Liquid Ass
What a readability nightmare.
These guys spend a billion dollars every couple years to invent the lock screen again
Vista called and wants it’s ugly back
Hey, it’s aqua! We’ve come full circle!
hey I had that winterboard theme like 15 years ago
I’m sorry if it’s a dumb question, but didn’t Microsoft already do this with Vista and Win 7? And I’m pretty sure transparency has been a thing on Android for a good while now:-?
Frutiger Aero.
I honestly don’t even know why I’m paying attention to Apple at this point, I think it’s like digging my nail into a freshly scarred-over cut, just to tease that sting out a bit. It’s the only way in which they have ever contributed to my feeling alive.
I only “follow” because whatever Apple does gets broadcast by every media outlet in existence. Also Google started blindly following Apple design since they killed my beloved blob emojis.
The blob emojis were one of their best features, that’s so true! I kid you not, every single time I’ve used Slack for work, for every single company which used it, someone had already uploaded the blobs! I really didn’t understand that move, the current Smile emoji looks psychotic.
Did they? MD2 and MD3 look very different from Apple’s design languages
Google themselves don’t really follow material all that closely over their entire product line.
Android 6 was basically the peak of the UI, IMO, the icons were very consistent and nice early material.
In later versions they shrank the icons and stuffed them into circles and started using a horrible color scheme, then they killed blobmoji and started outright copying Apple’s hideous emojis with that awful gradient and pseudo-skeumorphic visuals.
i mean yes, but this is a more dynamic transperency that reacts more to backgrounds, merging/separating with other elements, etc.
I mean… look, I’m genuinely not trying to be a sour asshole, but why did we need this? How is this furthering the development of smartphone tech? It’s, like… sure, pretty graphics are nice, but do we really need ray-tracing on our phones? (I know it’s not ray-tracing, but you get my point)
I don’t actually like this redesign tbh, but come on, people do care about design and UX.
Nobody said we need pretty UX design, it’s just nice to have, and that’s fine. Not everything needs to be furthering the development of XYZ. Beauty is fine, aesthetics is fine, art is fine.
But yeah, I don’t have an Apple device and likely never will, so this specific instance doesn’t matter to me.
It’s just a UI update, you know, like literally every other OS does periodically?
It’s what happens when they run out of useful things to improve but still need to announce something to make people think they’re getting an upgrade.
A kind of enshittification, out of boredom I guess…
jfc. that is one ugly looking ui. really scraping bottom of the barrel. that is soo last years.
What’s the liquid glass exactly?
It means making it look like Windows Vista. Because that’s what we all wanted, the perpetuation of a crappy design.
Overheating silicon
Honestly, it looks kind of terrible to me. Not to mention how unreadable text is since there’s apparently no guaranteed contrast with black text due to the transparent backgrounds. I feel like I’m going crazy with all the random articles praising it.
Gives me iOS 7 vibes.
I like it in theory, but in some of the examples they provided on https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/06/apple-introduces-a-delightful-and-elegant-new-software-design/, reading text isn’t the easiest with all the colors and blurs everywhere.
reading text isn’t the easiest with all the colors and blurs everywhere
Agreed - I like the look of these things in an abstract sense, but it makes the text really hard to read. I
assumehope there’s a way to disable it in accessibility settings.Also not a fan of the critical UI elements being popped out into floating islands, very easy to accidentally hit underlying page content when there’s effectively zero padding around controls (on touch devices, as the ad companies have discovered by making the × icons smaller and smaller).
Wow, that is bad. The music one is probably the worst of the examples. The artist name is barely readable most of that clip.
The notifications are rough too, a big wall of white text against a burry multicolor background is not fun to read.
Guess this means Apple has run out of ideas on how to make iPhone better.
What can we do to distract attention away from the fact that we don’t have any decent new features?
- “Rename the business unit so we can print new letterheads and business cards?” Our customer don’t work here, sir. “Dammit!”
- “Release a new color that nobody wants? How about a light blue that is so close to the regular silver no one can tell?” We did that last year, sir. “Dammit!”
- “Oh, I know: Repeat the year 2000 mistake by naming our OS versions after the current year using only 2 digits. That will never bite us in the ass in the future.” Brilliant, sir.
This is such a step back to 2005 and those glassy Winamp skins. It looks absolutely terrible. I wonder how Apple users put up with that
I beg to differ. It’s not a „putting up with“. I don’t hate modern flat designs but if I was putting up with anything it’s that.
Loved the translucent look back then, still love it now. Am very looking forward to the design update. Especially since the new design is not just some standard windows aero like transparency but actually has glass like refractions.
I’m very glad we’re getting something with a little more depth again, without going full 180 to the clutter of peak skeumorphic iOS <7.
I’m a little bit concerned about readability of text on the translucent backgrounds but on the other hand, it feels unlikely that Apple didn’t think of that…
Edit: typo
Yep. I was really annoyed when Windows moved away from the aero effects of Vista and 7 to the flat look of 8/8.1, 10, and 11.
(Yes yes, Windows bad. I have to use it for work.)
I’m looking forward to this, I think it looks gorgeous.