[BitwiseFool]

Liquid Glass looks pretty from a distance, but my biggest gripe with the design language is just how difficult so many things become to read or interact with. Given that the whole raison d'être of liquid glass is transparent effects, the options to limit that or otherwise increase contrast simply do not go far enough. I also balk at how much extra computing power is needed to generate effects I find no value in and would prefer to disable.

My hope was that Apple would be forced to course correct in subsequent releases but that doesn't seem to be happening.

[bs7280]

My biggest frustrations with it aren't even related to the look of things, its the all around disregard for user experience. The new screenshot UX on iOS is an insanely bad downgrade.

[jimsmart]

Just go to Settings > General > Screen Capture, and turn off Full-Screen Previews - which fully restores the previous behaviour.

Personally I prefer the new behaviour.

But eitherways: it’s just an option.

[SchemaLoad]

I think it makes sense. They refocused it on sharing or extracting information from screenshots. Which is what people want more than saving them to the camera roll. Being able to copy text or translate the text in a screenshot is super useful.

[Reason077]

> “My hope was that Apple would be forced to course correct in subsequent releases but that doesn't seem to be happening.”

I’m optimistic that they will eventually course correct on Liquid Glass, but we’ll have to wait until iOS/macOS 27, or perhaps longer.

There are parallels to Apple’s butterfly keyboard fiasco on the hardware side. Sleek looking on the surface but an objective step backwards in usability. Unfortunately it took Apple several years to reverse course on that one.

[kergonath]

> There are parallels to Apple’s butterfly keyboard fiasco on the hardware side.

There are also parallels with the original pinstripes-and-transparency-everywhere aqua UI. I am also optimistic that it will be toned down over time but retaining the responsiveness.

[Towaway69]

Whatever happened to the magic bar?

The SD card slot on macbooks … not to mention the HDMI slot.

Here’s hoping that the glass effect goes the same way as the Dodo.

[bee_rider]

What was the Windows Vista thing, right? It was pretty bad but nobody bought a windows laptop because they thought it’d look nice.

[ibejoeb]

The Windows ME/Fisher Price look. I can get past the drag handle problem. It's like every window is now the damn ios simulator.

[tailnode]

They almost certainly will course-correct in the next release now that the culprit responsible for Liquid Glass is no longer at the company. But they won't chuck it out wholesale; it will be a gradual evolution back to sanity.

[dylan604]

They reacted pretty quickly to the butterfly keyboard fiasco. By the time users received the shipping products of the first gen, the second gen were already in the pipeline so there was a slightly modified with only a dust cover being added. There was no third gen.

Hopefully iOS 26.x releases will continue to correct Liquid Glass, but I'm guessing iOS 27 is well down the path with it still integrated. Maybe iOS 28 will see sanity return???

[procaryote]

Second gen butterfly keyboard broke a lot too. And then there was the no-esc touch bar, and the removal of inverted-T arrow keys... It took a few years of no good mac laptops before they backpedalled enough to get back to where they started

[zer0zzz]

I’m pretty sure butterfly keyboard was made worse when it came to the hotter rubbing higher power Mac’s. I rarely saw folks with the original 12” low power model having issues.

It was not an entirely bad concept for the device it was conceived for, but Apple has a habit of unifying their technologies to all their products and sometimes, like with Liquid Glass, that seriously doesn’t work.

[nottorp]

Yes, some suckers bought the second gen with the dust cover. Because they said the keys are more protected from dust.

It started to break in 3 months, had unusable keys in 6...

Stop defending that idiocy.

[pjmlp]

Quickly, as measured in a few years.

[derefr]

> I also balk at how much extra computing power is needed to generate effects I find no value in and would prefer to disable.

I mean, "computing power" in a literal sense maybe, but does that matter if it doesn't translate to either "workload contention" or "electrical power"?

I think the Liquid Glass effects, similar to smooth scrolling, are mostly just running as pixel shaders on a spare tile of one of the SoC's GPU's Streaming Processors — a tile that likely likely would have been idle-but-burning-power-anyway, given that GPU power management occurs on the level of entire SPs. It's the same reason that ProMotion "smooth viewport scrolling" doesn't really cost anything.

[loloquwowndueo]

Workload contention. My iPhone 17 visibly struggles to render components with evident lagging - this is user-noticeable, if it were all done by an otherwise spare core I wouldn’t notice these things.

[derefr]

AFAICT, the steady-state Liquid Glass effects (think: the address bar in Safari, staying static itself while you scroll the page under it) cost nothing. That's what I meant above.

Animating the Liquid Glass widgets (i.e. changing their position or shape), on the other hand, does seem to cost a lot / produce lag.

I get the impression that this is down to the UI toolkit not being optimized for whatever Liquid Glass is doing in terms of recalculating constraints during animations. (When the GPU overruns its time budget while computing shaders for the compositor, the visual effect is of [double-buffered] texture buffers dropping/repeating frames, not slowdown. Actual "lag" in a GPU-composited UI is either from CPU work, or from one-shot CUDA-type GPU "prerender jobs".)

I get the sense that Apple rushed out some shitty code that has some of these components re-evaluating a bunch of their placement and sizing constraints on every non-static animation frame (rather than just giving the Liquid Glass shaders the ability to do declarative tweens.)

Or maybe the shaders already do declarative tweens, but Apple are doing tons of redundant on-CPU per-frame recalculations, to re-do any constraint-based layout for everything around the component during the animation, that might be impacted by the component's current tweened state. I dunno.

Either way, it's definitely silly, and could be re-engineered to work a lot better.

But it's also not really "Liquid Glass's fault" (i.e. something inherent to the visual design); it's just (AFAICT) bad implementation engineering, rushed to give Apple something to talk about besides its failure to launch Apple Intelligence.

[astrange]

It's a very complicated system. Performance issues are bad but they're not necessarily caused by how the UI looks.

You can report an issue by typing applefeedback:// into Safari if you want.

[loloquwowndueo]

lol. No. This has been widely reported in mainstream media. The phones sluggishness has wasted enough of my time, I’m not pouring more of it in a feedback black hole.

[Towaway69]

Are AI agents able to use that feedback Url? Apparently they can now open back accounts, so providing feedback must surely be possible.

[astrange]

"Widely reported in mainstream media" is not a reproducible bug report with logging.

[procaryote]

And even if they reserved a core, that would be a waste of a perfectly good core

[rdtsc]

> I also balk at how much extra computing power is needed to generate effects I find no value in and would prefer to disable

Sounds like you need to spend some money for a new Apple device! /s