> The move from skeuomorphic design in iOS 6 to the stark minimalism of iOS 7 sparked similar debates about usability and aesthetic merit. [...] Yet within two years, the entire industry had adopted flat design principles, from Google's Material Design to Microsoft's Metro language.
That's quite a rewrite of history considering Windows Phone and Microsoft's Metro interface launched a full three years before Apple's move to a flat design in iOS 7.
There's a weird amnesia in tech journalists that occurs when Apple does something and it's suddenly the first time it's been done. My hunch is that it's because they use iPhones as their daily drivers and don't really use other devices except in passing. So for them it is new and the first time it's been done.
Apple however often is the first to do a new thing successfully however. Earlier products often did not achieve enough success to be viable or just in a niche. A lot of labor lies in the path from idea to a viable product.
> That's quite a rewrite of history considering Windows Phone and Microsoft's Metro interface launched a full three years before Apple's move to a flat design in iOS 7.
Even Android had moved to a flatter design pattern 1-2 years before iOS. While Material Design wouldn't be released until 2014, you can see them moving in that direction from Gingerbread to Jelly Bean, particularly when looking at the system components and first-party apps, since this was before the concept of a unified design language across third-party apps had been formalized.
At the time Apple introduced their flat design in June 2013, they were the odd ones out. In fact, I remember a Daring Fireball article posted in spring 2013 (a few months before WWDC) praising Apple for leading the pack in flat design, and HN excoriating it for making what was at the time a clearly preposterous claim.
> Even Android had moved to a flatter design pattern 1-2 years before iOS. While Material Design wouldn't be released until 2014, you can see them moving in that direction from Gingerbread to Jelly Bean
FWIW, I always liked the Windows Phone OS design. Its text first minimalism was refreshingly useful. It was a big leap ahead from Windows Mobile. I think it had something worthwhile to offer.
For sure, so many of its features were far ahead of the competition. Sleek minimilist UX, live tiles, Qi wireless charging, kids mode, Cortana, search within settings (so simple yet no one did it at the time). Continuum let you plug your phone into a monitor and use it like a full Windows desktop (many years before Samsung Dex and other similar efforts on Android). "Universal apps" that could run on desktop/mobile/web. Sucks that Microsoft fumbled it so bad.
Beyond just the design, it was also an amazingly efficient OS. I had a cheap Lumia that had much lower specs than contemporary Samsung and iPhone flagship smartphones (500MB vs 1GB+ RAM IIRC) yet it was amazingly smooth and responsive, much smoother than the other two. Android especially, and to a lesser extent iOS, would get laggy and stutter while scrolling after a few major version updates, but Windows Phone stayed snappy even after the phone was 3+ years old.
This also made the battery life much better. (Although whenever I mentioned this, the usual retort I got was, of course the battery life would be better if there were no apps to consume it...)
Windows Metro UI was fantastic. It was leagues better than Android for sure. It was a very different take than iOS as well.
Honestly, it's a huge loss for all of us. I always felt like the U.S. government should have blocked Google from making Android "free." It killed the market for all non-iOS operating systems. We'd have a much richer world if all horizontally integrated OSes had to charge a licensing fee, instead of using a search monopoly to kill competition in other markets (and then using said free OS to further extend their search monopoly).
I also blame Google for killing Blackberry. If Google is blocked from using its search monopoly to make Android free, imagine the world we would have.
Android, for many years, was actively bad, but it was also a free OS that phone companies could grab. And the rest is history.
You didn't happen to try an app called Nothing but Crickets did you? I made a whole $4 from advertising.com from that on WP7. It was a single button and when you clicked on it, the sound of crickets would play. I always hoped someone would use it in a meeting. I didn't care about the money. I just wanted to make people laugh.
Different strokes for different folks, I guess. I hated that the UI was just rectangles in a grid with a single fill color. Few icons. The customization options were really poor from what I can remember, making it so that everyone's UI looked almost identical.
To be fair, I was getting seriously fed up by the poor software support at the same time which may have amplified my resentment.
My take was that Metro was flat to leverage finally-computationally-and-energy efficient scaling hardware. All design elements were simple primitives with overlaid text, with limited texturing.it was a design of the hardware of the time.
iPeople reject your reality and substitute their own.
When Apple makes a mistake, it was really a genius 4D chess move and everyone will copy them and also it wasn't really a mistake, we just have to trust the plan.
It's not just that. When Apple adopts a trend or implement a modern feature/flow that they are not the first to, like flat UIs, wearables, VR, etc they do put in earnest effort to polish and distinguish their experience compared to others. Something their competitors don't put a ton of weight in. This pushes people in general to believe that the "Apple way" is somewhat better just because it's different or at least has some mysterious merit. iPeople even more so tan the general public.
I read a lot of Apple blogs and they all complain about Apple all the time. They like Apple products, but they aren't stupid. For example, nobody thinks that Siri is a 4D chess move, everyone knows that Siri sucks.
that's what iPeople-haters like to say. people panned the trashcan pro. people panned the butterfly keyboard. people panned the removal of sd card reader from laptops. people call out apple, but that doesn't fit the iPeople-haters narrative, so it's best to just ignore it
Yep. This is another semi-fawning, apologistic article full of made-up assertions.
It ignores the fact that there has been a welcome step back from the derelict wasteland of "flat design" that users have endured for far too long. Flat design is often cited as a reaction to absurd levels of skeuomorphism, which Apple certainly WAS a leader in. Remember the "felt" surfaces of Game Center, the "paint" upon which was inexplicably a control? And the "leather" binding of Notes?
Then there's this: "In AR, visual affordances work differently. A button that casts realistic shadows and responds to virtual lighting feels more "real" when floating in your living room than a flat, colored rectangle."
That makes it a SHITTY control, which will get lost in the visual noise of the real environment. This UI sucks for the same reason that sports-stats graphics that are tracked onto real surfaces in TV coverage suck: They don't stand out. It's that simple.
So after years of "flat" design where nothing was demarcated as a control and users were apparently supposed to click on every pixel and every character on the screen in a hunt for hidden goodies, this article celebrates Apple's plan to create the same problem in AR using OVERLY-decorated controls.
Not to mention the stupidity of crippling computer, tablet, and phone UI for the sake of a "VR" UI. This isn't just dumb from a practical standpoint, but from a technical one as well. There's no reason that the control library can't be rendered differently on different devices. So, if this (admittedly poorly-substantiated opinion piece) is right about the motivation behind Apple's exhumation of the "transparent" UI fad that died 20 years ago, we can only lament the end of desktop usability... which Windows flushed vigorously with Microsoft's brain-dead attempt to dumb its UI down for touchscreens years ago.
Lucky for you, Valve has sold millions of SteamDecks. The result is that the majority of mainstream Windows software now works well in Proton == Wine on Linux.
And despite people constantly whining about it, GNOME is ultra fast, has great shortcuts, and it looks kinda like the pinnacle of UI design, which IMHO was Windows XP.
This is also a history rewrite. The recent MS UIs in at least the last 5 years are doing exactly the same thing. Fairy sure I saw some Windows AR demo about it a few years back.
This is happening a lot. If you talk to ChatGPT about any company it has quite a rosy picture to paint of just about everyone. Probably trying to convince companies to integrate advertising.
Also, no evidence that Liquid Glass isn't a bad UI for AR too.
John Carmack writes:
Translucent UI is usually a bad idea outside of movies and non-critical game interfaces.
The early moments of joy are fleeting, while the usability issues remain. Windows and Mac have both been down this road before, but I guess a new generation of designers needs to learn the lessons anew. Sigh.
All of the same issues apply in AR as well. Outside of movies, people do not work out their thoughts on windowpanes or transparent “whiteboards” because of the exact same legibility issues.
Would you prefer a notebook of white sheets, or hundreds of different blurry image backgrounds?
As a visionOS user (somewhat) what is so funny about all of this is that the translucency effects in visionOS are significantly toned down compared to liquid glass for this specific reason. The glass is heavily diffused, you can maybe get an idea of what is behind (a person moving, a television thats turned on) but nothing even close to the level that I have experienced in the iPadOS beta
The evidence suggests this isn't AR prep at all. I watched Apple's 20-minute design presentation, and their design team makes the same point repeatedly: Liquid Glass has very narrow guidelines and specific constraints.
Here's the actual design problem Apple solved. In content apps, you have a fundamental trade-off: you have a few controls that need to be instantly accessible, but you don't want them visually distracting from the content. Users are there to consume videos, photos, articles - not to stare at your buttons. But the controls still have to be there when needed.
Before Liquid Glass, your least intrusive option was backdrop blur or translucent pastel dimming overlays. Apple asked: can we make controls even less distracting? Liquid Glass lets you thread this needle even better. It's a pretty neat trick for solving this specific constraint.
So you'll feel like you're seeing Liquid Glass "everywhere" not because Apple applied it broadly, but because of selection bias. The narrow use case Apple designed this for just happens to be where you spend 80% of your phone time: videos, photos, reading messages. You're information processing, not authoring.
Apple's actual guidelines are clear: only a few controls visible at once, infrequent access pattern, only on top of rich content. The criticism assumes they're redesigning everything when they explicitly documented the opposite. People are reacting to marketing tone instead of reading what Apple's design team actually built.
> Users are there to consume videos, photos, articles - not to stare at your buttons
But if I want to use the buttons, that necessitates that I see the buttons first in order to use them. If I don't need to see a button, the button probably shouldn't be there at all.
It's not the worst design I've ever seen, but it does feel like they've swung a bit too far in the "users want to focus on the content" direction. The tools to interact with the content are also an important part of the interface and if you can't see them clearly they're not very usable.
> their design team makes the same point repeatedly: Liquid Glass has very narrow guidelines and specific constraints
Often, UX design rhetoric floats way beyond reality. For now, a lot of Liquid Glass is grossly applied. It's only dev beta 1, so it's likely it'll improve over time... especially if they launch an AR product.
I dunno, I find the blur more visually distracting than a hard stop.
I would rather borders and color contrast to create visual separation anyway. That approach takes up less space. White space takes makes your UI less dense, but blur is even worse.
Either way… how does that relate to my keyboard being transparent? I don’t need to see a completely illegible blur of the colors behind my keyboard.
I just turned on the “reduce transparency” setting and it’s much better.
I'm not necessarily a fan of Apple's design, but I want to add that when you have floating header bars it cuts down screen real estate and makes the UI feel more claustrophobic. Making it semi-transparent helps that significantly.
There are usability reasons for this too - for instance, even if it's blurred, a hint of what content is behind the bar helps the user know when they've neared some new content or when to stop scrolling, or whether there's more content above/below the unobscured viewport.
> Translucent UI is usually a bad idea outside of movies and non-critical game interfaces.
Reading the article's claims about translucent UI being ideal for AR, all I could think about was how bad this roadside traffic sign would be if it was white text printed on translucent glass. https://images.app.goo.gl/MU4kJmWZ8ogNGAD9A
Assuming the information a daily-use AR headset is presenting is important, it needs to be instantly legible to be useful. I guess my counter to the article would be images of "Roadside traffic signs as re-imagined in Apple's Liquid Glass." Would showing an intersection with a Liquid Glass stop sign and a car crashed into the side of another be too much?
I agree. Apple apologists keep saying that Apple will tweak the transparency a bit to improve contrast. And I am thinking that this shit does not need any transparency at all!
> Would you prefer a notebook of white sheets, or hundreds of different blurry image backgrounds?
Weird tangent, but I used tracing paper over piece of graph paper for notes for a while. I liked it because I could use the graph paper for drawing my figures or align my text, but then have something more aesthetically pleasing and nice for reading after. I find reading on graph paper annoying, due to the vertical lines.
Anyway, I can’t think of any way that a transparent OS window could be similarly helpful.
Big exception is aviation HUDs that are much closer to AR than conventional workspaces. In HUDs, everything is overlaid with bright green lines. It must be visible in day/night all sorts of conditions. But Apple's take on an overlay GUI isn't like this at all.
>Translucent UI is usually a bad idea outside of movies and non-critical game interfaces.
We're taking about Apple here, who prioritize aesthetics over everything else, shipping a defective keyboard design for 5 years straight just to shave 1 millimeter of thickness on the laptop.
It needs to 'wow' people in the Apple Store in terms of looks and feel, usability be dammed.
I thought the touch bar was even worse than the butterfly keys...
I put off upgrading my personal MacBook for years after work issued me a MacBook with the touch bar. Such a usability nightmare for the sake of eye candy. That was a long seven years.
Liquid glass looks great on the "Meet Liquid Glass" video. Implemention feels wrong. I think it was rushed. Video has some selective background/font color combinations.
- most of the close look examples are on very simple buttons with a single geometric shapes, like ">" or "□". Those will be legible even in pretty extreme conditions, and we can't expect real world applications to be mostly composed of those.
Imagine the screen at 11:51 with a "Select" as the button text instead of the geometrical icons. It wouldn't be great.
- text is only presented on very low contrast areas. When scrolling the elephant picture around 9:30 to show the title go dark -> light for instance, it's a switch between a very pale background to a very saturated one, and they stop the scrolling when the title is against the darkest part of the image, where it's the most legible.
It's not just the implementation IMHO, in a real application you can't adjust every screen and interaction to only hit the best absolute conditions to make Liquid Glass look good. The whole idea behind it is just harder to look good in real world, short of giving up and going for very low transparency.
I get the legibility argument, but if you want to make an AR device that’s safe to use in _any_ context, you just can’t occlude the environment. People would have accidents because of that - as drivers, but also while walking or just bumping into things while putting something in the fridge.
For walls of text you can still opt out of this and use a less translucent material.
A semitransparent glass pane with text sitting in front of my face while I'm walking (let alone driving!) would be hazardous. Anything that's taking the focus of your vision away from what's in front of you while you're using coordination is a hazard, plain and simple. Would you drive with a smudge over part of your glasses?
It's not about transparency, it's about not using AR and multitasking in the real world. The purpose of AR in a headset isn't to free up your hands so you can read the group chat while you drive or walk, it's to make UIs that can't feasibly exist with a screen alone.
Win7 had translucency, and it looked way better than Win8+. Vista looked meh because it overdid it initially, but Win7 dialed it down (mostly with "frosted glass" effect) in most places to where it didn't impede contrast, and added various ways to highlight text in places where it was directly overlaid over glass.
Judging from the demos, Apple's version is even more translucent than Vista, so I have no doubt that it'll be bad.
Funnily enough, I thought 7 dialled it up with windows no longer going opaque when maximised and the default blue being slightly more translucent-looking than the sky blue in Vista.
As someone who uses an exterior sliding glass door as a whiteboard, I haven't experienced any legibility issues while using it. It's actually remarkably easy to read.
This could be partly because there's nothing immediately close to the window so any writing is the only real thing in the focal plane.
If I stand further back, it is somewhat harder to read, but I imagine this wouldn't be a problem with displays that can emulate that (like laser retinal displays iirc)
For VR goggles, I agree. But if we're headed toward AR glasses, most (all?) technologies in that space don't support opaque screen content. They project images into your eyes, but they can't block light coming in from the real world.
So if that's the next big thing, Apple had to get consumers used to translucent UIs.
Writing on blurry glass can work but it requires effort. It the real world we have elements that can create shadows and refract light around writing making it more legable but we still don't bother printing books on overhead sheets and tracing paper!
I think the issue is less about whether it’s a good idea or not, but rather that AR interfaces essentially HAVE to be translucent (unless you’re doing video passthrough) — so might as well figure out how to get it right.
In AR the user needs to be able to tell which objects are real (R) and which are virtual/injected (A), but the latter type doesn’t need to be indicated by transparency. Consider the scenario where, instead of conventional HUD-type AR, we could conjure up the A elements as physical objects into thin air by magic. There is no particular reason why those would have to be translucent. Sure, depending on the situation it can be useful to control their opacity in order to be able to see what’s behind them, but otherwise there is no more reason than for real physical objects.
> Outside of movies, people do not work out their thoughts on windowpanes or transparent “whiteboards” because of the exact same legibility issues.
I knew a lovely man, a kind hearted engineer, Larry Weiss, for whom this was not true... In the early 1980s I was in his VW van that he used for business roadtrips when he, while still driving, grabbed a felt marker and started drawing on the window in front of him to illustrate a point.
I learned that he kept markers handy and used them to capture his thoughts on long drives (to conferences, customers etc). Rough mechanical sketches mostly.
Back then I did not generally know to describe myself as (modern term) aphantasic as I had yet to realize I was different from most people, but hopefully this context helps you to understand why I then (and now) grokked the value of putting your conceptual thought into your ongoing visual field, non-occlusively aka transparently
Legibility is no more the deciding factor of ~utility here/AR/VR than it is in dreams. Indeed I have been very near sighted for over 50 years and I do not find this ~illegibility to be an issue for clarity of visual~assist to thinking.
The point John Carmack makes may have greater merit for other people or if we were limited to discussing text--but Liquid Glass is not about text per se, is it?
"...there’s way too much information to decode the Matrix. You get used to it. I…I don’t even see the code." -- Cypher from The Matrix 1999
P.S. If my story about Larry intrigued you, I am happy to share these two tiny tidbits I found in memoriam ...
I’ve definitely been preferring a transparent background on my terminal lately, particularly when I only have one screen, because it increases my ability to read the reference material I have opened behind it. At the very least, if I have to alt-tab it out of the way, I’m already oriented on the page. So I can see the benefit in at least some use cases.
I don’t think I’d like to have it on everything, though. Or basically anything except my terminal, for that matter.
Is Liquid Glass really "translucent" though? I mean, aside from the gimmicky transparent setting, which is going to be horrible for accessibility (can you say "contrast"?) so anyone with less than perfect vision and/or a sensible concern for usable UX is going to turn that off immediately. The non-transparent icons and widgets look a lot like the older "flat" ones with some glassy/ceramic 3D effects on top. Still a bit fuzzy, but they're at least bearable for long-term use.
>s Liquid Glass really "translucent" though? I mean, aside from the gimmicky transparent setting, which is going to be horrible for accessibility (can you say "contrast"?) so anyone with less than perfect vision and/or a sensible concern for usable UX is going to turn that off immediately.
I have a hard time parsing this.
"Is the glass effect transparent if I don't turn off transparency?"
uhh.. Yes.
As a bit of a citizen scientist myself let me explain how I wrapped my laymen's brain around it :
If I can see through it, it's transparent. If the color changes behind the thing, and I can somehow intuit that -- good chance's we're dealing with transparency.
> While the tech press fixated on Apple's relatively quiet AI story at WWDC 2025, the company was executing a more subtle strategy. Rather than engaging in the current LLM arms race (where it's demonstrably behind), Apple doubled down on what it does best: creating compelling user experiences through design and integration.
I cant believe real people actually believe this kind of stuff. The author seems to think tech press alone is fixated on AI story. Apple themselves was all gung-ho about AI last time around. They sold an entire line of iPhones touting the benefits of AI. They even "invented" a brand for their line of offering - Apple Intelligence.
And when it all fell flat, Apple had to apologize and had to (yes, had to) showcase other things. Liquid Glass essentially was a replacement for that. If Apple had anything meaningful to show in AI world, it would have show cased that.
And author seems to think Apple is playing 4D chess. Sometimes the simplest explanation is what is really going on.
An even simpler explanation is that regular UI redesigns are an important tool for a device manufacturer to make the experience feel new or refreshed, and this novelty helps sell devices. Everyone reacts to the content of the redesign when it lands, but the fact that it happens should not be surprising.
Usability issues only manifest after point of sale. Messaging/marketing happens after the work has been done (and can involve post-rationalization).
The fact that the majority of AI features which were promised (and pushed hard) by Apple for iPhone 16 are still nowhere in sight should honestly be a bigger story. So many people upgraded to that phone entirely for AI.
There’s lots of new AI features in iOS 26, iPadOS 26, etc. But they aren’t the blockbuster features.
They’re more like quality of life issues that users will appreciate.
A now that 3rd parties can access Apple’s LLM models… let me correct that. Shortcuts, a visual automation app, can also access models on device or bigger, more capable models using Apple’s Private Cloud Compute.
Apple’s not playing multidimensional chess… but they are playing the long game, where users won’t have to use multiple AI chatbots to get work done, because most of what they want to do is handled by their current apps with new AI capabilities—on device.
Apple's models are not competitive. Apple has not demonstrated any leadership in fundamental models so far, and I don't expect that to change any time soon.
If anything I'd expect Google, OpenAI, Anthropic ... Or even Meta to have a better on-device "lite" model before Apple.
The author is far enough into apple fanboy conspiracies that they will probably next claim the reality distortion field didn't die because Jobs never died.
No, you see, Apple has spent untold billions of dollars chasing AI as a feint. Them repeatedly apologizing and telling investors they are working as fast as they can is all lies. They have everyone just where they want them, and are poised to deliver the killing blow of ... a new UI that everyone has to relearn.
And nobody mentions "developers forced to redesign and reimplement their app UI for no good reason" as part of the cost. Of course fanboys couldn't care less about that.
Funny, in the comparison image the article shows for the 3 design styles - Skeuomorphic, Flat, Liquid Glass - the Skeuomorphic one looks absolutely best to me:
The items look so much more tangible, and the text is more readable. Everything is easy to grok visually. The flat design looks way more confusing. And the liquid glass one looks even worse.
As I remember it, there was actually a step between Transition and Native in that image, which was noticeably flatter than Native. It was the first Ives interface, mentioned in the article: "iOS 7's initial release had similar problems: ultra-thin fonts that were hard to read, blue text links that didn't look clickable, animations that made some users motion sick. Apple responded with gradual refinements: thicker fonts, higher contrast, optional accessibility settings, and more obvious interactive elements." i.e. they made it much worse and then made it slightly less bad. I presume they'll follow a roughly similar path with this, when really, in my view, they should be reversing course on some of the fundamentals to make it easier to use. Scrollbars are a great example. I've got used to the fact that they're hidden on macOS now, but looks at some of the great ones from the past that have an almost tangible feel to them: https://imgur.com/scrollbars-through-history-fixed-jpdGk
One reason I use a plain black background for my iPhone--I can actually read the labels under each icon. (I could use plain text rather than icons, but that's a different gripe.)
Also, I can actually read the battery level indicator in the skeuomorphic display. I sometimes resort to getting out a magnifying glass to read it on my iPhone's current display. (Yes, I have old eyes. And I have to keep telling those Apple UI people to get off my grass.)
The cause and effect are not so clear cut. Customers also expect something new. That way they feel like they got something new when they have to replace their phone, especially in the "evolution not revolution" phase of a device.
And it's not just phones either. Car companies spend money on retooling to give a model a facelift because people expect it. Sales drop and then pick up again after the facelift because nobody wants to buy something that looks dated from day one.
Manufacturers take cues from each other because once a "modern" trend is set everything else looks dated. Everyone went with flat UIs in a matter of a few years. Cars went with lightbar lights in the past few years too. That's what feels modern now.
As long as a huge part of the market remembers skeuomorphic design and associates it with the early 2000s it will never feel modern so designers stay away from it.
P.S. For me suspenders are still the third best way to keep my pants on (right after "picking the right pants size" and "fastening the buttons"). But nobody wants them these days and it's not a Big Belt conspiracy. They just don't look modern.
I have similar feelings every time I look at a Windows 95 screenshot: everything is easy to grasp and feels natural. I know immediately what is interactive or not and what is the hierarchy between the different parts of the UI.
Sure, it's not pretty by today's standard, but it's way easier to use IMO.
iPhone 5 with iOS 6 was peak, around when Jobs died iirc. Then they changed the design, made the phones too big to fit in pockets, removed headphone jack to sell AirPods, and replaced the home button with some confusing gestures. The keyboard doesn't even work right anymore.
Yeah at the default sizes i couldn't read the glass ones nearly as easily. the icons themselves look like a bad icon pack that i could download on android 14 years ago
I really hated all the liquid glass screenshots, and had a bad reaction when I first updated my phone to it. I also updated my macOS, and had a MUCH better reaction to that. And after a few days I really dig it on my phone too.
I thought there was supposed to be a way to add a tint to it though, which I haven't found a setting for, and think I would do if I could find it.
In the Apple ecosystem, grey hasn't meant 'disabled' for years except for glyphs and text. In Liquid Glass, glyphs and text haven't changed their colouration.
I don't think too many people go hard on skeumorphism itself per se. It's more that the era was associated with desirable properties that seem lacking in the flat era. The primary thing that makes me gravitate to the left screenshot is the clear separation of foreground and background elements with drop-shadows. Icons were more complex and differentiated, less abstract: what is "news" supposed to be now, "game-center" became a bunch of bubbles, "reminders" and "notes" are spiraling into each other, and "passbook/wallet" has become less distinct at each step. Color is being used less and less as well (less true for top-level app icons).
I don't know how well connected it is to the power-user axis, but I would say a characteristic power-user doesn't care that they are looking a somewhat garish and busy collection of colored icons, gradients, bezels, etc, whereas the opposite sensibility favors a minimalist UI for the aesthetics over perhaps ease of locating things. The real opposite of a power-user is not a first-time user, its a non-user. The non-user is not annoyed that they can't find things that are hidden away in secret trays you have to swipe for or such, but they appreciate the resulting saved screen-space.
As someone who works with a wide range of AR displays, if this is the reason for the UI change, they've fucked up hard.
Blurring in AR is quite difficult as it requires an accurately aligned image to overlay the world. The point of AR is its just an overlay, you don't need to render whats already there. To make a blur, you need the underlying image, this costs energy, which you don't really have on AR glasses.
I would actually expect AR displays to be naturally transparent. I'm not a specialist at all, but achieving a transparent screen with perfectly opaque rendered areas sounds quite unrealistic.
If the display is naturally transparent, I don't see the need for a non-opaque UI.
> If the display is naturally transparent, I don't see the need for a non-opaque UI.
You're right, but it depends on the screen type. It turns out that just being transparent isn't actually good enough, you really want to be able to dim the background as well. This means that you can overwrite the real-world object much more effectively.
I just had a holy-shit moment reading through what you just said. I had not considered that AR overlays wont be blurred, without sampling what's behind the overlay/glass.
People are in for a world of pain when they realize this.
Alas I work for a very large company who has a bunch of teams that makes prototypes for us to use.
However, a secondhand Quest 3 with unity in MR is the cheapest way to get started. It gives you SLAM/world frame of reference, which almost no other system does (apart from hololens)
AR glasses will have some sort of camera. It's easy enough to warp the captured video to roughly match the view from each eye. It doesn't have to be perfectly aligned, clear, nor high-resolution. It just needs to be sufficient to provide a faux blurred background behind UI elements.
Looking at Liquid Glass, they certainly solved it for higher-res backdrops. Low res should be simpler. It won't be as clean as Liquid Glass, but it could probably do VisionOS quality.
Oh its possible, but it costs a lot of power, and has design implications.
You need the camera on and streaming, sure you only need a portion, but also your camera needs to cover all of your screen area, and the output remapped. It also means that your camera now has limited placement opportunities.
Having your camera on costs power to, so not only is your GUI costing power but its costing more power because the camera is on as well.
This would make sense if there was any indication that AR is going to happen. I would argue that there isn't even the faintest signal that it will.
People do not want invasive glasses, even if they make them as small at normal glasses. I just don't see it becoming anything other than a niche product.
It's like all the moves to voice/audio interfaces powered by AI. They simply won't take off as audio is inherently low bandwidth and low definition. Our eyes are able to see so much more in our peripheral vision, at a much higher bandwidth.
Some would argue that's an indication that AR will happen, but it's still so low deff, and incredibly intrusive, as much as I love the demos and the vision (pun not intended) behind it.
As far as I can see, the only motivation for the visual overall is that they need something to fill the gap until they have some real AI innovations to show. This is a "tick" in the traditional "tick" -> "tock" development and release cycle - a facelift while they work on some difficult re-engineering underneath. But that's not AR, it AI.
I think the appeal and the value equation of AR would be completely different if it didn’t feel like you were donning a heavy headset to step into the matrix. It’s very likely that there will be innovation in translucent displays and input methods that make AR ubiquitous at some point in the future. I just don’t know if that will be in 5 years or 15 years.
> People do not want invasive glasses, even if they make them as small at normal glasses. I just don't see it becoming anything other than a niche product.
Wait, are you arguing that consumers will reject something that puts, say, a social media feed in front of their face 24hrs a day? That will allow them to just gaze at an internet site constantly without even having to think about it? That will allow them to have videos in their peripheral vision while they “concentrate” on something else?
AR headsets will not replace computers, they’ll replace phones.
I actually have a homebrew Linux AR setup that I use heavily and absolutely think it will be the future (although it will be similar to the smartphone where you get a combined form factor and paradigm shift that people think are both connected.)
Good AR glasses are already available and combined with modern LLMs you can have normal people thinking about computers the way we do. This will feel less invasive than smartphones do currently while being able to do much more.
I'm absolutely certain Apple will not survive the transition though.
I genuinely expect that in a few years, Apple will release something that is effectively identical to Google Glass, and that will historically be seen as the real start of wide-spread usage of AR.
Anything less than lightweight glasses is a non-starter outside of gaming and other enthusiasts. The Vision Pro is just too bulky for it to sell serious numbers.
VR / AR will definitely replace desktop / stationary computers, but they need to be as lightweight as headphones. Steve Jobs said it best (also his opinion of the current Vision Pro at the very end): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQECSInWVPY
I've seen this speculation a lot, but that's all it is speculation. Apple has been working on an AR concept for going on 4-5 years now, and as recently as January this year were reported to have given up yet again:
Yet I see this speculation copied (TechCrunch), copied (MacRumors), copied (Substack), from one article to another with the fervor rising at each one. Yet we never approach anything close to substantive.
I read in 2023 AR is due in 24, then 24 it was 25, and now in 25 it is due in 26. AR also now has something to do with AI because of course it does, and Apple's new blurry UI is something to do with this product 1.5 years out at minimum... Sure.
One note on this with regards to the “flat” design - the technical reasoning for that was it decoupled the interface from the screen. Flat designs were all vector, and could scale to any screen or interface size. This has effectively unpinned Apple from fixed screen sizes (I’m genuinely not sure if any two iPhone designs have shared the same pixel counts in the last 5-10 years) and allowed them to scale the interface to any size.
I’m not sure what I think about liquid glass, but I do agree with the premise that it’s being driven by the move towards AR and extending interfaces outside the phone/tablet.
I think another interesting tell here will be the 20th anniversary iPhone, which should be coming in 2027 - the iPhone X set the tone for Apple devices for the next decade (so far), and I’d expect to get a better idea of what Apple’s doing here when they show off that hardware.
like most things it was probably a combination of things:
marketing (big new design), design trend catch-up (metro, android), and all those other technical reasons (memory, textures, vector graphics, enables easy dark-mode) etc etc
just my guess, but making a dark mode (more easily) possible must have been a large factor too
I expect an "AR based UI" to somehow leverage depth of field and focus. Blur and translucency/transparency used to achieve that could be amazing.
I'm reminded of prior UIs which had Z depth. One of the iOS releases had parallax.
Remember that awesome demo repurposing two Wii controllers to do head tracking? It transformed the screen into a portal that you that thru. Moving your head around changed your perspective.
I want that.
I just started watching the WWDC videos. So far I like what I see. I'm on board with stacked components; we'll see how it pans out. I love the idea of morphing UI elements, transitioning between list <-> menu bar; I really want this to succeed.
Mostly, I want less clutter. No matter the appearance or theme, I'm overwhelmed by all the icons, options, etc.
The age old conundrum of balancing ease of use against lots of features. Having created UIs in anger, I'm no smarter than anyone else and don't have any ideas to offer.
Further, I'm apprehensive about voice (w/ GPT). Methinks this will become the best strategy for reducing visual clutter.
Being an old, I just hate talking to my computer. Though I accept it feels natural for others, like my son's generation.
Apple has worked out a system of scaling to deal with differing pixel counts. One just provides assets in @2x and @3x versions. And most designers design non-vector assets once in 3x, and then downscale once. This system works remarkably well given that we have long reached the sweet spot of screen DPI.
Readit News
That's quite a rewrite of history considering Windows Phone and Microsoft's Metro interface launched a full three years before Apple's move to a flat design in iOS 7.
> don't really use other devices
Sometimes I feel like I might as well read the spec sheets myself than read “reviews” written by these people
Dead Comment
We have an inherent recency bias, totally natural of course. But this is where you do journalism and research stuff.
Even Android had moved to a flatter design pattern 1-2 years before iOS. While Material Design wouldn't be released until 2014, you can see them moving in that direction from Gingerbread to Jelly Bean, particularly when looking at the system components and first-party apps, since this was before the concept of a unified design language across third-party apps had been formalized.
At the time Apple introduced their flat design in June 2013, they were the odd ones out. In fact, I remember a Daring Fireball article posted in spring 2013 (a few months before WWDC) praising Apple for leading the pack in flat design, and HN excoriating it for making what was at the time a clearly preposterous claim.
Indeed:
https://www.behance.net/gallery/4315369/Google-Project-Kenne...
This also made the battery life much better. (Although whenever I mentioned this, the usual retort I got was, of course the battery life would be better if there were no apps to consume it...)
Honestly, it's a huge loss for all of us. I always felt like the U.S. government should have blocked Google from making Android "free." It killed the market for all non-iOS operating systems. We'd have a much richer world if all horizontally integrated OSes had to charge a licensing fee, instead of using a search monopoly to kill competition in other markets (and then using said free OS to further extend their search monopoly).
I also blame Google for killing Blackberry. If Google is blocked from using its search monopoly to make Android free, imagine the world we would have.
Android, for many years, was actively bad, but it was also a free OS that phone companies could grab. And the rest is history.
Sadly, I was able to get it in 2015 and by then it was too late. I don’t think any phone since then has hooked me like that.
To be fair, I was getting seriously fed up by the poor software support at the same time which may have amplified my resentment.
When Apple makes a mistake, it was really a genius 4D chess move and everyone will copy them and also it wasn't really a mistake, we just have to trust the plan.
It ignores the fact that there has been a welcome step back from the derelict wasteland of "flat design" that users have endured for far too long. Flat design is often cited as a reaction to absurd levels of skeuomorphism, which Apple certainly WAS a leader in. Remember the "felt" surfaces of Game Center, the "paint" upon which was inexplicably a control? And the "leather" binding of Notes?
Then there's this: "In AR, visual affordances work differently. A button that casts realistic shadows and responds to virtual lighting feels more "real" when floating in your living room than a flat, colored rectangle."
That makes it a SHITTY control, which will get lost in the visual noise of the real environment. This UI sucks for the same reason that sports-stats graphics that are tracked onto real surfaces in TV coverage suck: They don't stand out. It's that simple.
So after years of "flat" design where nothing was demarcated as a control and users were apparently supposed to click on every pixel and every character on the screen in a hunt for hidden goodies, this article celebrates Apple's plan to create the same problem in AR using OVERLY-decorated controls.
Not to mention the stupidity of crippling computer, tablet, and phone UI for the sake of a "VR" UI. This isn't just dumb from a practical standpoint, but from a technical one as well. There's no reason that the control library can't be rendered differently on different devices. So, if this (admittedly poorly-substantiated opinion piece) is right about the motivation behind Apple's exhumation of the "transparent" UI fad that died 20 years ago, we can only lament the end of desktop usability... which Windows flushed vigorously with Microsoft's brain-dead attempt to dumb its UI down for touchscreens years ago.
And despite people constantly whining about it, GNOME is ultra fast, has great shortcuts, and it looks kinda like the pinnacle of UI design, which IMHO was Windows XP.
The Win 10 UI was starting to be adapted for AR back in 2015...
John Carmack writes:
Translucent UI is usually a bad idea outside of movies and non-critical game interfaces.
The early moments of joy are fleeting, while the usability issues remain. Windows and Mac have both been down this road before, but I guess a new generation of designers needs to learn the lessons anew. Sigh.
All of the same issues apply in AR as well. Outside of movies, people do not work out their thoughts on windowpanes or transparent “whiteboards” because of the exact same legibility issues.
Would you prefer a notebook of white sheets, or hundreds of different blurry image backgrounds?
https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1932521605340483607
The evidence suggests this isn't AR prep at all. I watched Apple's 20-minute design presentation, and their design team makes the same point repeatedly: Liquid Glass has very narrow guidelines and specific constraints.
Here's the actual design problem Apple solved. In content apps, you have a fundamental trade-off: you have a few controls that need to be instantly accessible, but you don't want them visually distracting from the content. Users are there to consume videos, photos, articles - not to stare at your buttons. But the controls still have to be there when needed.
Before Liquid Glass, your least intrusive option was backdrop blur or translucent pastel dimming overlays. Apple asked: can we make controls even less distracting? Liquid Glass lets you thread this needle even better. It's a pretty neat trick for solving this specific constraint.
So you'll feel like you're seeing Liquid Glass "everywhere" not because Apple applied it broadly, but because of selection bias. The narrow use case Apple designed this for just happens to be where you spend 80% of your phone time: videos, photos, reading messages. You're information processing, not authoring.
Apple's actual guidelines are clear: only a few controls visible at once, infrequent access pattern, only on top of rich content. The criticism assumes they're redesigning everything when they explicitly documented the opposite. People are reacting to marketing tone instead of reading what Apple's design team actually built.
[1] https://peoplesgrocers.com/en/writing/liquid-glass-explained
But if I want to use the buttons, that necessitates that I see the buttons first in order to use them. If I don't need to see a button, the button probably shouldn't be there at all.
It's not the worst design I've ever seen, but it does feel like they've swung a bit too far in the "users want to focus on the content" direction. The tools to interact with the content are also an important part of the interface and if you can't see them clearly they're not very usable.
> The criticism assumes they're redesigning everything when they explicitly documented the opposite.
Does Control Center fit those guidelines for applying Liquid Glass ?
It doesn't look like Apple has as much restraint as you're giving them credit for.
Often, UX design rhetoric floats way beyond reality. For now, a lot of Liquid Glass is grossly applied. It's only dev beta 1, so it's likely it'll improve over time... especially if they launch an AR product.
Or an outline, like gameboy emulators have been doing forever
I would rather borders and color contrast to create visual separation anyway. That approach takes up less space. White space takes makes your UI less dense, but blur is even worse.
Either way… how does that relate to my keyboard being transparent? I don’t need to see a completely illegible blur of the colors behind my keyboard.
I just turned on the “reduce transparency” setting and it’s much better.
There are usability reasons for this too - for instance, even if it's blurred, a hint of what content is behind the bar helps the user know when they've neared some new content or when to stop scrolling, or whether there's more content above/below the unobscured viewport.
Dead Comment
Reading the article's claims about translucent UI being ideal for AR, all I could think about was how bad this roadside traffic sign would be if it was white text printed on translucent glass. https://images.app.goo.gl/MU4kJmWZ8ogNGAD9A
Assuming the information a daily-use AR headset is presenting is important, it needs to be instantly legible to be useful. I guess my counter to the article would be images of "Roadside traffic signs as re-imagined in Apple's Liquid Glass." Would showing an intersection with a Liquid Glass stop sign and a car crashed into the side of another be too much?
Weird tangent, but I used tracing paper over piece of graph paper for notes for a while. I liked it because I could use the graph paper for drawing my figures or align my text, but then have something more aesthetically pleasing and nice for reading after. I find reading on graph paper annoying, due to the vertical lines.
Anyway, I can’t think of any way that a transparent OS window could be similarly helpful.
You might get on with a Whitelines pad[0]?
[0] https://www.whitelinespaper.com/product/engineering-pad-8-5-...
We're taking about Apple here, who prioritize aesthetics over everything else, shipping a defective keyboard design for 5 years straight just to shave 1 millimeter of thickness on the laptop.
It needs to 'wow' people in the Apple Store in terms of looks and feel, usability be dammed.
I put off upgrading my personal MacBook for years after work issued me a MacBook with the touch bar. Such a usability nightmare for the sake of eye candy. That was a long seven years.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IrGYUq1mklk
- most of the close look examples are on very simple buttons with a single geometric shapes, like ">" or "□". Those will be legible even in pretty extreme conditions, and we can't expect real world applications to be mostly composed of those.
Imagine the screen at 11:51 with a "Select" as the button text instead of the geometrical icons. It wouldn't be great.
- text is only presented on very low contrast areas. When scrolling the elephant picture around 9:30 to show the title go dark -> light for instance, it's a switch between a very pale background to a very saturated one, and they stop the scrolling when the title is against the darkest part of the image, where it's the most legible.
It's not just the implementation IMHO, in a real application you can't adjust every screen and interaction to only hit the best absolute conditions to make Liquid Glass look good. The whole idea behind it is just harder to look good in real world, short of giving up and going for very low transparency.
Dead Comment
That basically is just a way of making people upgrade their iPhone
For walls of text you can still opt out of this and use a less translucent material.
It's not about transparency, it's about not using AR and multitasking in the real world. The purpose of AR in a headset isn't to free up your hands so you can read the group chat while you drive or walk, it's to make UIs that can't feasibly exist with a screen alone.
Carmack is wrong. Sometimes super smart people are wrong.
Judging from the demos, Apple's version is even more translucent than Vista, so I have no doubt that it'll be bad.
This could be partly because there's nothing immediately close to the window so any writing is the only real thing in the focal plane.
If I stand further back, it is somewhat harder to read, but I imagine this wouldn't be a problem with displays that can emulate that (like laser retinal displays iirc)
So if that's the next big thing, Apple had to get consumers used to translucent UIs.
Damn, now I want a frosted glass whiteboard. As if wanting a whiteboard wasn't bad enough.
Deleted Comment
I knew a lovely man, a kind hearted engineer, Larry Weiss, for whom this was not true... In the early 1980s I was in his VW van that he used for business roadtrips when he, while still driving, grabbed a felt marker and started drawing on the window in front of him to illustrate a point.
I learned that he kept markers handy and used them to capture his thoughts on long drives (to conferences, customers etc). Rough mechanical sketches mostly.
Back then I did not generally know to describe myself as (modern term) aphantasic as I had yet to realize I was different from most people, but hopefully this context helps you to understand why I then (and now) grokked the value of putting your conceptual thought into your ongoing visual field, non-occlusively aka transparently
Legibility is no more the deciding factor of ~utility here/AR/VR than it is in dreams. Indeed I have been very near sighted for over 50 years and I do not find this ~illegibility to be an issue for clarity of visual~assist to thinking.
The point John Carmack makes may have greater merit for other people or if we were limited to discussing text--but Liquid Glass is not about text per se, is it?
"...there’s way too much information to decode the Matrix. You get used to it. I…I don’t even see the code." -- Cypher from The Matrix 1999
P.S. If my story about Larry intrigued you, I am happy to share these two tiny tidbits I found in memoriam ...
https://isaac-online.org/wp-content/uploads/ISAAC-E-News-Oct...
https://w140.com/tekwiki/wiki/Larry_Weiss [re his work and patents at Tektronix in the 1960s]
I don’t think I’d like to have it on everything, though. Or basically anything except my terminal, for that matter.
I have a hard time parsing this.
"Is the glass effect transparent if I don't turn off transparency?"
uhh.. Yes.
As a bit of a citizen scientist myself let me explain how I wrapped my laymen's brain around it :
If I can see through it, it's transparent. If the color changes behind the thing, and I can somehow intuit that -- good chance's we're dealing with transparency.
My suspicion is this concern went the same way as DEI/ESG
I cant believe real people actually believe this kind of stuff. The author seems to think tech press alone is fixated on AI story. Apple themselves was all gung-ho about AI last time around. They sold an entire line of iPhones touting the benefits of AI. They even "invented" a brand for their line of offering - Apple Intelligence.
And when it all fell flat, Apple had to apologize and had to (yes, had to) showcase other things. Liquid Glass essentially was a replacement for that. If Apple had anything meaningful to show in AI world, it would have show cased that.
And author seems to think Apple is playing 4D chess. Sometimes the simplest explanation is what is really going on.
Usability issues only manifest after point of sale. Messaging/marketing happens after the work has been done (and can involve post-rationalization).
They’re more like quality of life issues that users will appreciate.
A now that 3rd parties can access Apple’s LLM models… let me correct that. Shortcuts, a visual automation app, can also access models on device or bigger, more capable models using Apple’s Private Cloud Compute.
Apple’s not playing multidimensional chess… but they are playing the long game, where users won’t have to use multiple AI chatbots to get work done, because most of what they want to do is handled by their current apps with new AI capabilities—on device.
If anything I'd expect Google, OpenAI, Anthropic ... Or even Meta to have a better on-device "lite" model before Apple.
https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/6...
The items look so much more tangible, and the text is more readable. Everything is easy to grok visually. The flat design looks way more confusing. And the liquid glass one looks even worse.
Also, I can actually read the battery level indicator in the skeuomorphic display. I sometimes resort to getting out a magnifying glass to read it on my iPhone's current display. (Yes, I have old eyes. And I have to keep telling those Apple UI people to get off my grass.)
Same. But how would large teams of UI designers justify their jobs if they'd leave it like that for 10+ years?
And it's not just phones either. Car companies spend money on retooling to give a model a facelift because people expect it. Sales drop and then pick up again after the facelift because nobody wants to buy something that looks dated from day one.
Manufacturers take cues from each other because once a "modern" trend is set everything else looks dated. Everyone went with flat UIs in a matter of a few years. Cars went with lightbar lights in the past few years too. That's what feels modern now.
As long as a huge part of the market remembers skeuomorphic design and associates it with the early 2000s it will never feel modern so designers stay away from it.
P.S. For me suspenders are still the third best way to keep my pants on (right after "picking the right pants size" and "fastening the buttons"). But nobody wants them these days and it's not a Big Belt conspiracy. They just don't look modern.
Sure, it's not pretty by today's standard, but it's way easier to use IMO.
I thought there was supposed to be a way to add a tint to it though, which I haven't found a setting for, and think I would do if I could find it.
I suppose it's easy to grok what the newsstand is[1], but I'm not convinced it would matter after the first five minutes.
[1] Because I've seen it in US media, along with the route symbol on the maps icon and the fire hydrants that are in captchas.
I don't know how well connected it is to the power-user axis, but I would say a characteristic power-user doesn't care that they are looking a somewhat garish and busy collection of colored icons, gradients, bezels, etc, whereas the opposite sensibility favors a minimalist UI for the aesthetics over perhaps ease of locating things. The real opposite of a power-user is not a first-time user, its a non-user. The non-user is not annoyed that they can't find things that are hidden away in secret trays you have to swipe for or such, but they appreciate the resulting saved screen-space.
Blurring in AR is quite difficult as it requires an accurately aligned image to overlay the world. The point of AR is its just an overlay, you don't need to render whats already there. To make a blur, you need the underlying image, this costs energy, which you don't really have on AR glasses.
If the display is naturally transparent, I don't see the need for a non-opaque UI.
You're right, but it depends on the screen type. It turns out that just being transparent isn't actually good enough, you really want to be able to dim the background as well. This means that you can overwrite the real-world object much more effectively.
but that adds a whole level of complication.
People are in for a world of pain when they realize this.
Deleted Comment
However, a secondhand Quest 3 with unity in MR is the cheapest way to get started. It gives you SLAM/world frame of reference, which almost no other system does (apart from hololens)
Looking at Liquid Glass, they certainly solved it for higher-res backdrops. Low res should be simpler. It won't be as clean as Liquid Glass, but it could probably do VisionOS quality.
You need the camera on and streaming, sure you only need a portion, but also your camera needs to cover all of your screen area, and the output remapped. It also means that your camera now has limited placement opportunities.
Having your camera on costs power to, so not only is your GUI costing power but its costing more power because the camera is on as well.
People do not want invasive glasses, even if they make them as small at normal glasses. I just don't see it becoming anything other than a niche product.
It's like all the moves to voice/audio interfaces powered by AI. They simply won't take off as audio is inherently low bandwidth and low definition. Our eyes are able to see so much more in our peripheral vision, at a much higher bandwidth.
Some would argue that's an indication that AR will happen, but it's still so low deff, and incredibly intrusive, as much as I love the demos and the vision (pun not intended) behind it.
As far as I can see, the only motivation for the visual overall is that they need something to fill the gap until they have some real AI innovations to show. This is a "tick" in the traditional "tick" -> "tock" development and release cycle - a facelift while they work on some difficult re-engineering underneath. But that's not AR, it AI.
It's just a matter of packaging and selling it the way the palm pilot was packaged and sold as the smartphone.
Wait, are you arguing that consumers will reject something that puts, say, a social media feed in front of their face 24hrs a day? That will allow them to just gaze at an internet site constantly without even having to think about it? That will allow them to have videos in their peripheral vision while they “concentrate” on something else?
AR headsets will not replace computers, they’ll replace phones.
Good AR glasses are already available and combined with modern LLMs you can have normal people thinking about computers the way we do. This will feel less invasive than smartphones do currently while being able to do much more.
I'm absolutely certain Apple will not survive the transition though.
Which ones do you think are good?
Anything less than lightweight glasses is a non-starter outside of gaming and other enthusiasts. The Vision Pro is just too bulky for it to sell serious numbers.
This is why I like Lex Fridman style podcast.
https://www.theverge.com/news/604378/apple-n107-ar-glasses-c...
Yet I see this speculation copied (TechCrunch), copied (MacRumors), copied (Substack), from one article to another with the fervor rising at each one. Yet we never approach anything close to substantive.
I read in 2023 AR is due in 24, then 24 it was 25, and now in 25 it is due in 26. AR also now has something to do with AI because of course it does, and Apple's new blurry UI is something to do with this product 1.5 years out at minimum... Sure.
I’m not sure what I think about liquid glass, but I do agree with the premise that it’s being driven by the move towards AR and extending interfaces outside the phone/tablet.
I think another interesting tell here will be the 20th anniversary iPhone, which should be coming in 2027 - the iPhone X set the tone for Apple devices for the next decade (so far), and I’d expect to get a better idea of what Apple’s doing here when they show off that hardware.
marketing (big new design), design trend catch-up (metro, android), and all those other technical reasons (memory, textures, vector graphics, enables easy dark-mode) etc etc
just my guess, but making a dark mode (more easily) possible must have been a large factor too
I expect an "AR based UI" to somehow leverage depth of field and focus. Blur and translucency/transparency used to achieve that could be amazing.
I'm reminded of prior UIs which had Z depth. One of the iOS releases had parallax.
Remember that awesome demo repurposing two Wii controllers to do head tracking? It transformed the screen into a portal that you that thru. Moving your head around changed your perspective.
I want that.
I just started watching the WWDC videos. So far I like what I see. I'm on board with stacked components; we'll see how it pans out. I love the idea of morphing UI elements, transitioning between list <-> menu bar; I really want this to succeed.
Mostly, I want less clutter. No matter the appearance or theme, I'm overwhelmed by all the icons, options, etc.
The age old conundrum of balancing ease of use against lots of features. Having created UIs in anger, I'm no smarter than anyone else and don't have any ideas to offer.
Further, I'm apprehensive about voice (w/ GPT). Methinks this will become the best strategy for reducing visual clutter.
Being an old, I just hate talking to my computer. Though I accept it feels natural for others, like my son's generation.