My Take on Apple's Liquid Glass

Major redesigns of graphical user interfaces (GUI) always provoke surprise and complaints. With Liquid Glass, Apple’s new visual language, it’s no different.

The good news is that beneath the new buttons, unreadable text blocks and modernized effects, the way you use systems like iOS and macOS hasn’t changed. People familiar with the previous versions will be able to find their way around the new ones.

That doesn’t mean Liquid Glass is a success. At the risk of contradicting myself later, I think Apple missed the mark.

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One big question I have after a week using iOS 26 and macOS 26 Tahoe is whether the bugs and the sluggishness are fixable in future updates or — especially the sluggishness — unavoidable side effects of transparency and refraction effects on glassy surfaces that, I imagine, require more processing power.

Bugs show up here and there: context menus that jump to odd places, screen transitions that go wrong, inconsistencies and other little issues. Nothing that breaks functionality, but enough to shatter the illusion of smoothness at the core of the new look. The same goes for the sluggishness, which sometimes appears in unexpected places like Spotlight or a command that should be instant.

There’s also a more fundamental issue that seems broken: Apple’s claim that Liquid Glass “brings more focus to content”. It does the opposite. Liquid Glass competes with app content for attention; sometimes it’s more eye-catching. Maybe that’s just the novelty factor, though.

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I’ve never bought the idea that Apple maintains a secret planned‑obsolescence policy. The first encounter with the 26 crop of operating systems — the first with Liquid Glass — shook that confidence.

My devices are “old” (a 2020 laptop, a 2022 phone), but until now they ran without hiccups. It’s possible iOS/macOS 26.1 and subsequent updates will improve things, but that’s not the point. The trillion‑dollar question is why Apple sacrificed performance and stability for a change that’s purely cosmetic.

At heart, Liquid Glass is just makeup. And at first glance it’s not the prettiest. There are moments when the visual effects impress, but they’re less frequent than Apple’s marketing suggests for a simple reason: much of the time — especially on macOS — the glass elements sit behind flat areas (white in Light Mode).

Although Liquid Glass feels fresh (because it’s new?), stepping back a few versions puts it in perspective. macOS, poor thing, suffers the most from Liquid Glass. Compare it with this:

Good times I didn’t live. (I started on 10.10 Yosemite.)

That window is from Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, 2011. It’s a more legible — and, to me, a prettier — GUI.

Since then macOS seems to have fallen into a spiral of decline, a phenomenon summed up by this exercise of reviewing Apple’s desktop OS in backwards, à la Benjamin Button, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s character who is born old and dies a baby.

For the first time since I switched to Apple devices in 2015, I looked into how to downgrade. I was (much) happier with macOS 15 Sequoia and iOS 18 (and, before that, iOS 17, the last version that played well with my phone’s tiny 4,7” screen). I ended up giving up because, as I said earlier, Liquid Glass is tacky and buggy, but overall things still work more or less as before.

My resignation isn’t without some… resentment? I’m not sure that word fully captures the feeling; if not, it’s something close. Over this decade using Apple systems, most changes have pleased me. I even embraced the controversial Safari tab redesign from 2021. That makes my displeasure with Liquid Glass sting more. It’s a rare misstep from Apple — and an unprecedented one in scale.