And if you look at the window title bar, you’ll see how the use of translucent material gives you a sense of place as you scroll your content.
Now, these same carefully crafted translucent materials are used in the sidebars. So now, your windows take on the personality of your desktop. As you change your desktop picture, your window adapts to reflect that personality and that temperature.
And that translucency helps retain a sense of depth and place as you move your windows over one another.
The above is not a quote about Liquid Glass. This is Apple’s VP talking about OS X Yosemite, way back at WWDC 2014.
It’s curious to see the similarities to what Apple unleashed last week. Honestly, though, these were the design aspects of Yosemite that I least liked at the time, and they aren’t things I’ve grown any fonder of over the years – especially on the Mac.
It is notable, however, that Federighi uses the term “carefully crafted”. And the translucency was relatively subtle in Yosemite. For me, much of the problem with Liquid Glass stems from how overbearing it is: as I said in my piece for WIRED, rather than helping you focus your attention on what you’re doing, it demands attention for itself.
I have issues with Apple’s current design trajectory. There’s a lot of gloss – style over substance – with Liquid Glass. While I appreciate some refinements, like the quiet exit of the Home indicator, the more I use macOS 26 and iPadOS 26, the more I question where Apple’s heading.
Historically, Apple has been opinionated and confident in its graphic design. More often than not, it’s also made good decisions. There are exceptions, but the Mac survived and later thrived by marrying beauty and usability. Similarly, the iPhone would never have become a giant in mobile computing if iOS hadn’t looked great and been easy to use. Today, though, Apple too often feels lost when it comes to design.
This sense of unease can be shown by focusing on one key component: the menu bar. This element has been a vital part of the Mac since the platform’s earliest days, helping users quickly and efficiently access commands and controls.
In the first macOS 26 dev beta, Apple removed the menu bar background entirely. Menu bar text and icons suddenly floated above whatever was behind them, dramatically reducing legibility – something that plagues Apple design right now, due to Apple’s obsession with Liquid Glass. Using Reduce Transparency brought the background back, but no one should be reliant on accessibility settings for basic legibility.
In beta 2, Apple added an option to restore the menu bar background. Which is good. Except it also makes me question Apple’s confidence in its design work. When Apple starts hedging its bets, it signals that it knows something is wrong, but lacks the conviction to course-correct. Or perhaps such settings are a means to temporarily shut people up, while default choices reveal the true intent and direction of travel.
On iPad, things are even worse. I’m a fan of the new windowing system, but the menu bar implementation is dreadful. The problem isn’t its auto-hide behaviour – the Mac has had something similar (although off by default) since 2015. Again, the issue is that Apple is so enamoured with transparency that it’s sacrificing visual clarity.
Unfortunately, the ‘fix’ on iPad isn’t yet anywhere near as full as the Mac one. In beta 1, a two-up window view could see menu bar text vanish entirely. In beta 2, Apple added a subtle gradient, which barely helps. Honestly, this is embarrassing – the sort of thing a design student wouldn’t hand in as part of a project. A menu bar coming to iPad is great, but not if you can’t read its text.
I spent five minutes mocking up alternatives, one with a frosted glass effect and the other with a solid background. I’m very aware that they are far from perfect, and one commenter rightly suggested iPadOS would prefer a rounded rectangle menu bar background, like the Dock. But they still offer more clarity than Apple’s proposal. And that’s a problem, because basic foundational graphic design should be the starting point for operating systems many millions of people use every day. Design that lacks legibility shouldn’t make it off of the drawing board, let alone into a beta.
Fortunately, it’s still June. These operating systems won’t ship until September. There’s still time to fix all this. But Apple’s timid iPad tweak doesn’t suggest an eagerness to improve. If anything, it suggests a design team wondering: what’s the bare minimum we can get away with to quiet the complaints?
What should new Apple leadership do? That’s the question posed in Apple Turnaround by John Siracusa, which explores a new deal for developers, better software reliability, and harder paths to growth. It’s a great post, and the developer side of things especially gets me. I remember being at an EA meet around 2010, with a slew of indies excited about iPhone. They didn’t care about Apple’s cut, because everything else was, for them, better than what existed on other platforms, including the (relative) freedom to do whatever they wanted. Amazingly, Apple was less prescriptive than others in the gaming space. Then things all went very wrong.
Apple prioritised IAP over traditional game models, training users to want games for nothing. App Store editorial led to iPhone game sites shuttering – but they’d given new titles far more visibility than Apple ever would. And competitors quickly learned and evolved to compete with – and then better – Apple’s offering to game creators. Whereas we once saw iPhone-first titles head to other platforms, the reverse quickly became more commonplace. Elsewhere, major mobile creators like Simogo quit, which should have set alarm bells ringing – but it didn’t. Because Apple just counted the cash.
More widely, across apps and games, Apple has also found itself in a space where it’s not just showing – as Siracusa suggests – disrespect for developers as much as outright disdain. Various emails, now very much in the public domain due to emerging in lawsuits, suggest too many senior figures at Apple believe their own press to the degree they think Apple is responsible for all developer success and the success of the platform as a whole. They argue developers should be grateful to Apple and not the other way around. I have two words to counter that: Windows Phone.
I hate doing a “what would Steve Jobs do?” and it’s naive in the extreme to think his Apple wasn’t out to make huge piles of cash. But there are questions today about where Apple’s priorities lie in a whole range of spaces. Perhaps, as one developer said to me, the Jobs version of Apple only appeared to be on the side of devs because it needed to be, and now it doesn’t. So was this disdain always there or not? Was it a culture ingrained in Apple when Jobs was CEO or is it a more recent thing? Because I’d say that if it’s the former, Apple has an even bigger problem than Siracusa suggests.
Rich white men feel they should have everything instantly. That now increasingly extends to skills. But also, they don’t know what good looks like. Hence the current mess we are seeing with GenAI. Worse, everyone – from managers to consumers – is now being taught the same thing.
I see an increasing number of people saying that they want to paint/write/make songs and that it’s unfair that they can’t, and GenAI is the solution. Or hear about organisations claiming they can automate such tasks to the level they no longer need creative people at all. But GenAI tools are rarely sufficient. At least, if you want good. Which requires you to be able to recognise good.
For people who want to be creative, GenAI generates a finished article for them, based on a vague idea. There’s none of ‘you’ in there. In corporate scenarios, the lack of precision, specificity and accuracy from GenAI ultimately leads to some level of slop. In either case, the result is further erosion of the creative industries to make a handful of rich white guys richer through enabling people to think they can be Picasso or Shakespeare from merely typing in a line of text. What you’re really getting is another anodyne ‘median’ remix of what’s already out there.
Just like any other type of skill, creativity is not innate. I’ve lost count of how many people in the past have inferred that people are just born artists or musicians or writers. You don’t get people saying someone was born an electrician or a scientist or a footballer. In my case, I certainly wasn’t born a writer or a musician. I got to the point I’m now at because I’ve been writing professionally for 25 years – and writing songs for even longer.
Whatever skills I do have in these fields are also the result of thousands of hours of experiments and failures and building on successes. There was no shortcut. Notably, I also, as a kid, was good at art. Today? I’m OK. I can draw quite well. Am I ‘entitled’ to more? No. I never kept at it. Increasingly, though, tech bros would argue there’s no need to keep at it because you don’t even need to start. You just need a GenAI service and a prompt and you’re good to go, ready to turn even the vaguest creative impulse into the finished article in an instant.
I’m not sure where this is leading us, but I’m certain it’s not anywhere good.
This post is based on a post originally published on Bluesky and Mastodon.
Veteran Apple expert and commentator Jason Snell asked of me the question that’s the title of this post. This was after I (playfully) responded to his thoughts about Apple working on a “new, consistent design” with an XKCD klaxon jibe.
The actual answer to the question, in true Betteridge’s Law fashion, is no. But really: it’s complicated.
In the full Mastodon thread, Snell suggested we should praise optimism over negativity, and called the latter “no way to live”. Similar sentiments about Apple have recently been expressed by Federico Viticci and David Smith. And, despite my often cynical and curmudgeonly demeanour, I think there’s value in that way of thinking. Being relentlessly negative is no fun.
But.
I’m not keen on recent trends that suggest where Apple might head, hiding or removing yet more UI, including iPhone app tabs and iPad app sidebars. More importantly, every single major Apple redesign – even more so than ‘standard’ annual OS updates – results in a slew of vestibular accessibility issues that slip through the net.
I’m not sure why this is the case. And, to be fair, Apple’s iOS team has been very responsive ever since the iOS 7 days. Multiple requests that I’ve made have been rolled into iOS, which remains far ahead of Apple’s other operating systems in terms of usability for people who have vestibular conditions. (Stern glare @ tvOS team…)
Even so, more proactive support would be welcome. And so, returning to the question posed at the start, I’m not afraid of a major iOS redesign per se, but I am concerned that it will render my devices unusable for weeks or even months until fixes are made. If that’s primarily for a coat of fresh paint, that will be particularly dispiriting.
