Apple's Liquid Glass is prep work for AR interfaces, not just a design refresh
omc345.substack.com328 points by lightningcable 3 days ago
328 points by lightningcable 3 days ago
> The move from skeuomorphic design in iOS 6 to the stark minimalism of iOS 7 sparked similar debates about usability and aesthetic merit. [...] Yet within two years, the entire industry had adopted flat design principles, from Google's Material Design to Microsoft's Metro language.
That's quite a rewrite of history considering Windows Phone and Microsoft's Metro interface launched a full three years before Apple's move to a flat design in iOS 7.
There's a weird amnesia in tech journalists that occurs when Apple does something and it's suddenly the first time it's been done. My hunch is that it's because they use iPhones as their daily drivers and don't really use other devices except in passing. So for them it is new and the first time it's been done.
> tech journalists
> don't really use other devices
Sometimes I feel like I might as well read the spec sheets myself than read “reviews” written by these people
I think if a layman picks a niche, and really goes into it, then the layman has a fair chance beating the professional in that specific niche. So, you are not wrong with this feeling at all. What professionals have in their favor is a higher level overview of the subject, and experience with similar subjects. Usually this means that while they might not know a niche in an out by heart, they can discover it very quickly, or consider things that are not fitting into that specific niche.
Also, these journalists might not be professionals at all.
That is also true in medicine, as a side note. If you have a specific combination of conditions, or a rare condition, you will know more about it than doctors. The good ones know this and accept it. The bad ones are offended you know more than they do in this area – or simply go into denial.
In the end, each body is a niche, which each one is uniquely positioned to know better than anyone else. But it’s hard to accept, for medical personal sometimes, and often for the patients themselves. They tend to want the doctor to be the all-knowing god.
Yes, medicine was specifically what I was thinking about! And it's a touchy subject, just as you mention. A patient, a layman, isn't supposed to know more than the doctor. It's a delicate situation.
Take all human knowledge as a whole pie. Out of that is, the experts only know 1/100 of a slice. We maybe experts in some minute context, yet there are so many that know so much more when removed from that context.
Or rephrased, that Person who has to deal with something 80 percent of their life knows more than the person having to deal with it 20 percent of their life.
Reviews in any medium are entertainment whether it’s film, music, games, hardware, food. Ultimately it’s someone’s subjective opinion on something. If you actually want to be happy with your choices your best bet is to find a reviewer with the same tastes and preferences as you and follow their train of thought. If you hate horror movies, you’re not going to enjoy “bring her back” no matter what the critics say.
Most of the time, I don't think it's subjective, I just think the reviewer has a conflict of interest. Especially pre-release products.
and thats why "influencers" are big
Easy way to outsource your thinking. Next step in this epopee will be/is already GenAI.
You can’t do all of your “thinking” yourself. You’re not a lone, isolated subsistence farmer. People have been reviewing things for other people for centuries, and it’s been a valuable service.
You are not wrong, but one thing is thinking about what others said and thought previously, generating maybe new ideas, or maybe not, but at least making them yours. Just parroting or blindly believe what others says, it's a tad different.
I can't relate to their behaviour, so even if they had the same taste i would not want to be associated.
you might not have found the ones that like the same stuff has you just yet
You know, thats true.. I wonder how much pain one has to endure before finding the right one.
It seems like they do use other devices, but the reviews never make sense, or they focus on the spec sheet too much. Since like 2009, the most talked about smartphone in those tech magazines was always some random thing like an HTC Plus+ Maxx 25.
The press releases from Apple say "first time" and the journos paste it into the article.
You see this flippin’ everywhere. That song you like and think is new? Probably a cover or sample that goes back decades.
We have an inherent recency bias, totally natural of course. But this is where you do journalism and research stuff.
Apple however often is the first to do a new thing successfully however. Earlier products often did not achieve enough success to be viable or just in a niche. A lot of labor lies in the path from idea to a viable product.
Defining success is hard then. If they go with a certain design trend and then change it, was that success? Just because of widespread adoption? “Enough success “ is also hard to pin down. What’s a thing Apple has done successfully first?
With a product it's pretty simple: sale numbers, market share, adoption rate. The iPhone is just the best example. Sure there were already mobile internet devices out there like the Nokia N800 I owned myself, and android was already in development, but Apple put out a mass-market compatible modern smartphone first.
Like what? No they aren't they wait for stuff to be proven in the market then do it the majority of the time. Face id is just them buying the company who made xbox kinekt etc.
> Like what?
Like smartphones with an entire interface focused on multitouch. There wasn’t another one of those “proven in the market” before the iPhone.
Or, you know, the first mass-marketed personal computer with a GUI, and the first successful one with a mouse (Lisa, Mac).
The Kinect example is nonsensical, it wasn’t as an authentication device. Even if they used the same team and technology, so much more went into it (like the Secure Enclave) than simply repackaging what already existed.
Just look at the size of Kinect and compare it with faceid embedded in a phone. The word “just” is doing a lot of work in the parent comment.
Got anything more recent than the invention of the iPhone? That was almost 20 years ago now....
I do, but don’t really feel like nitpicking what counts or not with arbitrary rules we make up as the conversation goes along. I chose those examples deliberately because the conversation was about the company’s history and they are pretty unambiguous in their importance. Going in circles with “oh, that doesn’t count because it was not as recent as this undefined period of time I have my head” or any other restrictions is not interesting, and I don’t really care about defending Apple, I was simply providing a factual rebuttal.
> That's quite a rewrite of history considering Windows Phone and Microsoft's Metro interface launched a full three years before Apple's move to a flat design in iOS 7.
Even Android had moved to a flatter design pattern 1-2 years before iOS. While Material Design wouldn't be released until 2014, you can see them moving in that direction from Gingerbread to Jelly Bean, particularly when looking at the system components and first-party apps, since this was before the concept of a unified design language across third-party apps had been formalized.
At the time Apple introduced their flat design in June 2013, they were the odd ones out. In fact, I remember a Daring Fireball article posted in spring 2013 (a few months before WWDC) praising Apple for leading the pack in flat design, and HN excoriating it for making what was at the time a clearly preposterous claim.
> Even Android had moved to a flatter design pattern 1-2 years before iOS. While Material Design wouldn't be released until 2014, you can see them moving in that direction from Gingerbread to Jelly Bean
Indeed:
https://www.behance.net/gallery/4315369/Google-Project-Kenne...
Oh that was a beautiful time for Google interfaces. google had subtle and clean lines. Things worked well and we weren't overwhelmed with advertising let alone AI Slop.
Yes, that was absolute peak Guber live-revisionism-in-action and when I basically stopped reading him entirely.
Please link said DF article praising Apple for leading the pack in flat design.
Did you try searching for it? The first result on Google for "daringfireball.net flat design 2013" is https://daringfireball.net/2013/01/the_trend_against_skeuomo...
Tack on site:news.ycombinator.com, and you'll find the top comment too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5081618
Cheers.
Gruber does mention Metro:
The lack of skeuomorphic effects and almost extreme flatness of the “modern” (née Metro) Windows 8 interface is remarkably forward-thinking. It’s meant to look best on retina-caliber displays, not the sub-retina displays it debuted on (with Windows Phone 7.x) or the typical PC displays of today. That said, I think there’s a sterility to Metro that prevents it from being endearing. It epitomizes “flat” design, but I don’t think it’s great design.
FWIW, I always liked the Windows Phone OS design. Its text first minimalism was refreshingly useful. It was a big leap ahead from Windows Mobile. I think it had something worthwhile to offer.
For sure, so many of its features were far ahead of the competition. Sleek minimilist UX, live tiles, Qi wireless charging, kids mode, Cortana, search within settings (so simple yet no one did it at the time). Continuum let you plug your phone into a monitor and use it like a full Windows desktop (many years before Samsung Dex and other similar efforts on Android). "Universal apps" that could run on desktop/mobile/web. Sucks that Microsoft fumbled it so bad.
Continuum seems to be released in 2015. Motorola Atrix that had desktop mode was released in 2011
Let's not also tell op that I was using Qi Wireless charging on my Google Nexus 4 in 2012.
Nokia Lumia phones launched a year before that.
What I was getting at is that the Windows phone wasn't revolutionary to include this as op was implying, certainly wasn't saying that the Nexus 4 was the first.
its really sucks to develop windows phone at the time
I guess MS really learn it lesson and go ham on opensource ecosystem
if its today MS that launch windows phone, I think they can take off
Still no. It failed due to lack of apps. Apple and Android have twenty years of app ecosystem behind them at this point. If launched today, it will still fail due to lack of apps.
Most of those apps have been completely rebuilt in the last couple of years. Everyone does that regularly. They could easily add a new platform at that point.
They could if they made the same looks with an underlying Android OS, just like Huawei and all the Chinese brands which have been barred from Google Android.
Then there’s no point? Just make a launcher? (They did make a launcher. Nobody used it either.)
All I really wanted from the Windows phone was the ability to pull up powershell and run some simple scripts :(
Beyond just the design, it was also an amazingly efficient OS. I had a cheap Lumia that had much lower specs than contemporary Samsung and iPhone flagship smartphones (500MB vs 1GB+ RAM IIRC) yet it was amazingly smooth and responsive, much smoother than the other two. Android especially, and to a lesser extent iOS, would get laggy and stutter while scrolling after a few major version updates, but Windows Phone stayed snappy even after the phone was 3+ years old.
This also made the battery life much better. (Although whenever I mentioned this, the usual retort I got was, of course the battery life would be better if there were no apps to consume it...)
It was "efficient" by leaving almost no memory for user applications. I used two phones with 512 MBs of RAM each, one Nokia-something (620 or 625), and the other Asus-something (completely forgot the model, but it was on Android 4 and then 5).
WP would offload applications from RAM as soon as you switched into another application. It was impossible to multitask — you're writing a comment on a message board, switch into a dictionary to quickly look up a word, switch back... and the state is gone. If you're lucky and the application was written correctly, you would only have to wait for 5-10 seconds before you get your half written comment back. If not (which was the norm for the stuff I used), well...
The second Android phone had none of these problems, not remotely to the same degree.
It was such a widespread problem that it quickly became a meme on forums.
It seems like iOS is still fairly aggressive in killing background apps, a dozen years after the Nokia 625? I rarely feel like I can be sure that if I go off to look something up, that I can be confident that a half-written comment will still be there when I go back to it?
Huh, interesting, I've never had good luck maintaining drafts on mobile devices so very early on I got into the habit of drafting them in something like a mail or notes app. Sometimes I still slip up and start writing drafts in an app itself and then lose them if I get distracted for a minute, though it's more often because apps are too aggressive in refreshing their feeds (the LinkedIn app being a prime example).
The Lumia was such a great deal back in the day. An amazing camera for the time, a great UI, comfy to use and supported crashes as a champion. The last bits of classic Nokia legendary hardware. It's a shame that the Microsoft ecosystem was so limited in apps.
I would separate Nokia Lumia and Microsoft Lumia (the last batch). I was so happy with my Nokia Lumia that I eventually upgraded to a newer Microsoft Lumia phone. What a disappointment it was.
Windows Metro UI was fantastic. It was leagues better than Android for sure. It was a very different take than iOS as well.
Honestly, it's a huge loss for all of us. I always felt like the U.S. government should have blocked Google from making Android "free." It killed the market for all non-iOS operating systems. We'd have a much richer world if all horizontally integrated OSes had to charge a licensing fee, instead of using a search monopoly to kill competition in other markets (and then using said free OS to further extend their search monopoly).
I also blame Google for killing Blackberry. If Google is blocked from using its search monopoly to make Android free, imagine the world we would have.
Android, for many years, was actively bad, but it was also a free OS that phone companies could grab. And the rest is history.
Nobody stopped Samsung or Microsoft from supporting android apps. Virtualization is pretty much present in all the phones.
The reality is that they all wanted what Apple had - a walled garden to charge exorbitant amounts. Only Google had the foresight to leverage open source (not free).
Blackberry killed Blackberry. Were you alive during that period of time or did you just read about it? Blackberry was so slow to react to the changing technology and the demand for a (decent)full touch device(the Storm 1-2 was trash). I guess BlackBerry either had their head up their ass or were afraid of killing off their biggest money maker, a phone with a Keyboard that the industry no longer wanted. By the time they had a possible candidate ready with the QNX based platform(2012) it was way too late.
Palm and Nokia did have very good OS's at the time and well HP killed Palm and then Microsoft Nokia(those two turkeys)
Android wasn't great but Google iterated very quickly and had the clout to go with it at the time.
You didn't happen to try an app called Nothing but Crickets did you? I made a whole $4 from advertising.com from that on WP7. It was a single button and when you clicked on it, the sound of crickets would play. I always hoped someone would use it in a meeting. I didn't care about the money. I just wanted to make people laugh.
Microsoft gave up on a phone operating system far too early.
Nah they just joined the race too late. Remember that Steve Ballmer was laughing at and dismissing the iPhone when it launched ("it's too expensive, no one will use it, it doesn't even have a keyboard"). Microsoft continued pushing Windows Mobile at that time and even spent $1B+ acquiring Danger and releasing Kin (remember that disaster?). Then Windows Phone 7 finally launched in 2010 and was rebooted again in 2012 with Windows Phone 8. By that time the mobile OS market was a duopoly, and neither users nor developers nor manufacturers cared for a third platform.
When discussing disasters, it’s impossible to ignore BlackBerry. They crafted solid devices, and their downfall from a hardware company is a tragic one. They grew too big and failed to adapt in times of “war” with a diminishing market share. However, I firmly believe they could have maintained a loyal user base over the years, at least large enough to allow them to fight another day.
Their user interface was a true gem - beautiful yet functional. The devices were incredibly fast, and the optical cursor was a revelation. I genuinely believe the way the trackpad cursor functions on the iPad is inspired by BlackBerry’s design.
I always think about BlackBerry as another Kodak.
They owned their space in their time, nothing came close, and then, one day, times have changed and their product become obsolete. I don't blame them.
It's cool to sit on HN and think everyone should pivot on a yearly basis, but in reality it rarely happens for companies that big. It takes a lot of time and effort to change to course of a tanker ship, and when you're in position that you have a product that is precisely on point, competition can't touch you, the most reasonable thing to do is just not to fuck things up... and then it's too late. Sometimes. Most of the time it's the winning strategy.
If anything, Nokia was distaster.
I blame them. When you have that kind of money you can not fuck things up and invent new things.
My only experience with BB was awful, though it was at the perfectly wrong time. I was responsible for developing an app for the Storm and it was really the worst of both worlds.
Storm was so funny to me. My lawyer older cousin got one excitedly and it felt like such a dinosaur compared to year old iPhones.
The lawyers I knew wrote tons of emails. Touch screens of earlier iphones were just not as good for writing long formally worded replies.
It would be like trying to write code on an iPhone today.
The storm was virtual keyboard only, and a markedly worse one where you had to click in the whole screen. Worst aspect of touchscreen keyboard (finger placement, no keyfinding haptics, still need to look directly at it) with the added slowness of needing to click the biggest possible button - one the size of a whole phone.
Storm was a very un-Blackberry phone and objectively awful. It should never have been released.
They were already working on Windows Phone when Ballmer said that. That’s why he said it. They were targeting a lower cost segment.
Android, courtesy of being open source, was just able to move much faster
I think if they had just open sourced the OS, like Android, instead of killing it, Windows Phone could have been a decent Android competitor
I think so. Heck, why don’t they open source it now? Although my guess is it’s a lot of low level C++ that I wouldn’t touch with a 10 foot pole. But I’ve been surprised before. What if they used dotnet?
I suspect it shared quite a bit of code with the regular windows codebase, so open sourcing it would have exposed a lot of proprietary code (and not necessarily only their own — there may have been licensed bits that they would not even have been allowed to open source).
Aye; MS wanted to make easier porting apps into their platform from Android and iOS with project astoria and islandwood but they abandon both at some point.
Apps availability was the main issue - there were people who baked their own 3rd party apps for instagram, snapchat and vine. Google on the other hand "fought" with MS by blocking access to YT from their app on the devices - because unsurprisingly ads in videos weren't playing on it. Only Opera released their browser for this platform - Mozilla had short lived Fennec in early alphas.
The OS updates were handled by device manufacturers/service providers and release times differ from one company to another. That could be also another issue leading to platform's failure.
Version fragmentation was also another thing; devices running WP7 couldn't upgrade to WP8 - these had a special 7.8 release which bring some features from 8.0. Same thing happen with WP8 devices - the top-most could get W10M while mid and low-end ones would stuck on 8.1. I tried installing 10 on my Lumia 1320 - it made phone ran hot.
Metro interface was perfect on mobile devices and tiles were an amazing middle ground between icons and widgets at that time. Apple pick up quite recently that concept allowing icons to be expanded into widgets serving particular bits of information. Overall the OS interface focused exactly on displaying needed information instead of delivery form for it; this was achieved by big font and modest use of icons within e.g settings pages. Windows 8/.1 failed miserably on desktop as we know - it wouldn't be as bad if start menu and desktop paradigm would remain and only visually system would receive a flat "lifting" as it did with Windows 10. But at that time it was too late.
YouTube stomping out the good 3rd party apps on Vision Pro killed the device for me (along with it being heavy enough to give me neck aches after a few sessions of use)
The fragmentation was equally worse on the dev side. You couldn’t develop WP8 apps on Win7 and vice versa no WP7 apps on Win8. The same happened with Win8.1 and Win10. So you had 4 different phone OS completely incompatible.
At the time I was working on WP apps for a customer and needed 3 different OS installed to work on their apps.
Different strokes for different folks, I guess. I hated that the UI was just rectangles in a grid with a single fill color. Few icons. The customization options were really poor from what I can remember, making it so that everyone's UI looked almost identical.
To be fair, I was getting seriously fed up by the poor software support at the same time which may have amplified my resentment.
Definitely my favorite phone ever was the Lumia 1020. I loved the OS, and I loved the phone itself with its focus on the camera.
Sadly, I was able to get it in 2015 and by then it was too late. I don’t think any phone since then has hooked me like that.
My take was that Metro was flat to leverage finally-computationally-and-energy efficient scaling hardware. All design elements were simple primitives with overlaid text, with limited texturing.it was a design of the hardware of the time.
Totally agreed. I really enjoyed using my Windows phone! Even the tablet software was great (might still be too, but I haven't used one in years)
Luckily it is immortalized in GTA5, when playing as Trevor at least. I found it the easiest phone to use in that game.
iPeople reject your reality and substitute their own.
When Apple makes a mistake, it was really a genius 4D chess move and everyone will copy them and also it wasn't really a mistake, we just have to trust the plan.
It's not just that. When Apple adopts a trend or implement a modern feature/flow that they are not the first to, like flat UIs, wearables, VR, etc they do put in earnest effort to polish and distinguish their experience compared to others. Something their competitors don't put a ton of weight in. This pushes people in general to believe that the "Apple way" is somewhat better just because it's different or at least has some mysterious merit. iPeople even more so tan the general public.
I read a lot of Apple blogs and they all complain about Apple all the time. They like Apple products, but they aren't stupid. For example, nobody thinks that Siri is a 4D chess move, everyone knows that Siri sucks.
that's what iPeople-haters like to say. people panned the trashcan pro. people panned the butterfly keyboard. people panned the removal of sd card reader from laptops. people call out apple, but that doesn't fit the iPeople-haters narrative, so it's best to just ignore it
> people panned the trashcan pro. people panned the butterfly keyboard. people panned the removal of sd card reader from laptops.
Those things all sucked and deserved to be panned, but we all remember plenty of people defending them too.
Actually. The charge port for the mouse on the bottom is genius. In this essay I will.....
"I suppose you still want a floppy drive too" and then they re-added the SD card and HDMI
Ah, overly broad stereotypes, you totally can't go wrong with them. May they never change
Yep. This is another semi-fawning, apologistic article full of made-up assertions.
It ignores the fact that there has been a welcome step back from the derelict wasteland of "flat design" that users have endured for far too long. Flat design is often cited as a reaction to absurd levels of skeuomorphism, which Apple certainly WAS a leader in. Remember the "felt" surfaces of Game Center, the "paint" upon which was inexplicably a control? And the "leather" binding of Notes?
Then there's this: "In AR, visual affordances work differently. A button that casts realistic shadows and responds to virtual lighting feels more "real" when floating in your living room than a flat, colored rectangle."
That makes it a SHITTY control, which will get lost in the visual noise of the real environment. This UI sucks for the same reason that sports-stats graphics that are tracked onto real surfaces in TV coverage suck: They don't stand out. It's that simple.
So after years of "flat" design where nothing was demarcated as a control and users were apparently supposed to click on every pixel and every character on the screen in a hunt for hidden goodies, this article celebrates Apple's plan to create the same problem in AR using OVERLY-decorated controls.
Not to mention the stupidity of crippling computer, tablet, and phone UI for the sake of a "VR" UI. This isn't just dumb from a practical standpoint, but from a technical one as well. There's no reason that the control library can't be rendered differently on different devices. So, if this (admittedly poorly-substantiated opinion piece) is right about the motivation behind Apple's exhumation of the "transparent" UI fad that died 20 years ago, we can only lament the end of desktop usability... which Windows flushed vigorously with Microsoft's brain-dead attempt to dumb its UI down for touchscreens years ago.
Lucky for you, Valve has sold millions of SteamDecks. The result is that the majority of mainstream Windows software now works well in Proton == Wine on Linux.
And despite people constantly whining about it, GNOME is ultra fast, has great shortcuts, and it looks kinda like the pinnacle of UI design, which IMHO was Windows XP.
I agree that XP was the top of Windows's UI evolution (in "Classic" mode, not the default Fischer-Price motif).
GNOME doesn't look anything like Windows XP, though. Not the design language and not the actual layout of the UI.
Yeah, I distinctly remember calling iOS 7 a copy of Android design when it came out, in a bad way. I want an iPhone, not an Android.
This is also a history rewrite. The recent MS UIs in at least the last 5 years are doing exactly the same thing. Fairy sure I saw some Windows AR demo about it a few years back.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Mixed_Reality
The Win 10 UI was starting to be adapted for AR back in 2015...
This is happening a lot. If you talk to ChatGPT about any company it has quite a rosy picture to paint of just about everyone. Probably trying to convince companies to integrate advertising.
Also, no evidence that Liquid Glass isn't a bad UI for AR too.
John Carmack writes:
Translucent UI is usually a bad idea outside of movies and non-critical game interfaces.
The early moments of joy are fleeting, while the usability issues remain. Windows and Mac have both been down this road before, but I guess a new generation of designers needs to learn the lessons anew. Sigh.
All of the same issues apply in AR as well. Outside of movies, people do not work out their thoughts on windowpanes or transparent “whiteboards” because of the exact same legibility issues.
Would you prefer a notebook of white sheets, or hundreds of different blurry image backgrounds?
As a visionOS user (somewhat) what is so funny about all of this is that the translucency effects in visionOS are significantly toned down compared to liquid glass for this specific reason. The glass is heavily diffused, you can maybe get an idea of what is behind (a person moving, a television thats turned on) but nothing even close to the level that I have experienced in the iPadOS beta
Similarly, I am perfectly content with the visionOS UI, and yet I turned off the iOS 26 transparency after maybe five minutes of using the Music app.
Wait, that’s an option? My god.
Just found the setting…thank you! It was actually driving me crazy. There’s still a bunch of really weird, unnecessary UX changes but this helps a lot.
I have to disagree with Carmack here.
The evidence suggests this isn't AR prep at all. I watched Apple's 20-minute design presentation, and their design team makes the same point repeatedly: Liquid Glass has very narrow guidelines and specific constraints.
Here's the actual design problem Apple solved. In content apps, you have a fundamental trade-off: you have a few controls that need to be instantly accessible, but you don't want them visually distracting from the content. Users are there to consume videos, photos, articles - not to stare at your buttons. But the controls still have to be there when needed.
Before Liquid Glass, your least intrusive option was backdrop blur or translucent pastel dimming overlays. Apple asked: can we make controls even less distracting? Liquid Glass lets you thread this needle even better. It's a pretty neat trick for solving this specific constraint.
So you'll feel like you're seeing Liquid Glass "everywhere" not because Apple applied it broadly, but because of selection bias. The narrow use case Apple designed this for just happens to be where you spend 80% of your phone time: videos, photos, reading messages. You're information processing, not authoring.
Apple's actual guidelines are clear: only a few controls visible at once, infrequent access pattern, only on top of rich content. The criticism assumes they're redesigning everything when they explicitly documented the opposite. People are reacting to marketing tone instead of reading what Apple's design team actually built.
[1] https://peoplesgrocers.com/en/writing/liquid-glass-explained
> Users are there to consume videos, photos, articles - not to stare at your buttons
But if I want to use the buttons, that necessitates that I see the buttons first in order to use them. If I don't need to see a button, the button probably shouldn't be there at all.
It's not the worst design I've ever seen, but it does feel like they've swung a bit too far in the "users want to focus on the content" direction. The tools to interact with the content are also an important part of the interface and if you can't see them clearly they're not very usable.
Not necessarily. Given how most mobile UX design operates today, in most apps there’ll just be a single glassy hamburger button that opens a (much more legible) menu. You don’t need to read a hamburger button; you just need to know it’s there as a tap target.
Honestly, I think the iPadOS enablement of toplevel app menus + addition of multi-key in-app-menu-action completions to macOS Spotlight, is presaging an iPhone that has a physical “hamburger button” that opens the app’s menu [and pops open the keyboard, to quick-access menu items by key.] Then there’ll be no need for an on-screen hamburger button at all, other than as a fallback for old iPhones that don’t have the hardware button.
> Apple's actual guidelines are clear: only a few controls visible at once, infrequent access pattern, only on top of rich content.
> The criticism assumes they're redesigning everything when they explicitly documented the opposite.
Does Control Center fit those guidelines for applying Liquid Glass ?
It doesn't look like Apple has as much restraint as you're giving them credit for.
I don’t think control center actually uses the liquid glass elements. They don’t respond to accessibility options like reduce transparency, for one thing.
> their design team makes the same point repeatedly: Liquid Glass has very narrow guidelines and specific constraints
Often, UX design rhetoric floats way beyond reality. For now, a lot of Liquid Glass is grossly applied. It's only dev beta 1, so it's likely it'll improve over time... especially if they launch an AR product.
>Before Liquid Glass, your least intrusive option was backdrop blur or translucent pastel dimming overlays.
Or an outline, like gameboy emulators have been doing forever
I dunno, I find the blur more visually distracting than a hard stop.
I would rather borders and color contrast to create visual separation anyway. That approach takes up less space. White space takes makes your UI less dense, but blur is even worse.
Either way… how does that relate to my keyboard being transparent? I don’t need to see a completely illegible blur of the colors behind my keyboard.
I just turned on the “reduce transparency” setting and it’s much better.
I'm not necessarily a fan of Apple's design, but I want to add that when you have floating header bars it cuts down screen real estate and makes the UI feel more claustrophobic. Making it semi-transparent helps that significantly.
There are usability reasons for this too - for instance, even if it's blurred, a hint of what content is behind the bar helps the user know when they've neared some new content or when to stop scrolling, or whether there's more content above/below the unobscured viewport.
> Translucent UI is usually a bad idea outside of movies and non-critical game interfaces.
Reading the article's claims about translucent UI being ideal for AR, all I could think about was how bad this roadside traffic sign would be if it was white text printed on translucent glass. https://images.app.goo.gl/MU4kJmWZ8ogNGAD9A
Assuming the information a daily-use AR headset is presenting is important, it needs to be instantly legible to be useful. I guess my counter to the article would be images of "Roadside traffic signs as re-imagined in Apple's Liquid Glass." Would showing an intersection with a Liquid Glass stop sign and a car crashed into the side of another be too much?
I agree. Apple apologists keep saying that Apple will tweak the transparency a bit to improve contrast. And I am thinking that this shit does not need any transparency at all!
> Would you prefer a notebook of white sheets, or hundreds of different blurry image backgrounds?
Weird tangent, but I used tracing paper over piece of graph paper for notes for a while. I liked it because I could use the graph paper for drawing my figures or align my text, but then have something more aesthetically pleasing and nice for reading after. I find reading on graph paper annoying, due to the vertical lines.
Anyway, I can’t think of any way that a transparent OS window could be similarly helpful.
> I find reading on graph paper annoying, due to the vertical lines.
You might get on with a Whitelines pad[0]?
[0] https://www.whitelinespaper.com/product/engineering-pad-8-5-...
Oh, that is neat. These days I’ve just settled on a regular lined notebook (no graphs) because my figures don’t need to be so precise (no more fields-and-waves lectures for me).
Liquid glass looks great on the "Meet Liquid Glass" video. Implemention feels wrong. I think it was rushed. Video has some selective background/font color combinations.
Two points stand out in that demo video:
- most of the close look examples are on very simple buttons with a single geometric shapes, like ">" or "□". Those will be legible even in pretty extreme conditions, and we can't expect real world applications to be mostly composed of those.
Imagine the screen at 11:51 with a "Select" as the button text instead of the geometrical icons. It wouldn't be great.
- text is only presented on very low contrast areas. When scrolling the elephant picture around 9:30 to show the title go dark -> light for instance, it's a switch between a very pale background to a very saturated one, and they stop the scrolling when the title is against the darkest part of the image, where it's the most legible.
It's not just the implementation IMHO, in a real application you can't adjust every screen and interaction to only hit the best absolute conditions to make Liquid Glass look good. The whole idea behind it is just harder to look good in real world, short of giving up and going for very low transparency.
Big exception is aviation HUDs that are much closer to AR than conventional workspaces. In HUDs, everything is overlaid with bright green lines. It must be visible in day/night all sorts of conditions. But Apple's take on an overlay GUI isn't like this at all.
Yeah because these bright green lines are obviously not aesthetically pleasing enough for Apple.
>Translucent UI is usually a bad idea outside of movies and non-critical game interfaces.
We're taking about Apple here, who prioritize aesthetics over everything else, shipping a defective keyboard design for 5 years straight just to shave 1 millimeter of thickness on the laptop.
It needs to 'wow' people in the Apple Store in terms of looks and feel, usability be dammed.
I thought the touch bar was even worse than the butterfly keys...
I put off upgrading my personal MacBook for years after work issued me a MacBook with the touch bar. Such a usability nightmare for the sake of eye candy. That was a long seven years.
You'd rather go 7 years without upgrading, than buy a computer without an apple on it?
There was a Lenovo and an ASUS and an Acer in between but those all went in the graveyard pile before their second year was up and I had to keep resorting to the 2011 Macbook.
And that's counting the extra ~year I got out of the Lenovo after having to replace the fans.
Having user serviceable parts is nice but having parts that last 14 years is better. If there was a brand that did both, that's what I'd buy.
I can't concur. Growing up poor, I've only owned the cheapest Acers and HPs and none of them ever died on me. They're still at my parents place chugging along.
Later I switched to Lenovo when I got money and still no issues. Meanwhile all my mates with 2016-2018 era Macbooks have had endless issues, that they swore off ever buying Apple.
Anecdotal stories can swing in both directions, that's not proof of anything.
Yeah, I'm more tempted on believing the other takes on it
That basically is just a way of making people upgrade their iPhone
I get the legibility argument, but if you want to make an AR device that’s safe to use in _any_ context, you just can’t occlude the environment. People would have accidents because of that - as drivers, but also while walking or just bumping into things while putting something in the fridge.
For walls of text you can still opt out of this and use a less translucent material.
A semitransparent glass pane with text sitting in front of my face while I'm walking (let alone driving!) would be hazardous. Anything that's taking the focus of your vision away from what's in front of you while you're using coordination is a hazard, plain and simple. Would you drive with a smudge over part of your glasses?
It's not about transparency, it's about not using AR and multitasking in the real world. The purpose of AR in a headset isn't to free up your hands so you can read the group chat while you drive or walk, it's to make UIs that can't feasibly exist with a screen alone.
Like sibling comment wrote, yes that’s a thing. My car has a HUD and it works great. AR doesn’t have to be your whole FOV either.
I‘m multitasking either way, glancing down on the phone or watch for every notification.
Your HUD isn't simulating a solid object floating in space.
If you want to hold a poster board in front of your face while driving, that's your prerogative, but that doesn't mean car or device manufacturers should design their interfaces with the assumption that you're being reckless. AR doesn't exist to fill the role of a smart watch and it never has (or Apple would have discontinued theirs when the Vision Pro came out).
I mean I HAVE that in my car. It uses a heads up display that shows the music that’s playing and my mph and whether the auto lane assist is engaged, and my cruise control settings. I find that extremely useful while driving. Done correctly that’s totally appropriate.
And I bet your HUD doesn't put a background behind any of the (very minimal) text or icons that it shows you. Mine doesn't. HUDs show information in front of your face that you need to drive. If you didn't have the HUD you'd be looking at the instrument cluster to see your speed. The car in front of you isn't fighting to be visible through the border of a push notification.
HUDs were originally developed for fighter planes, i.e. exactly the situation where the operator has to keep looking at important stuff outside.
That's unfortunate because it would make it extremely difficult to implement adblocking in AR (as in, blocking ads from the real world).
how would that even work? what ads do you see in the real world?
Billboards, posters on bus stops, etc?
Imagine watching TV while you have your AR glasses on, and blocking ads there.
or youtube ones lol
Yep, I agree. I call this the “cup of tea” problem - it’s important not to go smacking over your freshly brewed tea because it’s occluded.
Carmack is wrong. Sometimes super smart people are wrong.
As someone who uses an exterior sliding glass door as a whiteboard, I haven't experienced any legibility issues while using it. It's actually remarkably easy to read.
This could be partly because there's nothing immediately close to the window so any writing is the only real thing in the focal plane.
If I stand further back, it is somewhat harder to read, but I imagine this wouldn't be a problem with displays that can emulate that (like laser retinal displays iirc)
This is completely dependent on what's behind it, not mention you need to light an entirely separate room/hallway to read it.
Imagine another pane of glass with writing on it about a foot behind. You can imagine how illegible it could become.
Do you use multiple marker colors? Or just one?
Several colors, though I do tend to use one at a time until it runs out before switching.
Whiteboard markers don't really work though (too transparent when it's bright out). Permanent markers and liquid chalk work best, though the latter can be especially annoying to erase. Some glass-specific erasable markers aren't bad either.
not OP but I use normal wb markers any color and as long as you wipe down pretty regularly using glass cleaner it is a great option in certain rooms
For VR goggles, I agree. But if we're headed toward AR glasses, most (all?) technologies in that space don't support opaque screen content. They project images into your eyes, but they can't block light coming in from the real world.
So if that's the next big thing, Apple had to get consumers used to translucent UIs.
Win7 had translucency, and it looked way better than Win8+. Vista looked meh because it overdid it initially, but Win7 dialed it down (mostly with "frosted glass" effect) in most places to where it didn't impede contrast, and added various ways to highlight text in places where it was directly overlaid over glass.
Judging from the demos, Apple's version is even more translucent than Vista, so I have no doubt that it'll be bad.
> people do not work out their thoughts on windowpanes or transparent “whiteboards” because of the exact same legibility issues.
Damn, now I want a frosted glass whiteboard. As if wanting a whiteboard wasn't bad enough.
Writing on blurry glass can work but it requires effort. It the real world we have elements that can create shadows and refract light around writing making it more legable but we still don't bother printing books on overhead sheets and tracing paper!
> Outside of movies, people do not work out their thoughts on windowpanes or transparent “whiteboards” because of the exact same legibility issues.
I knew a lovely man, a kind hearted engineer, Larry Weiss, for whom this was not true... In the early 1980s I was in his VW van that he used for business roadtrips when he, while still driving, grabbed a felt marker and started drawing on the window in front of him to illustrate a point.
I learned that he kept markers handy and used them to capture his thoughts on long drives (to conferences, customers etc). Rough mechanical sketches mostly.
Back then I did not generally know to describe myself as (modern term) aphantasic as I had yet to realize I was different from most people, but hopefully this context helps you to understand why I then (and now) grokked the value of putting your conceptual thought into your ongoing visual field, non-occlusively aka transparently
Legibility is no more the deciding factor of ~utility here/AR/VR than it is in dreams. Indeed I have been very near sighted for over 50 years and I do not find this ~illegibility to be an issue for clarity of visual~assist to thinking.
The point John Carmack makes may have greater merit for other people or if we were limited to discussing text--but Liquid Glass is not about text per se, is it?
"...there’s way too much information to decode the Matrix. You get used to it. I…I don’t even see the code." -- Cypher from The Matrix 1999
P.S. If my story about Larry intrigued you, I am happy to share these two tiny tidbits I found in memoriam ...
https://isaac-online.org/wp-content/uploads/ISAAC-E-News-Oct...
https://w140.com/tekwiki/wiki/Larry_Weiss [re his work and patents at Tektronix in the 1960s]
I think the issue is less about whether it’s a good idea or not, but rather that AR interfaces essentially HAVE to be translucent (unless you’re doing video passthrough) — so might as well figure out how to get it right.
In AR the user needs to be able to tell which objects are real (R) and which are virtual/injected (A), but the latter type doesn’t need to be indicated by transparency. Consider the scenario where, instead of conventional HUD-type AR, we could conjure up the A elements as physical objects into thin air by magic. There is no particular reason why those would have to be translucent. Sure, depending on the situation it can be useful to control their opacity in order to be able to see what’s behind them, but otherwise there is no more reason than for real physical objects.
Parent was talking about current screen technology ("real AR" vs "passthrough AR").
It's not particularly hard to dynamically darken part of a pair of glasses.
It appears extremely hard. From what I can tell, localized opacity has only been commercialized once, by Magic Leap, at insane expense and questionable quality.
What information do you have that this is “not particularly hard”?
The insane expense and questionable quality in magic leap was the projection system, not the darkening.
As for what information I have, I could link you some press releases from FlexEnable, but how about I simply point out that you can slap a commodity grayscale LCD on the outside of any pair of glasses, whether or not they have an AR projector.
There are multiple brands of sunglasses and AR glasses that can already do global tinting with the press of a button, you just need to split that up.
The hardest part is getting the alignment right, but you already did the hard alignment work if you build AR glasses. Also making things as light as possible is hard but glasses that are a bit heavy are still valid solutions.
This is impossible in current glasses form factors. The display is additive.
If you are starting at a display which displays a video feed (VR/MR form factor), you are correct.
It is not impossible in the current glasses form factor. You add a film onto the glasses that darkens specific areas on demand.
I’ve definitely been preferring a transparent background on my terminal lately, particularly when I only have one screen, because it increases my ability to read the reference material I have opened behind it. At the very least, if I have to alt-tab it out of the way, I’m already oriented on the page. So I can see the benefit in at least some use cases.
I don’t think I’d like to have it on everything, though. Or basically anything except my terminal, for that matter.
Transparent terminals are still a thing? I thought that fad ended 10 years ago. Never made any sense to me.
Honestly I thought I’d hate it, but if I get the transparency just right where it’s not distracting but I can still see read through it if I try, I do find that it helps when I find myself lacking screen real estate.
I’d still rather have an opaque terminal and just get a second monitor, but that’s not always an option.
Is Liquid Glass really "translucent" though? I mean, aside from the gimmicky transparent setting, which is going to be horrible for accessibility (can you say "contrast"?) so anyone with less than perfect vision and/or a sensible concern for usable UX is going to turn that off immediately. The non-transparent icons and widgets look a lot like the older "flat" ones with some glassy/ceramic 3D effects on top. Still a bit fuzzy, but they're at least bearable for long-term use.
>s Liquid Glass really "translucent" though? I mean, aside from the gimmicky transparent setting, which is going to be horrible for accessibility (can you say "contrast"?) so anyone with less than perfect vision and/or a sensible concern for usable UX is going to turn that off immediately.
I have a hard time parsing this.
"Is the glass effect transparent if I don't turn off transparency?"
uhh.. Yes.
As a bit of a citizen scientist myself let me explain how I wrapped my laymen's brain around it :
If I can see through it, it's transparent. If the color changes behind the thing, and I can somehow intuit that -- good chance's we're dealing with transparency.
Seems like you're conflating translucency and transparency, and Apple is being a bit imprecise with those terms too. As in, if you turn off what Apple is calling "transparency", is the interface still arguably "translucent" in the way that's implied by the Carmack quote, which I take to mean some Minority Report barely frosted-glass effect in the background.
> If I can see through it, it's transparent.
Yes, if you can clearly make out the details behind whatever it is you're looking through.
> If the color changes behind the thing, and I can somehow intuit that -- good chance's we're dealing with transparency.
This would normally be translucency, akin to a shower door or curtain that lets you see that someone is in there and maybe who, but not much more.
In this case though, it's a bit weird, and it seems like the person you responded to did have a relevant question, because as far as I've seen it's kind of pseudo-transparent but not quite translucent in different contexts, in the sense that you can more clearly see through to detail that's sometimes there (slider position, magnifying glass) and sometimes only derived from the bottom layer, like colors changing.
To me, it's less like a shower door vs window, and more like a window vs looking through the bottom of a shot glass, but im some cases closer to opaque than translucent if the transparent gimmick is turned off, based on how the question was asked.
I haven’t downloaded the beta, but from what I can see in the demos, Liquid Glass dynamically adjusts the properties of the overlay (text color, background blur, alpha, fill) based on what is underneath so that the illusion of transparency is there but the text is still readable. The only time this doesn’t seem to happen is while in animation / scrolling. The adjustment comes after the movement stops.
All of the outrage screenshots I’ve seen appeared to have been taken during animation.
It doesn’t adjust correctly much of the time. For example, full screen video controls will effectively disappear, rendering them unususable, in many circumstances (particularly against white backgrounds).
>which is going to be horrible for accessibility
My suspicion is this concern went the same way as DEI/ESG
> While the tech press fixated on Apple's relatively quiet AI story at WWDC 2025, the company was executing a more subtle strategy. Rather than engaging in the current LLM arms race (where it's demonstrably behind), Apple doubled down on what it does best: creating compelling user experiences through design and integration.
I cant believe real people actually believe this kind of stuff. The author seems to think tech press alone is fixated on AI story. Apple themselves was all gung-ho about AI last time around. They sold an entire line of iPhones touting the benefits of AI. They even "invented" a brand for their line of offering - Apple Intelligence.
And when it all fell flat, Apple had to apologize and had to (yes, had to) showcase other things. Liquid Glass essentially was a replacement for that. If Apple had anything meaningful to show in AI world, it would have show cased that.
And author seems to think Apple is playing 4D chess. Sometimes the simplest explanation is what is really going on.
An even simpler explanation is that regular UI redesigns are an important tool for a device manufacturer to make the experience feel new or refreshed, and this novelty helps sell devices. Everyone reacts to the content of the redesign when it lands, but the fact that it happens should not be surprising.
Usability issues only manifest after point of sale. Messaging/marketing happens after the work has been done (and can involve post-rationalization).
The fact that the majority of AI features which were promised (and pushed hard) by Apple for iPhone 16 are still nowhere in sight should honestly be a bigger story. So many people upgraded to that phone entirely for AI.
There is a class action lawsuit regarding that: https://clarksonlawfirm.com/lp/apple-intelligence-false-adve...
i hope it wins against apple. i also bought my new iphone mainly for AI reasons but looking back, i should have purchased a pixel.
I dunno. I feel like a lawsuit would need to demonstrate damages.
Real-world productivity improvements due to AI in terms of actual metrics or financial outcomes remain stubbornly undemonstrated.
Really? If a company advertises a new red version of their widget and I excitedly upgrade because I love red, but when it comes it's gray just like the old widget, don't I have a case? Surely I don't need to demonstrate that red makes me more productive.
Genuine question: have there been any successful lawsuits on the basis of "false advertising" in recent times? It seems so prevalent everywhere, I'm really curious if there's any repercussions for it (no matter how egregious.)
In Australia the regulators pursue such things. https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/jayco-in-court-over-of...
I updated to avoid paying the new American tariffs. The advertised AI features were decidedly underwhelming.
There’s lots of new AI features in iOS 26, iPadOS 26, etc. But they aren’t the blockbuster features.
They’re more like quality of life issues that users will appreciate.
A now that 3rd parties can access Apple’s LLM models… let me correct that. Shortcuts, a visual automation app, can also access models on device or bigger, more capable models using Apple’s Private Cloud Compute.
Apple’s not playing multidimensional chess… but they are playing the long game, where users won’t have to use multiple AI chatbots to get work done, because most of what they want to do is handled by their current apps with new AI capabilities—on device.
Apple's models are not competitive. Apple has not demonstrated any leadership in fundamental models so far, and I don't expect that to change any time soon.
If anything I'd expect Google, OpenAI, Anthropic ... Or even Meta to have a better on-device "lite" model before Apple.
> Apple's models are not competitive.
1. You have no way of objectively assessing this.
2. Apple’s been using machine learning, neural networking and other AI technologies in their operating systems before most of these AI companies even existed.
3. Apple was the first to ship AI-specific hardware (Neural Engine) in the iPhone X in 2017
> Google, OpenAI, Anthropic ... Or even Meta to have a better on-device "lite" model before Apple.
Google's "lite" model Gemma 2B has 2 billion parameters and their Gemini Nano has 1.5 billion. The largest lite model Meta tops out at 1.5 billion.
The model demonstrated at WWDC has 3 billion parameters [1] with 2-bit and 4-bit quantization. So Apple has already surpassed Meta and Google when it comes to LLMs on smartphones from the jump. Seems pretty competitive.
3rd party developers will have access to it as well. If the task requires a more comprehensive model, it can access Apple's Private Cloud Compute [2] seamlessly. Sounds like a win-win to me.
This model is also exposed to automation; you'll be able to create custom workflows that incorporate AI very easily.
[1]: From Apple's press release:
A key component of Apple Intelligence is a new on-device Foundation Model. This model, with approximately 3 billion parameters, has been engineered for efficiency and is optimized to run directly on Apple's latest silicon. To achieve this, Apple has employed advanced quantization techniques, including 2-bit and 4-bit quantization for the model's weights and an 8-bit KV cache, which significantly reduce the model's memory and computational footprint without compromising performance
[2]: "Private Cloud Compute: A new frontier for AI privacy in the cloud" https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/
The reality distortion field didn’t die with Jobs.
The author is far enough into apple fanboy conspiracies that they will probably next claim the reality distortion field didn't die because Jobs never died.
No, you see, Apple has spent untold billions of dollars chasing AI as a feint. Them repeatedly apologizing and telling investors they are working as fast as they can is all lies. They have everyone just where they want them, and are poised to deliver the killing blow of ... a new UI that everyone has to relearn.
And nobody mentions "developers forced to redesign and reimplement their app UI for no good reason" as part of the cost. Of course fanboys couldn't care less about that.
Funny, in the comparison image the article shows for the 3 design styles - Skeuomorphic, Flat, Liquid Glass - the Skeuomorphic one looks absolutely best to me:
https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/6...
The items look so much more tangible, and the text is more readable. Everything is easy to grok visually. The flat design looks way more confusing. And the liquid glass one looks even worse.
As I remember it, there was actually a step between Transition and Native in that image, which was noticeably flatter than Native. It was the first Ives interface, mentioned in the article: "iOS 7's initial release had similar problems: ultra-thin fonts that were hard to read, blue text links that didn't look clickable, animations that made some users motion sick. Apple responded with gradual refinements: thicker fonts, higher contrast, optional accessibility settings, and more obvious interactive elements." i.e. they made it much worse and then made it slightly less bad. I presume they'll follow a roughly similar path with this, when really, in my view, they should be reversing course on some of the fundamentals to make it easier to use. Scrollbars are a great example. I've got used to the fact that they're hidden on macOS now, but looks at some of the great ones from the past that have an almost tangible feel to them: https://imgur.com/scrollbars-through-history-fixed-jpdGk
Yeah, iOS 7 was unreadable. First time I ever had to go into accessibility settings (to enable bold fonts), and I was like 18 years old.
Also I think every iOS update after 7 has either stayed the same or added subtly more depth/shadows. In multiple steps.
One reason I use a plain black background for my iPhone--I can actually read the labels under each icon. (I could use plain text rather than icons, but that's a different gripe.)
Also, I can actually read the battery level indicator in the skeuomorphic display. I sometimes resort to getting out a magnifying glass to read it on my iPhone's current display. (Yes, I have old eyes. And I have to keep telling those Apple UI people to get off my grass.)
iPhone 5 with iOS 6 was peak, around when Jobs died iirc. Then they changed the design, made the phones too big to fit in pockets, removed headphone jack to sell AirPods, and replaced the home button with some confusing gestures. The keyboard doesn't even work right anymore.
>the Skeuomorphic one looks absolutely best to me
Same. But how would large teams of UI designers justify their jobs if they'd leave it like that for 10+ years?
Designing all the slow animations that are required for maintaining the kayfabe of shells that depend on desk analogies.
The cause and effect are not so clear cut. Customers also expect something new. That way they feel like they got something new when they have to replace their phone, especially in the "evolution not revolution" phase of a device.
And it's not just phones either. Car companies spend money on retooling to give a model a facelift because people expect it. Sales drop and then pick up again after the facelift because nobody wants to buy something that looks dated from day one.
Manufacturers take cues from each other because once a "modern" trend is set everything else looks dated. Everyone went with flat UIs in a matter of a few years. Cars went with lightbar lights in the past few years too. That's what feels modern now.
As long as a huge part of the market remembers skeuomorphic design and associates it with the early 2000s it will never feel modern so designers stay away from it.
P.S. For me suspenders are still the third best way to keep my pants on (right after "picking the right pants size" and "fastening the buttons"). But nobody wants them these days and it's not a Big Belt conspiracy. They just don't look modern.
I don't think that's true at all. Customers hate when things change in my experience. It doesn't matter how well intentioned the change is, it's going to be upsetting to people. I really do think it's just that companies are obsessed with changing things, in willful defiance of what their customers want.
Customers hate if things change on their phone, but will absolutely also slam your product and not buy it if it feels "old" and hasn't been changed in a while. Especially media will smear you and tell people to buy the other guy's work if you don't run the redesign threadmill.
People aren't always rational. And "customers" aren't a single group either.
Well if you go straight to the elephant in question - Apple - their laptops have looked essentially the same for 10 years or even 15 years if you squint. Because they found a design that's near perfect. So it doesn't need to be renewed to communicate reliability and quality.
Motorcycles of the classic cut are still being manufactured and sold in massive quantities, even though the design is about 50 years old. Same for them, customers know that the quality is high so it doesn't need to say "new".
And I'm positive that people would line up to buy cars with classic designs if the manufacturers started caring about what customers actually want. Not that I dislike modern car design, but it hit the sweet spot about 5 years ago IMO.
So at least for hardware I think a classic design works well to communicate quality.
And I think we're soon reaching a similar mood in software GUI as well.
Do they? I used FVWM's MWM theme for 13 years starting from when I was 12 and was pretty happy with it. I've been using CWM for the past 6 years with roughly no changes and am happy with that. Having themes and UI changes forced on you is annoying.
You are using a niche window manager, with a niche theme, on a niche OS. This is almost as far as it gets from being representative of the majority.
You're missing the point. The point is that most people are contempt with something once they find it, not about niche UIs.
I have similar feelings every time I look at a Windows 95 screenshot: everything is easy to grasp and feels natural. I know immediately what is interactive or not and what is the hierarchy between the different parts of the UI.
Sure, it's not pretty by today's standard, but it's way easier to use IMO.
Yeah at the default sizes i couldn't read the glass ones nearly as easily. the icons themselves look like a bad icon pack that i could download on android 14 years ago
I really hated all the liquid glass screenshots, and had a bad reaction when I first updated my phone to it. I also updated my macOS, and had a MUCH better reaction to that. And after a few days I really dig it on my phone too.
I thought there was supposed to be a way to add a tint to it though, which I haven't found a setting for, and think I would do if I could find it.
Please don't live on developer betas like that. They're not meant to be stable enough for it.
I'm alright man
You're alright if you restart once a day to clear out the memory leaks, maybe.
None of my devices has any precious data and I can handle stuff not working perfectly.
It would be annoying if a device got bricked in such a way that it was unrepairable, but I'd still be alright.
I find it surprising that skeumorphism is popular here: the rationale is the opposite of the rationale for power-user desktop UIs.
I suppose it's easy to grok what the newsstand is[1], but I'm not convinced it would matter after the first five minutes.
[1] Because I've seen it in US media, along with the route symbol on the maps icon and the fire hydrants that are in captchas.
I don't think too many people go hard on skeumorphism itself per se. It's more that the era was associated with desirable properties that seem lacking in the flat era. The primary thing that makes me gravitate to the left screenshot is the clear separation of foreground and background elements with drop-shadows. Icons were more complex and differentiated, less abstract: what is "news" supposed to be now, "game-center" became a bunch of bubbles, "reminders" and "notes" are spiraling into each other, and "passbook/wallet" has become less distinct at each step. Color is being used less and less as well (less true for top-level app icons).
I don't know how well connected it is to the power-user axis, but I would say a characteristic power-user doesn't care that they are looking a somewhat garish and busy collection of colored icons, gradients, bezels, etc, whereas the opposite sensibility favors a minimalist UI for the aesthetics over perhaps ease of locating things. The real opposite of a power-user is not a first-time user, its a non-user. The non-user is not annoyed that they can't find things that are hidden away in secret trays you have to swipe for or such, but they appreciate the resulting saved screen-space.
Is it just me or the glass design makes everything look disabled? Why are you supposed think that these are active when they're all gray?
As someone who works with a wide range of AR displays, if this is the reason for the UI change, they've fucked up hard.
Blurring in AR is quite difficult as it requires an accurately aligned image to overlay the world. The point of AR is its just an overlay, you don't need to render whats already there. To make a blur, you need the underlying image, this costs energy, which you don't really have on AR glasses.
I would actually expect AR displays to be naturally transparent. I'm not a specialist at all, but achieving a transparent screen with perfectly opaque rendered areas sounds quite unrealistic.
If the display is naturally transparent, I don't see the need for a non-opaque UI.
> If the display is naturally transparent, I don't see the need for a non-opaque UI.
You're right, but it depends on the screen type. It turns out that just being transparent isn't actually good enough, you really want to be able to dim the background as well. This means that you can overwrite the real-world object much more effectively.
but that adds a whole level of complication.
I just had a holy-shit moment reading through what you just said. I had not considered that AR overlays wont be blurred, without sampling what's behind the overlay/glass.
People are in for a world of pain when they realize this.
Unless the blur is built into the optics of the glass itself somehow!
You can only get a frosted glass effect with that.
Imagine an overlay in front of a red circle. If you want the red circle blurred in the overlay, you need to know about red circle, and sample from it for each pixel. Vision Pro cant sample the entire viewport 120fps (or whatever fps they are running at). It would be a janky mess.
Vision Pro UI is not transparent / translucent but frosted.
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/images/2024/02/apple-announce...
> Vision Pro cant sample the entire viewport 120fps
Even worse than that. Each pane of glass that's blurring needs to do its own sampling of what's behind itself. That means you have to render from back to front, sampling in 3D, for each eye, to get realistic blur effects. Your vision isn't a 2D grid coming from each eye, it's conic. A line from your retina out through two equally sized panes placed in front of each other will likely pass through two different points on each pane.
You'd probably need to implement this with ray tracing, to make it truly accurate, or at least convincing. And to make your device not slow to a crawl as you open more and more windows.
This is insightful thank you. Question: if you work with a wide range of AR displays, what do you suggest that's readily available and has a sdk?
Alas I work for a very large company who has a bunch of teams that makes prototypes for us to use.
However, a secondhand Quest 3 with unity in MR is the cheapest way to get started. It gives you SLAM/world frame of reference, which almost no other system does (apart from hololens)
AR glasses will have some sort of camera. It's easy enough to warp the captured video to roughly match the view from each eye. It doesn't have to be perfectly aligned, clear, nor high-resolution. It just needs to be sufficient to provide a faux blurred background behind UI elements.
Looking at Liquid Glass, they certainly solved it for higher-res backdrops. Low res should be simpler. It won't be as clean as Liquid Glass, but it could probably do VisionOS quality.
Oh its possible, but it costs a lot of power, and has design implications.
You need the camera on and streaming, sure you only need a portion, but also your camera needs to cover all of your screen area, and the output remapped. It also means that your camera now has limited placement opportunities.
Having your camera on costs power to, so not only is your GUI costing power but its costing more power because the camera is on as well.
I think you're over-thinking it. Camera power is extremely cheap. Amazon's Ring cameras run for months on a single charge. It's the display, refreshing content at 24–60 Hz (or more) that consumes power.
The camera will have to turn on for the glasses to show you metadata, right? The camera will see what you see, just from slightly different angles from each eye. A simple video matrix can warp the image to match each eye again. Cut out what you don't need, and just keep what's needed for the UI element. The AR glasses could simply have a dedicated chip for the matrix and other FX. I imagine view depth could take extra work, but iPhones do that now with their always-on lockscreen.
> I think you're over-thinking it
Nope, its experience. Why do you think oculus has funny warping issues? its down to camera placement.
> A simple video matrix can warp the image to match each eye again
Occlusions are not your friend here.
> Cut out what you don't need, and just keep what's needed for the UI element.
For UI thats fix in screen space, this works, for UI thats locked to world space, you need to be much more clever about your warping. Plus your now doing realtime low latency stuff on really resource constrained devices.
> I imagine view depth could take extra work,
yes, and no. If you have a decent SLAM stack with some object tracking, you kind of get depth for free. If you have 3d gaze vectors, you can also use that to estimate depth of what you're looking at without doing anything else. (but gaze estimation thats accurate needs calibration)
> but iPhones do that now with their always-on lockscreen
Thats just a rendering thing. Its not actually looking for your face all the time. most of that is accelerometer. Plus its not like it needs to be accurate, just move more or less in time with the phone.
> Camera power is extremely cheap
Yes, but not for glasses. Glasses have about 1.3 watt-hours for the whole day. cameras consume about 30-60mw, which is about half your power budget if you want a 12 hour day
> Amazon's Ring cameras run for months on a single charge
Yes, the cameras isn't on all the time, it has PIR to work out if there is movement. Plus the battery is much much bigger. (I think it has 23 watt hours of battery)
This would make sense if there was any indication that AR is going to happen. I would argue that there isn't even the faintest signal that it will.
People do not want invasive glasses, even if they make them as small at normal glasses. I just don't see it becoming anything other than a niche product.
It's like all the moves to voice/audio interfaces powered by AI. They simply won't take off as audio is inherently low bandwidth and low definition. Our eyes are able to see so much more in our peripheral vision, at a much higher bandwidth.
Some would argue that's an indication that AR will happen, but it's still so low deff, and incredibly intrusive, as much as I love the demos and the vision (pun not intended) behind it.
As far as I can see, the only motivation for the visual overall is that they need something to fill the gap until they have some real AI innovations to show. This is a "tick" in the traditional "tick" -> "tock" development and release cycle - a facelift while they work on some difficult re-engineering underneath. But that's not AR, it AI.
I think the appeal and the value equation of AR would be completely different if it didn’t feel like you were donning a heavy headset to step into the matrix. It’s very likely that there will be innovation in translucent displays and input methods that make AR ubiquitous at some point in the future. I just don’t know if that will be in 5 years or 15 years.
Zero years. http://swiley.net/arglassescroped.jpg
It's just a matter of packaging and selling it the way the palm pilot was packaged and sold as the smartphone.
> People do not want invasive glasses, even if they make them as small at normal glasses. I just don't see it becoming anything other than a niche product.
Wait, are you arguing that consumers will reject something that puts, say, a social media feed in front of their face 24hrs a day? That will allow them to just gaze at an internet site constantly without even having to think about it? That will allow them to have videos in their peripheral vision while they “concentrate” on something else?
AR headsets will not replace computers, they’ll replace phones.
I actually have a homebrew Linux AR setup that I use heavily and absolutely think it will be the future (although it will be similar to the smartphone where you get a combined form factor and paradigm shift that people think are both connected.)
Good AR glasses are already available and combined with modern LLMs you can have normal people thinking about computers the way we do. This will feel less invasive than smartphones do currently while being able to do much more.
I'm absolutely certain Apple will not survive the transition though.
I genuinely expect that in a few years, Apple will release something that is effectively identical to Google Glass, and that will historically be seen as the real start of wide-spread usage of AR.
Anything less than lightweight glasses is a non-starter outside of gaming and other enthusiasts. The Vision Pro is just too bulky for it to sell serious numbers.
VR / AR will definitely replace desktop / stationary computers, but they need to be as lightweight as headphones. Steve Jobs said it best (also his opinion of the current Vision Pro at the very end): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQECSInWVPY
Some insights/vision lost to history because interviewer needed to interrupt.
This is why I like Lex Fridman style podcast.
I've seen this speculation a lot, but that's all it is speculation. Apple has been working on an AR concept for going on 4-5 years now, and as recently as January this year were reported to have given up yet again:
https://www.theverge.com/news/604378/apple-n107-ar-glasses-c...
Yet I see this speculation copied (TechCrunch), copied (MacRumors), copied (Substack), from one article to another with the fervor rising at each one. Yet we never approach anything close to substantive.
I read in 2023 AR is due in 24, then 24 it was 25, and now in 25 it is due in 26. AR also now has something to do with AI because of course it does, and Apple's new blurry UI is something to do with this product 1.5 years out at minimum... Sure.
One note on this with regards to the “flat” design - the technical reasoning for that was it decoupled the interface from the screen. Flat designs were all vector, and could scale to any screen or interface size. This has effectively unpinned Apple from fixed screen sizes (I’m genuinely not sure if any two iPhone designs have shared the same pixel counts in the last 5-10 years) and allowed them to scale the interface to any size.
I’m not sure what I think about liquid glass, but I do agree with the premise that it’s being driven by the move towards AR and extending interfaces outside the phone/tablet.
I think another interesting tell here will be the 20th anniversary iPhone, which should be coming in 2027 - the iPhone X set the tone for Apple devices for the next decade (so far), and I’d expect to get a better idea of what Apple’s doing here when they show off that hardware.
I have a very open mind wrt liquid glass.
I expect an "AR based UI" to somehow leverage depth of field and focus. Blur and translucency/transparency used to achieve that could be amazing.
I'm reminded of prior UIs which had Z depth. One of the iOS releases had parallax.
Remember that awesome demo repurposing two Wii controllers to do head tracking? It transformed the screen into a portal that you that thru. Moving your head around changed your perspective.
I want that.
I just started watching the WWDC videos. So far I like what I see. I'm on board with stacked components; we'll see how it pans out. I love the idea of morphing UI elements, transitioning between list <-> menu bar; I really want this to succeed.
Mostly, I want less clutter. No matter the appearance or theme, I'm overwhelmed by all the icons, options, etc.
The age old conundrum of balancing ease of use against lots of features. Having created UIs in anger, I'm no smarter than anyone else and don't have any ideas to offer.
Further, I'm apprehensive about voice (w/ GPT). Methinks this will become the best strategy for reducing visual clutter.
Being an old, I just hate talking to my computer. Though I accept it feels natural for others, like my son's generation.
I’ve seen skeuomorphic designs done with vector art, surely this can’t be the only/real reason.
like most things it was probably a combination of things:
marketing (big new design), design trend catch-up (metro, android), and all those other technical reasons (memory, textures, vector graphics, enables easy dark-mode) etc etc
just my guess, but making a dark mode (more easily) possible must have been a large factor too
Apple has worked out a system of scaling to deal with differing pixel counts. One just provides assets in @2x and @3x versions. And most designers design non-vector assets once in 3x, and then downscale once. This system works remarkably well given that we have long reached the sweet spot of screen DPI.
«If history is any guide, we'll all be using glass-like interfaces within five years, wondering how we ever lived without them». Thanks but no thanks. I’ll keep my current phone until I can’t anymore but that’s it then.
This article presents two speculations: first, that Apple has a strong belief in augmented reality (AR), and second, that the company is adapting its user interface and user experience (UI/UX) design in preparation for AR integration. However, where is the evidence to support these claims?
> In augmented reality, interface elements must coexist with the physical world. They can't be opaque rectangles that block your view. They need to be translucent, layered, and contextually aware.
This isn’t true. You’re never going to want your browser, editor, or Slack window to be translucent.
…or your movie playback window, or Instagram, or your ebook reader, for that matter.
I agree with your core sentiment but unfortunately we don't have a mass-producible display technology that allows for black pixels in a see-through optic (yet). It's going to be really hard to achieve.
Pass-through is the only AR approach that currently allows black pixels, but it has uncomfortable limitations compared to a see-through optic.
Liquid glass design paradigm only works on reprojected displays. Additive displays can't replicate the distortions along the edges of the elements for both optical focus reasons and because you can see through the element.
That's pretty much the conclusion of my article linked above, at least short term. When I worked on that AR device we experimented with a segmented electrochromic layer that could allow a mixture of see-through and pass-through, but it's far from mass-producible, and probably a dead-end approach for what Apple is trying to do.
You absolutely did want all of that until the novelty of Windows Aero wore off.
Of course, now that Apple has invented it, it will be completely different.
I see my kid doing homework and he’s got YouTube open on his other monitor. I don’t know how that constitutes “working” but maybe in the future, you will indeed have your movie playback window underneath your vibe coding UI. Sounds terrible to me, but it’s a distraction economy.
This has been possible for well over a decade: https://www.mobzystems.com/tools/seethroughwindows/
> You’re never going to want your browser, editor, or Slack window to be translucent.
r/unixporn disagrees
The lack of stroke outlining of text on transparency is also just going to make it unreadable particular if the background has motion in it (so worse for AR).
This was obvious from the start. Microsoft tried to do a convergence of design across devices too and it failed. I have a feeling this will be a failure as well, different use cases simply require different designs. Despite all the talent at Apple, I can't see them escaping this reality. I like some of the aspects of Liquid Glass and some of the aspects of it are somewhat mind blowing, but it needs to be toned down a lot. If they want it to truly be a cross device idea it needs to be fleshed out a large amount with some features dropping for some devices, and that's when it gets complicated to keep together.
I’m all for a common design language but not at the expense of breaking the UX on devices that aren’t interacted with in the same way.
Or in layman’s terms: Let’s hope this isn’t like Microsoft with Metro, “everything is a smart phone” even when it’s not.
The HN crowd is the worst at predicting things so I wouldn't be surprised if this turns out to be the best decision Apple ever made.
> The translucent panels, the layered depth, the environmental responsiveness will all feel like a natural extension of what they already know from their iPhone.
Bullshit. Nobody picked up a Hololens and thought "Oh no, I don't know what to do." Nobody put on a first generation Vision Pro and was clueless how to use it because the UI wasn't skeuomorphic and glass-like. AR has been around for decades and this hasn't been a necessity for anyone, ever.
Simply put: it's not important for AR/VR, and it's definitely not necessary for every other computing form factor to adopt it so that folks are somehow prepared to use AR someday. My laptop isn't AR, don't give me an AR interface because it's nice to be consistent across your product lineup.
The only take this post gets right, as best as I can tell: liquid glass gets stuff wrong, and it'll need to change before shipping.
> Flat design emerged when users had internalized touch interactions and no longer needed heavy visual scaffolding.
Huh. I always took the move, which I seem to recall as being led by the Google Material folks, as a strategic move to kneecap Apple's huge graphics advantage on iPhones. Apple's hardware could actually execute aesthetically pleasing "real world" things on screen (shadows, blurs, etc). Whereas the ragtag hoard of Android devices, had only a few devices that could draw pretty things, and at large power consumption. It seemed a genius move that suddenly a gestalt of "uh, let's all just work with squares of color, ya know, like construction paper" emerged out of Google as "the new cool." It was marketed well, and the "eye candy space" had saturated, so Apple was forced to "catch up" after holding out for a few years.
The comparison to the evolution of iOS is misleading. With iOS, they introduced users to a new platform by using familiar and appropriate design language on that platform. With the current redesign, they're using design language that is really geared towards AR on non-AR devices. The design is in service of devices that most people don't use and haven't showed much interest in using.
The better comparison are those operating systems which tried for mobile-desktop convergence without adequate consideration of the differences between those platforms, thereby making the desktop experience worse and alienating users. In fact, it's not even as well considered as that, since mobile was a well established phenomenon at that point, whereas AR is still very niche.
The liquid glass seems like a way for smaller apps to differentiate themselves visually as flat design was a way to drastically reduce the amount of UI design time needed.
It also seems like a way to try and go directly against things like React Native and Kotlin Multiplatform. The recently announced Swift Java interoperability directly really makes it seem like they think KMP is some kind of threat.
> It also seems like a way to try and go directly against things like React Native and Kotlin Multiplatform.
This is a bingo for me. If you know your web, you know these effects are almost impossible to pull off. Or any other UI framework for that matter.
This is a play that will enforce the line between proprietary ”native” and cross platform technologies, no matter how performant or good they may be. It is designed to surface the underlying tech stack to the user, so it can be a differentiator kinda like the green bubble or the constant camera array realignment that are both pure social posturing.
10-15 years ago it might have worked, but honestly, I don’t think it will this time. It’s too specific to be adopted and copied by other UI platforms, and Apple-only ecosystem just isn’t feasible for even the most hardcore Apple fans.
It will certainly be adopted by Apple-only devs that make bespoke quality apps in Swift, but Apple really overestimates how much value those can deliver in a world where smartphone is utility in a broad ecosystem. Your average business, from libraries to airlines to grocery stores, don’t have a reason to create full-native apps in 2-3 completely separate stacks. The differentiating features on eg iOS vs Android are simply not effecting the vast majority of real-life businesses.
React native can do it, no? Don't RN components just use the native API?
Flutter, and MAUI/Xamarin OTOH won't be able to.
> React native can do it, no?
In theory yes? But the point is still to use shared API and models for 2-3 platforms. In practice it could go unused if it’s too different. Most real world app developers don’t like to spend maintenance cycles on platform specific stuff, especially if there’s no functional benefit.
I don’t disagree but the vast majority of apps I use don’t even bother to flirt with trying to recreate Apple UI anymore, and they’re probably right. Unless you are an Apple-only business and appealing to the fanboy, the benefits are minimal.
well then do it when it's ready, not before??
idk what it is but when a new paradigm comes whether it is AI or AR the bigtech companies always want to ram it down everybody's throats rather than gentle opt-in. its not like they lack enthusiasts who WILL opt in to offer feedback.
you have billions of users, including many normies who just want to get shit done and dont even know that you have keynotes or shareholders to impress and dont care about the translucency of your "glass" when they're trying to call 911[0]
[0]: see talk (https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2016/01/25/designing-for-...) and tldr (https://hookedoncode.com/2015/02/designing-for-crisis-by-eri...)
Also, do it for the target device not all of them. Liquid glass makes little sense on a tiny iPhone that a lot of people read outside in sunlight.
Changing the UI beforehand is their approach at a gentle introduction. It's just not voluntary.
I'm old enough to remember when the iPhone OS was the gentle introduction to iPad OS — all the rumour sites' mock-ups of the then-upcoming mystery Apple Tablet showed MacOS.
In retrospect, watchOS 1.0 was the gentle introduction to what became SwiftUI. At the time, I was a bit frustrated that I couldn't specify widget position and size like I was used to.
Honestly I still am frustrated by that. We already had variable size windows back in the days of Win3.11 and System 7 — we've just made it far more complicated to do the same things, and even several years into SwiftUI it feels like we've got more bugs with SwiftUI based apps than we ever had with UIKit, and I'm not sure if that's the layout stuff or the reactive stuff or both.
>idk what it is
the blog post explains this
in short, it's simply a continuation of the practices that resulted in apple's dominance in the first place
> well then do it when it's ready, not before??
This will let them build up an ecosystem of apps ready at launch and it means you are already training users. This are all laying the foundation of a successful future launch.
Seems like it could be new design fad. Noticed that the info panel on the bottom of an MLB baseball game was translucent. Then, noticed that the bottom button panel on the iPhone X app is also translucent.
I remember Notes subtly replicating the texture of paper. And text being drawn black, not some shades of gray, with effects to maximize, and not reduce, readability and fidelity. Then Scott Forstall was gone.
> The same pattern appears to be playing out with AI. While competitors race to stuff large language models into everything, Apple is taking a more measured approach. The Liquid Glass design language actually creates opportunities for more contextual AI interactions. Imagine smart suggestions that appear as translucent overlays, or AI-generated content that floats naturally over your existing workflow. The glass metaphor provides a visual framework for AI that feels ambient rather than intrusive.
This whole post is pure speculation right? "Screens becoming less relevant" sounds like ravings of someone trying to play Nostradamus.
I'll keep saying it; all this design stuff is goofy and will continue to be goofy as long as everyone in it keeps confusing "science" with "fashion."
Genuinely -- fashion is fine, plaid is in this year, great! Whatever!
But so many bozos think they're doing "science about human behavior" when they do this, and they're not.
I remember when the armchair experts were laughing at us old people for reminiscing about the eye candy of OS X from Tiger to Snow Leopard - no, they told us, the nice looking things are from the past. Now everything needs to be flat. It's better. It's more usable. You're not supposed to know the difference between text and buttons based on sight.
Oh now the shiny is back, but worse.
> armchair experts were laughing at us old people for reminiscing about the eye candy of OS X ...they told us... everything needs to be flat. ... You're not supposed to know the difference between text and buttons...
> are just post-hoc justifications in the end
It didn't have to be - there was a time they spent money and time on watching people use stuff and figured out how to improve them. Nowadays that sort of scientific process is only applied to increasing engagement and addiction on social media.
> a time they spent money and time on watching people use stuff and figured out how to improve
i'm reminded of parc with smalltalk and the early lisa/mac design prototypes being based on actually learning how people think about problem solving and its relations to ui/ux (with the goal of improving usability, discovery and reducing cognitive load etc)
I 100% agree that this is the strategy that they are taking… but I wonder if the hardware will catch up fast enough to make the bet pay off.
What would they lose if not?
The interface will look old and dated by the time it rolls out on the new hardware.
but isnt the point of liquid ass[1] supposed to be a universal design across all platforms[2]? that just means it should hopefully be easier to update as time changes
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44243404
2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44226612
edit: forever formatting
Well.. this is going to be fun to re-create in Electron for all those native desktop app wannabes. All those gains in battery life just got thrown away.
Why is the author acting like they've discovered some big secret? Vision Pro launched over a year ago, includes AR features, and was the precursor the the liquid glass redesign. Vision Pro and AR was the prep work for liquid glass.
The looking forward part about additive AR glasses won't really work with liquid glass: how will you do refraction without doubling up the unrefracted version passing through?
Maybe it would still work ok in low light.
As other comments allude to, there are several factual weaknesses quickly obvious in contrast to the storyline of the article.
Another rather significant historical fact the author completely omits is that the iPhone generated crazy hype among consumer customers [0] and bored the business community.
I think it would still even be graceful to assume the opposite about AR "computing".
Constructing the premise of "this is a precursor of the next big thing" in light of this contrast is rather hard to follow.
[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/27/technology/circuits/27pog...
Didn't Microsoft do this whole glass UI thing 20 years ago?
Where we're not going to need interfaces. It seems like most normal people will not need any type of interface. Glasses or not.
So a design refresh is needed for AR interfaces to work. Interesting!
no no , my bet is apple is soon launching physically changing tactile screens that will blob out just like this interface does.
Or that your phone will start shedding tears every time you touch it
I can't be the only person who thinks this whole "liquid glass" thing is a nothing-burger. Just a WWDC25 misdirection by Apple because they got nothing of "major" excitement to the general market this year.
I feel Apple throws a "UI overhaul" WWDC when they want to occupy all the discussion about them with "UI discussion" while why buy themselves more time to work on things. People will spend all their time and effort arguing merits of UI that Apple fully intend to again as soon as they release it.
smart glasses is exactly where I saw this interface working and being developed for
I've seen this "theory" floating around social media. I mean, it makes sense but also Apple has a history of boneheaded UI decisions, so I'm not going to put much weight on it. It reads more like cope because of how poorly the UI has been received. Such apologizing also usually follows Apple's boneheaded decisions. "It's 4D chess, you just don't have the vision that Apple has to understand it. But I do, and here's the plan."
They keep trying to prep everything for AR for years now, the LiDAR on the back of the iPhone is another example. And all this has cluttered the product with nonsense, while they've abandoned its core value. I'm frankly dismayed an intelligent company led by intelligent people could go so astray.
But why put an AR interface on an non AR hardware?
Exactly. Make iPhone text and buttons hard to understand for some potential new AR tech that people actually use???
I wonder if they will release a transparent frosted glass iPad next?!
Just let the backside camera feed be the wallpaper. They’d probably do it if it didn’t cost too much battery.
I would've saved that one for April Fool's Day, myself. People would tie themselves in knots arguing about whether it was real or a joke. "A product only Apple could deliver."
windows vista was prep work for ar interfaces
Seriously? I think they just hired a bunch of youngsters with perfect eye sight and they convinced Cook (who probably doesn't use screens that much) that it's the future.
Windows Vista never looked so nice
apple is always innovating new ways to make your old device obsolete
So we're waiting for a cheaper to use Vision Pro (Vision SE?)
No shit. They said in the keynote that the Liquid Glass design update was a result of what they created for the Apple Vision UI. They're making iOS, iPadOS, macOS match the same UI as visionOS.
This is utter horseshit.
Get a grip.
The total sales of the Vision are a fucking rounding error compared to the sales of the iPhone.
Glass is neither new nor is it some grand strategic vision.
What an embarrassment.
This just seems like a skeuomorphic design refresh. Which Apple HATED and tore down with prejudice. And then proceeded to replace it with childish, flat, candy-colored icons for kids.... smh
The same AR they built a product for and flopped? Oh please..
This is nonsense. It will take at least a decade for AR to become mainstream, if it ever happens at all.
Liquid Ass
Apple's pattern has always been to enter markets later but with more refined, integrated solutions.
They weren't first with MP3 players, smartphones, tablets, or smartwatches - but when they entered, they often redefined those categories. The current AI situation likely follows this same playbook.
Apple's culture of secrecy means we only see what they choose to release.
What's often overlooked is that Apple might be playing a different game entirely.
Tim Cook's measured approach and the company's $100B+ R&D budget suggest they're building something substantial, not scrambling to catch up.
They may be betting that the current LLM race will commoditize, and the real value will come from integration and user experience - areas where Apple traditionally excels.
"Apple's pattern has always been to enter markets later but with more refined, integrated solutions."
Err, no it isn't. It would be more accurate to state "the only thing that apple has recently been successful at is entering markets later with more refined, integrated solutions".
But it's definitely not the pattern of what they've tried.
The 100 billion also includes tons of expensive failures, like self-driving cars, etc. Those are not cheap, and they were definitely playing catch-up.
Here's an alternate take - apple fails at things sometimes, and has historically been able to get people to ignore and minimize the failure. Leading to folks saying things like "Apple's pattern has always been to enter markets later ...." because they just ignore the failures that contradict this. In this case, they are not just failing at AI, but are failing to get people to ignore the failure.
Why isn't that a better explanation than "apple never fails, they secretly were not trying to succeed at AI, they aren't spending billions trying to catch up, they are spending billions on a secret knockout blow that nobody knows about"
> Tim Cook's measured approach and the company's $100B+ R&D budget suggest they're building something substantial, not scrambling to catch up.
It could also be that Tim Cook is just an ops guy who only knows how to hill climb graphs up and to the right and Apple is running out of the innovation momentum it had when Jobs died.
Well it even if he’s only that it seems to work pretty well regarding sales over the last +10 years. Cash is the blood of companies so even if that’s not the best decisions ever regarding pure/first player innovations, as long as the company last more years alive in a competitive market it’s a win for him/them
Coca-Cola has made a ton of money over the years too, but they're still just selling sugar water, not "making something substantial".
That’s exactly my point, maybe for Tim Cook in the end what matters most is just to find a way to make the company money and lasts longer. Innovation might happen along the way or not, in the end money is what matters for him. I don’t say if it’s good or bad, it just is.
The new UI is gorgeous and importantly, delightful.
I don't care about "gorgeous", and I don't know what "delightful" means. But I do know what "useable" means, and that's what I want. And translucent does not enhance useability, on the contrary.
If and when this comes, I'll be changing the setting to maximal opacity, just like I did with Windows Vista.
> just like I did with Windows Vista.
Yeah, it's not like these lesson haven't been learned. But I guess Apple could always do it right, but I don't see it happening.
This was initially my hunch, but after using the betas quite a bit, I changed my mind.
The pre-WWDC rumors suggested that iOS and macOS would be refreshed with inspiration from "Apple Vision Pro." However, after using the interface, I don't see much similarity beyond the use of translucency and some of the toolbar shapes.
I had preconceived notions from watching the WWDC videos before trying the new interface, but I didn't really get it until I used it. The videos don't do it justice and fail to provide a genuine feel for the experience.
Keep in mind that much of what you see in the videos consists of marketing renders.
Note: None of this is to claim that AR isn't going to be a thing. I completely believe it will come to dominate.