[HN Gopher] iOS 26.1 lets users control Liquid Glass transparency
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iOS 26.1 lets users control Liquid Glass transparency
Author : dabinat
Score : 119 points
Date : 2025-10-20 19:39 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.macrumors.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.macrumors.com)
| rcarmo wrote:
| Now all we need is a "disable kindergarten mode" button to remove
| the superfluous whitespace in macOS.
| montroser wrote:
| So, so, much money, time, and resources poured into this update
| that only made things worse; and now again to roll it back...
| GenerocUsername wrote:
| I don't see it said enough, but liquid glass slowed my M3
| noticably.
|
| Odd I got the update 2 weeks before M5 launch.
|
| Software as a means to obsolete hardware.
|
| Trillion dollar company
| frizlab wrote:
| I have an M3 max and see literally no difference in
| performance. YMMV I guess!
|
| I do have performance issues on my iPhone 13 mini, but I
| expected it.
| jsheard wrote:
| I mean your M3 Max has a 3-5x bigger GPU than OPs base M3,
| you'd certainly hope it could rip through those new
| shaders.
| jamesthurley wrote:
| I haven't noticed any performance issues on my M3 Air,
| other than the Ghostty / Zed scrolling lag issues that
| were fixed in a software update.
| mroche wrote:
| I migrated from a 13 Mini to a 17 Pro last week. Updated
| the Mini to 26 beforehand to mitigate any potential 18->26
| issues with data transfers/backups.
|
| I'm still getting accustomed to the device size, the Mini
| was such a perfect device. If only app and web developers
| would actually preview their work on its dimensions, I
| probably would have just replaced the battery (76%).
|
| Reduced Transparency is a hard requirement for iOS 26.
| zamadatix wrote:
| The M3 can run modern 3D games at high frame rates, surely it
| was something else about the update than the glass effect in
| the UI causing slowness??
|
| It's a more appreciable burden on older iPhones though.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| The glass transparency effect is just very computationally
| expensive.
| gambiting wrote:
| I just don't understand how if Visa could render its
| transparency efects smoothly on Intel 920 grade GPUs with
| 128mb of ram.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| That's not how I remember it. Back in the day the first
| thing you did was disable the Aero stuff to claw back
| some performance on Vista.
|
| That said, who knows how efficient the implementation is
| compared to other changes in iOS 26. I turned liquid
| glass off with "reduced transparency" because even 1%
| extra battery usage for it would be too much even though
| I kinda appreciated the new look.
| gambiting wrote:
| >>That's not how I remember it. Back in the day the first
| thing you did was disable the Aero stuff to claw back
| some performance on Vista.
|
| I remember it being kinda like placebo - you did, you
| marvelled at how much faster it's working, but in reality
| nothing changed. I really liked the look, and it did run
| smooth unless you had something below the minimum
| spec(which a lot of people did at the time).
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| Vista problems were largely nvidia driver crashes and low
| spec machines. Otherwise vista was fine.
| Gigachad wrote:
| The glass UI renders on my Apple Watch 6 just fine and
| that thing has probably 0.5% the GPU power as the
| Macbooks.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| There's visible lag & stutters opening the control center
| on my Series 10.
|
| Likewise, while it performs "fine," interacting with the
| UI still feels sluggish on Tahoe on my M4 Pro compared to
| Sequoia. I still have another M4 Pro with sequoia on it
| and it's a night and day difference, in favor of Sequoia.
|
| There may not be any real performance loss but there is
| definitely UI latency and it's very noticable.
| monster_truck wrote:
| It barely handles that, and even the M5 still cannot cope
| with 8khz mouse input coupled to a high refresh rate (>240)
| screen. I laugh every time they try and sell us on these
| things being able to play games
| iknowstuff wrote:
| ?? isn't it objectively the fastest ST core out there,
| topping MT benchmarks as well? Depending on the variant
| the M4 plays cyberpunk at 50-120fps so what are you
| saying?
| zamadatix wrote:
| Even looking at pro CS players, a single 8 KHz entry is
| found in the table at https://liquipedia.net/counterstrik
| e/List_of_player_mouse_se..., so it's a really odd hill
| to try to die on.
|
| They really are great gaming machines from a hardware
| perspective. I wouldn't bother with an x86 laptop for
| gaming if it weren't for the software (mostly DRM) side.
| t1234s wrote:
| I think LG made the finder windows buggy as they have issues
| focusing when I click on them. Didn't have this issue before
| Tahoe
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Wasn't Windows 7 doing this same stuff back in like 2009?
| AlexandrB wrote:
| I think the liquid glass transparency is more complex than
| Aero - with curved glass objects distorting what's behind
| them significantly in some cases. Don't know how much more
| computationally intensive that is.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Nah liquid glass isn't just transparency and gaussion blur,
| it refracts/bends light around the rims as well as a kind
| of sub pixel colour splitting on some elements like when
| you have a water droplet magnifying your screen.
| fujigawa wrote:
| If we follow the same pattern, iOS 27 and corresponding
| releases will be completely flat and look like Mac OS
| System 7. Chicago font wants to live another day.
|
| Windows 8 got some serious hate back in the day, it had
| some sound ideas that were implemented poorly, but no one
| could deny it was lightweight. It had the smallest memory
| footprint of all the modern Windowses IIRC.
| tiahura wrote:
| Four trillion
| Gigachad wrote:
| I don't think that's the UI, it's some other bug. My M1 is
| still running at full speed after Tahoe. Some people have
| said there is a broken version of Electron which causes
| slowdowns on Tahoe currently, most but not all apps have
| updated to a newer fixed version of Electron.
| fidotron wrote:
| Apple product managers are falling into the trap Microsoft did
| in the run up to Windows 8: a belief that unifying across Mac,
| iOS, Apple TV and Vision Pro will make them all stickier. In
| truth it really does just make everything obnoxiously bad.
| etempleton wrote:
| Unifying the look and feel to such a literal degree on
| desktop was a weird choice and I hate it a lot on my personal
| and work machine.
| afavour wrote:
| Exactly what happened with iOS 7 as well. 7.0 make all the text
| incredibly thin and light and then 7.1 made it darker and
| bolder.
| Someone1234 wrote:
| If you cannot wait, you can already substantially reduce the
| transparency effect via Settings -> Accessibility -> Display &
| Text Size -> Reduce Transparency.
|
| This new setting and the existing "Reduce Transparency" look a
| little different but same idea overall.
| sehugg wrote:
| There were/are some horrible bugs with Reduce Transparency mode
| in iOS 26, let's hope this new mode gets added to the fully-
| tested set of configurations.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Unfortunately "Reduce Transparenxy" does a bunch of other stuff
| too, like remove your background/wallpaper.
| endymi0n wrote:
| Meanwhile, core functionality like "Find My" is completely and
| utterly broken. Leaving behind my stuff at a new place gets me at
| least two different messages on my Apple Watch at different
| timing. One for my devices, one for my Apple tags. One only has a
| "dismiss" button, the other has a "trust location" button that
| when I click, it says "content unavailable", and if it works
| (which is only! over Wi-Fi), then it only works for that one
| device. I always need to go through the find my app at every new
| place since it's an absolute UX disaster.
|
| That's what I get for carrying only Apple gear in the thousands
| of euros with me.
| toast0 wrote:
| You should try it if you're only a step into their ecosystem.
| Kiddo got some airpods for use with his android phone.
| Registered them with 'find my' on an iPhone SE I have for work
| that sits on my desk, so that _when_ they get lost, we have a
| chance of finding them. Now, we get to be alerted to potential
| trackers every time when travel with him... even he gets the
| alerts, because he travels with his airpods frequently.
|
| I've heard good things about Apple TV devices, but given what a
| pain Airpods are without the rest of the ecosystem, there's no
| way I'm going to try it.
| gambiting wrote:
| I just don't understand how more people don't complain about
| this all the time. My wife has an apple tracker on her keys
| and I get a notification about an unknown tracker travelling
| with me on my phone every time we go anywhere. Why isn't
| there an "I know this tracker, leave me the fuck alone"
| option anywhere???
| toast0 wrote:
| Yeah, seems like we should be able to acknowledge known
| trackers, or something. Or be able to enroll multiple
| phones or other devices (of multiple OSes) as owners, so if
| the keys move with your phone instead of hers, that counts
| as 'not being separated from the owner', rather than
| throwing another BS alert.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _I just don 't understand how more people don't complain
| about this all the time._
|
| I'd assume because they're using the share feature:
| https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/share-an-airtag-
| iph41...
|
| You can also turn them off altogether in Settings >
| Notifications > Tracking Notifications.
| busymom0 wrote:
| Talking about core functionality, iOS `UISlider` api is broken
| in iOS 26. A lot of my users emailed me last few days how the
| font sizing menu in my hacker news app is broken because the
| sliders don't do anything. Turns out it's a bug many developers
| are facing.
|
| This bug somehow went through the beta releases and still
| exists:
|
| https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/797468?login=true
| antinomicus wrote:
| I just want to pile on, to any Apple engineers here that might
| have some say: PLEASE STOP with the Liquid Glass. My god, what an
| unbelievably stupid 'feature'. Warren Buffett famously talked
| about how Apple is so valuable because their moat is so strong.
| That if you were to pay someone 10,000$ to switch from iPhones -
| they wouldn't. No other brand is like this.
|
| I was the same way, couldn't pay me 10k to switch from my iPhone.
| For 10 years. Then, liquid ass came along and made me consider
| ditching Apple more seriously than I ever have. This redesign is
| apple's most colossal failure of the last decade and I
| desperately hope they keep moving in the direction of rolling
| back these changes. It's not just that everything is blurry and
| tinted. They made the buttons across the UI far less space
| efficient, widening and making cartoonish random elements that
| worked fine before. They added animations that slow down my
| iPhone 15 Pro and have tanked its battery life (don't tell me
| it's indexing either it's been weeks!). They completely broke my
| "dumb phone" layout for my home screen by adding these incredibly
| ugly borders to everything.
|
| Every day I curse myself for updating to this slop and for not
| quickly rolling back while they were still signing the old iOS.
| It is so unbelievably stupid that they decided to do this.
| t1234s wrote:
| On Tahoe the only difference I notice with LG is the icons on the
| dock look worse and the corners of the windows look blurry.
| riversflow wrote:
| I _really_ want the original, highly translucent liquid glass
| back from beta 1. Pleeease?
|
| The original liquid glass was my favorite UI ever, and I love to
| customize my UI.
|
| Also, all the hate is really boring and lame.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| And I really want the easy-to-understand, information-dense iOS
| 6 UI back. Too bad all the boring and lame hate for
| skeuomorphism led to "the great flattening" and "the great
| paddening".
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| In big engineering programs engineers are paid bounties for every
| kg they remove from the design. We need software developer
| bounties for removing CPU cycles and memory.
| liuliu wrote:
| Is this just
| https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uiglasseffec... ?
| pupppet wrote:
| All of this baloney they added to their OS they now need to
| support for who knows how many years across who knows how many
| devices. What a waste.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Perhaps it was a move to ensure job security.
|
| As a user, I would have looked forward to a few years of
| simply fixing bugs and making the OS more efficient.
| cardanome wrote:
| Give me proper theming support.
|
| Allow me to disable all animations, rounded corners, opacity,
| white space and whatever else I don't need. Imagine how snappy
| and productive it could be!
| electric_mayhem wrote:
| There are settings under the accessibility heading that let you
| adjust transparency and some other things.
|
| They've also gotten less effective over time.
|
| And they don't get rid of rounded corners currently.
|
| But it still does have a positive impact on the busyness of the
| os
| busymom0 wrote:
| What I really need them to give me is a way to disable the
| border around the Home Screen icons. They look ugly whenever a
| black or dark background is applied. Probably because glass
| itself doesn't look good in darkness.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _give me proper theming support_
|
| This is sort of like walking into an art gallery and demanding
| they hang different art.
|
| Apple has always been visually opinionated. That's fine. Not
| everything needs to be customisable. The problem is their
| aesthetic historically varied between daringly great and
| daringly fucked. Nothing about Liquid Glass, on the other hand,
| screams daring, thought or even vision. It's just a random new
| effect, completely unjustified, whose only genuine utility for
| me has been making app icons less engaging.
| cardanome wrote:
| No that is like my landlord telling me what kind of art I can
| hang in my own home.
|
| If I spend hours of my day using a device I should be able to
| theme it exactly to my taste. The customer is always right in
| matters of taste. You are supposed to serve your customers
| not the other way round.
|
| And don't give me oh that is not the apple way. I don't care.
| People don't buy apple for liquid glass or whatever but
| because they have arguably the best hardware so people put up
| with the software side of things.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _that is like my landlord telling me what kind of art I
| can hang in my own home_
|
| Fair enough, it's like the landlord telling you that you
| can't change the layout.
|
| > _don 't give me oh that is not the apple way. I don't
| care_
|
| Fair enough again. Apple doesn't care about others'
| aesthetic preferences either, and that's worked well for
| Cupertino since the 1980s.
| mycodendral wrote:
| I switched from Android to iOS exclusively because of Liquid
| Glass. It's amazing. I'll just sit there and drag the glass back
| and forth over different things on my screen and stare in awe.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| I dont mean to impugn, but that sounds like how someone would
| describe a toddler being given an ipad. I turn off animations
| and use apps with an OLED theme.
| monster_truck wrote:
| The first thing I do every time I install a new version of
| iOS or get a new iPhone is disable all of the animations and
| enable reduce visual motion in accessibility. Not only is it
| faster in the countless cases where overambitious UI
| designers subject us to >0.2s animations, but it dramatically
| extends battery life
| gambiting wrote:
| I mean I do remember the feeling of switching over to KDE from
| Windows around.....2005-2010 era and just being blown away by
| how _pretty_ everything was. I yearn for that feeling again.
| But I have both android and iOS devices at home and the liquid
| glass is just......not that nice(imho). I hope I 'll get that
| feeling of awe with computers at some point again.
| adastra22 wrote:
| KDE to Windows? You missed out on peak Enlightenment.
| joshuat wrote:
| You forget that HN is incapable of detecting even the most
| obvious sarcasm
| gessha wrote:
| At this point the comment is more for internal vs external
| pleasure.
| aucisson_masque wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| To be fair, it is an affront to usability, but it looks
| pretty the first time you play with the distortion of several
| confusing layers of Glass. I had to play with different
| wallpapers to find one who distorted the better.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| But wait, have you noticed that it's named "Liquid Glass(TM)",
| but none of the glass is actually liquid, or even flowing?
| Everything is solid pieces of glass. You fooled us again,
| Apple!
| cloudfudge wrote:
| Does it let me read my fucking title bar while I'm using safari?
| I can't tell what time it is or what my battery level is anymore.
| dabinat wrote:
| It's technically impressive that they're simulating the way light
| travels through glass. But a lot of the time it's so subtle that
| I wonder if they could have just used simple semi-opacity and it
| would have had 85% of the same effect at a fraction of the CPU
| cycles.
| monster_truck wrote:
| I feel like this is a big miss for them. Am I really supposed
| to believe that the company making its flagship phones burn at
| 14W to simulate the travel of light through glass for a UI
| actually cares about the planet?
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| I strongly suspect (as I've said elsewhere) that there's no
| simulation going on, just a bunch of precomputed refraction
| maps. Two dependent texture fetches are not nothing (and
| neither of course is the sequentializing nature of rendering
| a transparent thing over another thing), but I wouldn't lose
| sleep over them if there was a point. Thus far I'm not
| convinced that there is.
|
| Has noone located and disassembled the thing yet? The
| speculation is getting tiresome. (I don't own an up-to-date
| macOS device and have never owned an iOS one, so no help from
| my end, sorry.)
| arghwhat wrote:
| I seriously doubt they're doing anything more than a boring
| shader with some decent approximation.
|
| We can stimulate light, but that's just a waste of ray tracing
| and introducing annoying complexities.
| pointlessone wrote:
| They probably do because the effect can be pretty closely
| recreated with a displacement map in SVG.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| I agree. Actual simulation would be an inexcusable waste of
| resources when the end result is simply indistinguishable
| from a normal distortion filer. Specially when their newest
| flagship has a smaller battery.
| clickety_clack wrote:
| If you assume a fixed depth "behind" the screen and a fixed
| eye position, a lot of the math shakes out. It's overkill
| for button backgrounds, but the actual implementation of a
| simplified simulation isn't as computationally heavy as I
| think you're imaging.
| Gigachad wrote:
| I'm not sure how but it doesn't seem to use that much
| processing power. My 5 year old apple watch seems to render the
| glass UI fairly well and I assume this thing has the bare
| minimum processing power.
| dlivingston wrote:
| It's a GPU shader(s), so you'd have to measure its resource
| usage indirectly (device heating up; shorter battery life).
| DecentShoes wrote:
| Yes but that wouldn't slow down their older devices enough to
| make people buy new ones
| m-hodges wrote:
| I had to change my iOS wallpaper because of how bad the liquid
| glass distortions looked when swiping my home and lock screens. I
| get that Apple wants to control the experience, but ruining my
| own wallpaper ... a thing that is a very personal touch to many
| users ... felt beyond hostile.
| merelysounds wrote:
| I wish settings like these would also increase UI performance in
| a way that would prolong battery life. UX is far more important
| to me than FX, I would run XFCE on iOS if I could.
| spankalee wrote:
| How did they not do enough user testing to know users wanted this
| before it even got to beta?
|
| Are they so paranoid about secrecy that they can't do event the
| most basic of UX design processes?
| isodev wrote:
| I would've killed it even before user testing. It's borderline
| malicious that this thing was shipped in the first place
| kridsdale3 wrote:
| Apple does zero user testing and AB testing, and has always
| worked that way.
| Austin_Conlon wrote:
| Even in services?
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| My experience with corporate Apple services (MDM):
|
| "We changed the terms of service. Accept them to keep using
| this service."
|
| Outside of that, not much in the way of communication. They
| change and you keep catching up to them.
| yreg wrote:
| No communication does not mean no user testing.
| basisword wrote:
| Keep in mind the people complaining are more than likely the
| loud minority. Personally I had some issues in the early betas
| (too much opacity causes readability issues) but I haven't had
| any issues since July. Unfortunately Apple is listening to
| feedback when they should ignore it and continue improving
| their work (which is what they usually do).
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| What does it matter if they're a "loud minority"? To quote
| Apple themselves, "The best technology is designed with
| everyone in mind."
|
| iOS isn't clothing you can return to the store when you don't
| like the style. You're stuck with the update once you have
| it.
| shantara wrote:
| They received a lot of bug reports and negative feedback from
| developer and public betas. Guess what, they've still released
| the glass almost unchanged. "We know better than you" is a
| fundamental part of Apple's mentality
| aylmao wrote:
| IMO a big problem with Liquid Glass is that you're trying to
| recreate an effect that's highly reliant on the sense of depth we
| get from binocular vision in a 2D screen.
|
| When looking at glass in real life, your left eye and your right
| eye see slightly different refraction patterns since they're
| looking at the surface from slightly different angles. It might
| be minimal, but light refraction patterns can change a lot when
| looked at from slightly different distances. This is depth
| information our brains automatically interpret, and it makes easy
| to tell what is "the glass" vs what is "on the glass".
|
| On a 2D screen both eyes see the same refraction pattern-- your
| eyes are receiving no depth information. It's just up to color
| contrast and semantics to figure out what's part of the glass vs
| laid on top of it, so things that might look legible or easy to
| tell apart on physical glass will look messy on the screen.
| wpm wrote:
| The other problem is that the effect is so subtle everywhere
| until it gets in your way. Even on a system _with_ actual
| binocular screens, the Liquid Glass effect is barely noticeable
| and has been since visionOS 1.0.
|
| It's like a horrible compromise between the indulgences of
| early 10.2-era Aqua and the worst flat boring low contrast
| bullshit "mimimmumunlism" crap from iOS 7-18 and macOS from Big
| Sur onwards.
| martini333 wrote:
| TANK YOU, better than nothing.
| oktwtf wrote:
| I always wanted them to turn the traffic lights from Jaguar into
| a fully shader based orbs. Full @2x/Vector Aqua Liquid Glass in
| all it's glory...
| kridsdale3 wrote:
| It's @3x these days.
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| Upgrading randomly broke my ultrawide second monitor. Now macos
| can't figure out what resolutions it supports and the only two
| options look awful and stretched. Can't figure out the refresh
| rate either and defaults to less than half the correct value.
| nipperkinfeet wrote:
| This should have been in place from the beginning. The current
| state of large technology companies is really quite depressing.
| The intellectual capabilities of these companies have become
| completely stagnant.
| ls-a wrote:
| So now I have to go to settings to get rid of it. That's worse.
| Even more work for me.
| mgarfias wrote:
| Now can they fix all the other usability issues?
| aucisson_masque wrote:
| My mother iphone is still on iOS 18, I'm honestly afraid to make
| her update because I know she will be lost and I'll have to come
| to the rescue a thousand times.
|
| I can't understand how they decided to work on that, they must
| know that a significant part of their customer is boomers that
| want things simple and intuitive. Liquid glass make everything
| hard unintuitive, how are you going to know that this button is
| important if you can't use contrast because everything is
| transparent ?
| RandomBacon wrote:
| Same (though a slightly newer version).
|
| I'm an Android person, but I got an iPhone 4S for her first
| cell phone because it was straightforward and hard to mess up.
|
| Now there are double-secret swipes, all other kinds of anti-
| user "features" that almost make her cry because she can't
| figure out her phone anymore.
|
| Now I am thinking about getting an Android and finding a home
| app ("launcher") that makes it impossible to screw things up
| and lock down everything else that I can.
|
| Edit: Crap. She does have an Apple Watch that she loves though.
| And Apple is not only a piece of shit company about their UI,
| they also don't allow their watch to play nice with Android.
| (Except that answering a call on the watch pipes the audio to
| her watch and not her hearing aids. Fuck Apple.)
| Humphrey wrote:
| About to switch from stable to beta - purely so I can get get rid
| of liquid glass and hopefully the other bugs in 26.0.
| rayiner wrote:
| Today I discovered you can't downgrade from iOS 26 to iOS 18.
| It's that bad.
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