But it’s true — something important died with Steve Jobs. He was really Apple’s kernel, for better and for… less better. This Apple has been dismantling Mac OS, as if it’s a foreign tool to them. They’ve bashed its UI around. And they seem to have done that not for the purpose of improving it, but simply for the purpose of changing it; adapting it to their (mostly misguided) idea of unifying the interface of different devices to bring it down to the simplest common denominator.
And this Liquid Glass facelift just makes me almost irrationally furious. Everything I’m seeing of Liquid Glass – at least on Mac OS – is a terrible regression. And I don’t want it on my production Mac. I do not want to look at that shit 14 hours a day. It’s ultimately that simple.
If you’re someone who’s only using email, a web browser, and some messaging apps to get stuff done, changes to your desktop appearance aren’t going to be disruptive. It’s also likely that you’ll appreciate changes that make it look like your phone.
If you’re doing anything more complex than that, your response to change will be much different.
Professionals on the Mac are like truck drivers. Drivers have a cockpit filled with specialized dials, knobs, switches, microwave ovens, refrigerators, and pillows that are absolutely necessary for hauling goods across country. Those of us who are making movies, producing hit songs, building apps, or doing scientific research have our own highly specialized cockpits.
And along comes Alan Dye with his standard cockpit, that is beautiful to look at and fun to use on curvy roads. But also completely wrong for the jobs we’re doing. There’s no air ride seat, microwave oven, or air brake release. His response will be to hide these things that we use all the time behind a hidden menu.
I don’t disagree with Riccardo, Craig, and the many people complaining about Liquid Glass, but i can’t shake the feeling that they’re missing the forest for the trees. It’s devastatingly easy to find things that look awful in screenshots, but truth be told, Liquid Glass is nothing more than a coat of paint1. Nothing has fundamentally changed in the inner workings of macOS. Everybody should just breathe.
The Mac is still the best platform around for multitasking. You can still make a mess of things with its terminal emulator. Even though it’s been considerably tightened over the last few years, mostly for good reasons, macOS’s security model is still fairly permissive. The apps that you use to make movies, produce hit songs, build other apps and do scientific research still ignore every rule in the Human Interface Guidelines. I’ve spent the last fifteen summers writing whole books about macOS, so i don’t think i’m too far off the mark when i say that Liquid Glass breaks where the UI was already cracking2.
The menu bar has been a mess since the introduction of Spotlight way back in 2005. It now houses app menus (which might be broken up by the notch), status menus (which can be hidden in the Control Center… unless they can’t), menu items (which could open a sub-menu, a drawer, a whole app, additional controls, or pop-ups that appear elsewhere on screen), the Control Center (which is a world in itself) and its arcane privacy indicators and, finally, the Notification Center (which gives more space to widgets than to notifications). Oh, and can someone explain why it disappears when you open Mission Control? This whole area of the screen needs rejiggering — what Gnome does is interesting.
Liquid Glass is at its worst in the Finder, but only because it’s been years since anyone at Cupertino has had any idea about what the sidebar, the title bar, the tool bars, the path bar and the status bar should do. The structure of windows has been getting worse and worse since OS X Lion, but i don’t believe we should go back to the way things were in Mac OS X Snow Leopard. Some of my students don’t know their files from their folders, and i don’t blame them. The whole metaphor of the “desktop environment” probably needs reinventing.
Case in point, Safari’s tabs haven’t looked like tabs for years, and they now look like shit. I could go on, but i think i’ve made my point. Liquid Glass isn’t great because macOS’s user interface has been bad for years — and i should note that its breakdown began under the guidance of Steve Jobs and Scott Forstall. As they say, you can put lipstick on a pig…
Things are a bit better on iOS 26 and iPadOS 26, precisely because Apple’s designers weren’t content with swapping textures and icons. You can even see moments of brilliance in the onboarding modals, the full-screen password prompts, the Camera app and the behaviour of search fields. But the UX still fails at the basics — don’t get me started on that ducking To connect, turn off Airplane Mode dialog.
This has nothing to do Liquid Glass and everything to do with an utter lack of attention and expertise. Alan Dye might be a bad designer, but he’s a worse manager. But then again, most Apple VPs have shown how good they were at failing to effectively manage talent and allocate resources— remember AirPower? The Titan project? The Vision Pro? Apple Intelligence? Ultimately, the fault lies with Tim Cook. Maybe if he spent a little less time licking (wannabe) dictators’ boots and a little more time leading his troops, we wouldn’t suffer the consequences of what is, in the end, an organizational failure. Maybe.