[HN Gopher] Apple's Liquid Glass is prep work for AR interfaces,...
___________________________________________________________________
Apple's Liquid Glass is prep work for AR interfaces, not just a
design refresh
Author : lightningcable
Score : 308 points
Date : 2025-06-13 19:44 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (omc345.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (omc345.substack.com)
| evantravers wrote:
| 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.
| apples_oranges wrote:
| What would they lose if not?
| deadbabe wrote:
| The interface will look old and dated by the time it rolls
| out on the new hardware.
| out-of-ideas wrote:
| 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
| swyx wrote:
| 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...)
| cybrox wrote:
| Changing the UI beforehand is their approach at a gentle
| introduction. It's just not voluntary.
| ben_w wrote:
| 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.
| dinobones wrote:
| 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.
| mumbisChungo wrote:
| >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
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| > 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.
| Larrikin wrote:
| 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.
| klabb3 wrote:
| > 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.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| 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.
| klabb3 wrote:
| > 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.
| jeffgreco wrote:
| 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.
| sneak wrote:
| > _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.
| willquack wrote:
| > You're never going to want your browser, editor, or Slack
| window to be translucent.
|
| r/unixporn disagrees
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Maybe Apple designers should stop hanging out there and
| reread WCAG
| bigyabai wrote:
| r/unixporn disagrees with most HIGs.
| kepano wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://stephango.com/black-pixels
| polyomino wrote:
| 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.
| kepano wrote:
| 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.
| YeahThisIsMe wrote:
| 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.
| XorNot wrote:
| 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).
| adriand wrote:
| 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.
| XorNot wrote:
| If people wanted to do this then they'd do this right now on
| a monitor.
| layer8 wrote:
| This has been possible for well over a decade:
| https://www.mobzystems.com/tools/seethroughwindows/
| randomname4325 wrote:
| smart glasses is exactly where I saw this interface working and
| being developed for
| paxys wrote:
| > 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.
| chimeracoder wrote:
| > 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.
| dmoy wrote:
| > 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...
| outofpaper wrote:
| 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.
| Marazan wrote:
| Yes, that was absolute peak Guber live-revisionism-in-action
| and when I basically stopped reading him entirely.
| nntwozz wrote:
| Please link said DF article praising Apple for leading the
| pack in flat design.
| chimeracoder wrote:
| Did you try searching for it? The first result on Google
| for "daringfireball.net flat design 2013" is https://daring
| fireball.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
| nntwozz wrote:
| Cheers.
|
| Gruber does mention Metro:
|
| The lack of skeuomorphic effects and almost extreme
| flatness of the "modern" (nee 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.
| sheepscreek wrote:
| 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.
| sunflowerfly wrote:
| Microsoft gave up on a phone operating system far too early.
| paxys wrote:
| 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.
| DrBenCarson wrote:
| 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
| sheepscreek wrote:
| 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?
| microtherion wrote:
| 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).
| sheepscreek wrote:
| 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.
| zeroq wrote:
| 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.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| I blame them. When you have that kind of money you can
| not fuck things up _and_ invent new things.
| zdragnar wrote:
| 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.
| jitl wrote:
| 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.
| elictronic wrote:
| 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.
| jitl wrote:
| 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.
| pwthornton wrote:
| Storm was a very un-Blackberry phone and objectively
| awful. It should never have been released.
| pndy wrote:
| 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.
| jitl wrote:
| 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)
| drw85 wrote:
| 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.
| zeroq wrote:
| Ever heard the phrase "too Zune"?
| brookst wrote:
| Both times.
| someone7x wrote:
| Luckily it is immortalized in GTA5, when playing as Trevor at
| least. I found it the easiest phone to use in that game.
| _dark_matter_ wrote:
| 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)
| paxys wrote:
| 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.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| 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
| Den_VR wrote:
| All I really wanted from the Windows phone was the
| ability to pull up powershell and run some simple scripts
| :(
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| I don't think that's why it failed
| attendant3446 wrote:
| Looking at the state of Windows 11, I doubt that.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| 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.
| fakedang wrote:
| 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.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| reading comprehension
| tguvot wrote:
| Continuum seems to be released in 2015. Motorola Atrix that
| had desktop mode was released in 2011
| Grazester wrote:
| Let's not also tell op that I was using Qi Wireless
| charging on my Google Nexus 4 in 2012.
| paxys wrote:
| Nokia Lumia phones launched a year before that.
| Grazester wrote:
| 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.
| keeda wrote:
| 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...)
| homebrewer wrote:
| 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.
| no-name-here wrote:
| 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?
| keeda wrote:
| 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).
| javchz wrote:
| 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.
| attendant3446 wrote:
| 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.
| TheBozzCL wrote:
| 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.
| pwthornton wrote:
| 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.
| cubancigar11 wrote:
| 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).
| Grazester wrote:
| 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.
| xattt wrote:
| 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.
| notjoemama wrote:
| 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.
| fleebee wrote:
| 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.
| neuroelectron wrote:
| 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.
| Hyperboreanal wrote:
| 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.
| eddythompson80 wrote:
| 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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| 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
| bhaney wrote:
| > 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.
| intothemild wrote:
| Actually. The charge port for the mouse on the bottom is
| genius. In this essay I will.....
| frollogaston wrote:
| "I suppose you still want a floppy drive too" and then
| they re-added the SD card and HDMI
| czottmann wrote:
| Ah, overly broad stereotypes, you totally can't go wrong with
| them. May they never change
| jjcob wrote:
| 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.
| frollogaston wrote:
| 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.
| zaphirplane wrote:
| You and your "facts". stop ruining the story time
| huhkerrf wrote:
| 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.
| prox wrote:
| 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.
| vachina wrote:
| > 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
| npteljes wrote:
| 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.
| illiac786 wrote:
| 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.
| npteljes wrote:
| 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.
| maccard wrote:
| 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.
| qiine wrote:
| and thats why "influencers" are big
| darkwater wrote:
| Easy way to outsource your thinking. Next step in this
| epopee will be/is already GenAI.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| 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.
| darkwater wrote:
| 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.
| frollogaston wrote:
| 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.
| dgellow wrote:
| I mean, yes? That has been true for as long as I can
| remember
| frollogaston wrote:
| 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.
| legulere wrote:
| 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.
| fennecbutt wrote:
| 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.
| latexr wrote:
| > 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.
| alphakappa wrote:
| 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.
| olyjohn wrote:
| Got anything more recent than the invention of the
| iPhone? That was almost 20 years ago now....
| whycome wrote:
| 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?
| pjc50 wrote:
| The press releases from Apple say "first time" and the
| journos paste it into the article.
| DidYaWipe wrote:
| 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.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| 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.
| aboardRat4 wrote:
| Gnome doesn't support system tray by default.
| trealira wrote:
| GNOME doesn't look anything like Windows XP, though. Not
| the design language and not the actual layout of the UI.
| DidYaWipe wrote:
| I agree that XP was the top of Windows's UI evolution (in
| "Classic" mode, not the default Fischer-Price motif).
| oblio wrote:
| 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.
| oblio wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Mixed_Reality
|
| The Win 10 UI was starting to be adapted for AR back in
| 2015...
| laborcontract wrote:
| The new UI is gorgeous and importantly, delightful.
| mcswell wrote:
| 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.
| ModernMech wrote:
| > 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.
| layer8 wrote:
| You should have added an /s. ;)
| hnlmorg wrote:
| 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.
| MrThoughtful wrote:
| 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.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> 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?
| buran77 wrote:
| 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.
| msgodel wrote:
| 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.
| buran77 wrote:
| 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.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| You're missing the point. The point is that most people
| are contempt with something once they find it, not about
| niche UIs.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| 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.
| izacus wrote:
| 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.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| 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.
| devnullbrain wrote:
| Designing all the slow animations that are required for
| maintaining the kayfabe of shells that depend on desk
| analogies.
| mcswell wrote:
| 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.)
| furyofantares wrote:
| 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.
| astrange wrote:
| Please don't live on developer betas like that. They're not
| meant to be stable enough for it.
| furyofantares wrote:
| I'm alright man
| astrange wrote:
| You're alright if you restart once a day to clear out the
| memory leaks, maybe.
| furyofantares wrote:
| 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.
| frereubu wrote:
| 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
| frollogaston wrote:
| 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.
| frollogaston wrote:
| Also I think every iOS update after 7 has either stayed the
| same or added subtly more depth/shadows. In multiple steps.
| dvngnt_ wrote:
| 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
| IsTom wrote:
| 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?
| frollogaston wrote:
| 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.
| devnullbrain wrote:
| 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.
| recursivecaveat wrote:
| 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.
| Seb-C wrote:
| 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.
| hcarvalhoalves wrote:
| This looks like a product evolution, but in reverse.
| yrcyrc wrote:
| <<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.
| xnx wrote:
| 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?
|
| https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1932521605340483607
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> 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.
| oxygen_crisis wrote:
| 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.
| bigyabai wrote:
| Hey, at least Apple hedged their bet on the future needing
| emoji keyboards.
| encom wrote:
| You'd rather go 7 years without upgrading, than buy a
| computer without an apple on it?
| oxygen_crisis wrote:
| 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.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| 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.
| iw7tdb2kqo9 wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IrGYUq1mklk
| makeitdouble wrote:
| 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.
| didgeoridoo wrote:
| 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.
| layer8 wrote:
| 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.
| two_handfuls wrote:
| Parent was talking about current screen technology ("real
| AR" vs "passthrough AR").
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| It's not particularly hard to dynamically darken part of a
| pair of glasses.
| ozten wrote:
| 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.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| It is not impossible in the current glasses form factor.
| You add a film onto the glasses that darkens specific
| areas on demand.
| didgeoridoo wrote:
| 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"?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| 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.
| manmal wrote:
| 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.
| philwelch wrote:
| That's unfortunate because it would make it extremely
| difficult to implement adblocking in AR (as in, blocking ads
| from the real world).
| behnamoh wrote:
| how would that even work? what ads do you see in the real
| world?
| nemomarx wrote:
| Billboards, posters on bus stops, etc?
| tough wrote:
| Imagine watching TV while you have your AR glasses on,
| and blocking ads there.
|
| or youtube ones lol
| bastawhiz wrote:
| 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.
| wincy wrote:
| 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.
| int_19h wrote:
| HUDs were originally developed for fighter planes, i.e.
| exactly the situation where the operator has to keep
| looking at important stuff outside.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| 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.
| manmal wrote:
| 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.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| 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).
| rhubarbtree wrote:
| 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.
| bee_rider wrote:
| > 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.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > 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-...
| bee_rider wrote:
| 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).
| hxtk wrote:
| 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.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Transparent terminals are still a thing? I thought that fad
| ended 10 years ago. Never made any sense to me.
| hxtk wrote:
| 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.
| evanextreme wrote:
| 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
| crooked-v wrote:
| 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.
| ncphillips wrote:
| 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.
| carabiner wrote:
| 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.
| kccqzy wrote:
| Yeah because these bright green lines are obviously not
| aesthetically pleasing enough for Apple.
| Aloisius wrote:
| 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)
| bigyabai wrote:
| Do you use multiple marker colors? Or just one?
| jimmySixDOF wrote:
| 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
| Aloisius wrote:
| 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.
| xnx wrote:
| Probably not very good at night?
| bongodongobob wrote:
| This is completely dependent on what's behind it, not mention
| you need to light an entirely separate room/hallway to read
| it.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| Imagine another pane of glass with writing on it about a foot
| behind. You can imagine how illegible it could become.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| 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.
| serf wrote:
| >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.
| brailsafe wrote:
| 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.
| anon373839 wrote:
| 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.
| vehemenz wrote:
| 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).
| devnullbrain wrote:
| >which is going to be horrible for accessibility
|
| My suspicion is this concern went the same way as DEI/ESG
| outofpaper wrote:
| 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!
| mrandish wrote:
| > 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?
| cheema33 wrote:
| 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!
| raverbashing wrote:
| Yeah, I'm more tempted on believing the other takes on it
|
| That basically is just a way of making people upgrade their
| iPhone
| marxism wrote:
| 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
| devnullbrain wrote:
| >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
| jitl wrote:
| Now they made the outline shiny
| radley wrote:
| > 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.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| _> 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.
| derefr wrote:
| 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.
| rendaw wrote:
| 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.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| > 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.
| nateroling wrote:
| 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.
| ncphillips wrote:
| 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.
| danhite wrote:
| > 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]
| int_19h wrote:
| 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.
| scotty79 wrote:
| > 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.
| qnleigh wrote:
| 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.
| Someone1234 wrote:
| 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.
| samwillis wrote:
| 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.
| msgodel wrote:
| 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.
| delian66 wrote:
| > Good AR glasses are already available
|
| Which ones do you think are good?
| msgodel wrote:
| I use first generation Xreal glasses.
| kbos87 wrote:
| 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.
| msgodel wrote:
| 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.
| Geee wrote:
| 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
| iw7tdb2kqo9 wrote:
| Some insights/vision lost to history because interviewer
| needed to interrupt.
|
| This is why I like Lex Fridman style podcast.
| roughly wrote:
| > 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.
| rewgs wrote:
| 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.
| coastalpuma wrote:
| 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.
| coastalpuma wrote:
| 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.
| thenaturalist wrote:
| 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...
| cma wrote:
| 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.
| htrp wrote:
| So we're waiting for a cheaper to use Vision Pro (Vision SE?)
| ModernMech wrote:
| 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."
| iamleppert wrote:
| I wonder if they will release a transparent frosted glass iPad
| next?!
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| 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."
| layer8 wrote:
| Just let the backside camera feed be the wallpaper. They'd
| probably do it if it didn't cost too much battery.
| tzury wrote:
| 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.
| munificent wrote:
| _> 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.
| shinycode wrote:
| 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
| munificent wrote:
| Coca-Cola has made a ton of money over the years too, but
| they're still just selling sugar water, not "making
| something substantial".
| shinycode wrote:
| 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.
| DannyBee wrote:
| "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"
| bitpush wrote:
| > 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| The reality distortion field didn't die with Jobs.
| DannyBee wrote:
| 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.
| mrandish wrote:
| True... and in AR the Liquid Glass UI actually distorts
| reality.
| paxys wrote:
| 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.
| kitten_mittens_ wrote:
| I updated to avoid paying the new American tariffs. The
| advertised AI features were decidedly underwhelming.
| layer8 wrote:
| There is a class action lawsuit regarding that:
| https://clarksonlawfirm.com/lp/apple-intelligence-false-
| adve...
| behnamoh wrote:
| 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.
| lukev wrote:
| 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.
| simondw wrote:
| 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.
| bradleyankrom wrote:
| I think you would just return it, not sue them.
| paxys wrote:
| So is Apple accepting returns from all iPhone 16 owners?
| lukev wrote:
| 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.)
| tionate wrote:
| In Australia the regulators pursue such things.
| https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/jayco-in-court-
| over-of...
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Maybe Elon is secretly running Apple too, among his other
| roles.
| DannyBee wrote:
| 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.
| conradev wrote:
| 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).
| rs186 wrote:
| 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.
| alwillis wrote:
| 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.
| bitpush wrote:
| 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.
| alwillis wrote:
| > 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/
| KaiserPro wrote:
| 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.
| bitpush wrote:
| 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.
| dustbunny wrote:
| Unless the blur is built into the optics of the glass itself
| somehow!
| bitpush wrote:
| 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...
| bastawhiz wrote:
| > 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.
| radley wrote:
| 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.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| 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.
| radley wrote:
| 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.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| > 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)
| Seb-C wrote:
| 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.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| > 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.
| ghotli wrote:
| 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?
| KaiserPro wrote:
| 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)
| roughly wrote:
| 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.
| wizzledonker wrote:
| I've seen skeuomorphic designs done with vector art, surely
| this can't be the only/real reason.
| andrekandre wrote:
| 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
| kccqzy wrote:
| 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.
| specialist wrote:
| 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.
| curiousgal wrote:
| The same AR they built a product for and flopped? Oh please..
| exe34 wrote:
| 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.
| andrekandre wrote:
| > 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...
|
| its pretty clear, i think, most of this stuff, including from
| the designers (apple) themselves are just post-hoc
| justifications in the end...
| exe34 wrote:
| > 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.
| runjake wrote:
| 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.
| scudsworth wrote:
| windows vista was prep work for ar interfaces
| exiguus wrote:
| 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?
| partiallypro wrote:
| 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.
| excalibur wrote:
| Didn't Microsoft do this whole glass UI thing 20 years ago?
| I_dream_of_Geni wrote:
| 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
| ray_ wrote:
| > 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.
| pier25 wrote:
| This is nonsense. It will take at least a decade for AR to become
| mainstream, if it ever happens at all.
| basisword wrote:
| 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.
| eddythompson80 wrote:
| 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.
| wuming2 wrote:
| 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.
| aetherspawn wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IrGYUq1mklk
| bastawhiz wrote:
| > 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.
| dham wrote:
| Where we're not going to need interfaces. It seems like most
| normal people will not need any type of interface. Glasses or
| not.
| wnevets wrote:
| Windows Vista never looked so nice
| hk1337 wrote:
| 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.
| tropicalfruit wrote:
| apple is always innovating new ways to make your old device
| obsolete
| ksynwa wrote:
| This whole post is pure speculation right? "Screens becoming less
| relevant" sounds like ravings of someone trying to play
| Nostradamus.
| travisgriggs wrote:
| > 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.
| kccqzy wrote:
| Material Design was in response to iOS 7, not the other way
| around.
| nottorp wrote:
| 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.
| XiphiasX wrote:
| Liquid Ass
| notorandit wrote:
| So a design refresh is needed for AR interfaces to work.
| Interesting!
| arathis wrote:
| 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.
| croes wrote:
| But why put an AR interface on an non AR hardware?
| bigyabai wrote:
| Product upsell.
| seydor wrote:
| 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
| Kiro wrote:
| 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.
| jrm4 wrote:
| 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.
| 3cats-in-a-coat wrote:
| 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.
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