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Comment by hbn | Hacker News Reader

> the much-celebrated Liquid Glass opacity slider

The Liquid Glass slider is an embarrassing outright admission of failure. Apple built its brand as a tastemaker, so to put out this new, controversial design language, and after a year of tweaking, finally throw their hands up and say "we don't know what looks good, you decide" is so disappointing.

That said, all the changes in iOS 27 are such a massive improvement from 26. The first design turnout with Alan Dye gone is making me feel very optimistic of their direction.

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It's prideful too since just undoing it would be an actual admission of failure. This is a hollow apology and compromise

You're totally right. :)

That's just big corporate politics. Ever been involved in a 'lessons learned' exercise? Everything gets politically massaged so as not to upset individuals or functions, so that by the end of it, there are very few meaningful lessons remaining, and those that are still present need background understanding to divine.

This approach just protects the people, the function, and ultimately the corporation.

> outright admission of failure

Right!? Who's out there going "oh no, translucent is too translucent; opaque is too opaque; but now that I can have 72.93% glass, my life is complete"?

Apple designers

I'll take an admission of failure over slavishly refusing to and trying to pretend it's fine.

There were plenty of people saying Liquid Glass was fundamentally an utterly flawed, bad design, that even if you subjectively liked the way it looked, that its design philosophy was wrong, and led to logically consistent but unusable and ugly interfaces, all to solve a problem no one had.

I'm cautiously optimistic now that the bozo cardboard box designer dope with the ugly glasses is gone we'll see a quiet but rapid change of direction. I'll take "mea culpa". I'll take "whelp, this shit does actually just suck, here's a slider while we work on something better".

To me the cherry on top was that they started modifying how third party icons look to match the Liquid Glass. People started complaining to us that our app icon looked blurry because of it.

Apple's own app icons look blurry in iOS 26.

They look fine when zoomed in, and I'm assuming that's all the designers considered as they were redrawing icons, blown up across their 27" monitor. But once you shrink them down to an actual app icon size, the glassy effects on the edges of everything look like a blur.

In iOS 27 they sharpened the edges up and everything looks a lot better.

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