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                      Nick Heer Peers Through Liquid Glass

   Adam Engst

   In a deep examination of Liquid Glass on the iPhone and Mac on his
   Pixel Envy blog, [1]Nick Heer writes:

     I am spending an awful lot of words on the MacOS version because I
     think it is the least successful of the two Liquid Glass
     implementations I have used. MacOS still works a lot like MacOS. But
     it looks and feels like someone dictated, context-free, that it
     needed to reflect the redesign of iOS.

     The iOS implementation is more successful since Liquid Glass feels '
     and I mean feels ' like something designed first for touch-based
     systems. There is an increasingly tight relationship between the
     device and its physical environment. Longstanding features like True
     Tone meet new (well, [2]new-ish) shifting highlights that respond to
     physical device orientation, situating the iPhone within its
     real-world context. Yet, even in its best implementation on iOS,
     Liquid Glass looks out of place when it is used in apps that rely on
     layouts driven by simple shapes and clean lines.

   I highly recommend reading Heer's extensively documented criticisms of
   Liquid Glass. He offers numerous examples of what he likes and doesn't
   like about Liquid Glass, though there is much more of the latter,
   leading to this delicious line, 'I could keep going with my nitpicks,
   so I shall.' Nevertheless, it's essential to acknowledge that Liquid
   Glass is here to stay, while also offering constructive criticism that
   can help push Apple to improve the user experience.

   I also appreciated his attempts to understand why Apple chose to
   introduce Liquid Glass now:

     I kept asking myself 'why?' as I used iOS 26 and MacOS 26 this
     summer. I wanted to understand the rationale for a complete makeover
     across Apple's entire line of products. What was the imperative for
     unifying the systems' visual interface design language? Why this,
     specifically?

     Come to think of it, why is this the first time all of the operating
     systems are marketed with the same version number? And why did Apple
     decide this was the right time to make a [3]dedicated 'operating
     system' section on its website to show how it delivers a 'more
     consistent experience' between devices? I have no evidence Apple
     would want to unify under some kind of 'Apple OS' branding, but if
     Apple did want to make such a change, this feels like a very Apple-y
     way to soft-launch it. After all, your devices already run specific
     versions of Safari and Siri without them needing to be called 'Mac
     Safari' and 'Watch Siri'. Just throwing that thought into the wind.

     If anything like that pans out, it could explain why Apple sees its
     products as needing a unified identity.

   Why now? The answer may partly lie in available processing power. The
   balance between usability and aesthetics has always been informed by
   technical capabilities. Consider a few dates from Apple's history:
     * 1980s: With just Motorola 680×0 chips and QuickDraw'and users new
       to graphical interfaces'a focus on usability was paramount.
     * 1990s: As computers gained power, interface flourishes became
       possible, leading Steve Dorner to add his cranky 'Waste cycles
       drawing trendy 3D junk' setting to Eudora.
     * 2001: Mac OS X's Aqua interface introduced gel buttons, drop
       shadows, and translucent menus, made possible by Quartz and GPU
       acceleration.
     * 2007: The iPhone's signature 60 fps animations'smooth scrolling,
       springy bounces, fluid zooms'left competing smartphones stuttering
       through basic tasks.
     * 2013/14: iOS 7 and OS X 10.10 Yosemite pushed hardware limits with
       live blur effects and translucency that older devices struggled to
       handle.
     * 2025: Apple silicon provides enough horsepower that our devices can
       easily handle the kind of sophisticated optical effects once
       reserved for SIGGRAPH graphics conference demos.

   I'm also intrigued by Heer's idea that Liquid Glass might signal a
   broader 'Apple OS' branding, since I've been using OS as a shorthand
   for Apple's stable of operating systems for some time now. While I'd be
   surprised to see Apple drop the separate operating system names
   entirely, Heer makes a valid point that Apple already uses universal
   naming across platforms for apps and features.

   [4]Read original article

References

   1. https://pxlnv.com/blog/on-liquid-glass/
   2. https://gizmodo.com/check-out-how-insane-this-tiny-new-detail-in-ios-6-is-5917967
   3. https://www.apple.com/ca/os/
   4. https://pxlnv.com/blog/on-liquid-glass/

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