Design, to cite a wildly overused Steve Jobs-ism, is the way it works. And if that’s the case, Apple’s new design language, which the corporate is looking “Liquid Glass” and simply introduced at WWDC 2025, is de facto nothing new in any respect.
The Liquid Glass look comes largely from VisionOS, which shipped with a specific constraint: it needed to layer digital data over your bodily world, with out occluding that bodily world. That’s why every part in VisionOS is translucent and glassy, so you’ll be able to each see it and see by means of it. All the pieces is layered and three-dimensional, an effort to make digital experiences really feel extra like objects in house than objects on a display screen.
The impetus for turning the VisionOS look into the Liquid Glass system, Apple software program boss Craig Federighi mentioned initially of this 12 months’s developer convention keynote, was that Apple’s gadgets are extra carefully related than ever. That’s actually true: Apple’s ecosystem stays tight, and there are many good causes to purchase an iPad when you have an iPhone or an Apple TV when you have a Mac. (Name it synergy, name it unlawful monopoly upkeep, you decide.) Most of Apple’s gadgets have plenty of options in widespread, and it is smart to carry all of them extra carefully collectively. Placing parts in acquainted locations, ensuring issues work the identical in all places — these are all good issues!
Leaving apart the considerably wild choice to pivot your total UI system round a prohibitively costly headset hardly anybody has ever even tried, the factor about most of Apple’s gadgets is that they aren’t overlaying digital data on the bodily world. They’re simply screens! So the little glass loupe that slides over textual content as you spotlight on a webpage gained’t really feel such as you’re transferring one thing round; it’ll really feel such as you’re poking at a faux water droplet on the display screen. The playback controls that appear to drift barely above your content material, refracting its mild and colours, look to my eyes just a little like a hokey 3D impact. The navigation buttons that ripple as you scroll a webpage don’t appear to be bodily objects — they simply look busy and laborious to learn. Apple executives regularly made some extent of noting that Liquid Glass is minimalist and “retains your content material in focus,” however the continuously morphing interface feels to me prefer it is likely to be much more noticeable.
There’s one factor about Liquid Glass I actually like. Now, if you faucet on an alert or a menu merchandise, the remainder of the content material seems from inside, as if it had been contained by the factor you simply tapped. That’s a intelligent solution to maintain folks anchored in place. You gained’t faucet one thing, solely to be taken to a different display screen, with no apparent approach again to the place you had been. The menu simply radiates out over high of no matter you had been doing, after which folds again in on itself if you’re achieved. It’s far too straightforward to get misplaced in your cellphone, and it is a good contact.
You actually can’t take a look at Liquid Glass with out considering of Home windows Aero, the equally glassy and translucent design language that shipped with… Home windows Vista. (Powerful comparability, that.) With Aero, Microsoft made an effort to make it straightforward to know the place you had been in your pc, and to search out every part you wanted. You could possibly see by means of home windows to different home windows; app borders would change to match the content material inside; you might use widgets and dwell thumbnails to get fast entry to data. Aero didn’t final, partially as a result of it was an enormous useful resource suck to render one thing so graphically intense. Now, Microsoft’s design is far more colourful, and much more aggressively bodily — there are drop shadows in all places.
The concepts behind each Liquid Glass and Home windows Aero are good ones! They stand for personalization, customization, for serving to folks work out the place they’re and what they’re doing on their machine. Apple has lengthy been unmatched in executing this sort of stuff, too, and the demos we noticed at WWDC as we speak counsel that this layered, three-dimensional impact will work easily throughout all of Apple’s gadgets. However for all of the epic language of the disclosing, I don’t see a lot in Liquid Glass that can matter. Possibly we’ll get extra within the months to return, and possibly builders will work out methods to make the very best of the layers. However for each place this sort of layered translucency is smart, there can be plenty of locations it simply appears to be like like a multitude. It gained’t change a lot about how you employ your gadgets or the way in which you understand them, and at the least to my eyes, it doesn’t even make them better-looking. It’s simply … barely completely different.
Watching Apple’s announcement, it’s laborious to not learn the entire thing as borne of effectivity moderately than of inspiration. Alan Dye, Apple’s vice chairman of design, began his portion of the keynote by harkening again to iOS 7, and its easy, layer-based look. “Now, with the highly effective advances in our {hardware}, silicon, and graphics applied sciences,” he mentioned, “we now have the chance to put the inspiration for the subsequent chapter of our software program.” He known as Liquid Glass “our broadest design replace ever.” Not largest. Not greatest. Simply broadest.
In that broadest sense, it’s logical that that is the place Apple landed. It clearly wouldn’t, and doubtless couldn’t, essentially change the appear and feel of each machine it makes for billions of customers world wide. Nobody desires that. So Apple simply took all its parts and made them extra common: every part’s just a little extra spherical, just a little extra contained, rather less designed for a particular display screen measurement. A floating menu of black and white icons works just about wherever, you realize? By turning menus into lists that come out of buttons, Apple prevents itself from having to optimize each menu for each machine and display screen orientation. Liquid Glass is the bottom widespread denominator, achieved about in addition to you might.
However I’m not impressed, and I’m not optimistic. Apple is at its greatest when it has sturdy opinions about how issues ought to work; even the try to get out of the way in which and let your content material dictate every part feels just like the fallacious tack. Plus, I’ve spent the previous 12 months tinkering with Apple’s new tinted and color-matching iPhone homescreens, which largely serve to make your machine uglier. I don’t see a motive that Liquid Glass would make my gadgets higher, easier, or extra private. I simply see buttons which are tougher to learn.
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