I'll take the bubble tea interface over the extreme flatness of every widget that dominates the UI these days where no cues are given as to what is just text, what's a button, an editable text input etc.
While liquid glass is perhaps mediocre and distracting, the current "everything is just a text label or a stick figure icon" paradigm is pure hell. I dread learning any new UI because of how bad most are.
I don’t buy the argument that we need design harmony between platforms. If I wanted an iPad like experience on my Mac I would have bought an iPad. I paid for a mouse and keyboard centric experience. Liquid Glass actively takes away from that.
Some people will say that iOS has an option for ‘reduce transparency’ that mitigates the issue. But every time I turn it on, there’s a general lack of design polish in the OS and apps due to it not being the default.
Another point: I wonder how much of this is for the OS designer/UX/UI team to justify their existence at Apple. Suspect it’ll start out very glassy and gets flatter over time, so that they can claim ‘improvement to user experience’ over many years to come.
> Apple's designers (and those of many other companies) come back to the idea of translucency giving order and imbuing personality. I cannot for the life of me understand where this idea comes from. When multiple layers of different imagery shine through each other, I am not helped by this. The user interface placed on a semi-transparent panel is not more effective because it is set against a smeared mess of colors, nor am I emotionally fulfilled as a human being for knowing that the mess comes from a treasured personal memory.
This article acts as though design choices which are sub-optimal from a purely informational perspective, but which add personality and attraction to a product, have not earned Apple hundreds of billions of dollars in the past 25 years. The fact that he cannot understand where the idea comes from is okay, since he's not a product, UI, or industrial designer for Apple: that's their job, not his. The deeper question of why people form attachments to things that look 'cool' but have lower performance in some areas is indeed mysterious. But relentlessly pursuing that phenomenon has worked for Apple pretty well so far.
Liquid Glass isn't immediately impressive to me either, but it will either succeed or fail not based on whether it is more effective or not, but whether people like it or not, and those are two different things.
I think what you're missing is that this is likely in preparation for some sort of AR glasses and something smaller form factor than the Vision Pro that will require transparency so you can see through to the real world etc...
I think the real takeaway is that Apple has achieved a psychotic break from actual users, and its internal forces are driving decisions. Somehow user testing signal has been captured by these forces, and market signals are overwhelmed by the overall quality premium they deliver (and you can never prove the negative of how much better sales would have been without this).
I care less about the quality failings than the signs the Apple is too big to manage through the next few years. They’ve done a great job asserting independence from chip makers, but they’re no where near independent enough for the new era of assertive nationalism.
UI design gripes posted on site with icon that doesn't link through to homepage
Back in the 1990s I remember CS professors taking a very chauvinistic idea of what an "operating system" was limited to the kernel, would probably exclude a CLI interpreter like bash, never mind the rest of the userspace and would particularly exclude anything having to do with GUI even if you had kernel drivers and tons of DLLs that came with the OS to support GUIs.
Now you have Arstechnica, which should know better, which makes detailed reviews pixel-by-pixel of everything that changed between one version of MacOS and the next and seems to think the only thing that matters in an OS is the superficial things you can see, at least if the OS is MacOS.
Windows is refreshing because it has more widget sets than I can count but it doesn't matter because you can get your work done even though it is inconsistent and usually just a bit ugly. It beats Linux though, because at least in Windows if a label is 75px wide, Windows will make at least 75px of space for it, whereas in Linux nobody gets excited if it label gets clipped because they only left 55px -- they'll even close out a bug request about this as soon as you make it. But hey, Linux on a bad day looks better than the 99% percentile NFT.
> Apple's designers (and those of many other companies) come back to the idea of translucency giving order and imbuing personality. I cannot for the life of me understand where this idea comes from.
When the company employs designers on a permanent salaried basis, those designers must make changes in order to assure their continued employment. To do otherwise risks the bean counters in the accounting department asking the pointed question: "Why are we employing all these designers when they are not producing anything?". The result is that there must be change for the purpose of assuring the designers continued employment. Result: translucent designs no one wants, but that looked great in the powerpoint presentations used to assure the designers remained employed.