6 ms·

Apple very rarely admits mistakes. The fact they're rolling back some of the extremeness in Liquid Glass and actively mentioned in the keynote that they very se

Apple very rarely admits mistakes. The fact they're rolling back some of the extremeness in Liquid Glass and actively mentioned in the keynote that they very seriously took the user feedback shows just how bad it was, at least initially.

matesz 3mo ago
I bet they planned this before the initial release and actually had this capability then and there. Just needed some guinea pigs (aka their users) to learn more and establish the trend.
- kefabean 3mo ago
  well, they also needed the initial release to facilitate a 'speed bump' in the new release, so perhaps!
philistine 3mo ago
It was literally the first specific announcement they made after they finished their introductions. Not anything iPhone related; they announced that Liquid Glass on macOS would move towards the older design. Goes to show that a year of anybody with any sort of clout complaining about the thousand little cuts of Liquid Glass on macOS will get a company to respond. That and the guy who announced it last year fled to Facebook of all places.
- xoa 3mo ago
  >shows just how bad it was >Goes to show that a year of anybody with any sort of clout complaining about the thousand little cuts of Liquid Glass on macOS will get a company to respond. Worth remembering too that this isn't merely about "complaints", Apple has significant metrics on the rates at which users are upgrading to a new OS, or not. You can opt-out of sharing that data, but a lot of people (even technical people) may choose to check the box to share with Apple. Anecdotally, I myself and a LOT of other people have stuck with macOS 15 or earlier, but Apple should have a lot of hard data on it and adoption curves vs the past. A real reaction does certainly suggest that this wasn't just a tempest in a teacup, but that they really weren't seeing the adoption on Macs they expected.
  - yurishimo 3mo ago
    I and most of my dev friends didn’t update. The reality is that many of us work in a web browser and an IDE all day writing software for non-Apple platforms. The only incentive I have to update is new and compelling OS features or bugfixes. Since major security patches will likely be backported, that just leaves new features and the reality is that macOS’ only new “feature” worth talking about was Liquid Glass considering their AI offering was also an absolute joke. Given the other emphasis placed on performance improvements (likely in service to helping to mask the slowness of LLM Siri) I’m really hoping this is a modern Snow Leopard release. I’m looking forward to the Apple nerds digging and offering a compelling narrative about why I should care about updating. And to add on to that, if this is a bug-fix bonanza release, hopefully we’ll also see a lot of positive movement during the beta period to keep shipping fixes. We’re getting a freaking EQ on AirPods!!!!111!!1! It seems Apple is finally taking some things to heart about listening to their users and I’m 10000% here for it.
  - dijit 3mo ago
    not just that, people keeping to older OS’s will actively avoid converting to new hardware sales.. I did not upgrade my laptop because it would come with the latest OS- I am not alone.
    - 05 3mo ago
      The other side of it is forced obsolescence where new OS makes your existing hardware slower. So I wouldn't upgrade my phone beyond iOS18.x purely for performance reasons but if there's a killer feature in a new iPhone I would still consider buying it because its hardware was built to handle the new effects and extra ram it needs.
  - 05 3mo ago
    Opt out all you want do you really think Apple doesn't know what OS version hits their APIs?
  - lynndotpy 3mo ago
    Yes!! I agree with this entirely. As far as I know, the best data the rest of us have is Google Trends. And based on that, it really does look like Liquid Glass elicited the largest negative reaction that Apple has ever had to an OS release. "How to Switch to Android" hit 3x its all time peak, "iPhone revert update", hit 4x its all-time peak, "iPhone slow" hit 8x its all time peak, "iPhone bad now" hit 5x its all time peak, "iPhone fix battery" hit 3x its all-time peak (and 14x its five-year peak) https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=how%20to%20switch%20to%20android&hl=en-US https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=how%20to... https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=iphone%20revert%20update&hl=en-US https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=iphone%2... https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=iphone%20slow&hl=en-US https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=i... https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=iphone%20bad%20now&hl=en-US https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=iphone%2... https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=iphone%20fix%20battery&hl=en-US https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=iphone%2... I mostly looked at this for iOS, but searches like "macOS slow", "mac slow", "fix mac battery", "fix mac", etc. all show similar hockey-stick jumps as Liquid Glass rolled out. If this means a sudden highest-ever 10x shift in customer dissatisfaction - 1000% - then that has to have been significant.
- torben-friis 3mo ago
  It's still nice to see a company not double down on a fall! They seem to have been on a full year of tech debt and optimisation. I still would have liked a more genuine walk back (they sold it as "iterations and adjustments" as if the rewinded stuff were new ideas) but overall reassuring.
  - alaedine 3mo ago
    [flagged]
dry_soup 3mo ago
Maybe I’m misremembering but I feel like Steve Jobs era Apple was much better at admitting mistakes. Nowadays even fiascos like the butterfly keyboard don’t warrant an apology, just a quiet change.
GeekyBear 3mo ago
Apple has always tweaked new UI designs over the first few OS releases. They did it with Aqua when MacOS launched and again with the iPhone's original skeuomorphic UI and yet again with the flat redesign of iOS.
- try-working 3mo ago
  Of course. Every company does that. There is no company ever that just freezes after they release something.
  - tsunamifury 3mo ago
    He means the classic revolution/evolution cycle. Move forward, and then refine. This means you have to accept some errors in the name of momentum.
- marbletiles 3mo ago
  What they don’t do is open their keynotes with announcements of the tweaks. This isn’t like the other situations.
moogly 3mo ago
Jobs: "You're holding it wrong, idiot." Also Jobs: fires the antenna designer
- Y-bar 3mo ago
  Multiple things can be true: We could be holding it wrong, and Jobs be correct to point out that many rival phones at the time literally had manuals dictating how to hold their phones to avoid reception issues. The antenna designer could have done a better job, preventing the situation, thereby not dragging Jobs into a PR storm. Jobs could have handled the situation and communication _significantly_ better.
analogpixel 3mo ago
Maybe I wasn't in the minority of people that stopped updating macos to wait for them to remove it.
firemelt 3mo ago
so bad like john ive ferarri lmao
robot_jesus 3mo ago
Yeah. It's clear they've been hearing the complaints. Not just Liquid Glass, but they even talked about the inconsistent menu bar icons and problems with rounded corner radii (among a bunch of improvements). I'm excited that this is basically Snow Leopard part II, for those who remember.
- szundi 3mo ago
  Snow Leopard was a nothing release basically - but under the hood a lot got fixed and got better for devs
- sudokatsu 3mo ago
  Well, let’s wait a bit before giving it such an honorable name lol
  - wpm 3mo ago
    Snow Leopard was a goddamn mess, everyone forgets. Yeah, 10.6.8 was rock solid. In 10.6.0 there was a bug that erased your user folder if you logged into the guest account. It was NOT a good release at the start.
    - latexr 3mo ago
      Exactly. And macOS 27 is unlikely to be a Snow Leopard release because it won’t have the time to. The yearly release schedule is too brutal.
    - lynguist 3mo ago
      Snow Leopard even happened in the first place because Apple's A team was busy with iPhone, and iPhone has priority. You will see that during this era Mac OS X was relegated to stepchild status and received far fewer support. All this glory is just Steve Jobs selling it to us as a good thing! In the end it worked out, but it was more incidental and a collateral of the iPhone than the public memory likes to admit.
xnx 3mo ago
> Apple very rarely admits mistakes. Probably the best reversion was getting rid of the butterfly keyboard and bringing back ports after Jony Ive was gone.
- xiaoyu2006 3mo ago
  I hope they redesign their magic mouse. It's not a real product.
  - kqp 3mo ago
    I think it’s basically recalcitrance. Same as they suddenly turn into the world’s worst devs every time they have to make software for Windows. Apple hates mouses, but many people won’t consider not using one, so they reluctantly make an expensive, pretty, and absolutely terrible mouse to get you over the hump of the macOS switch then keep pushing you along to where they really want you: the giant touchpad, where they do have a moat, and which trains you for the rest of their ecosystem. They even sneak half of that touchpad into the mouse itself, and half of the mouse out, so the transition is oh so easy.
    - yurishimo 3mo ago
      I have been a desktop trackpad user for so long now, I literally don’t want to use a mouse for anything except playing video games. The amount of flexibility offered by a good trackpad just wins most of the time as it is plenty accurate for quickly jumping around on one axis. With a large enough trackpad, you could even move to a 1:1 type of movement, or add that functionality to a layer for the best of both worlds (like gyro enhanced aiming in games).
      - _doctor_love 3mo ago
        Wacom wants your money! I’ve worked with some designers who did what you described with their huge tablets. Use the stylus to turn it into a giant touchpad. Works pretty good.
  - 3mo ago
dmitrygr 3mo ago
At least, unlike microslop, they ARE fixing things based on user feedback.
- thewebguyd 3mo ago
  So is Microsoft, albeit a bit late to the party. Taskbar now movable, performance improvements hitting insider builds, MS BUILD half about WSL containers, native coreutils, a dev edition of windows using Winget config to strip all the bloat out, all new system dialogs replacing a good chunk of the old Win32 stuff, WinUI reactor, ability to remove AI models & Copilot from the OS, etc. Classic case of the reality distortion field here.
  - dmitrygr 3mo ago
    Oh? So I can now disable "AI" and "onedrive" and "microsoft accounts" in windows? COOL! where do i enable that?
    - thewebguyd 3mo ago
      You always could disable OneDrive (it's uninstallable), and you could always use a local account on Pro editions of Windows, that's nothing new. Uninstalling Copilot and the local AI models is whats new on current insider builds.
      - dmitrygr 3mo ago
        https://www.google.com/search?q=microsoft+blocks+local+accounts https://www.google.com/search?q=microsoft+blocks+local+accou... https://redmondmag.com/articles/2025/10/08/microsoft-ends-local-account-workarounds-in-latest-windows-11-build.aspx https://redmondmag.com/articles/2025/10/08/microsoft-ends-lo...
        thewebguyd 3mo ago
        Hmm, funny, because I literally just set up a Win11 PRO machine yesterday, I could still create a local account, no bypass script needed. Your links only apply to Home editions.
tomduncalf 3mo ago
Yeah I’m surprised by what a design misstep it was. The shiny corners of icons on iOS look so tacky and on macOS the corner radius mismatch is crazy. Also not a fan of the “bulbous” shapes of things with excessive rounded corners. Whenever I use my personal Mac or iPad, still on the old OS, I wonder what they were thinking - I would guess it was rushed to hit the annual release, as it does have potential in parts. That said, it looks from the few screenshots in this like you’re able to pare it back to something much closer to how it used to look, which is great and I’m glad they’re taking feedback on board.
- wpm 3mo ago
  The screenshots are generous. I just spent a few hours in macOS 27 and while yes, some of the absolutely galling and baffling errors have been rolled back, it's still bad. I cannot help but think: they are such cowards, so afraid of anything that stands out after years of flat design. Like, you can almost feel like there is someone trying to sneak it in, only for it to get squeegeed at the last minute. The buttons could look like classic Aqua ( if they are allowed a background color that is), if it got slammed with a belt sander. Everything has to be too subtle, too toned down, too pale, and too faint, only noticable blown up to 4x on an OLED screen. It's like all they are allowed is "mimiminalizm", just remove, remove, remove, tone down, remove, slavishly, without thought. I'm supposed to cheer they added color back to in-focus window sidebars? First: good lord, what were they thinking? Of course they rolled such an utterly stupid decision back. Second: what color? Some single accent color applied to some whisper thin monochrome squiggles they call icons? Its still more of the same. In the Installer app, there are windows where the dividing line between toolbar and content is like a 1px 30% grey line on same old bland 20% grey background, and that's with the new "Draw Borders" Accessibility setting turned on. They can dress it up. Fix the worst issues. I'm thankful for it. Hell, I might not skip this one. But the problem still remains: Liquid Glass was a *bad, flawed* design from the start, whose central principle is contradictory (we'll get out of the way of your content by floating directly in front of your content all the time, in the way). There is no salvaging it.
andrewl-hn 3mo ago
> Apple very rarely admits mistakes Excep every time they do a big redesign like this. This happened when they moved away from skeuomorphism in iOS7(?) and then backpedalled hard in the following revision because of negative user feedback. Similar thing happened when they presented the reinvented Safari (I do't think that one even survived through betas). And it is happening now.
- sirwhinesalot 3mo ago
  It didn't happen when they introduced Leopard, because the new design was legitimately better than the ugly brushed aluminium look that preceeded it. When they toned down the horrific excesses of skeumorphism (like leather textures) on macOS but still retained some skeumorphic design (e.g., buttons that look like buttons) people were pretty ok with it too. I remember some complaints that the lickable aqua buttons were gone but that wasn't really a serious complaint, just more of a "I kind of liked those gaudy buttons, sad they're gone" type of sentiment.
robomartin 3mo ago
I would love to be able to have a conversation with the people who decided Liquid Glass was a good idea. The first question would be: Given all other truly useful things you could implement as well as bug fixes, why did you think that investing time and money on Liquid Glass would deliver useful value to users? I wonder how much time and money they wasted on something that nobody wanted, cared for, needed or solved any real problem?
- sethops1 3mo ago
  My theory is they made Liquid Glass for the Watch first, where (IMHO) it's actually pretty great, and assumed it would translate well to iOS and macOS, which in retrospect it did not.
  - zulux 3mo ago
    Sort of how Microsoft made Windows 8 look like a Zune.
    - Lammy 3mo ago
      Zune HD was itself based on the UI design of Windows Media Center: https://www.redmondpie.com/windows-media-center-in-windows-7-build-7022/ https://www.redmondpie.com/windows-media-center-in-windows-7...
    - adi_kurian 3mo ago
      Zune was low key pretty damn solid. (Yes, I lived in Redmond as a teenager.) In fact I may even say it was their last gasp of a solid user interface. Right before Vista.
mjsweet 3mo ago
“We are sorry and we think we fixed it… ok, here is a slider”

matesz 3mo ago

I bet they planned this before the initial release and actually had this capability then and there. Just needed some guinea pigs (aka their users) to learn more and establish the trend.

kefabean 3mo ago
well, they also needed the initial release to facilitate a 'speed bump' in the new release, so perhaps!

philistine 3mo ago

It was literally the first specific announcement they made after they finished their introductions. Not anything iPhone related; they announced that Liquid Glass on macOS would move towards the older design. Goes to show that a year of anybody with any sort of clout complaining about the thousand little cuts of Liquid Glass on macOS will get a company to respond. That and the guy who announced it last year fled to Facebook of all places.

xoa 3mo ago
>shows just how bad it was >Goes to show that a year of anybody with any sort of clout complaining about the thousand little cuts of Liquid Glass on macOS will get a company to respond. Worth remembering too that this isn't merely about "complaints", Apple has significant metrics on the rates at which users are upgrading to a new OS, or not. You can opt-out of sharing that data, but a lot of people (even technical people) may choose to check the box to share with Apple. Anecdotally, I myself and a LOT of other people have stuck with macOS 15 or earlier, but Apple should have a lot of hard data on it and adoption curves vs the past. A real reaction does certainly suggest that this wasn't just a tempest in a teacup, but that they really weren't seeing the adoption on Macs they expected.
- yurishimo 3mo ago
  I and most of my dev friends didn’t update. The reality is that many of us work in a web browser and an IDE all day writing software for non-Apple platforms. The only incentive I have to update is new and compelling OS features or bugfixes. Since major security patches will likely be backported, that just leaves new features and the reality is that macOS’ only new “feature” worth talking about was Liquid Glass considering their AI offering was also an absolute joke. Given the other emphasis placed on performance improvements (likely in service to helping to mask the slowness of LLM Siri) I’m really hoping this is a modern Snow Leopard release. I’m looking forward to the Apple nerds digging and offering a compelling narrative about why I should care about updating. And to add on to that, if this is a bug-fix bonanza release, hopefully we’ll also see a lot of positive movement during the beta period to keep shipping fixes. We’re getting a freaking EQ on AirPods!!!!111!!1! It seems Apple is finally taking some things to heart about listening to their users and I’m 10000% here for it.
- dijit 3mo ago
  not just that, people keeping to older OS’s will actively avoid converting to new hardware sales.. I did not upgrade my laptop because it would come with the latest OS- I am not alone.
  - 05 3mo ago
    The other side of it is forced obsolescence where new OS makes your existing hardware slower. So I wouldn't upgrade my phone beyond iOS18.x purely for performance reasons but if there's a killer feature in a new iPhone I would still consider buying it because its hardware was built to handle the new effects and extra ram it needs.
- 05 3mo ago
  Opt out all you want do you really think Apple doesn't know what OS version hits their APIs?
- lynndotpy 3mo ago
  Yes!! I agree with this entirely. As far as I know, the best data the rest of us have is Google Trends. And based on that, it really does look like Liquid Glass elicited the largest negative reaction that Apple has ever had to an OS release. "How to Switch to Android" hit 3x its all time peak, "iPhone revert update", hit 4x its all-time peak, "iPhone slow" hit 8x its all time peak, "iPhone bad now" hit 5x its all time peak, "iPhone fix battery" hit 3x its all-time peak (and 14x its five-year peak) https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=how%20to%20switch%20to%20android&hl=en-US https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=how%20to... https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=iphone%20revert%20update&hl=en-US https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=iphone%2... https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=iphone%20slow&hl=en-US https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=i... https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=iphone%20bad%20now&hl=en-US https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=iphone%2... https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=iphone%20fix%20battery&hl=en-US https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=iphone%2... I mostly looked at this for iOS, but searches like "macOS slow", "mac slow", "fix mac battery", "fix mac", etc. all show similar hockey-stick jumps as Liquid Glass rolled out. If this means a sudden highest-ever 10x shift in customer dissatisfaction - 1000% - then that has to have been significant.
torben-friis 3mo ago
It's still nice to see a company not double down on a fall! They seem to have been on a full year of tech debt and optimisation. I still would have liked a more genuine walk back (they sold it as "iterations and adjustments" as if the rewinded stuff were new ideas) but overall reassuring.
- alaedine 3mo ago
  [flagged]

dry_soup 3mo ago

Maybe I’m misremembering but I feel like Steve Jobs era Apple was much better at admitting mistakes. Nowadays even fiascos like the butterfly keyboard don’t warrant an apology, just a quiet change.

GeekyBear 3mo ago

Apple has always tweaked new UI designs over the first few OS releases. They did it with Aqua when MacOS launched and again with the iPhone's original skeuomorphic UI and yet again with the flat redesign of iOS.

try-working 3mo ago
Of course. Every company does that. There is no company ever that just freezes after they release something.
- tsunamifury 3mo ago
  He means the classic revolution/evolution cycle. Move forward, and then refine. This means you have to accept some errors in the name of momentum.
marbletiles 3mo ago
What they don’t do is open their keynotes with announcements of the tweaks. This isn’t like the other situations.

moogly 3mo ago

Jobs: "You're holding it wrong, idiot." Also Jobs: fires the antenna designer

Y-bar 3mo ago
Multiple things can be true: We could be holding it wrong, and Jobs be correct to point out that many rival phones at the time literally had manuals dictating how to hold their phones to avoid reception issues. The antenna designer could have done a better job, preventing the situation, thereby not dragging Jobs into a PR storm. Jobs could have handled the situation and communication _significantly_ better.

analogpixel 3mo ago

Maybe I wasn't in the minority of people that stopped updating macos to wait for them to remove it.

firemelt 3mo ago

so bad like john ive ferarri lmao

robot_jesus 3mo ago

Yeah. It's clear they've been hearing the complaints. Not just Liquid Glass, but they even talked about the inconsistent menu bar icons and problems with rounded corner radii (among a bunch of improvements). I'm excited that this is basically Snow Leopard part II, for those who remember.

szundi 3mo ago
Snow Leopard was a nothing release basically - but under the hood a lot got fixed and got better for devs
sudokatsu 3mo ago
Well, let’s wait a bit before giving it such an honorable name lol
- wpm 3mo ago
  Snow Leopard was a goddamn mess, everyone forgets. Yeah, 10.6.8 was rock solid. In 10.6.0 there was a bug that erased your user folder if you logged into the guest account. It was NOT a good release at the start.
  - latexr 3mo ago
    Exactly. And macOS 27 is unlikely to be a Snow Leopard release because it won’t have the time to. The yearly release schedule is too brutal.
  - lynguist 3mo ago
    Snow Leopard even happened in the first place because Apple's A team was busy with iPhone, and iPhone has priority. You will see that during this era Mac OS X was relegated to stepchild status and received far fewer support. All this glory is just Steve Jobs selling it to us as a good thing! In the end it worked out, but it was more incidental and a collateral of the iPhone than the public memory likes to admit.

xnx 3mo ago

> Apple very rarely admits mistakes. Probably the best reversion was getting rid of the butterfly keyboard and bringing back ports after Jony Ive was gone.

xiaoyu2006 3mo ago
I hope they redesign their magic mouse. It's not a real product.
- kqp 3mo ago
  I think it’s basically recalcitrance. Same as they suddenly turn into the world’s worst devs every time they have to make software for Windows. Apple hates mouses, but many people won’t consider not using one, so they reluctantly make an expensive, pretty, and absolutely terrible mouse to get you over the hump of the macOS switch then keep pushing you along to where they really want you: the giant touchpad, where they do have a moat, and which trains you for the rest of their ecosystem. They even sneak half of that touchpad into the mouse itself, and half of the mouse out, so the transition is oh so easy.
  - yurishimo 3mo ago
    I have been a desktop trackpad user for so long now, I literally don’t want to use a mouse for anything except playing video games. The amount of flexibility offered by a good trackpad just wins most of the time as it is plenty accurate for quickly jumping around on one axis. With a large enough trackpad, you could even move to a 1:1 type of movement, or add that functionality to a layer for the best of both worlds (like gyro enhanced aiming in games).
    - _doctor_love 3mo ago
      Wacom wants your money! I’ve worked with some designers who did what you described with their huge tablets. Use the stylus to turn it into a giant touchpad. Works pretty good.
- 3mo ago

dmitrygr 3mo ago

At least, unlike microslop, they ARE fixing things based on user feedback.

thewebguyd 3mo ago
So is Microsoft, albeit a bit late to the party. Taskbar now movable, performance improvements hitting insider builds, MS BUILD half about WSL containers, native coreutils, a dev edition of windows using Winget config to strip all the bloat out, all new system dialogs replacing a good chunk of the old Win32 stuff, WinUI reactor, ability to remove AI models & Copilot from the OS, etc. Classic case of the reality distortion field here.
- dmitrygr 3mo ago
  Oh? So I can now disable "AI" and "onedrive" and "microsoft accounts" in windows? COOL! where do i enable that?
  - thewebguyd 3mo ago
    You always could disable OneDrive (it's uninstallable), and you could always use a local account on Pro editions of Windows, that's nothing new. Uninstalling Copilot and the local AI models is whats new on current insider builds.
    - dmitrygr 3mo ago
      https://www.google.com/search?q=microsoft+blocks+local+accounts https://www.google.com/search?q=microsoft+blocks+local+accou... https://redmondmag.com/articles/2025/10/08/microsoft-ends-local-account-workarounds-in-latest-windows-11-build.aspx https://redmondmag.com/articles/2025/10/08/microsoft-ends-lo...
      - thewebguyd 3mo ago
        Hmm, funny, because I literally just set up a Win11 PRO machine yesterday, I could still create a local account, no bypass script needed. Your links only apply to Home editions.

tomduncalf 3mo ago

Yeah I’m surprised by what a design misstep it was. The shiny corners of icons on iOS look so tacky and on macOS the corner radius mismatch is crazy. Also not a fan of the “bulbous” shapes of things with excessive rounded corners. Whenever I use my personal Mac or iPad, still on the old OS, I wonder what they were thinking - I would guess it was rushed to hit the annual release, as it does have potential in parts. That said, it looks from the few screenshots in this like you’re able to pare it back to something much closer to how it used to look, which is great and I’m glad they’re taking feedback on board.

wpm 3mo ago
The screenshots are generous. I just spent a few hours in macOS 27 and while yes, some of the absolutely galling and baffling errors have been rolled back, it's still bad. I cannot help but think: they are such cowards, so afraid of anything that stands out after years of flat design. Like, you can almost feel like there is someone trying to sneak it in, only for it to get squeegeed at the last minute. The buttons could look like classic Aqua ( if they are allowed a background color that is), if it got slammed with a belt sander. Everything has to be too subtle, too toned down, too pale, and too faint, only noticable blown up to 4x on an OLED screen. It's like all they are allowed is "mimiminalizm", just remove, remove, remove, tone down, remove, slavishly, without thought. I'm supposed to cheer they added color back to in-focus window sidebars? First: good lord, what were they thinking? Of course they rolled such an utterly stupid decision back. Second: what color? Some single accent color applied to some whisper thin monochrome squiggles they call icons? Its still more of the same. In the Installer app, there are windows where the dividing line between toolbar and content is like a 1px 30% grey line on same old bland 20% grey background, and that's with the new "Draw Borders" Accessibility setting turned on. They can dress it up. Fix the worst issues. I'm thankful for it. Hell, I might not skip this one. But the problem still remains: Liquid Glass was a *bad, flawed* design from the start, whose central principle is contradictory (we'll get out of the way of your content by floating directly in front of your content all the time, in the way). There is no salvaging it.

andrewl-hn 3mo ago

> Apple very rarely admits mistakes Excep every time they do a big redesign like this. This happened when they moved away from skeuomorphism in iOS7(?) and then backpedalled hard in the following revision because of negative user feedback. Similar thing happened when they presented the reinvented Safari (I do't think that one even survived through betas). And it is happening now.

sirwhinesalot 3mo ago
It didn't happen when they introduced Leopard, because the new design was legitimately better than the ugly brushed aluminium look that preceeded it. When they toned down the horrific excesses of skeumorphism (like leather textures) on macOS but still retained some skeumorphic design (e.g., buttons that look like buttons) people were pretty ok with it too. I remember some complaints that the lickable aqua buttons were gone but that wasn't really a serious complaint, just more of a "I kind of liked those gaudy buttons, sad they're gone" type of sentiment.

robomartin 3mo ago

I would love to be able to have a conversation with the people who decided Liquid Glass was a good idea. The first question would be: Given all other truly useful things you could implement as well as bug fixes, why did you think that investing time and money on Liquid Glass would deliver useful value to users? I wonder how much time and money they wasted on something that nobody wanted, cared for, needed or solved any real problem?

sethops1 3mo ago
My theory is they made Liquid Glass for the Watch first, where (IMHO) it's actually pretty great, and assumed it would translate well to iOS and macOS, which in retrospect it did not.
- zulux 3mo ago
  Sort of how Microsoft made Windows 8 look like a Zune.
  - Lammy 3mo ago
    Zune HD was itself based on the UI design of Windows Media Center: https://www.redmondpie.com/windows-media-center-in-windows-7-build-7022/ https://www.redmondpie.com/windows-media-center-in-windows-7...
  - adi_kurian 3mo ago
    Zune was low key pretty damn solid. (Yes, I lived in Redmond as a teenager.) In fact I may even say it was their last gasp of a solid user interface. Right before Vista.

mjsweet 3mo ago

“We are sorry and we think we fixed it… ok, here is a slider”