, Number One, make it so.
as stated, THEN turn it on for control center with
defaults write com.apple.ControlCenter com.apple.SwiftUI.DisableSolarium -bool NO
then it can be off for everything else but control center will now be useable.
As far as the menubar extras go, it looks like the only ones remaining are the ones you have turned on which are from Apple, but you can turn at least some others on individually if you can figure out what they are called. For example, to get the OneDrive menubar item you can use
defaults write com.microsoft.OneDrive com.apple.SwiftUI.DisableSolarium -bool NO
and then log out and in again of course. A good place to look for the names is in ~/Library/Preferences
Even so after all this, some things will still be not nice - like things that layer over windows might not have their correct background and might be difficult to read or use.
It remains to be seen how useable/workable this is, but it sure looks a lot better.
