iOS 26.1 lets users control Liquid Glass transparency | Hacker News Reader

iOS 26.1 lets users control Liquid Glass transparency

macrumors.com

207 pointsdabinat240 comments

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.

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.

I would gladly take the indulgences of the 10.2 era where clickable things looked like clickable things instead of hobs and gobs of indistinguishable text.

What’s misunderstood about aqua was how most of the visual flair was for usability. Things looked like what they did. Windows XP famously ripped off how MS thought they looked without considering how they worked.

Totally agree. I have 10.2 on a G4 Cube on my workbench and it's just so wonderful to boot it up. Especially on the Studio Display CRT at 1600x1200@75. Just gorgeous, friendly, enticing, with just a few rough spots where they maybe overcooked some transparency or flair.

The big problem is that it’s shit and terrible UX. We should stop complicating feedback :)

I'd love to see 3DS-style lenticular 3D display with the power of modern Apple hardware + FaceID hardware eye tracking. I bet they'd be able to do it seamlessly.

It was very tricky to get the effect on the 3DS but already way better on the New 3DS, so i can definitely think it would work flawlessly on such a powerful device as iPhone.

In addition to this, glass also reflects light from around you, thus there is not the slightest chance of realistically recreating a glass effect on any device without having some sort of ambient vision which is incorporated into a real time rendering.

This is wrong on so many levels and I sincerely hope there will be an option for not just choosing less transparency but an entire UI-skin that is mature, clean and above all: legible.

Honestly, the effect I don’t really mind. I don’t really get it in the way I understood the idea behind skeuomorphism or the initial material design but then again I’m not sure I really got the grand concept behind the previous flat interface either.

What I do mind is some of the puzzling UX choice they made like the new Safari UX on iOS. It’s somehow even less discoverable than before and iOS was already doing pretty poorly.

I was planning to part way with Apple products for separate reasons but that surely doesn’t make me regret the decision.

so maybe the future folding iphone with double screen will mimic binocular vision

We already have eye tracking in phone. Add a lenticular screen.

Have you ever used a lenticular screen? They have extremely bad ergonomics.

Ew no

> 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

But if you close one eye, you can still make out the depth. Brain is still able to tell what is glass, what is on top of glass or below it.

Only across time via parallax motion and depth refocusing, neither of which are available on the screen. And both of those signals are extremely secondary to binocular sight. There's a reason that people with strabismus lose depth perception. Their point stands.

(Though Apple could technically do a parallax effect by face tracking if they wanted)

> There's a reason that people with strabismus lose depth perception.

Still we don't stumble onto things nor do we fail recognise what is on a glass vs inside. Even if we do not have binocular depth perception, we actually perceive depth irl just fine.

And people with binocular vision also fall for depth illusions just fine, too. The brain does a lot of predictive processing. It would be too inefficient to be constantly relying on such details for basic tasks.

> Even if we do not have binocular depth perception, we actually perceive depth irl just fine.

I don't think it's everyone of us because I struggle somewhat with pouring things into small openings (eg refilling a small bottle from a bigger one) and most ball games (tennis, table tennis) are difficult.

I don't think it makes depth perception a problem, but I think it's unarguable mine isn't as good as the people I know with binocular vision.

I don't know about your experience or situation, but a confound is that usually people with strabismus have bad eyesight in other aspects in general too. Usually, developing strabismus is the result of other issues with eyesight. The obvious confound is basically having only one good eye to use at a time, and thus also less neural pathways developed and utilised than those who use 2 eyes. This could make visual perception tasks like tracking a fast moving ball harder regardless of the actual role of depth perception in it. There could be tasks where reliance on perceptual cues for depth perception is less effective, but I wouldn't think a moving ball is that kind of task.

You might well be right. My eyes are definitely not great on top of the strabismus and lack of binocular vision.

One of the main issues with tracking things is focus switching from one eye to another based on where it's moving.

That said I do think the issues with pouring things is more of a depth perception issue. I basically have to switch focus from one eye to another to be satisfied I'm aligned where I want to be.

Pouring things sounds more like sth that could be a depth perception issue, true, though I never actually noticed that for myself. I believe I find it harder than usual passing a thread through a needle though because of depth perception issues.

It's good that you don't have trouble getting through life, but "just fine" is not a measurement. Lacking binocular convergence inarguably diminishes perception even if not 100% gone completely.

Measurements actually support that [0]. I am pretty sure you could devise some scenarios where individuals with strabismus do not perform as well, but for most irl scenarios there is no difference. Compensatory mechanisms do the job just fine, and even those with normal eyesight do not rely solely on binocular convergence either. Our brains don't usually rely on a single signal to make sense of the world, and predictive processing plays a huge role for constructing the image of the world around us, which is also why depth illusions work. Even for those with normal binocular convergence, its contribution for making sense of depth is prob smaller compared to other perceptual cues.

[0] Zlatkute et al 2020, Unimpaired perception of relative depth from perspective cues in strabismus. R. Soc. Open Sci. 7: 200955. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.200955

That article does not seem to support your point. They're not measuring depth perception, they're measuring whether people with strabismus have managed to learn perspective cues in 2D images, and, in fact, the article explicitly states agreement with the point you're arguing against.

> Strabismus disrupts sensory fusion, the cortical process of combining the images from the two eyes into a single binocular image [3–6]. The main perceptual consequences of lack of fused binocular images is diplopia (double vision) and a lack of binocular depth perception.

Just because those with strabismus can use monocular cues to inform them of relative depth does not mean that they have the same level of depth perception as those with normal binocular convergence.

The best example of this is sports, but as another example I'm legally disallowed from driving an articulated vehicle -- for what I personally think is a pretty good reason. Anecdotally, compared to friends and family my depth perception is dogshit.

You quote:

I am speaking specifically about whether people with strabismus have issues with depth perception or not. Obviously "strabismus disrupts sensory fusion" as you do not combine the input of the 2 eyes, and obviously this is a problem outside of depth perception. Moreover, most people with strabismus have bad eyesight more generally, as a common path to develop strabismus is having one eye much worse than the other. I am not saying strabismus is not an issue, I am saying that people with strabismus can still develop normal levels of depth perception in most irl situations by compensating with perceptual cues.

The article specifically tests whether people with strabismus had problems developing depth perception. If binocular depth perception was necessary for developing depth perception, they would have found that people with strabismus have impaired depth perception with 2d images. They didn't.

Again as I wrote to the other commenter before, I do not know about your situation, but I am curious about how you compare depth perception specifically with your friends and family. Having problems wrt visual perception does not mean that "lack of depth perception" is the issue. Using only one eye at the time is a huge issue by itself that makes vision harder, and a huge confound to control for in such comparisons.

they do parallax effect for some things, but not for all liquid glass widget (it would be interesting but probably too much)

So, so, much money, time, and resources poured into this update that only made things worse; and now again to roll it back...

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

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.

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.

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.

The shaders are nothing. I’m kind of appalled by everybody telling “oh shaders, it’s expensive!”

OP probably has been hit by the electron bug, which does indeed kill the performance of the whole OS…

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.

I just replaced the battery on my 13 mini (actually I got a brand new one since I still have Apple Care+ on mine and I did an express replacement). I’m good for an other 2 years.

Yeah, I'm keeping mine around and not trading it in. I might get the battery replaced at some point anyways and continue using it as a secondary device for some workloads.

Missing my Mini too

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.

The glass transparency effect is just very computationally expensive.

I just don't understand how if Visa could render its transparency efects smoothly on Intel 920 grade GPUs with 128mb of ram.

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.

>>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).

Vista problems were largely nvidia driver crashes and low spec machines. Otherwise vista was fine.

Yes, though I think it worth noting that at that point "low spec machines" was like 80% of laptops and maybe 50% of desktops. It also really hurt when you went from XP which ran great to Vista which noticeably dragged on your machine.

My friend had an Alienware laptop which absolutely screamed with Vista

I mostly disliked Vista for a number of reasons, but the looks were incredible. I was actually blown away at the beauty

I liked aero too, XP was too fisher price.

XP Media Center Edition had a pretty slick theme, not at all toy-like. To say nothing of the Metro interface in its titular app, though it seems Metro was kind of a dud when they tried to apply it to other apps.

Vista did translucency and a statically positioned reflection mask, whereas this glass effect involves refraction/tinting that samples from surrounding surfaces.

The glass UI renders on my Apple Watch 6 just fine and that thing has probably 0.5% the GPU power as the Macbooks.

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.

Like others have said, check whether you have any Electron apps that weren’t updated with the latest Electron framework. Both my M1 Pro and my work M3 Pro don’t feel any slower (unless I open an offending Electron app). I was updating a Mac that uses Sequoia yesterday and it didn’t feel any faster.

Your watch also has a screen resolution of (3024 * 1964) / (368 * 448) = 36 times less than a Macbook, so it's all a wash. Except the wasted coulombs.

It also renders on my M1 Macbook just fine as well for what it's worth. If it's running slow, it's because something is bugged out rather than the UI inherently being too heavy.

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

?? 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?

The problem is the edge cases where people use hardware capable of absolutely ridiculous things that nonetheless are common-ish on Windows and expect macOS to be capable of dealing with as well.

(Don't get me started on macOS and the un-disableable mouse acceleration override coupled together with Steam Link...)

LinearMouse is a bandaid for the latter problem.

Benchmarks are one thing. Real world usage and I/O are another.

There is no world where 50fps is acceptable in any game in 2025. Flagship GPUs on high end systems running Windows manage 4k @ max settings north of 60, nearly double that with RT off. To achieve anything close on a mac, you're dropping down to 1440p, at lower settings, with frame generation.

Lol ok buddy you’re not accounting for the 50W vs 500W difference. Gotta compare to windows laptops on battery.

They’re about the level of a 4060 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LWfM7Ktsal0

Even looking at pro CS players, a single 8 KHz entry is found in the table at https://liquipedia.net/counterstrike/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.

That is wildly outdated, everyone is using 8khz input now. Keyboards too. This also completely ignores the 600-640hz monitors they are playing on.

Even 1khz mkb input on an apple silicon mac connected to a 500hz screen has insane utilization just doing shit in the OS. They are also struggling with variable refresh rate, improperly dropping down to the minimum (as low as 24hz) with jarring, jagged jumps up to the maximum after a few seconds of use.

This is a solved problem on both windows and linux. Even Asahi does a better job.

No, not "everyone" is using 8 KHz polling now... it breaks a lot of game engines for no benefit (even 4 KHz) but is heavily marketed because higher numbers. Worse yet, 8 KHz eats the kernel with interrupts (even on my 9800X3D) instead of letting the game run as fast as possible.

High refresh rate monitors are great, yes, but those are still sub KHz - you're talking about polling a mouse at 13x the rate of the highest end esports monitors as some minimum bar for when a machine can be for gaming - get out of here with that kind of artificial gatekeeping.

No complaints about Asahi though :).

Not "everyone". The G Pro Wireless is one of the most popular mouses and polls at 1KHz, and it works just fine. Polling a keyboard beyond 1KHz is utterly useless. The only time you're gonna want more fidelity is with stuff like Snap Tap, which is considered cheating and is banned.

In a similar vein, >120Hz screens are of doubtful utility. The performance gain is insignificant, considering top human reaction time to visual stimuli is ~150ms and the jump from 120Hz to 240Hz is -4.17ms, 1/36th or 2.77% improvement.

Even then, most pro FPS players also still play on 200-800 DPI when 1600 DPI and preferably even 3200 DPI is much better. Those low DPIs are purely cargo culted from the 2000s era CS Pros their .cfg, when sensors were still pretty crappy, and those players are effectively running lowgrade mouse smoothing.

Uneducated gamers are kin to uneducated audiophiles. Stop drinking the snake oil.

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

Wasn't Windows 7 doing this same stuff back in like 2009?

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.

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.

That sounds like maybe a few more multiplies and applying slightly different constants to different colour channels. There is no complex simulation happening.

Sounds like some computationally expensive, unnecessary bullshit.

Even an iGPU from a decade ago could handle that easily. There is some other problem with the new UI’s performance.

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.

Unironically Mac OS 7/8/9 felt the best IMHO. Even though there were some missteps (the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_Strip was awful) and 9.x got a bit overloaded towards the end.

Mac OS X (and macOS still) never felt as good.

Apple's classic human interface guidelines were well thought out. They should consider (re)reading them sometime.

Tiger was fine :D

Tiger still had that weird thing where half the apps were brushed metal for no apparent reason.

A lot of people argue it peaked with snow leopard; that was consistent, performant, and feature complete, not yet overly influenced by mobile.

Four trillion

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.

You may want to check if you have one of the app listed here[1] on your system.

Electron based apps cause a huge system wide lag on macOS 26 due to the use of a private macOS API[2]. This bug has been fixed in Electron but not all Electron-based apps have been updated yet.

[1] - https://avarayr.github.io/shamelectron/

[2] - https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/48311

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.

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.

Do you like the enormous round borders?

I do not.

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.

TBF

- they made and are still making the headlines for how many months ?

Any press is not always good press, but in this case it's not like their users were going to flock to android anyway. So same deal as the orange iPhone: they kept a pretty big place in the news cycle.

- not doing any changes to the OS appareance for more decades would make it exponentially harder the more it goes on.

Doing a shit job at it is still fine in that respect, they get leeway to fix it, and people will still praise Apple for having seen the light at the end.

As a parallel we had the port situation and the keyboard on MacBooks. They did a shit job and reversed it, and during that time sales didn't specially tank. They could afford to do two or three cycles of "here we fixed it", to scrap it all at the end, and people still love their MacBooks the same.

I immediately disabled transparency effects and liquid glass hasn't bothered me since.

that's why liquid glass is more resource intensive, apple's gotta sell new iphones next season

Not to roll it back, no - rather to give the user a choice between things being bad (the default) or a bit better ;)

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.

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?

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 noöne 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.)

Ain't no way precomputed reflection maps are burning through the full TDP of the processor. Even the desktop experience is miserable perf-wise

For those who hasn’t seen it, just dropping down the control center consumes 14 watts of CPU/GPU power as demonstrated by various YouTube videos.

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.

They probably do because the effect can be pretty closely recreated with a displacement map in SVG.

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.

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.

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.

It's a GPU shader(s), so you'd have to measure its resource usage indirectly (device heating up; shorter battery life).

iOS has been applying a gaussian blur to various UI layers for years so there likely isn’t a big incremental performance hit for this graphical effect

Why do you insist that the Watch uses the same exact code to render the glass?

Yes but that wouldn't slow down their older devices enough to make people buy new ones

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?

I would’ve killed it even before user testing. It’s borderline malicious that this thing was shipped in the first place

Apple does zero user testing and AB testing, and has always worked that way.

Even in services?

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.

No communication does not mean no user testing.

And the award for dumbest and wrongest comment of the day goes to...

… this one

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).

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.

You can't please everyone when it comes to visual design. They say that in relation to accessibility which is completely covered via the accessibility settings in this case.

Most of the criticism I've seen on Liquid Glass has focused on accessibility issues like visual contrast, ambiguities, and removed text labels.

Please stop gaslighting people. What Apple shipped as OS 26 series is clearly a beta as best and has been the most unpopular of OS update so far by a large margin.

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

It's a fundamental part of many tech companies at this point, really

At least for Microsoft it is balanced by the real need to listen to business customers. Apple has none of such checks-and-balances because it caters primarily to individual users.

Apple relies on internal feedback and executive reviews rather than user testing. They likely received a lot of different feedback internally, but the execs decided to ship it anyway. I think they would rather ship something half-baked than change the yearly release process that has been continuously operating since the early days of iOS, and at the scale of the whole platform, it's hard to turn back once you've committed to making the changes.

Reminds me of when Google brought out a revised Maps app some years ago. Everyone hated it; there was a website for comments, with literally 10,000 comments, and everyone I read except for one was negative--and that one was a parody. Did Google revert back to the earlier look? Are you kidding? The only company I've ever seen do that is Microsoft, after the Win8 debacle.

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.

I heard about this story when BMW was designing the 1300GS, they had a bag of 40 lbs of sand hanging in the engineers' office. Engineers who developed weight savings got to do a ceremony where they removed that amount of sand from the bag.

This reminds me of the “battery bucks” design philosophy at Tesla, where a part could be as expensive as an engineer wanted if it increased range by at least that much cost in batteries. This was responsible for, among other things, monobloc brake calipers on the model 3 because it retracted the pads faster than a sliding piston caliper.

In the car industry this is the case because there is a direct incentive for the company to make a vehicle lighter.

A single kg is enormous likely saving tens of dollars per car, which sounds like nothing, but if a million of these cars are made the cost saving are in the tens of millions.

What does a software company save by their software running 10% faster on user hardware. Exactly nothing. In the case of apple they even have some incentives to make their software worse to get people to buy new devices.

The curse of software engineering has always been that there is very rarely a reward for your software being better. Software companies mostly make it on features and "good enough" stability.

If it was marketed it would be successful. Users are keenly aware of the lag modern programs have, even with top spec new hardware.

>Users are keenly aware of the lag modern programs have, even with top spec new hardware.

Which is always a combination of many factors.

I do not believe that you can market performance to anyone but a niche audience. The metrics are often difficult to comprehend and do not mean much. The one industry which does this is gaming and they usually do not go above giving specs at which a certain graphics quality at a certain frame rate is achievable.

I do not see how e.g. productivity software could be marketed like this. Except for unverifiable claims about "good performance".

To be honest, I do not think most users even care. They are annoyed at it, sure, but they will use what they have always used.

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.

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.

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

I would do this on macOS if it could make it faster to switch Spaces; unfortunately it does not (just makes the animation into an ugly fade that still takes just as long).

In iOS <= 18 reduce motion works fine but in iOS 26 it just changes animation to be symmetrical and fast. It still an animation and being fast it looks almost like flicker. I don't like animations in UI but had to disable this option in iOS 26.

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.

KDE to Windows? You missed out on peak Enlightenment.

You forget that HN is incapable of detecting even the most obvious sarcasm

At this point the comment is more for internal vs external pleasure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

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.

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!

You want to hold a lump of molten glass?

At least give us a lava lamp experience. Icons slowly floating up to the top, bursting into notifications that slowly sink to the bottom.

Some they are using Metal instead of OpenGL they should just remove the GL from the name.

The touch animations for switches and selector controls, and the animations of tab bar controls splitting and joining are "liquid".

It's surprising how they managed to instantly spawn liquids inside of the screen. I love Liquid Ass.

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!

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

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

This attitude always cracks me up. Only with tech products and among techies do we hear these demands of infinite customization of the products and tools we use.

Can you imagine any other vocation or industry making such demands of infinite customization of their tools and products that they use? I know I can’t.

The real analogy here isn’t landlords and homes. It’s a carpenter demanding that Stanley ship moldable handles with their hammers so that it fits their hand one millimeter better giving them the ability to maybe hammer one extra nail a day.

What you call "demands of infinite customization" is a basic thing on Windows and Android since forever.

Users can change the theme however they want.

Windows isn't a mobile operating system, unless you're referring to Windows phone, and from what little knowledge I have of what it's like to use an Android device, you can install custom "launchers" but you cannot change the user interface too drastically.

And they are available to use if that’s a requirement for the user.

I don’t think that every OS needs to adopt every feature of every other OS that’s out there.

>Users can change the theme however they want.

Windows has extremely limited customizability compared to what is available on Android and Linux.

The key feature of both Linux and Android is that the main interface "Desktop Environment" or "Launcher" can be replaced by the user.

Custom made tooling was the norm the vast majority of human history, the whole mass production thing as a very recent fad.

People will decorate their workplace. Imagine working in an office and not being allowed any personal items on your table, no family photos nothing, empty clean table. It would seem draconian.

It isn't just about efficiency and accessibility but also about individuality. Tech is already dehumanizing enough.

Plus accepting the same feature that Windows, Linux, literally any operating system ever had isn't exactly outrageous. It wouldn't be a big deal to implement for apple. They don't because they are pretentious wankers. Simple as that. If you had themes, everyone would deactivate that liquid glass shite and that would hurt their egos.

> If you had themes, everyone would deactivate that liquid glass shite

I’ve been using iOS 26, iPad 26, and MacOs 26 since the initial developer betas and it’s perfectly fine and perfectly usable for me. I like it well enough that I would prefer not going back at this point. I downloaded the 26.1 beta today, flipped off all the standard settings to minimize the Liquid Glass effects. It’s not exactly the iOS 18 experience, buts close enough. After 15 minutes I put them all back, I prefer the Liquid Glass. Everything is subjective.

Frankly, every time there is any sort of UI change on any public platform be it OS, site, or popular app, there are always detractors until they get used to it. Then they complain a few years later when the UI they complained about and ultimately adopted gets changed again.

> Then they complain a few years later when the UI they complained about and ultimately adopted gets changed again.

1) A few years later and you (or at least I) can't remember what the previous UI looked like. So if I don't complain about the change, it's only because I don't remember enough to recall what it used to be.

2) Exception: Windows 8. Nobody complained when Windows 9 came out, because they remembered what Windows 7 looked like (indeed, many of us were still using 7). (Of course some did complain that 9 didn't look exactly like 7, but since 9 was such an improvement over 8, their voices were muted.)

Noone complains about Windows 9 because Windows 9 does not exist.

Oops...you got me!

A few years later and you (or at least I) can't remember what the previous UI looked like. So if I don't complain about the change, it's only because I don't remember enough to recall what it used to be.

There was a similar amount of hate around the iOS 7 design. Apple toned it a bit down (like they are doing with Liquid Glass now), but you can compare the screenshots before and after and iOS 7 was certainly better in hindsight.

One day my dad dug up his old iPhone that was still running pre-7 and the UI was kind of meh.

All the non-techies in my family don’t seem to care about Liquid Glass? They went ‘oh it looks slightly different’ and went on with their lives.

By the way, I don’t think Windows 9 exists. They went 8 -> 8.1 -> 10.

Whenever I move a piece of furniture in the house, even slightly, my dog barks at it. After about 10 mins, he shrugs and moves on.

Our brains might rebel a bit for a short period at the change, then we adapt.

Customizing tools is extremely common, and many manufacturers do ship moldable handled tools—they’re made of wood.

But wood is not aesthetically pleasing for me, I demand fiberglass.

Any physical item can be customized with the proper tools, and they often are. Software should be the same way!

We're talking about a phone, not an art gallery.

I feel that Apple succeeds because it isn't customizable, although I do think a completely customizable phone operating system (that wouldn't be Linux or Android-based) could be successful with a niche crowd.

Disable animations? How else would you know how old your phone is?

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.

I don’t have iOS 26, but a couple of apps like telegram have already adopted it and pushed it users. I thought not updating would be a solution. Apparently not. Also things started bouncing around a lot and had to turn off animations. Either I am getting too old for this and it’s all going downhill.

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.

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.

Unfortunately “Reduce Transparenxy” does a bunch of other stuff too, like remove your background/wallpaper.

I’ve found “Increase Contrast” to be a better setting. Still a little bit of transparency but most elements now have borders and much more readable text. Not too many rough edges.

Is this just https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uiglasseffec... ?

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.

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.

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.

Not when it comes to profit extraction. This is enshittification in full swing, done by professionals.

"Apple says that the new toggle was added because during the beta testing period over the summer, user feedback suggested that some people would prefer to have a more opaque option for Liquid Glass."

I'd like to have a COMPLETELY OPAQUE option. No liquid glass whatsoever. That's why I'm still running iOS 18.

There's been a "reduce transparency" toggle under Accessibility settings forever and it's exactly what you want.

No, I do NOT want "reduce[d] transparency", I want OPACITY.

Lower your voice

WHAT? I CAN'T HEAR YOU!

(must be my hearing aids)

You know it's a sad state we're in when this passes for news these days.

What's next? iOS 26.1 lets users control Liquid Glass color?

Woweeeee, what's up with designers like Ive and Alan Dye going off the deep end in their late careers?

I don't how much Craig Federighi has been involved but it's definitely tainted his reputation too I'm afraid.

I think you may be missing the forest for the trees?

I don’t think this was posted because folks are thrilled with the brilliance of Apple’s UI designers; it’s noteworthy because it shows they’re backpedaling on a pretty radical interface shift they made in iOS 26.

So what?

If you didn’t find it interesting, why did you come to the comment section and scroll past a hundred or so messages to leave this useless comment?

It's gonna last as long as people will buy this crap. And it doesn't seem to be the end for this delusion of "progress".

Believe it or not, whether people care about something is completely unrelated to whether you personally care about it. What a wild concept!

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...

It's @3x these days.

I'd like to see Apple pull a Jaguar with their marketing department. Might clean the sewer enough to get them toward a that sweet middle ground of "users like us" and "shareholder profits."

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.

> 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

Same. First it was unnecessary tinkering with phone shape which was introduced in apple way in no less as "revolutionary". I laughed but still used the iphone.

Now they started to break UX with their stupid "liquid glass" and I am contemplating switch to android. At least you can switch off unnecessary garbage there.

Not to be that guy but I switched to Android a few months back for the first time in my life.

It took some getting used to here and there, but over all I've been happy with doing something new on this front.

I suspect I'll be looking at hopping back over a couple summers from now when they figure out how to make this design language work.

The Liquid Glass aesthetic isn't bad, it's just rough around the edges. It'll be a nice effect once reality reigns it all in. That's what happened around a year or two following iOS7.

Today I discovered you can’t downgrade from iOS 26 to iOS 18. It’s that bad.

Apple has stopped signing older versions of IOS shortly after releasing a new version since IOS 4 or so, this isn't anything new.

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.

I’m doing the same - and also for the fact that I can finally turn off the lock screen’s swipe for camera that I seem to activate too often when my phone’s in my pocket

Nobody wants or needs transparent windows or widgets. Apple tried this twenty years ago with Aqua and nobody wanted or needed it back then either. As a programmer, this seems like such a cool thing to build (I have done it too) but it has very few real world uses.

So basically the acknowledgement that Liquid Glass isn't that great after all.

To be honest I think that the Liquid glass design is a really cool effect and creates a really nice atmosphere in the UI.

Google's design is based around bright colors and large, simple shapes, together with large margins. No doubt this is the superior choice for accessibility. At the same time I really have to say that I appreciate the Liquid glass design more. It was the first time that moving a slider felt magical.

Certainly it is a technical accomplishment, but besides the very reasonable concerns about accessibility, it feels like a great new choice in design.

All 26 OSes thus far fall into the same shit gambit Microsoft plays to constantly ruin hardware to later act as a Karma Drama Triangle "hero" either by some future promised software upgrade or payment for hardware. The root cause is unrestrained greed and a customer-unaligned, bureaucratic orgchart pyramid of having too many designers constantly trying to justify their existence instead of leaving things alone. The problem is they sometimes do their job too well and create Microsoft Vista instead.

Waiting for color and squares to make a big comeback..

It looks like a step in the right direction but for me the main iOS 26 problem is not the transparency but the shape, size and placement of controls (buttons) - they waste too much space. It looks like designers has not tested iOS 26 well on small screens (iPhone SE) or they don't care about iPhone SE owners.

Still insane to me how broken the UX is. In safari, tapping the back button, disabled or not, makes it react in the same bubbly way.

If the back/forward arrows are present, it again reacts identically, regardless of which button is tapped.

Not to mention simple QoL regressions like taking 3+ taps to share a url instead of 1.

Now all we need is a "disable kindergarten mode" button to remove the superfluous whitespace in macOS.

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.

After having used it, I've been joking for a bit that Liquid Glass is just a silly name for Soap Bubbles. I think that also explains how often I expect them to pop when I touch them. Some of them do, even.

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 ?

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.)

There is a “kids mode” that can lock down iPhone. It’s useful for kids, seniors, and those unfamiliar with the device.

Thank you, I will look into it.

My father is way more tech illiterate and I got him a Samsung, I put the mod 'ultra power saving' where it locks down the phone to 8 preselected app, no app drawer only home screen with the 8 icons, and it's enough for him to make phone call, send SMS and take photo. Everything else he doesn't know how to use and didn't want to learn anyway. Bonus, the phone last for one to two week.

Now I don't know if yours is as bad as my father, in that case I'd suggest Samsung, but my mother on the other hand she can actually use the phone for many things : Spotify, using wireless payment, Waze and so on... It's just that things got to be intuitive enough and she is going to fall every time there is dark pattern and she is going to call me every time something is convoluted.

Because of that Android is even worst, Google UI is horrendous and they are master at dark pattern, at least as good as Microsoft.

Apple is still better but that's a far cry from what it used to be a few years ago.

We are evolving, just not in the right direction.

How about Apple actually fix the iOS wifi hotspot? Disconnects when it wants to, selectively connects to clients only when it wants to. Broken on every iPhone I've used in the past three years. When it does work the hotspot drains 30% per hour. Can run a hotspot on an Android phone half the day without any issues. What an infuriatingly amatureish product.

It works beautifully with MacBooks and horribly with anything else. I think Apple view that as a feature.

this is the first ios that i could remember where i wanted to go back 10 minutes after the update. by the time i updated it, they stopped signing older ios :\

I always wondered if they considered that each control on the UI should match WCAG AA contrast/readability in their design by default?

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.

We’ve spent hundreds of years perfecting crystal clear glass and now we want skeuomorphic imperfections? Two steps back, indeed.

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.

TANK YOU, better than nothing.

I thought ios 18 was perfect..

It was simple, just fucking worked.

Leave it to some uninspired people to fuck things up.

Agreed! No one asked for liquid ass!

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.

Liquid Glass is Skeuomorphism’s inbred grandchild.

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.

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".

Of course it's not a slider.

and yet it does not fix the true problem: that they have fundamentally changed the size and shape of fundamental components, rendering some uis broken, and others, like the imessage topbar still an annoyance even if "reduce transparency" is on

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.

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.

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???

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.

> 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.

I should have mentioned - I'm on android, she's an iPhone user. Afaik there is no way to do this without also having an iPhone.

That shouldn't be happening.

The way it should work, is that if the keys are nearby the user that owns them, the tracker shouldn't be giving unknown tracker notifications to other nearby users.

> nearby the user

You mean nearby the user's phone.. nowadays the 2 are almost interchangeable..

Maybe the wife doesn't take her phone when they go somewhere (yeah, implausible, but, maybe). Or she has several phones..

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

So we now have two independent and different ways to disable Liquid Glass: "reduce transparency" and "tinted". Nice.

Now can they fix all the other usability issues?

So now I have to go to settings to get rid of it. That's worse. Even more work for me.

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