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Comment by _benton | Hacker News Reader

I have a feeling this will be yet another case of the nerds thinking something is a huge deal and when people update their phones this fall I bet most people won't care after 10 minutes.

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Is that not every major software release? Like what are you gonna do, stop using your phone / laptop and turn hermit? Because I 100% feel people would be more likely to do that than to hop ecosystems, but then this is obviously not happening either. So yes, people will just shake their fist at the sky and then just slowly accept whatever instead. Not because "nurds stoopid", but because life moves on. Life's not anywhere near so narratively satisfying.

You can easily wait for a few years to update MacOS or iOS, so it's not a huge deal.

iOS starts shoving the update down your throat the moment it’s out. I wonder if there’s a “don’t try to auto update the OS dammit” setting somewhere. I guess I’ll be investigating this fall!

MacOS has the same annoying behaviour, but you can still close the notice and keep on keeping on.

But if you don’t use the newest macOS, you don’t get all security updates. ;(

You still get security updates for older versions, and you are fine without them anyway.

It is probably largely true, but for people with vision and memory impairments Liquid Glass will be harder to use.

It will be harder to use for non-impaired people as well, though they might not consciously notice and/or still like how it looks despite being harder to use.

That feeling goes away incredibly quickly. Like every major visual update before it, this is a non-event.

Then you turn on "Reduce Transparency" in the Accessibility options. And then it's all gone. Testing it right now in the beta and everything is opaque. Even the faux-glass elements.

You're assuming that more than a fraction of users will know that setting even exists. The majority of people with vision impairments aren't people who are used to thinking of themselves as disabled and know their way around an a11y menu; they're 60-something grandparents trying to navigate their iphone to see photos of the grandkids.

Good defaults are extremely important.

I don't like this theme. I don't like pushing people to use settings like "reduce transparency" because they also make the UI much uglier, even before this increase in the use of transparency-- non-default settings like this are an afterthought, design-wise. It means downgrading to a second-class experience.

However, I find this a bit irksome:

> The majority of people with vision impairments aren't people who are used to thinking of themselves as disabled and know their way around an a11y menu

That should change, and to the extent that something like this makes a small push in that direction, so much the better. Disability is a spectrum, everyone will deal with disability to some extent in their lifetime, and accessibility features are for everyone.

Separating out "serious" accessibility considerations from those of people with "normal" accessibility needs is just likely to make accessibility features even more second-class. If the main problem is the problem you describe, it should be fixed by better surfacing the existing accessibility features.

I will admit it takes a little getting used to. But that feeling goes away in literally a single day. Just like _every_ major OS upgrade before this, people complain that things are hard to find. But your brain gets used to these things so quickly.

I am really liking this upgrade. There is something appealing about seeing _less_ of the OS and more of your content. I know this felt like lip service, but the focus here really is content.

For example the lock screen. Before you even unlock your phone, your wallpaper is more visible than before. I've never enjoyed having my wallpaper cycle more than I do with update.

This is an update people are going to absolutely freaking fall in love with. It's good stuff.

Agree, it's great. And beta 1 => 2 fixed a ton of stuff. Plus there's a ton of room to keep improving from here for years to get to some really cool UI.

Two weeks in, I still don't know if the speaker phone button is toggled or not.

Nerds are the canary, not the mainstream user, in product development.

This reminds me about the time people would protest Facebook changes. What's more interesting is that Facebook is now dead and nobody cares about its UX anymore.

I hope that one day, Facebook will be used as an example of what not to do.

I'm reminded of a meme, from around when Facebook had its IPO:

"Why is Facebook going public?

They couldn't figure out their privacy settings either!"

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