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Comment by antran22 | Hacker News Reader

Good grief, hopefully in v28 Lemay will also throw away the absolute crap that is Liquid glass. Aesthetically it looks horrible, it slows my iPhone 13 — which never before lagged in all its life since iOS 15 – to a maddening crawl.

Liquid glass should be taught in design school as an example of what not to do when you design UX. And also in business school as a case of how middle management can fudge up something that is working normally in the illusion of progress.

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My iPhone 13 performs better since the Liquid Glass update. Animations seem to have been optimized and are much smoother. I also replaced the battery last year, so it might be worth checking if you are getting degraded performance due to a old battery.

Did they not learn from windows aero? Or are they comprised of pure hubris that they thought they could make it work

There's a constant "need" to churn UI revamps, so I guess eventually you run out of ideas before cycling around.

Windows Aero did work, or at least the Windows 7 incarnation of it.

Wasn't it a bastardized watered down version that cached the elements behind it and still gave a performance hit?

They seem to be running into the same issues and didn't take the learned lessons with them

It was still ugly, but it did kinda work because it only affected the window chrome, and it could be set to opaque with an easy-to-find setting.

On macOS the checkbox for "Reduce transparency" is hidden away in the Accessibility settings panel which is the last place I'd look for configuring the desktop theme.

Many good settings are ‘hidden’ in Accessibility, notably to increase contrast, differentiate without colour, etc.

The wonderful ability to control music playback on your Mac? It’s in Accessibility on iOS.

Thinks like Reachability, Shake to Undo, and Require Attention for Face ID are all accessibility features.

Evidently, Accessibility is the new Advanced Settings for Apple, and anything goes in there. I’d argue many of these should be On by default.

> Aesthetically it looks horrible, it slows my iPhone 13 — which never before lagged in all its life since iOS 15 – to a maddening crawl

I have an iPhone 13 mini and have not experienced this.

You're lucky then. I wish I could easily downgrade on iOS.

Liquid Glass made my 13 mini consistently lock up and overheat. Multiple reboots every day. Ludicrously slow screen repaints. It only stopped with the latest version (26.5).

Anecdotal evidence is not proof, and as I’ve seen two people in this thread saying the performance of their iPhone 13s improved after iOS 26, I don’t see how you could concretely attribute any of your issues to Liquid Glass specifically (especially since you say it has been resolved with 26.5 despite Liquid Glass still being present in the os).

Not 13 but 13 mini, and it was fine until iOS 26. The symptoms lessened in 26.4 and now seem to be gone. So maybe the "mini" display factor was not sufficiently tested before iOS 26 was released and... it ran into snags (to put it diplomatically).

It was srsly crazy stuff. Screen freeze for a minute, for two minutes, while the battery gets hot enough to cook an egg.

A gazillion-dollar company not throughly testing their software - who'da thunk it ?

> Good grief, hopefully in v28 Lemay will also throw away the absolute crap that is Liquid glass.

Why would he? He was a) one of the most senior designers, b) directly responsible for its implementation and c) "driving force behind Liquid Glass" https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/15/ios-27-macos-27-no-majo...

Why the hell do people keep assuming that whats-his-face was the one singular person responsible for Liquid Glass? How do they imagine Liquid Glass happened? By magic? Unbeknownst to any person in the company? Including the people who spent two hours on stage last year praising it?

Steve Lemay was a driving supporter of liquid glass, just like at least 2 other remaining designers at Apple. It's not going anywhere. Hopefully it will get toned down several times over though.

It is being toned down, at least in that they seem to be lightening up on that stupid lie that it helps you "focus on the content" because there were no toolbars. As if you're reading any text behind the buttons that are warping it and displaying another layer of text or an icon on top of it. And they ended up having to do an ugly fade at the top and bottom anyway cause you couldn't see the buttons on certain backgrounds.

Toolbars are back!

Apple just rolled out all of the liquid glass components and style guides to update apps with. No way they're getting rid of it any time soon.

I don’t think Liquid Glass is inherently bad.

I think Apple’s implementation and overuse of those effects is bad.

I think Liquid Glass is inherently bad. Universaly accepted truths about UIs that Liquid Glass violates:

* Consistent look across instances

* Consistent look as surrounding content changes

* Contrast is meaningful

* Interactsble elements are not stacked on the z axis

* Animation conveys meaning

You can see evidence that even Apple understands this by the presence of the options to disable many aspects of Liquid Glass living in the accessibility options.

Perhaps they can add a ‘macOS Classic’ option, in the style of Windows letting you show 98-themed UI, and the many attempts at bringing back an XP-ish look to modern versions.

I’d pay… 30€ for my Mac to again look like the cat-named versions.

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