The real news is that he is being replaced with Steve Lemay, one of the most OG interaction designers at Apple.
Not someone with a marketing or packaging design background; someone who sweats over pixels and knows what "discoverability" and "affordance" and "feedback" and all those dirty human factors words mean.
This may be one of the happiest days of my life (scoped to apple things in the past 15 years). I'm legitimately more excited and invigorated by this news than any of their product announcements in the Cook era.
The general direction of Apple's design has been the opposite of delight. I hope they right this ship. Their lack of leadership in the design space has trickled down to developers. iOS apps used to be a proud showcase of a company's best work but those days are long gone.
One example of Apple's fall from grace in software design was the perceived "design moat" that people thought that liquid glass would impart of apps that adopted it versus apps that didn't. People speculated that developers had to update their apps because those without liquid glass would look terrible in comparison to those with it. In reality, people (a) didn't care or (b) considered liquid glass a regression.
The human interface guidelines (HIG) used to mean something. Now it's a manual of hypocrisy.
There were some rumours of macOS27 being a `Snow Leopard` style release with a focus on bug fixes and performance. This replacement kind of confirms that at least a little. I think Liquid Glass looks pretty but definitely needs a polish and some improvements to usability, it would be lovely if that's what is in store for us.
Great for apple. Great for Meta, in that hopefully it destroys meta.
Really great time for an UI change, with governments banning the thing. If they want people to go to the effort of using a VPN to access meta, they should make it better, not worse.
I really don't understand how liquid glass on Mac OS made it past quality control. It is truly awful. The worst desktop UX I have ever seen, maybe ever. They should just roll back most of the changes to the interface
They basically have been slowly rolling it back with every update, probably because doing it all in one go would have been too much bad PR. iOS 26 right now looks very different from the one that was shown off on stage in June.
For the first time ever, since I got my first mac in 2009, I have not updated to the latest OS when I had the choice, because of this. I'm hoping the next major OS version rectifies the situation.
If the OS wasn't so damned buggy, the UI would be easier to put up with. But apps freezing, UI glitches, especially with the keyboard popping up or thinking it did, or not popping up. If the UI changed without it being so buggy there would be less to complain about, but while I'm complaining about the bugs, I'm simply going to be critical of the UI changes and not think ooh how pretty when I'm having to restart an app, once again.
The transparency is cool, but everything got turned into bubbly corners, like someone wanted to live the Lost In Space timeline where everyone is computing with circular video monitors controlled by joysticks.
I've been working on UI/UX design since 2012, and have witnessed several major shifts in design styles.
I clearly remember the release of iOS7 (or maybe I'm mistaken) with its flat design in the summer of 2013. Users accustomed to the skeuomorphic style for years initially felt this change was terrible. However, within two months, people adapted to the change, and other companies' design teams were quickly following suit.
But this time is different. Even though Liquid Glass has been around for quite some time, looking at the screen on my Mac still makes me feeling unacceptable.
I don't mind it on my phone, but agreed that the Mac version just is not good. I've never understood the obsession with making sidebars translucent, and the new version made it much worse, and expanded that philosophy to the whole OS. I've been using it since betas (that was a mistake) and I don't like it any better.
Even stuff that uses a more "clear" material now is a bigger obstruction of the content below it than the old translucent gray versions were. The huge play/pause blob over videos looks like a transparent material, but you can't see a goddamn thing through it anymore because they turned it into a crazy lens. For all the talk of the new UI getting out of the way of content, it really is a big shiny attention grabbing blob that blocks your content. You can get a hint of what colors are underneath it, and it's shiny.
The trend in Apple's design for years feels like it's been making things look pretty in screenshots, but less functional and worse to use.
Another recent fuckup is the Apple Watch's redesign where they traded scrolling lists of cards for full screen slideshows, because you wouldn't want to see what's coming or what you've scrolled past. You used to have more than one item in view at a time, and it was a hell of a lot easier to stop scrolling at the exact right spot instead of blowing past the thing you wanted to get to.
Also bad, the System Preferences redesign. The rearrangement of that wouldn't be as bad if the search bar could reliably find and take me to all of the settings, but it can't.
If they put someone in charge who prioritizes usability again, I don't think this is much of a loss for Apple. Heck, maybe he'll bring his design priorities to Meta and help Apple make a comeback with whatever their smart glasses / AR play is.
I will give them credit for one good thing that has come from iOS to Mac: having Control Center in the menu bar is a nice change. A few things I want in the menu bar for immediate access, and for the items that don't quite make the cut it's nice to have all of them two clicks away instead of requiring a trip to System Preferences.
I do wish they would bring Bartender-style menuextra containment as an official feature though. This is particularly awful today for visually impaired users, who are using the "Larger Text" screen scaling, lose a chunk of the menubar to the display notch, and then lose even more space to the big spacing they put between menuextras a couple of years ago.
The amount of bullshit that comes with a work laptop and wants to be in the menu bar is crazy, and when you run out of menu space things just disappear. Where did the VPN go? Sorry, displaced by your VOIP system and wireless presentation remote drivers and Dropbox and Teams and ...
It's nice that this software is quickly accessible without being in the Dock all the time, but the menu extras need to learn the same lesson as Control Center (and the Windows XP system tray 24 years ago) and have a second level that isn't space constrained.
Flat design was always atrocious, in that it utterly fails to take advantage of our visualization systems extremely effective autonomous recognition and interpretation of any 3D cue at all.
Not meaning we need things to look gratuitously 3D. But that small amounts of 3D effect, edges, shadows and highlighting, greatly reduce the effort of "seeing" what is where and what it means.
And of course, the trend to simply use text for text, buttons, links, ... without very high standards and consistency of differentiation, is truly horrible design.
GNOME added the High-Contrast section to their HIG in 2003 - it prioritised simplicity, and used icons drawn with an "on-the-shelf" (ie. flat) perspective with overhead lighting.
Stylistically, it was a decade ahead of other flat designs - and was much more pleasant to use than the shiny 3D overload of KDE 3 / OSX Aqua / Windows XP.
I hope this signals a move away from Liquid Glass. It's an absolutely awful design. Android has enough of its own problems that I'm not in a rush to switch, but I'm really not happy at all with this new design direction Apple has taken.
Of course, that’s mostly because there are bigger problems this release cycle. For instance, they didn’t test Magnifier on 13 mini sized screens. Now that it doesn’t fit, the other app teams will probably make more stuff uselessly cluttered/embiggened, rendering Apple’s last phone-size devices useless.
Liquid Glass is actually very good design that addresses design problems that persisted since the switch to touchscreens in a very comprehensive way.
More specifically, the problem of how to have universally recognizable and standardized UI controls in every app without interfering with their design identity.
To me it’s just a logical conclusion in the UI design field, and I fully expect Google and others to adopt something like it eventually.
The implementation isn’t flawless though.
I’d love if an actual UX designer could comment here.
Hilarious that every single comment is "Good. Apple's design sense is bad" and not him moving to Meta which will presumably make them b- I mean even worse than they are now
The other day I had to fire up my decade old 27” iMac to get some files off it and swear to God it felt faster than my two-year-old Mac Studio running Tahoe. I can’t imagine all the stupid bullshit going on behind the scenes to pull off these stupid liquid glass effects.
As negative as it may be, I refuse to update iOS until liquid glass is dead. Apple always gives us something we didn't ask for and don't want, and sometimes takes away things we do like and want.
I avoided the entire butterfly keyboard/touch bar Macbooks by buying an older model (2015 MacBook pro, the last one with scissor switch until 2020) and not upgrading until M series. That turned out to be a good decision.
That's what I did as well, I waited until the touch bar and the butterfly keyboard were out of the flow and got a really fantastic MacBook Pro with touch ID. Dare I say it works better than my iphone.
It's not going away, but I remain hopeful it will be refined. macOS is the real casualty this upgrade cycle—iOS has problems but isn't fundamentally broken.
Liquid Glass is hot garbage. I updated and kept thinking it would grow on me, no I just hate it. UI is hidden behind extra taps (the stupid new tab bar) and for the first time in my memory I've clicked, seen the animation of my click, and nothing has happened. Not to be a jerk but that's Android-level-shit (and yes, I've personally experienced that countless times in Android or Android-based OSes, like in the Meta Quest).
No one wants to see their content behind controls, they want to see the controls. The stupid glassy circles over my video are just distracting and literally make it harder for me to see the controls.
Just today I was scrolling and getting increasingly frustrated with the glass header flip/flopping between white/black text to account for the content under. For what??? I can't actually _see_ the content, it's warped and half-hidden.
Honestly, whoever thought "Hey, let's make things like the Safari address bar not cover the bottom so you can 'see your content'" should be fired (and I try not to say that often). It was a stupid idea, oh look now I can see 10px more of "content" that is just distracting and stealing space from useful controls. All the padding/margins got bigger in Liquid Glass all while reducing visibility and removing functionality.
Liquid Glass will go down as "Look over there" (re: AI), it was a distraction at best (because if people actually thought it was an improvement they are blind). Hopefully we don't have to wait quite as long as we did after iOS 7 for them to reverse course.
In my opinion, Bloomberg was being too nice by saying that he was poached by Meta. He was not worth being poached. So I don’t really think this is a dupe.
My lino is a better link, which is why mine is on the front page and yours is not. I can’t read your article. That’s a problem for people like me who are poor and can’t afford a Bloomberg subscription.
My turn to complain about bugs. I used to balk at people when they complained about bugs on MacOS/iOS.
My iPhone 7 which I used for 7 years straight, was more bug-free than my current iPhone 15 Pro.
There’s no shortage of visual bugs with iOS 26, but that’s not my point. Recently I had to restart my phone (literally unheard of in Apple land) because I put it in Guided Access and it wasn’t possible to get it out without a force restart, which I had to learn how to do for the first time. That bug persisted for at least a month.
A few days ago the camera app would just show a grey screen and the fix was to restart your iPhone.
I’m sorry but that’s Android. If you have to restart your phone because of a bug, or core functionality like camera doesn’t work, you are not using an iPhone. But apparently, you are, and apparently Apple has finally succumbed to organizational corruption like every other company.
Still miles better than Android though, in which the OS is still an active warzone between Google and the manufacturer.
This is not the real news.
The real news is that he is being replaced with Steve Lemay, one of the most OG interaction designers at Apple.
Not someone with a marketing or packaging design background; someone who sweats over pixels and knows what "discoverability" and "affordance" and "feedback" and all those dirty human factors words mean.
https://patents.google.com/?inventor=stephen+lemay
This may be one of the happiest days of my life (scoped to apple things in the past 15 years). I'm legitimately more excited and invigorated by this news than any of their product announcements in the Cook era.
The general direction of Apple's design has been the opposite of delight. I hope they right this ship. Their lack of leadership in the design space has trickled down to developers. iOS apps used to be a proud showcase of a company's best work but those days are long gone.
One example of Apple's fall from grace in software design was the perceived "design moat" that people thought that liquid glass would impart of apps that adopted it versus apps that didn't. People speculated that developers had to update their apps because those without liquid glass would look terrible in comparison to those with it. In reality, people (a) didn't care or (b) considered liquid glass a regression.
The human interface guidelines (HIG) used to mean something. Now it's a manual of hypocrisy.
...
Alan Dye is gone! Light the beacons!
There were some rumours of macOS27 being a `Snow Leopard` style release with a focus on bug fixes and performance. This replacement kind of confirms that at least a little. I think Liquid Glass looks pretty but definitely needs a polish and some improvements to usability, it would be lovely if that's what is in store for us.
Margaret to the rescue!
Great for apple. Great for Meta, in that hopefully it destroys meta.
Really great time for an UI change, with governments banning the thing. If they want people to go to the effort of using a VPN to access meta, they should make it better, not worse.
I saw someone on Twitter say "the average IQ in both companies just went up"
I really don't understand how liquid glass on Mac OS made it past quality control. It is truly awful. The worst desktop UX I have ever seen, maybe ever. They should just roll back most of the changes to the interface
They basically have been slowly rolling it back with every update, probably because doing it all in one go would have been too much bad PR. iOS 26 right now looks very different from the one that was shown off on stage in June.
For the first time ever, since I got my first mac in 2009, I have not updated to the latest OS when I had the choice, because of this. I'm hoping the next major OS version rectifies the situation.
If the OS wasn't so damned buggy, the UI would be easier to put up with. But apps freezing, UI glitches, especially with the keyboard popping up or thinking it did, or not popping up. If the UI changed without it being so buggy there would be less to complain about, but while I'm complaining about the bugs, I'm simply going to be critical of the UI changes and not think ooh how pretty when I'm having to restart an app, once again.
I wish on the iPhone they would at least bring back the option to downgrade. But they took that away a week after liquid glass was released.
The transparency is cool, but everything got turned into bubbly corners, like someone wanted to live the Lost In Space timeline where everyone is computing with circular video monitors controlled by joysticks.
I've been working on UI/UX design since 2012, and have witnessed several major shifts in design styles.
I clearly remember the release of iOS7 (or maybe I'm mistaken) with its flat design in the summer of 2013. Users accustomed to the skeuomorphic style for years initially felt this change was terrible. However, within two months, people adapted to the change, and other companies' design teams were quickly following suit.
But this time is different. Even though Liquid Glass has been around for quite some time, looking at the screen on my Mac still makes me feeling unacceptable.
I don't mind it on my phone, but agreed that the Mac version just is not good. I've never understood the obsession with making sidebars translucent, and the new version made it much worse, and expanded that philosophy to the whole OS. I've been using it since betas (that was a mistake) and I don't like it any better.
Even stuff that uses a more "clear" material now is a bigger obstruction of the content below it than the old translucent gray versions were. The huge play/pause blob over videos looks like a transparent material, but you can't see a goddamn thing through it anymore because they turned it into a crazy lens. For all the talk of the new UI getting out of the way of content, it really is a big shiny attention grabbing blob that blocks your content. You can get a hint of what colors are underneath it, and it's shiny.
The trend in Apple's design for years feels like it's been making things look pretty in screenshots, but less functional and worse to use.
Another recent fuckup is the Apple Watch's redesign where they traded scrolling lists of cards for full screen slideshows, because you wouldn't want to see what's coming or what you've scrolled past. You used to have more than one item in view at a time, and it was a hell of a lot easier to stop scrolling at the exact right spot instead of blowing past the thing you wanted to get to.
Also bad, the System Preferences redesign. The rearrangement of that wouldn't be as bad if the search bar could reliably find and take me to all of the settings, but it can't.
If they put someone in charge who prioritizes usability again, I don't think this is much of a loss for Apple. Heck, maybe he'll bring his design priorities to Meta and help Apple make a comeback with whatever their smart glasses / AR play is.
I will give them credit for one good thing that has come from iOS to Mac: having Control Center in the menu bar is a nice change. A few things I want in the menu bar for immediate access, and for the items that don't quite make the cut it's nice to have all of them two clicks away instead of requiring a trip to System Preferences.
I do wish they would bring Bartender-style menuextra containment as an official feature though. This is particularly awful today for visually impaired users, who are using the "Larger Text" screen scaling, lose a chunk of the menubar to the display notch, and then lose even more space to the big spacing they put between menuextras a couple of years ago.
The amount of bullshit that comes with a work laptop and wants to be in the menu bar is crazy, and when you run out of menu space things just disappear. Where did the VPN go? Sorry, displaced by your VOIP system and wireless presentation remote drivers and Dropbox and Teams and ...
It's nice that this software is quickly accessible without being in the Dock all the time, but the menu extras need to learn the same lesson as Control Center (and the Windows XP system tray 24 years ago) and have a second level that isn't space constrained.
I hate the new system preferences. I miss how the old one had handcrafted icons and just felt more compact.
I understand the new design scales better but I agree that the search is broken. Also it’s not responsive and feels like a web app.
I agree with most of your points.
The change to non-skeuomorphic style at least made it faster. Liquid Glass makes it simultaneously harder to read and slower.
You are absolutely right. This is the core spirit of "Forms Following Functions"
What lies beneath the surface of subjective aesthetics should be the functionality of information acquisition efficiency.
In what way was it faster?
Flat design was always atrocious, in that it utterly fails to take advantage of our visualization systems extremely effective autonomous recognition and interpretation of any 3D cue at all.
Not meaning we need things to look gratuitously 3D. But that small amounts of 3D effect, edges, shadows and highlighting, greatly reduce the effort of "seeing" what is where and what it means.
And of course, the trend to simply use text for text, buttons, links, ... without very high standards and consistency of differentiation, is truly horrible design.
The flat UI trend started at Microsoft and Windows 8.
Google showed off the Holo design language in Android 3.0 which was a year before Windows 8.
GNOME added the High-Contrast section to their HIG in 2003 - it prioritised simplicity, and used icons drawn with an "on-the-shelf" (ie. flat) perspective with overhead lighting.
Stylistically, it was a decade ahead of other flat designs - and was much more pleasant to use than the shiny 3D overload of KDE 3 / OSX Aqua / Windows XP.
I hope this signals a move away from Liquid Glass. It's an absolutely awful design. Android has enough of its own problems that I'm not in a rush to switch, but I'm really not happy at all with this new design direction Apple has taken.
It's kinda funny that 20 years ago the Mac cases were translucent plastic, and the UI was brushed metal, now it's the opposite, lol.
interesting observation, indeed funny!
I’ll be the one to say it:
I don’t really mind liquid glass.
Of course, that’s mostly because there are bigger problems this release cycle. For instance, they didn’t test Magnifier on 13 mini sized screens. Now that it doesn’t fit, the other app teams will probably make more stuff uselessly cluttered/embiggened, rendering Apple’s last phone-size devices useless.
I’ll be the one to say it:
Liquid Glass is actually very good design that addresses design problems that persisted since the switch to touchscreens in a very comprehensive way.
More specifically, the problem of how to have universally recognizable and standardized UI controls in every app without interfering with their design identity.
To me it’s just a logical conclusion in the UI design field, and I fully expect Google and others to adopt something like it eventually.
The implementation isn’t flawless though.
I’d love if an actual UX designer could comment here.
Hilarious that every single comment is "Good. Apple's design sense is bad" and not him moving to Meta which will presumably make them b- I mean even worse than they are now
I don't think people really care much about whatever metaverse worlds he is going to build over there.
Good. Apple has been making many, many bad UX decisions. It's not just Liquid Glass, either. I've been noticing the downward trend for years.
The other day I had to fire up my decade old 27” iMac to get some files off it and swear to God it felt faster than my two-year-old Mac Studio running Tahoe. I can’t imagine all the stupid bullshit going on behind the scenes to pull off these stupid liquid glass effects.
This seems like good news for The future of Apple. Jony Ive, the AI guy, and this UI guy all seemed net negative to product quality.
After Liquid Glass, I hope he was forced out of Apple. Either way a net benefit to Apple.
Yes please, liquid glass get out of here. This is the first time I viscerally felt: "Man I hate this update."
I'm still too locked in to consider switching, but my eye is on the door if this keeps up.
As negative as it may be, I refuse to update iOS until liquid glass is dead. Apple always gives us something we didn't ask for and don't want, and sometimes takes away things we do like and want.
I avoided the entire butterfly keyboard/touch bar Macbooks by buying an older model (2015 MacBook pro, the last one with scissor switch until 2020) and not upgrading until M series. That turned out to be a good decision.
That's what I did as well, I waited until the touch bar and the butterfly keyboard were out of the flow and got a really fantastic MacBook Pro with touch ID. Dare I say it works better than my iphone.
It's not going away, but I remain hopeful it will be refined. macOS is the real casualty this upgrade cycle—iOS has problems but isn't fundamentally broken.
that's the right move. after i upgraded, i showed my wife and she simply hasn't moved yet either. if i had only known.
My question is, how are they gonna fix this? Is it even possible? That’s what’s making me switch right now.
I’m just lucky. I’m a nobody that has nothing to do so I can easily switch over to android.
It’s a hack, but here’s what I did to make iOS less awful (credit to some HN thread I can’t find right now for the suggestion):
settings -> accessibility -> display and text size ->
reduce transparency ON
increase contrast ON
differentiate without color ON
That makes Liquid Glass marginally usable for me. Without those settings, I’d be doomed. What a horrifically bad design.
Thank you! Instant relief for eyes and brain.
[dead]
Hopefully the end of liquid [gl]ass.
I guess he made his escape before the users with torches and pitchforks could get ahold of him. Liquid Glass my a**.
“Liquid A**”? It’s right there!
I prefer “Glarse”
If only he would take liquid glass with him. I am so tired of upgrades that are "more delightful than ever" :(
Liquid Glass is hot garbage. I updated and kept thinking it would grow on me, no I just hate it. UI is hidden behind extra taps (the stupid new tab bar) and for the first time in my memory I've clicked, seen the animation of my click, and nothing has happened. Not to be a jerk but that's Android-level-shit (and yes, I've personally experienced that countless times in Android or Android-based OSes, like in the Meta Quest).
No one wants to see their content behind controls, they want to see the controls. The stupid glassy circles over my video are just distracting and literally make it harder for me to see the controls.
Just today I was scrolling and getting increasingly frustrated with the glass header flip/flopping between white/black text to account for the content under. For what??? I can't actually _see_ the content, it's warped and half-hidden.
Honestly, whoever thought "Hey, let's make things like the Safari address bar not cover the bottom so you can 'see your content'" should be fired (and I try not to say that often). It was a stupid idea, oh look now I can see 10px more of "content" that is just distracting and stealing space from useful controls. All the padding/margins got bigger in Liquid Glass all while reducing visibility and removing functionality.
Liquid Glass will go down as "Look over there" (re: AI), it was a distraction at best (because if people actually thought it was an improvement they are blind). Hopefully we don't have to wait quite as long as we did after iOS 7 for them to reverse course.
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46139145
In my opinion, Bloomberg was being too nice by saying that he was poached by Meta. He was not worth being poached. So I don’t really think this is a dupe.
It's the same discussion. Even referenced as the source. It's a dupe.
I can’t even read that Bloomberg article because there’s so many pop-ups and it’s behind a paywall.
Not to mention the overly sympathetic headline.
The Bloomberg article is accessible here: https://archive.ph/VW0Sw
So share your link over there. The point is no need to split up the discussion. Which is over there from earlier.
My lino is a better link, which is why mine is on the front page and yours is not. I can’t read your article. That’s a problem for people like me who are poor and can’t afford a Bloomberg subscription.
Addition by subtraction for Apple.
Lmao. No common back button, gave up on force touch, settings hidden in weird places, etc.
My turn to complain about bugs. I used to balk at people when they complained about bugs on MacOS/iOS.
My iPhone 7 which I used for 7 years straight, was more bug-free than my current iPhone 15 Pro.
There’s no shortage of visual bugs with iOS 26, but that’s not my point. Recently I had to restart my phone (literally unheard of in Apple land) because I put it in Guided Access and it wasn’t possible to get it out without a force restart, which I had to learn how to do for the first time. That bug persisted for at least a month.
A few days ago the camera app would just show a grey screen and the fix was to restart your iPhone.
I’m sorry but that’s Android. If you have to restart your phone because of a bug, or core functionality like camera doesn’t work, you are not using an iPhone. But apparently, you are, and apparently Apple has finally succumbed to organizational corruption like every other company.
Still miles better than Android though, in which the OS is still an active warzone between Google and the manufacturer.
[dead]
[flagged]
Sorry you were flagged. Perfectly valid comment that everyone at Apple should see.
Glass dick