{"id":60172,"date":"2025-09-25T08:11:43","date_gmt":"2025-09-25T11:11:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/manualdousuario.net\/?p=60172"},"modified":"2025-09-25T08:11:43","modified_gmt":"2025-09-25T11:11:43","slug":"liquid-glass","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/manualdousuario.net\/en\/liquid-glass\/","title":{"rendered":"Liquid Glass"},"content":{"rendered":"

Major redesigns of graphical user interfaces (GUI) always provoke surprise and complaints. With Liquid Glass, Apple\u2019s new visual language, it\u2019s no different.<\/p>\n

The good news is that beneath the new buttons, unreadable text blocks and modernized effects, the way you use systems like iOS and macOS hasn\u2019t changed. People familiar with the previous versions will be able to find their way around the new ones.<\/p>\n

That doesn\u2019t mean Liquid Glass is a success. At the risk of contradicting myself later, I think Apple missed the mark.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

One big question I have after a week using iOS 26 and macOS 26 Tahoe is whether the bugs and the sluggishness are fixable in future updates or \u2014 especially the sluggishness \u2014 unavoidable side effects of transparency and refraction effects on glassy surfaces that, I imagine, require more processing power.<\/p>\n

Bugs show up here and there: context menus that jump to odd places, screen transitions that go wrong, inconsistencies and other little issues. Nothing that breaks functionality, but enough to shatter the illusion of smoothness at the core of the new look. The same goes for the sluggishness, which sometimes appears in unexpected places like Spotlight or a command that should be instant.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s also a more fundamental issue that seems broken: Apple\u2019s claim<\/a> that Liquid Glass \u201cbrings more focus to content\u201d. It does the opposite. Liquid Glass competes with app content for attention; sometimes it\u2019s more eye-catching. Maybe that\u2019s just the novelty factor, though.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve never bought the idea that Apple maintains a secret planned\u2011obsolescence policy. The first encounter with the 26 crop of operating systems \u2014 the first with Liquid Glass \u2014 shook that confidence.<\/p>\n

My devices are \u201cold\u201d (a 2020 laptop, a 2022 phone), but until now they ran without hiccups. It\u2019s possible iOS\/macOS 26.1 and subsequent updates will improve things, but that\u2019s not the point. The trillion\u2011dollar question is why Apple sacrificed performance and stability for a change that\u2019s purely cosmetic.<\/p>\n

At heart, Liquid Glass is just makeup. And at first glance it\u2019s not the prettiest. There are moments when the visual effects impress, but they\u2019re less frequent than Apple\u2019s marketing suggests for a simple reason: much of the time \u2014 especially on macOS \u2014 the glass elements sit behind flat areas (white in Light Mode).<\/p>\n

Although Liquid Glass feels fresh (because it\u2019s new?), stepping back a few versions puts it in perspective. macOS, poor thing, suffers the most from Liquid Glass. Compare it<\/a> with this:<\/p>\n

\"Dock
Good times I didn’t live. (I started on 10.10 Yosemite.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

That window is from Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, 2011. It\u2019s a more legible \u2014 and, to me, a prettier \u2014 GUI.<\/p>\n

Since then macOS seems to have fallen into a spiral of decline, a phenomenon summed up by this exercise of reviewing Apple\u2019s desktop OS in backwards<\/a>, \u00e0 la Benjamin Button, F. Scott Fitzgerald\u2019s character who is born old and dies a baby.<\/p>\n

For the first time since I switched to Apple devices in 2015, I looked into how to downgrade. I was (much) happier with macOS 15 Sequoia and iOS 18 (and, before that, iOS 17, the last version that played well with my phone’s tiny 4,7\u201d screen). I ended up giving up because, as I said earlier, Liquid Glass is tacky and buggy, but overall things still work more or less as before.<\/p>\n

My resignation isn\u2019t without some\u2026 resentment? I\u2019m not sure that word fully captures the feeling; if not, it\u2019s something close. Over this decade using Apple systems, most changes have pleased me. I even embraced the controversial Safari tab redesign from 2021. That makes my displeasure with Liquid Glass sting more. It\u2019s a rare misstep from Apple \u2014 and an unprecedented one in scale.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Major redesigns of graphical user interfaces (GUI) always provoke surprise and complaints. With Liquid Glass, Apple\u2019s new visual language, it\u2019s no different. The good news is that beneath the new buttons, unreadable text blocks and modernized effects, the way you use systems like iOS and macOS hasn\u2019t changed. People familiar with the previous versions will […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"episode_type":"","audio_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":"","_locale":"en_US","_original_post":""},"categories":[1575],"tags":[1818,1820],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/manualdousuario.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60172"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/manualdousuario.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/manualdousuario.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manualdousuario.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manualdousuario.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60172"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/manualdousuario.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60172\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":60175,"href":"https:\/\/manualdousuario.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60172\/revisions\/60175"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/manualdousuario.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manualdousuario.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manualdousuario.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}