Liquid Glass was actually a big surprise for me, and it was a shock to see Apple moving forward with this and nobody stopping it. Microsoft did that with Vista back in 2006 and they stopped doing this. So Apple is copying a 2006 design? From Microsoft? Where even Microsoft stopped doing it because of all the known issues? So many questions...

Even Vista did not have nearly as many problems as Liquid Glass. Most of the elements were static images, and the "aero" effects could be disabled, as well as the "Fluent Design" effects in later Windows 10.

Liquid Glass - with its wobbling jiggling jerking, shimmering and flashing, blurry and difficult-to-read, shifting and unpredictable design, and battery-demolishing performance - is so much worse. It's mindblowing how bad it is.

I would be very tempted to place a bet that nobody in the decision making chain used Vista or Compiz to any degree.

Commercial software coding glorifies denying anything older than 10 years exist outside of museums, let alone learn anything from it. The same has merely infected design world.

This is why we need more old timers in charge. We've been around the block and seen how all these things play out already.

Now they just promote the youngsters that say the word AI a lot instead of those of us who actually care about the craft.

But they did use early builds of liquid glass and that should've triggered nausea and someone must've said "Don't"... yet they still did. You don't have to have gone through Windows Vista time to understand UI/UX (least of all, Apple Designers).

> But they did use early builds of liquid glass

Is this known to be true or speculated? I don't know how this process is handled at Apple specifically, however, generally decision-makers are highly detached from UX. One would think that, especially for an overhaul initiative, "important" people would daily-drive dev/nightly builds to wear off the cool factor and experience the not so pleasant annoyances, but generally they shield themselves from that and mostly look at the "cool demos".

Regardless, as far as I am aware Apple has a tight product release cadence and ties feature gates to that. Obviously hardware readiness gates are much earlier than software, but I can easily imagine situations where "yes men" report "good enough" at gates relevant for marketing, feature gets greenlit, but then gets half-assed for the actual release. Recall iphones crashing at the initial release demo? Might as well be history rhyming.

> ..Jobs would've crucified a few people

And rightfully so. Tahoe is not just a step back, but it throws away so many good design elements that have been there for ages - and for no good reason.

I really hope they revert most of the design changes in macOS 27. I don't mind the Liquid Glass - the other changes they made to expose/highlight Liquid Glass are the real issue.

IMO we reached peak design in 2013 with Mavericks.

The golden rule from Apple in 2007 when they changed to flat design was icon or text - never both together.

Apple abandoned enforcing HIG for app developers around 2012 (Facebook tiled menu, modal abuse, and hamburger) but now seems to have given up on standards entirely.

The wall to wall interaction pattern is terrible too. Every time my hand brushes my phone some unexpected (and sometimes unknown) interaction occurs. Classic example is changing orientation while watching YT where accidental contact with the bottom-left (becoming top-right) part of the screen as you move the phone selects a new video. It’s becoming slop.

Steve Jobs died 14 years ago. If we're attributing this to those in charge, Jony Ive's departure is much more correlated.

Apple's UI design started going downhill with the iOS 7 "flat design" release which was very shortly after Steve's death, and seemed to correspond to Ive being given a little too much free rein in the leadership vacuum that followed.

Jobs had his own flaws, but he was definitely a huge part of why Apple's UI design (and product design in general) has historically been as good as it has.

> Apple's UI design started going downhill with the iOS 7 "flat design" release which was very shortly after Steve's death, and seemed to correspond to Ive being given a little too much free rein in the leadership vacuum that followed.

This was so obvious to me. The damage done to Apple by losing Jobs as their most vicious editor was almost instantly noticeable.

I agree. Jobs being around for the birth of the GUI probably played a big role in that. Pushing past text-based terminals to graphical interfaces meant having to spend every moment thinking about purposeful interaction and design.

Maybe we could use Vison Pro to recreate a visit to Xerox Parc in 1979 to inspire the current designers to use UI patterns that gave been working well for fifty years.

Pretty sure iOS 7 was regarded as awful on launch and then a little while later people decided it was amazing and lovely to look at once the kinks were ironed out.

People just don't like new things that change what they are used to.

Apple spent the next several years walking lots of the changes back, in particular the thin text and overdone translucency

One thing I'll definitely give Apple is that they have walked back some design decisions that were total flops in the past, such as the butterfly keyboard and the touchbar (though I found it more than a bit annoying when I'd see reviews saying how great and visionary Apple was for simply undoing bad decisions - it deserved an "OK, good" not an "OMG Apple is amazing!!)

I like this article because it points out how undeniably awful some of these decisions were in a "this signifies something is seriously, fundamentally wrong with Apple design" way. I really hope Apple listens a does a major course correction.

Count me as someone who never turned around on the iOS 7+ flat design being a usability degradation.

> then a little while later people decided it was amazing and lovely to look at

Sorry, who decided this? Which people exactly?

Alan Dye designed IOS7 as well.

iOS7 was great; it had mistakes but they ironed them out. Aqua under Jobs had mistakes too... OS X was hated at first.

Apple often took bold steps and then improved things.

But Liquid Glass seems like a step in the wrong direction.

Jony Ive’s elevation was the problem: neither he nor his protege Alan Dye (who worked on the boxes) had UI training or experience and that has shown since iOS 7 where the focus shifted to things which looked nicer on the side of the iPhone box than they are in actual use - stuff like Liquid Glass shipping with an illegible lock screen keyboard is possible because they never put the lock screen in a presentation or product screenshot.

As a complete outsider, my impression is that this started slow because they had to politically overpower Apple’s actual UI group. Liquid Glass probably managed that with a unified look across all devices pitch which should’ve weighted the relative impact on the popular platforms much higher than the niche Vision Pro.

>Jobs would've crucified a few people

Jobs liked to talk this side of the business up because creatives were the substantial part of the business. Now they sell to everybody it doesn't matter so much. The average person won't even notice the complaints in the original article. They aren't sensitive to it in the way that creative people are.

They don't notice, but they can _feel_ it. My aging mother, god bless, doesn't give a crap about design.. but she updated her iPhone and asked me what I thought about it because she hates it. And it wasn't nitpicking design choices - she just said 'it's so hard for me to do anything now and know where anything is'

They might not _notice_ but that doesn't mean it's not affecting their ability to use their computer smoothly.

With computers such a huge part of almost everyone's lives now, it's a travesty for one of the largest companies in the world to inflict something so subpar on so many old-style

I'll chime in with the others to say that "amateur" users still notice, even if my dad isn't calling me to say "Son, why does this new MacOS version have different icons for the `New` action across apps?"

I had to help him "get his bookmarks back" meaning see his bookmarks toolbar in Firefox. He must have hit a keyboard combo on accident. Since Firefox hides the menus by default, I had to tell him to tap Alt to see the menu, after which he was easily guided to View > Toolbars > Bookmarks Toolbar.

Bad UI design for novices is felt, if not conveyed outright.

I consider myself above average with UI design, but I still got confused with that dang "i" icon in the Preview app just yesterday.

I had to add my signature and write in the date so it looks like it was handwritten. So the plan was to just draw the date with a pencil tool and if that failed use the text tool to write the date.

First I instinctively clicked the pencil icon which turned out to be a highlighter. That's a great example where if they had added color for the tip and line it would have clearly looked like a highlighter. After that failed, I clicked that "i" icon because it looks like it's for inserting text. Honestly I was in such a rush I didn't even see the info pane popping up and was dang confused when nothing was happening.

I'm very familiar with info icons and have used them in my own apps, yet I had never seen one without the circle around it.

I don’t think it’s about being an a hole, but someone who deeply cares about the product is needed.

The experience right now is bad. It’s frustrating and there is no overarching vision or clear focus on the user.

This release of MacOS is the most retrograde backwards step I've seen Apple make.

To use a famous movie quote: "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, that they didn't stop to think if they should"

Just because you have HDPI and opacity, doesn't mean that you have to use it by default, everywhere.

Reminds me of how OSX used to treat opacity in app icons as not part of the hithox. So I'd accidentally click the hole in the "O" for Outlook and it wouldn't open, haha.

No one might be Job-level ahole, but I'm certain Cook ain't less ruthless. It's a matter of priorities, not attitude.

> Jobs would've crucified a few people.

Steve Jobs had good taste in many areas, but he also approved the puck mouse.

Everyone makes mistakes every now and then. He also approved the Ping "music social network", and a few other nonsense products that no one wanted or liked.

But when you see mistakes made consistently, year after year, you know the problem is systemic.

I haven’t updated to the new OS because the liquid glass experience made me think of historic UI elements that were more novelty than substance.