Oh no. It looks like every button and menu is now a translucent layer, so that any noise from the background shows through and muddles the text. This seems like an accessibility nightmare.
Translucent layers generally make software unusable for me. In the video, I saw several instances that would be really really bad for me, where I’d be straining to understand the text. Looks really cool and futuristic though. Just like a movie. Big whoop.
I’m autistic, but this won’t only affect autistic people. A lot of people are going to have problems with this. I hope there’s a very prominent way to turn it off.
This is also likely a performance nightmare. Funny that they mention that "new hardware has enabled us to..." which means that this will perform poorly on old devices.
At a previous company, we were forbidden from using translucency (with a few exceptions) because of the performance cost of blending. There are debugging tools we'd use fairly often to confirm that all layers were opaque.
Unlikely. Frosted glass blur was introduced almost twelve years ago in iOS 7, and was supported all the way down to the iPhone 4. Many apps like control center have used a full screen blur without any performance issues for a long time.
Apple at the time created their own 'approximate gaussian blur' algorithm specifically to enable this, and it ran crazy fast on devices where a simple gaussian blur would barely achieve double digit FPS. Even if this 'liquid glass' effect is heavier to compute, on the hardware we have today it will be a negligible performance concern.
> Unlikely. Frosted glass blur was introduced almost twelve years ago in iOS 7, and was supported all the way down to the iPhone 4. Many apps like control center have used a full screen blur without any performance issues for a long time.
"Without any performance issues"? Entirely false - reviews at the time noted iOS 7 dramatically reduced battery life - all across the board for Apple devices, even for the then latest iPhone 5S and 5c (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/09/ios-7-thoroughly-rev...).
The abuse of transparency/translucency in the UI was the primary reason - you could go to Accessibility settings and disable animations + transparency/translucency and get notable increases in both runtime speed of the OS UI and battery life.
Memory unlocked: the awful slog that was an iPhone 4S with iOS >= 7.
Indeed, I remember the switch to iOS 7, for me battery life seemed to get slightly worse but there were conflicting opinions at the time. It's fresh in my memory as it was around the same time I binged on all five seasons of Breaking Bad :)
I's also true that iOS 7 made the 4/4S seem much slower, but the frosted glass effect still ran at 60FPS - that was my point. It was really impressive at the time. Though unless you spent hours sliding the control center up and down, it's hard to blame the blur effect for the reduced battery life, as it rarely appeared inside apps. Most likely the result of increased OS bloat and proliferation of background services.
You can’t judge battery life and performance off a .0 release when the priority is on delivering features with the minimum number of showstopper bugs. At least wait until the .1.
It has been like this for every Apple release for over 20 years.
Maybe for "Apple", but there's one team that takes performance seriously. The WebKit team has a zero tolerance policy for performance regressions (https://webkit.org/performance/) dating back to the implementation of the Page Load Test in 2002 (Creative Selection, p. 93).
WebKit sounds like the kind of scrappy startup Apple might want to acquire and gain some hard-earned engineering knowledge.
>The WebKit team has a zero tolerance policy for performance regressions
But apparently they still welcome app-crashing bugs and UI-stalling code!
WebKit is the only browser that lags when there is too much logs in devtools console on my M1 mac... Pretty funny.
If Apple has been shipping betas for 2 decades that do not meaningfully prepare the release candidate for users, something is horribly wrong. They're either not listening to the feedback they receive or they're not giving themselves enough time; both are firmly within Apple's control.
Well, firstly, this is a developer beta. So the target audience are developers that want to get a head start on getting their app(s) ready. So measuring battery performance of those dev betas is dumb.
Also, they do listen to feedback and do gather it. They won't change entire design language now tho.
The parent comment wasn't talking about the developer beta, they were talking about the .0 release. They should use the release candidates as an opportunity to dogfood new solutions instead of shipping an MVP to prod.
Poor performance of a GUI is a showstopper bug. It should be, anyway.
> number of showstopper bugs
Screwing with the battery life on a mobile device would be a showstopper bug if Steve were still around.
Maybe we should stop accepting this?
This isn't just a gaussian blur though, there's raytracing and refractions happening. The OS is becoming a low-key high-fidelity video game.
I don't usually say things are bloated but raytracing buttons is something I'd expect to be a parody...
And all of this just to make the whole UI white and generic.
I just want everything to look like Windows XP. I don't get it.
It’s almost certain to be a fairly cheap thing, at least for a GPU that can sling pixels at the gigabytes per second necessary to get smooth touch scrolling at these screen resolutions.
The demos only show a very limited array of shapes. Precompute the refraction, store the result in a texture, and the gist should be sample(blur(background), sample(refraction, point)). Probably a bit more complicated than this—I’m no magician of the kind that’s needed to devise cheap graphics tricks like this—but the computational effort should be in that ballpark. Compared to on-device language models and such, I wouldn’t be worried.
(Also, do I need to remind you of the absolute disdain directed by 95/98/Me/2000 users at the “toy” default theme of XP? And it was a bit silly, to be honest. It’s just that major software outfits don’t dare to be silly anymore, and that way lies blandness.)
> It’s just that major software outfits don’t dare to be silly anymore, and that way lies blandness
Great observation! We need some of that sillyness back. Everything is all serious and corporate nowadays, even 'fun' stuff like social media or games. Even movies can't be silly anymore.
Not sure about 'serious and corporate', the big corps like to appear cute, folksy etc. and recently we even saw new Google Material Design advertised as judged more "rebellious" by focus groups. Maybe bland and toothless is just a general direction of contemporary culture and style that they follow.
Myself, I can appreciate corporate stuff presenting corporate. More truthful, feels a little less manipulative.
>It’s almost certain to be a fairly cheap thing, at least for a GPU that can sling pixels at the gigabytes per second
Okay, but what about the battery connected to the GPU? The battery in my iPhone has already degraded below 80% health in the 2.7 years I've had it, so I'd rather not waste its charge on low-contrast glass effects.
You’ll be able to turn them off with “reduce transparency” setting like you’ve been able to since iOS 7
the Winamp GUI and skins are "silly". This is just boring and bland.
> And all of this just to make the whole UI white and generic.
3:30–3:45 in the video is painful. Describing “giving you an entirely new way, to personalise your experience”, while showing… white. White white white. Oh, and light tinted backgrounds to set your white on. I hope the personalisation you wanted was white.
My conspiracy theory is that dark/light theme was invented by companies to keep users from asking for full customization.
We used to have such customisation, then it kinda went away for a while because it was too hard and limited development, and then dark mode was hailed as a brilliant new invention.
But it is worth remembering that dark mode does actually get you some things; it’s not all bad: the restrictions do have some value.
Full customisation became paradoxically limiting: when you give too much power to the user, the app is essentially operating in a hostile environment. Of course, a lot of it was laziness on app and UI framework developers’ parts, but it really did limit innovation, too.
Dark mode gets you a pair of themes that you can switch between easily, and an expectation that there are only two themes you need to consider, with well-defined characteristics. This is a much more practical target, a vastly easier sell for app and framework developers.
The funny thing with monochrome icons is that in some ways they were actually a better fit for a full-customisation environment, where you had arbitrary background and foreground colours. Once it’s just mundane light and dark themes, you could more safely have full colour in two variants.
Certainly light mode and dark mode does not mean things need to be monochrome.
Make things slow so they can sell more hardware to make it look faster?
I don’t know, just kidding :-)
If GPUs can handle it, I guess why not. It’s some people will notice and say “wow, looks pretty, glad I upgraded”
Hey now, this is Windows Vista. Get it straight!
From what I've seen,the refractions happen in predictable contexts so I suspect that they'll be able to create shaders, etc that will limit the performance hit
Ray tracing is done in shaders these days. Doesn't make it cheap.
The comment you’re replying to probably means “a shader that is a fine approximation of ray tracing (for cheap)”
I would imagine that for a known geometry of glass, you can do the ray tracing once, see where each photon ends up, and then bake that transformation into the UI. If you do this for each edge and curve your UI will produce, you can stitch them together piecewise to form UI elements of different shapes without computing everything again from scratch.
The sampling will still affect performance.
it looks like old school 2D bumpmapping to me, it's not expensive if you don't overengineer it
where do you see raytracing? it's just reading back the texture of the layer behind a bit distorted. honestly that's cheaper than a blur
Early iPhone hardware was barely keeping with rendering the UI with a total ban on transparency. Even on iPhone 4 which improved the hardware a lot had the issue that it also increased amount of pixels to be pushed around.
And yes, later iOS on early hardware was huge PITA and slowdown.
Yes! And it was frustratingly patented! https://patents.google.com/patent/US7397964B2/en
I made a comment about this a couple of years ago, but I fudged the explanation of it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34937618
I suspect that their new technique implements the existing fast gaussian blur, and since the patent is about to expire, it was a good time to spice it up.
I suspect as others have mentioned here, they use a "Liquid Glass" shader which samples the backing layer of the UI composition below the target element and applies a lens distortion based on the target element's border radius, all heavily parameterized so as to be used with the rest of the system's Liquid Glass applications like the new icon system.
iOS 7 made the iPhone 4 practically unusable.
“Supported” and “works well” ain’t the same. Do you remember how your iPhone 4 crawled when that effect was enabled?
Surely it's a performance nightmare because whatever is behind the frosting has to be rendered in full. Without this it can see that it's occluded and not have to render. Or does MacOS not do that?
Anyone who's ever written a blur shader knows that blurs aren't cheap.
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> Wirth's law is an adage on computer performance which states that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster.
> this will perform poorly on old devices
I don't know how long you've been following Apple but with previous "high cost on old hardware" features they just disabled them for old hardware.
Apple loves their battery life numbers, they won't purposefully ship a UI feature that meaningfully reduces them. Now bugs that drop framerates and cause hangs, they love shipping those.
> Apple loves their battery life numbers
For devices currently being sold, primarily.
Maybe in the past, but my iPhone 13 still has pretty good battery life considering the battery has physically degraded over the years. No update felt like it killed the battery.
Eh, I use an iPhone 11 that's 5.5 years old, with the original battery and to this day the battery life is not noticeably different from when it was new.
It's the first iPhone I bought and has lasted longer than any of the three Android phones I had before it.
Literally impossible for your battery life not to have degraded in 5.5 years, battery tech just degrades - my 14 Pro was noticably worse in less than a year.
Hence the use of 'noticeably', as opposed to 'measurably'. There's no point in arguing about subjective experience.
> Apple loves their battery life numbers
...under pressure of consumer protection and e-waste laws. As it should be, I hope the other phone manufacturers are experiencing the same pressure.
Windows Vista introduced this same concept. Performance was awful unless you had compatible graphics acceleration. 20 years later, I think most devices should be fine, especially Apple devices.
Vista was dogged by issues caused by migrating display drivers from NTDDM to WDDM 1.0, something that was only finished by 7 (which dropped NTDDM fully and introduced WDDM 1.1) and 8 (which afaik had mandated WDDM 1.1 only).
Unlike previous GDI acceleration, DWM.EXE could composite alpha channel quickly with the GPU, and generally achieved much higher fill rates on the same hw - if the drivers worked properly.
Yeah one of the easiest ways to make windows vista+7 perform better was to simply disable all the fancy UI graphics that add nothing. I don't care if my window title bars have a gradient and animated transparency. It's actually a bit distracting and makes the system perform worse, so I just turned it off.
Even on modern devices though which have more computation and graphics power to the point that they aren't going to actually lag or anything while rendering it, why waste cycles and battery animating these useless and distracting things? There's no good justification.
20 years later and they're building the start menu in React Native.
these performance hungry "improvements" are forcefully introduced to legitimately slow down older devices and force the device refresh across the user base.
I have been using 8 year old iPhone just fine, but features like these over time will make the experience slower and slower and slower, until I am forced to refresh my iphone
I think probably a much bigger problem is app bloat. Devs are usually using very recent if not brand new top end devices to test and develop against which naturally makes several types of performance degradation invisible to them (“works on my machine”). Users on old and/or low end devices on the other hand feel all of those degradations.
If we want to take increasing device lifetimes seriously we need to normalize testing and development against slow/old models. Even if such testing is automated, it’d do wonders for keeping bloat at bay.
More likely it's a result of pressure to ship highly visible "improvements," combined with a lack of ideas that could improve the experience in a meaningful way. What do you do in that situation? Ship an obvious UI update that wouldn't have performed on the last gen hardware.
I haven’t used the new UI, so don’t assume this to be an endorsement of it, but even if you have good ideas about UI improvements and implement them, there still is pressure to make the UI look different because that, at a glance, shows users that they get something new.
And yes, “looking different” doesn’t have to mean “requires faster hardware”, but picking something that requires faster hardware makes it less likely that you will be accused of being a copy-cat of some other product’s UI.
And you base your first sentence on…? Surely not the ol’ “my phone slows down when my battery is failing so that I’ll buy a new phone” canard?
To be clear, these are new features that will likely have a setting to turn off. There’s no conspiracy, nothing “forcefully” added for the purpose of driving upgrades. (Ah, ninja edit): There’s not even a guarantee these features will be supported on an eight year old phone. EDIT: wait a minute...your eight year old phone won't even be supported.
(EDIT: reworded first paragraph to account for the ninja edit.)
What’s the exact canard here?
It’s a legitimate concern even assuming good intent.
But Apple has had to publicly admit bad intent specifically with their batteries and had to offer people money etc.
Strange to criticize people for something Apple publicly admitted they did wrong.
Apple publicly admitted they did wrong.
When is the last time a company has admitted wrong-doing? No, Apple admitted to slowing down phones when the battery was shot so it wouldn’t just suddenly shut down.
I adamantly believe this was the right call for Apple to make. I frequently switch between Apple and Android phones across different generations. At the time I had an aging flagship Samsung that did NOT do this. My battery indicator would say "18%" and it would last however long that implies...if I didn't do anything remotely CPU-intensive. If I did anything that boosted the CPU, the current draw caused the battery voltage to fall off a cliff and the phone would instantly shut down without warning.
The worst part was that during the boot sequence, the CPU ran at full-throttle for a few moments until the power-management components were loaded. So I couldn't restart it. As long as I didn't open a game or YouTube or a wonky website with super awful javascript, I could continue using the phone for another couple hours. But if the phone turned off, it couldn't be turned back on without charging it more ... even though it had "18%" battery left (as determined by voltage, not taking into account increased internal resistance in the battery as it ages).
I was envious of iPhone users that got a real fix for this (Apple slowing down the phone when the internal voltage got low). I would have greatly preferred that Samsung had done the same for my phone too.
I agree, it was the right call to make -- a temporarily-impaired device is always better than a temporarily-failed device, especially when you're talking about something you may need in an emergency situation.
That said, Apple _significantly_ erred in not over-communicating what they were doing. At that point, the OS would pop warnings to users if the phone had to thermal throttle, and adding a similar notification that led the user to a FAQ page explaining the battery dynamics wouldn't have been technically hard to do.
the solution to old battery is $15 replacement battery, not the $1500 replacement iPhone.
which I am doing exactly, but still new iOS version make my phone slower and slower and I cannot even opt out of updates.
because some apps are forcing me to use the latest version of iOS (Authentication, Okta 2fa, etc)
Apple provides a battery replacement program.
And you can use third parties as well which Apple now officially supports.
It is just a lie to say you need a new phone.
We don't need to carry water for greedy billionaires.
JWZ was right about us the whole time.
You can opt out of updates by not using new software. You want the best of both worlds.
the software forces me to update
That was fake, tho. They slowed down old iPhones to make you buy a new one. My iPhone 7 wasn't auto shutting down, battery health was good, but they still made it so slow it was unusable the same week they released the iPhone X.
There is literally a zero percent chance it was anything to do with batteries. This is not a conspiracy theory. It's an objective fact.
Right, yes, your anecdotal experience is totally objective fact.
They didn't admit bad intent. They admitted to doing something with good intent(the slowing was to stop crashes with near EOL batteries) but that they weren't transparent about it.
I'd much rather us have progress and people with 8 year old phones suffer than ensure that everything continues to run smoothly on any old device for eternity.
Disagree. I much preferred my phone running slightly slower to shutting down randomly. Maybe that’s just me.
I would prefer to be told that my battery is weak so I could make a decision on if I want to replace the battery, replace the phone, live with the phone shutting down randomly when battery is low, or continue with a slower phone. That's just me.
So why did they slow down iPhones that weren't shutting down randomly?
To prevent random shutdowns.
Apple absolutely effed up by not communicating the specifics well, but that’s corporate policy. Apple docs have always been targeted at the non-technical user and therefore inadequate for others.
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No matter what happens in the world someone will blame it on a top down conspiracy decided in some smoke filled back room.
But this one is true. Apple obviously puts out slowdown updates right as they release a new phone. They made my iPhone 7 unusable the same week they released the iPhone X.
Do you have some actual evidence that this is the case ?
Otherwise saying it is definitively true is misleading to put it mildly.
I'm very happy with my iPhone 13 Mini, my wife is very happy with her iPhone 12. They feel exactly the same as when bought new.
Whatever is it that you're saying that Apple does, it's either not obvious or they're shit at it.
Apple announces all iOS updates in June and releases them simultaneously with the newest iPhones in September. So you're right, but only trivially so.
Replying to you from an iPhone 7 that I use daily.
if conspiracy makes hundreds of billions $$$ then nothing stops people really.
like Charlie Munger have said: "Show me the incentives and I will tell you the outcome"
I don’t think your overall take is wrong (it’s about money), but maybe the simplicity of it is.
Reality is that designers, product managers, engineers — they all wanna build cool things, get promoted, make money etc.
You don’t do that by shipping plain designs, no matter how tried and true. The pressure to create something new and interesting is ever present. And look we have these powerful Apple silicon chips that can capably render these neat effects.
So no I don’t think it’s a shadowy conspiracy to come after your iPhone 8. Just the regular pressure of everyday men and women to build new and interesting things that will bring success.
In the late 90s/early 2000s desktop computing was moving at such a pace that an 8 year old PC was near unusable. Overtime progress slowed and its not unusual to have a decade old desktop now. The problem is thinking that mobile has slowed that much too. Mobile is still progressing quite rapidly so yeah an almost decade old device is going to feel slow.
You have what an iPhone 6? 1GB of RAM vs 8GB for modern devices, the first A chip came out 2 generations after yours as has 2% of the power of a current chip so modern chips are likely close to 100x as powerful as your phone.
Why should we hold back software to support extreme outliers like you?
> Why should we hold back software to support extreme outliers like you?
What are apps and mobile sites doing differently today besides loading up unnecessary animations and user tracking? How has user experience improved for those operating on devices fast enough to make up for developer laziness?
Games are dramatically bigger in scale and graphics quality.
I can now do on-device transcription without issue, security improvements at the chip level, HD graphics for video streaming, etc.
Right, but you choose when to play the games right ?
You can't choose when to use your OS, and you need to 'update your os' to stay secure.
if I want to play games, I will buy the latest iPhone. If I want to a smartphone with couple simple primitive apps that just send JSON and call REST APIs in the cloud, I don’t want to be forced to shell out $1500 every couple years
So trashing fine working hardware that was produced using valuable and rare resources sounds perfectly sane to you?
For what? So a designer can get a promotion? This is not progress, this is pure fashion. As if the planet being literally on fire needed more fuel.
Yes, everything has a lifetime, 10 years is a very good run for a complex piece of technology you can carry in your pocket. Send it in for recycling.
So that we can have better features and functionality in our future systems. Backwards compatibility is an anchor. If you want new things then expect to get new platforms to run them on don't expect everyone to limit their possibilities to support you.
The vast majority of things don't get recycled properly.
We are not talking about new features. Of course no one expects to run a LLM on an ten year old phone, again we are talking about fashion. It is change for change's sake. It is not providing value to users it is so the the designer gets to eat and management and shareholders are kept happy.
There is a difference between actual technical progress and you throwing out your skinny jeans because baggy pants are now in fashion.
Why shouldn't we build phones that last ten year, twenty years, or even more?
Apple offers a recycling program.
>We are not talking about new features
We are, you are just choosing to ignore them and call them fashion. There have been immense changes in capabilities over the past 10 years.
>Why shouldn't we build phones that last ten year, twenty years, or even more?
We do, dumb phones, why don't you own one of those instead of trying to limit progress in the phones pushing progress?
I am totally fine if I stop getting software updates. In general I prefer not to update software either, because every new version brings only bloat
Windows 10 keeps telling me I need to buy a new Desktop in October. I don't remember when I bought it, but it runs fine for everything I do. I've been running Linux for ages on my laptops, I be upgrading my desktop to Linux too!
Windows 10 is EOL. As a fellow internet user I'm glad Microsoft is taking a harder line these days on people running EOL software. The internet has a history of being swamped by people running EOL versions of Windows full of security issues causing problems for everyone else.
No one is holding back software. You're not running local LLM or anything useful, you're adding performance cost for merely displaying icons on screen.
No one is holding back software because they aren't being allowed. If we were forced to support decade+ old devices though software would for sure be held back.
Laggards cost society by running insecure devices that generally impact the rest of the world besides just complaining about no one continuing to support them long after the useful life of their devices.
> Laggards cost society by running insecure devices that generally impact the rest of the world
Maybe there's also a cost to updating phones as frequently as people do, and inefficient software running across billions of devices.
I wouldn't blame people who make their hardware last longer and call them "laggards". And it's not their responsibility to write security patches for their device, that falls on the manufacturer.
For these people, me included, they don't need the latest hardware features to ray trace a game or run some local LLM. We're just taking some photos, making calls, getting map navigation, messaging, interacting with CRUD apps, and web browsing. None of that requires the latest hardware, and especially Apple hardware from 8 years ago is more than capable of handling it smoothly.
Ask anyone who had to deal with supporting IE back in the day what the cost to the world is fort supporting tech laggards. They are an anchor on tech growth and a real issue.
If you're running an insecure device past it's support life it's your responsibility and your fault if it's used to attack others. You are fully to blame for choosing to use something past it's serviced life. You cannot expect companies to support old software forever.
Currently replying from my iPhone 16 pro (granted, not old by any means) on the iOS 26 dev beta. MOST things actually feel smoother/snappier than iOS 18. Safari is a joy to use from a performance perspective.
It’s in beta so ofc I’m getting a ton of frame hitches, overheating, etc. but my summarized initial thoughts are “it’ll take some getting used to, but it feels pretty fast”
How can you get overheating and better performance? Is it just using the big cores for basic OS functions now?
My guess- GPU is probably being used a ton for the blurs causing the heat but the CPU is still free allowing for snappy scrolling performance.
> MOST things actually feel smoother/snappier than iOS 18
I have a feeling the whole smooth animations thing contributes to this a lot. Obsessing about the reaction time and feeling of how stuff comes on the screen. But yeah iPhone 16 pro is probably a bad performance test case
Real test probably iPhone 12 Pro. Anecdotally, I still see a tonnn of those in the wild.
how is battery-life?> It’s in beta so ofc I’m getting a ton of frame hitches, overheatingSince overheating was already mentioned, I give you one guess how that affects battery life.
After using it for a couple more days, battery life hasn't really changed from 18. I'm tempted to say that it's better but I don't want to make any claims before I actually track battery life across a week and compare it to my battery life pre-update.
The overheating is a common occurrence, but it doesn't persist. It seems to be certain things (setting the animated backgrounds in iMessage is a good example), but the moment I'm not doing one of those things the temp feels fine. My battery does drop a percent or two during those cases (which sucks), but my typical use of the phone hasn't yielded any noticeable battery life loss compared to 18.5
These transparency effects have been in macOS, ipadOS, iOS, and tvOS for years though?
There's a difference between something like a transparent background (you can run i3/picom on a potato) and having to composite many little UI elements to render a frame.
I can think of a couple of creative ways to dramatically optimize rendering of these effects. There is probably quite some batching and reordering possible without affecting correctness.
Ceteris paribus your performance is always going to be substantially worse even with tons of fancy tricks. Those also get much harder to implement when you're building a complete UI toolkit that has to support a ton of stuff rather than just writing first-party apps/OS components.
I think that the batching that I have in mind would work especially well with complex layouts. The thing to realize is that even if you have tons of elements on a screen, their visual components aren't actually stacked deeply in most cases and the type and order of applied effects is quite similar for large groups of elements. This allows for pretty effective per-level batching in hierarchies, even if elements don't have the same parents.
"ceteris paribus" - "all else equal"
Right. My point is the response to this is "well if we optimize it more we'll improve performance", but oftentimes if you optimized the existing code you would also improve performance. Your end state is still worse.
Is it really worse if the GPU spends maybe 0.5ms more per frame on these effects? I'd be surprised if a good implementation adds much more to the per frame rendering time.
The consideration for mobile devices (laptops, tablets, and phones make up the bulk of apple's hardware sales) is more power consumption.
But even then it doesn't matter in practice. I dare you to measure the battery life impact of this change.
Thanks. Wasn't familiar with that latin
The reality distortion field is back, it seems.
> At a previous company, we were forbidden from using translucency (with a few exceptions) because of the performance cost of blending.
I imagine this was on mobile devices.
Blending was relatively expensive on GPUs from Imagination Technologies and their derivatives, including all Apple GPUs. This is because these GPUs had relatively weak shader processors and relied instead on dedicated hardware to sort geometry so that the shader processor had to do less work than on a traditional GPU.
Other GPUs vendors rely more on beefier shader processors and less on sorting geometry (e.g. Hierarchical-Z). This turned out to be a better approach in the long term, especially once game engines started relying on deferred shading anyway, which is in essence a software-based approach that sorts geometry first before computing the final pixel colors.
Modern iOS and Mac devices have plenty of GPU power for a shader effect. They already do one with the translucent blue.
Interestingly, in iOS 18, suppressing transparency (there’s a setting for it) makes performance worse, not better. The UI lags significantly more with transparency disabled. I expect it will be the same with iOS 26: there will be setting to reduce the transparency (which I find highly distracting) but it will make performance actually worse…
Thanks for this insight. It's very counter intuitive. Normally transparency is additional work for a GPU.
I had "Reduce Transparency" check-box in settings turned on because I distaste semit-transparent interfaces. Was not noticing performance problems except one application - Ogranics Maps which were unusably slow after switching to another app and returning to maps so I had to restart it freqently (swipe up). I was thinking that the problem is with Ogranics Maps code.
After seeing this comment re-enabled transparency (iOS default) and Ogranics Maps working fast even if I switch between Organic Maps and other apps!
It potentially only applies to older iPhones, I have an iPhone 12, what’s yours?
Also reported here for example:
https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/1d2ncvu/if_your_old...
I use iPhone SE 3rd gen, accordig to wikipedia it's on A15 Bionic SoC, newer than in iPhone 12 (A14 Bionic) but still far from the latest.
Did suppressing transparency also turn on processor throttling or something too? Like putting the device in a power saver mode?
My phone is always in power save mode. Re-enabling transparency actually made the UI less jerky. It was mostly the keyboard that became unresponsive, I could type 15-20 letters while it froze and it would then „catch up“.
Also reported here for example: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255911835
Re-enabling transparency improved this a lot, also keyboard still hangs a bit from time to time. I’m always in power save mode, on an iPhone 12, running iOS18.
> This is also likely a performance nightmare. Funny that they mention that "new hardware has enabled us to..." which means that this will perform poorly on old devices.
Not sure if it is planned obsolescence but it certainly is an upsell to upgrade.
I think brand most recent iPhones are ridiculously powerful for their average use, so I don't think this would be an issue.
For older models, on the other hand, it would be an issue, and will put pressure to people to buy a new one.
Translucency being a main feature of Mac OS X is decades old at this point. I remember a magazine article touting it as an advantage over the upcoming release of Windows XP!
> Funny that they mention that "new hardware has enabled us to..." which means that this will perform poorly on old devices.
They're going to backport this? I seriously doubt it.
It runs on iPhone 11 and later.
> At a previous company, we were forbidden from using translucency (with a few exceptions) because of the performance cost of blending. There are debugging tools we'd use fairly often to confirm that all layers were opaque.
I feel like a few years back when I still used an Intel macbook i noticed an increase in battery life and less frames dropping (like during 'Expose' animations) by disabling transparency in Accessibility settings.
I think this was after the BIg Sur update.
These modern chips have so much graphics processing capability, I think they just throw the problem at the hardware and let it do its thing.
It may not be overt, but it also seems they are working to justify the hardware with the software.
Yes, but I think it’s about giving the consumer “more” so that the upgrade train doesn’t stall out and stop moving. They need everyone upgrading iPhones every 3 years and,people won’t do that for just an abstract “it’s faster.”
This reminds me of disabling the Windows Vista translucent UI to claw back performance on my crappy Gateway laptop in uni.
Meh, Vista laptops could run lots of translucency fine (well as long as they were actualy Vista era laptops and not just XP era laptops with Vista installed)
you just proved that MSFT released slow OS to force people refresh hardware.
Plus, vista was released in 2007, XP SP2 (the most popular version) was in 2004. so its like ~3 years diff. So its not like hardware has progressed in 3 years, its more like new software got significantly slower
I don't think upgrading was the reason for Vista performance. MS wasn't in the hardware business back then (and is just a marginal player even today).
They WAY overreached in their goals with Longhorn. When they finally decided to cut back features to something actually attainable, they didn't have enough time to make a high-performance OS.
Windows 7 was a well-loved rebrand of what was essentially just a Windows Vista service pack and improved performance (though it was still too heavy for a lot of the older machines people tried to upgrade to Vista). If they'd have cut back on their goals earlier, Windows 7 is likely a lot closer to what would have shipped as Vista.
A lot of problems was simply a fight with device makers and shit drivers, to be quite honest.
Windows 7 benefited from coming later with Vista being the battleground in which vendors were forced to update to NT6.0 models.
It's almost like they said the same thing: Funny that they mention that "new hardware has enabled us to..."
oh wait. it's not like they did. they did say it.
I agree, I think it extends to anybody who wants a calmer experience or has vision trouble or strain. I guess you can turn those options off but if the aesthetic appeal of the design is based on them then I assume we'll be getting a second-class version of it. I was already leaning towards switching to Linux for other reasons but I think this is the thing that finally pushes me there. I think optimizing for VisionOS is quite a bad idea from a UX POV, since they're two entirely different usecases. With augmented reality you need and want to see things in the background, whereas on other devices you don't. It's a fairly fundamental difference, and it's sad that they chose to go this way in my opinion.
To me it looks plain ugly, especially with all the bounces and transforms. Look at those sliders and toggles..
It's straight from the 2000s, with Linux users using Compiz and... Amethyst(?), stuffing their entire desktop full with gaudy transparency, transforms, jiggles and bounces.
More of a nit, but the sentence
is so ironic and funny. No one noticed how talking about "harmony" whilst having one single platform use a codename next to the version number just screams inattention to detail?The new design extends across iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS Tahoe 26, watchOS 26, and tvOS 26 to establish even more harmonyThey switched the positions of the codename and version this time (macOS 15 Sequoia to macOS Tahoe 26). I'd give it one more version cycle until the codenames go away.
Or maybe they standardise on the codename across platforms? If they're going to aim for meaningful cross-compatibility, then that would make a lot more sense than confusing, boring version numbers.
Please no. I can never remember which Cali area we're on. I almost always know which year it is. This has been long overdue. Should have learned their lesson from OS X and gone that way after iOS 10 the latest.
Thought you guys were just being whiney until I looked at the linked “beautiful new design” page and saw the screen shots they selected. Literally gives me a headache to look at the first sample and I am one of the people that miss the candy coated look of early OS X.
The section on macOS only used the name Tahoe, like the 26 idea hadn’t made it to the copy for that section.
This is an existing and somewhat nitpicky issue, but it's also annoying how they specifically insist on rounded corners "because that matches all modern devices" in the announcement. Pretty much all third party external monitors don't, and even their latest top line laptops only have them at the top of the screen. So we're stuck with these dumb little triangles of background peeking out. It's kind of the "charging port on the bottom of the magic mouse" of MacOS.
Rounded corners vex me so much.
I can barely cope with their being no option to turn them off on Mac, especially for windows. I literally had to make my background pure black because the few pixels of backgrounds always showing pissed me off so much.
It makes taking nice screenshots so much more awkward, if not impossible. Just give us a quick toggle option, please!
Command+option+shift+4 then press the space bar to take a screenshot of a single window (shadow included).
FYI for anyone not aware it's CMD + Shift + 4 (no option)
Oops. Thank you!
You know something that almost never has rounded corners? Glass.
I have several objects on my desk made of glass with rounded corners. The glass lunch container I ate out of a little bit ago. A squircle glass bowl on my desk holding various nicknacks. The glass on the front of my phone. The glass I'm drinking out of right now has rounded corners. I used to have a kitchen table that had the top as one giant sheet of glass as a square with rounded corners. The windows in my car have some corners rounded. Tons of glass things have rounded corners.
And don't forget eyeglasses, which are named for the fact that they are made of glass, and which very often have rounded corners.
Here I was looking through them and not even thinking about them. Yes!
No you don't.
Just kidding: Yeah, it's just that when I think about a digital glass effect it feels more right with square corners than rounded corners. Because glass windows which we look through usually have square corners. Says I, who spend most of my time looking through a curved motorcycle helmet visor.
Rounded corners is easier than straight. When you work glass, its usually somewhere between a liquid and non-Newtonian fluid. Molding it into round frames is trivial.
That's why we have round glass coasters, round lenses, round glasses for drinking, etc.
Almost every common glass object I can think of has rounded corners. The only obvious exception is most household window panes. I have to think pretty hard to come up with another one...maybe aquarium tanks? Some mirrors and glass tables, although the images that comes to mind for those are just as likely to be round as square.
I'm very curious which items you went through before concluding that glass almost never has rounded corners.
I should have specified glass panels/panes, specifically windows and mirrors, which you mention.
These likely have small radius rounded corners too.
The fate of all perfectly squared glass sheets is to become quite round if you get them hot enough. If you get a moment, try looking up glass fusing. It is admittedly a niche hobby, but it's pretty interesting what starts happening when you apply a little heat.
"Turning off" could just put solid light/dark under the glass. That would be decent-looking (not much different than before), accessible, and easy to implement.
> I think optimizing for VisionOS
Yeah, this really looks like an Apple temper tantrum of "Nobody wants to program for the Vision Pro? Fine. We'll MAKE you program the iPhone like the Vision Pro. Take that developers. Now get back to doing our job for us, you lazy slobs."
What is the reasoning behind this comment?
This UI "update" is so obviously detrimental to anyone who doesn't have great 20ish-year-old eyesight, that it is going to negatively impact customer support costs, sales, engagement, etc.
So, you can either assume that Apple are blundering, incompetent dolts who have completely lost the plot (certainly possible) or that Apple has an actual purpose behind this.
If you ask for the purpose and the look at the GUI, you see Apple cramming a UI update targeted with the design language from AR (transparency behind everything, motion cues to activate orienting reflex, etc.) down the throats of all developers as opposed to just those on the Vision.
if you're switching to linux what device are you considering getting?
- [deleted]
Ironic that it's the 20th anniversary of this other design masterpiece:
https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Scree...
I don't know that a redesign was called for at all. I guess they needed to show something if Siri still isn't ready, but this is just not it.
I'd have personally hoped for them to beef up iCloud+ but I know it doesn't sell devices to the general user.
> I guess they needed to show something if Siri still isn't ready, but this is just not it.
This certainly is not that. Like it or not, a huge multi-OS redesign is not something you rush out for a keynote because your first choice didn't pan out at the last minute.
It's not something you rush out at the last minute, but it might be something you plan a long time ahead as "our interesting stuff might not work out, so let's do a huge redesign too to be confident we can pretend to be releasing something excitingly new either way".
(I don't particularly have an opinion that this was their line of thinking, just pointing out that for a company like Apple they would have been thinking "what if X isn't ready in time" months or even years before the point of actually knowing if X is it isn't ready on time.)
That's probably driven by some kind of an AR headset. AR can't properly render solids, so it is stuck with having everything transparent. Now it won't look worse than everything else.
Because everything else looks worse instead. That's one way to solve it, I guess.
Not autistic, but this is just so weird.
Why would you design readability and visibility to depend on chaotic, highly varied and probably sometimes bad underlying backgrounds?
I fail to see any systematic approach/ consistent design language at play here.
Let's hope this does not survive for long.
I’ve noticed a recurring theme on iOS where interactions intended for an app get trapped by the OS (especially multi-window interactions on iPad). The OS is less and less a foundation to support what you actually want, and more the product itself. If the actual content of the phones matters less than the fact that iOS itself is “the latest” then this makes perfect sense and is in line with the general momentum over the past several years.
Fully agree with your sentiment, and it was kinda sad to see the demo going there.
"And this is how easy I can replace this custom component with a new glass component...".
The whole thing is just wild.
There was plenty of UX enhancements which looked solid, but just for them to be paired with a design choice of N=1 elements is... well let's see if it pays off I guess?
>I fail to see any systematic approach/ consistent design language at play here.
O no, there is a systematic approach.
1. Bosses in UI division get promotions & raises for their new implementation of shiny
2. Marketing guys get to use their bird brains to promote shiny
3. Apple UX guys get to have their med prescriptions renewed
What does autism have to do with it?
Autistic people tend to have very different sensory sensitivities than neurotypical people. Most are very highly sensitive and tend have trouble picking out a signal when there’s too much noise around it.
To me, being socially awkward is kind of a secondary, less important trait, but that’s the one everyone seems to notice. We’re weird on the outside because inside, we’re dealing with overwhelming sensory input.
Whoops, I didn't see parent comment and thought the reply was to the submission. It seemed massively out of context but absolutely wasn't :-)
Curse HackerNews' narrow indents!
Check the parent comment.
Oh! I've long struggled with the narrow indents on Hacker News comments. I thought this was a reply to OP.
Thank you.
It is, once again, designing interfaces based on "vibes" instead of science or principles or used feedback, optimising for looking good on screenshots and marketing materials and not for actual usability or user friendly was. With "vibes" here standing for whatever some SV asshole thinks it's cool and modern.
Alegria, flat design, pastel colors, or unholy amounts of whitespace. It's been the story of the last 15 years of UI design at least.
> , designing interfaces based on "vibes" instead of science or principles or used feedback
Well, this is what Apple does, and the reason I hate their devices with a passion. It always was style over substance.
You must be too young to remember because a lot of the early user interface design principles, based on actual research, were pioneered by Bruce Tognazzini and Jef Raskin at Apple. Tog on Interface and Tog on Software Design were THE bibles back in the day and Apple's Human Interface Guidelines showed how a company could and should adopt consistent user experience across all of their products.
It honestly saddens me how far Apple has fallen.
And Larry Tesler, who was a particular champion of usability testing and important in the development of the Human Interface Group. Larry cared a lot about usability.
When I was at NeXT, Steve Jobs told me that if it was up to him, Apple would get rid of the Human Interface Group. (Steve was rather hostile to Larry.)
Later, when it was up to Steve, he did exactly what he said: he got rid of HIG.
I think it’s easier to sell visual design than it is to sell usability because people see visual design immediately, but it takes time and experience to see and understand usability (and some users never seem to consciously notice it at all).
I had no idea Steve Jobs felt that way about Larry Tesler. There were so many great UI experts at Apple, like Larry Tesler, Bruce Tognazzini, and Don Norman. While I love Mac OS X for its stability and its Unix support, I prefer the interface of the classic Mac OS, and it seemed to me that many third-party applications of the era were even more compliant with Apple’s human interface guidelines compared to later eras.
A dream desktop OS for me would be something with a classic Mac interface and with conformity to the Apple human interface guidelines of the 1990s, but with Lisp- or Smalltalk-like underpinnings to support component-based software. It would be the ultimate alternate universe Mac OS, the marriage of Smalltalk (with Lisp machine influence) with Macintosh innovations. Of course, there were many projects at Apple during the 80s and 90s that could’ve led to such a system.
Now that I’m a community college professor, I have more free time in the summer months for side projects...
> It honestly saddens me how far Apple has fallen.
Same. For just one example, consider how submenus work. You don't notice when they're done right, but when they're done poorly, they will disappear when you try to choose a submenu item, or stick around when you expect them to go away. Getting them right is subtle; Apple got them right, and plenty of web pages still get them wrong.
That's interface design. Flashy translucency effects are something else.
Isn't macOS the one, though, which immediately closes menus if you accidentally click or release over a divider? That always bugs me.
> You must be too young to remember
Hopefully. I wouldn't mind being young. I am also not a designer, so UI/UX history may be lost on me.
I can only say that the only Apple product I genuinely enjoyed from a design perspective was the iPod Nano I bought sometime in early 2000s.
I feel the same way about Google's design and development principles. What the fuck happened?
You mean how they heavily researched their latest redesign of Android? https://design.google/library/expressive-material-design-goo...
> M3 Expressive designs were overwhelmingly rated higher for attributes such as “energetic,” “emotive,” “positive vibe,” “creative,” “playful,” and “friendly.”
Heavy research indeed
I can't tell if you're joking. M3 Expressive is godawful and throws away so many hard-won lessons in UX R&D.
I spent some time navigating through the linked page.
I don't doubt designers spent a lot of time researching it. It still reads like an incredible amount of carefully crafted bullshit.
The more the design of things "evolve", the more I appreciate designs that simply don't.
Well to be fair their research confirmed that half of 55+ year-olds didn't like the new design
Funny, someone else mentioned in another reply that I may be too young to remember something from like 25 years ago.
I'm a Schrodinger's old man.
Do you really think that Apple, of all companies, did a cross-platform UI refresh based entirely on vibes without considering user taste, usability, accessibility, etc?
You've already judged the system as only good for "looking good on screenshots and marketing materials" when you haven't even seen anything other than the announcement.
I think you're holding it wrong
> Do you really think that Apple, of all companies, did a cross-platform UI refresh based entirely on vibes without considering user taste, usability, accessibility, etc?
Yes, I think they would do that.
Lots of historical examples of Apple making weird design choices for decades now. I'm old enough to remember the hockey-puck mouse on the original iMac.
Also, here's a list of bugs I've personally observed over just the last two months: https://gist.github.com/BenWheatley/29a3c22203d90ae80465cdb1...
3.3 trillion dollar market cap, and the *clipboard* is no longer reliable. The mail badge is an unreliable count. The wallpaper sometimes disappears. The alarms don't play out of whatever speaker or headphones you're using for all your other audio.
> Do you really think that Apple, of all companies, did a cross-platform UI refresh based entirely on vibes without considering user taste, usability, accessibility, etc?
Yes, and where have you been for the last two decades? :) The last time Apple did actual UX research must have been in the late 1990s.
Exposé and multi touch seem too well designed for no research.
Of course they would. Have you used Sequoia? It's a hot dumpster fire that's caused me unending frustration with how they've broken the bluetooth and networking stack, introduced unprecedented instability (anyone else's macbooks suddenly crashing and restarting while the lid is closed and it's in sleep mode?) and a host of other issues. Apples has been taking one step forward and two steps back with their software and design for a long time, and they have increasingly preferred form over function, and hidden, obtuse UX.
If their hardware wasn't so damn good for my professional work, I wouldn't go near this child slavery enabling shitshow of a corporation. I don't know if I've ever felt as trivialized or patronized as watching someone in formal dress talk to me about how many new ways I can express myself to my friends via emoji or whatever else as I have when watching Apple keynotes. It feels like they've tried to commoditize interaction even more than Meta. It all feels so hollow. You can tell Steve is gone.
> Do you really think that Apple, of all companies, did a cross-platform UI refresh based entirely on vibes without considering user taste, usability, accessibility, etc?
We are talking about the same company that to make a the MCP a little bit thinner released that crap with only two USBC ports, forcing everyone to carry fucking dongles everywhere.
And let's not forget that awful butterfly keyboard.
So much usability, so much accessibility. No vibes, no sir.
Perhaps they learned something from that? Look at modern MBP models which have MagSafe, HDMI, and SD card slots.
I think the implication was that if they went on anything but vibes, they would have never removed MagSafe, HDMI, or SD card slots.
Mr. Vibe works for OpenAI now.
Mr. Vibe wasn't the issue. Tim Apple was the one who gave his leash infinite slack, and he's still there calling the shots. Probably conferring equally stupid protections onto whoever replaced Ive internally.
Lord only knows Altman is probably doting on him in the same way. This industry just never learns.
Are you telling me that the trillion dollar company had to actually release a laptop with only two USBC ports to "learn" that people need more ports on a laptop? And you do that on a straight face on a sequence where it was claimed that they carefully consider usability and accessibility?
And yes, I am aware those silly toy computers have a couple more ports nowadays, I have to use that on a daily basis for work.
Absolufuckingloothy.
The Apple of today is nowhere near what the Apple of Steve Jobs was.
Bugs galore, UX issues galore. Overall it's a mashup of various staff egos over everything.
I’d bet there’s a toggle that dramatically increases opacity or eliminates transparency entirely while keeping the shading and gloss. If it exists I’m sure it’ll be popular.
Probably, but they tend to also make for an ugly look, like the “Increase Contrast” setting in iOS. The other way around would be better: Have an accessible down-to-earth default, and a secondary “fancy visuals” mode for those who want that.
I have no complaints with the UI settings I use on iOS: reduce motion, reduce transparency, differentiate without color.
Given the huge change and sensitivity to accessibility I'm going to guess the opposite -- it will be designed to look nice without transparency.
"reduce motion" is gone in the new macOS beta.
no it isn't
the autistic user base is vastly smaller than the neurotypical user base. So it makes sense to ship settings that most people would like.
It’s simply a matter of “which settings would MOST of our users want enabled by default?”
I do agree that the accessibility settings can make ios pretty ugly though. It’s a real shame. :(
The version most people would like is usually the first or second iteration. Then designers need to change things to keep it looking new and fresh and the changes are inherently going to be worse because that's the only option available.
I’m don’t think that most users want a fancy new look that also decreases usability and readability. At least that’s not the impression I get with the users I talk to. Maybe most users let themselves be impressed in a marketing sense, but that doesn’t mean they would actively want it by themselves.
[dead]
I'm hoping that's true and there's still an option for a flat, minimal look.
so all they had to do to get people to quit bitching about the flat look was to introduce the translucent look!
updating ticket to closed
Did burntalmonds bitch about the flat look before? Or was this the fallacy where people assume everyone else is 1 person?
or more like the fallacy that people can come online and snipe a thread when they miss the joke and think everyone else is serious trying to prove a fallacy. let's get meta
I hope it removes the shading and gloss too. Literally nothing in this design update is an improvement to accessibility.
Ever since we didn't use bolder text for bright text on dark backgrounds (dark mode) to keep with typographical principles, it looks like we're doubling down on the readability sins.
Surely anyone who's fiddled with the caption background opacity on their TV or video player knows this is a mess?
Would have been nice for someone to explain why we're getting Windows Aero[1] for main content and not just bezels.
I don't think this design language is mutually exclusive with readability, it actually looks really cool in many ways; I just can't fathom why the examples in the presentation seemed good enough to show.
I'm on the same boat. The specularity around edges don't match the refraction patterns and it throws me off every time. Somehow they thought this wouldn't affect readability of whatever button or panel it's applied to. They also use the specular bits as a border that's also so uneven depending on which direction light hits from. I noticed that some of the dark panels had almost no borders at the lower right corner.
Another bit I'd like to pick on is the speed at which transparent context bubbles spring out. Waiting for a panel to bounce back and forth so that you know where to put your finger next is so bad as a UX choice that I'm losing confidence in Apple.
From a visual point of view, there is now flat design mixed with this voluminous transparent design which is a weird combination of skeuomorphic and abstract designs in one. I really don't know what they were thinking.
macOS (I'm still on Sonoma tho): System Settings -> Accessibility -> Display -> Reduce Transparency. (I also recommend Reduce Motion, but YMMV - some animations are really helpful.)
iOS: Settings -> Accessibility -> Display & Text Size -> Reduce Transparency.
You're welcome.
Everyone affected by this will know to look for those deeply nested setting, right? Or will the 70 year old with bad eyesight just stop being able to use their phone? Or use it a lot less, or be frustrated and stressed by it? A lot of people don’t bother fiddling with their settings and just take what they’re given.
I’m not just thinking of myself here. I’m concerned that a lot of people who don’t consider themselves disabled will be disabled by this.
My 70 year old relatives seem to have no problem finding the setting that makes everything on the phone 2x bigger. Probably because Apple is good at this and offers it up as an option in the OS onboarding and after every major update.
It’ll be fine.
On Mac OS the first significant thing on screen after turning it on for the first time are the accessibility settings with screenshots and animations to explain every option. You can also access those options with the Spotlight search, typing "tran" will give you the "reduce transparency" toggle directly in the search results without having to open settings first (though to be fair the search indexing is a bit lacking, like on iOS - the animation toggle is called "reduce motion" and so it can't be found via typing in "animation").
Apple designs stuff this way on purpose. They think it's neat to "discover" something that should be obvious. The new camera app is a perfect example of this. No indication that swiping up from the bottom brings up a menu for camera controls. The fact any of these obviously terrible design and implementation choices are praised is baffling.
You can also disable animations on iOS.
When switching between screens, there’s just a long pause instead of the animation. These pauses drive me crazy, it’s simply not possible to configure the device to be responsive.
> You can also disable animations on iOS.
No, you can not. You can reduce _some_ animations, but most of them actually remain. Including the most annoying ones like the slowwwww screen switching, or the bottom sheet animation.
An amusing anecdote: I have animation turned off entirely on my Android phone, and I was demoing an app on it. People commented how amazingly fast it felt compared to iOS, simply because there were no animations.
I'm just as annoyed by this, but from what I understand, the animations are used to hide loading times, so the delay is not optional.
That explanation makes no sense in this case. The workspace transition animation takes a full second, on extremely performant devices that can keep up their pace up until the OS swaps around 15GB, at which point animations start lagging so they actually make it even worse. Meanwhile a Linux setup will switch workspaces instantly. Same for Windows 11 if you turn off animations, by the way.
This animation slows every transition by one second including entering and leaving fullscreen mode, because on Mac OS fullscreen works by moving the window to a new workspace. There is no justification for this.
They're not [always] about hiding loading times. Even switching from an app to the desktop screen has a slow animation, or switching back and forth between two running apps.
macOS is awful in so many places. I would prefer if they had an option to disable only some of the animations. "Show Desktop" is so sudden and zoomy I almost get motion sickness, but Mission Control is more subtle and really helps me figure out which window is which.
My strategy for multiple desktops is to not use them at all. But I'm enjoying the comfort of a 43" screen, so all the windows I need just fit.
IMHO iOS strikes an almost perfect balance. It animates things in response to continuous drag gestures (notification centre, app switching), but almost nothing else. Maybe macOS could take a page from that book? E.g. dragging the menu bar; the animation plays out in direct response to user action.
Yeah I'm pretty sure that setting has been there since Yosemite. That was the version that first prominently featured blurred translucency. (The transparency in earlier versions like Mavericks was really subtle and would not need such a setting: see for yourself in this image found by Googling https://i0.wp.com/morrick.me/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/001-....)
Thanks.
Transparency confuses me regularly - and I then waste cycles trying to understand why a particular heading has a strange colour before I work out it is bleeding through from some unobvious background thing.
I'd argue that it doesn't even look that cool or futuristic. Kind of looks like Windows 7.
That said, Windows 7 had an option to turn off all the translucency, so hopefully Apple ripped that idea, too.
Completely agree, takes me back to the days of Compiz Fusion, wavy windows and fire trails.
There has been a reduce transparency option in iOS and it has this effect on the new OS.
https://preview.redd.it/zzxh77iv906f1.png?width=2358&format=...
Fortunately you can turn off the transparency in accessibility options.
https://preview.redd.it/zzxh77iv906f1.png?width=2358&format=...
+1. I wish they would concentrate more on bug fixes instead of adding “features” you have to turn off to make the OS usable.
The way you phrased it makes it sound like everyone will have to turn it off to make the OS “usable” - which is clearly false.
I agree that these changes are distracting. I don’t want effects that change things as I move it. I want fewer distractions and don’t want things all over the place.
I liked webpages in the 1990s before the blink and marquee tags. I wasn’t excited by skeuomorphic design, but it was at least fun. Then there was flat blocky design which really sucked. Then that was undone by putting curves back in, and it was ok. Then people started adding a shit ton of empty space everywhere which was the first time when Millennials started f-ing up design. I still blame them today because they’re still the most opinionated and make terrible, TERRIBLE design decisions. I don’t think I’ll ever be happy again with interface design. It’s super f-d.
Accessibility aside, I don't see the appeal in this design. I find the current design quite pleasant and usable. Translucent 3D text sounds like teenage-me messing around in Photoshop in the early 2000s.
The new glass design feels fresh and playful. Like a more refined luxury version of Frutiger Aero. The current design is functional, but it feels pretty stale and mundane after years.
That is actually a feature. An UI should never be, under any circumstances, in line with a trend, fresh or different for the sake of being different.
It should, however, be as invisible as possible. Being only functional is a compliment.
Huge disagreement here. Maybe true for something critical like the control board on some heavy machinery.
But for something like a phone or messaging app, I want to see the return of fun, creative, and unique. We had such a great era of design around 2006-2013 and then it all rapidly went incredibly dull since then.
I want to see creative menus back, I want to see whacky UIs like windows media player skins back. Ultimately for basic stuff of low importance like your phone, the most absolutely optimal UI doesn’t matter, much like I don’t care for the most absolutely optimal furniture. Its visual appeal matters.
My phone is the control board of my life. It is critical infrastructure and serious.
No one is getting mangled in machinery if I take 100ms longer to send a text message. There’s time to spare to actually enjoy the design.
911/112 calls are still made via phones, and I have to say that even making a simple phone call has, at times, become highly problematic on these new and very complex smart-phones.
With that said, my pants' pocket still manages to somehow initiate the "emergency call" procedure every couple of months or so, I have no idea how that happens (I don't even know how I'd do that with the phone placed in front of me).
> Pant's pockets
Yep. I keep making accidental emergency calls too. Another interesting incident which happened only once:
I accidentally opened instagram, a group chat, and changed the background to bubbles or something like that, all with my phone in my pocket. I guess I put my phone into my pocket unlocked by accident because I can't imagine accidentally typing my PIN.
But what if animated and "playful" do not make the UI enjoyable?
>We had such a great era of design around 2006-2013 and then it all rapidly went incredibly dull since then.
I agree with the huge disagreement. That 2006-2013 era was, in my opinion, horrendous and takes the second spot as an offender just after “peak flat”.
However, I never denied that visual appeal matters. But design is how it holistically works, not how it looks.
Maybe, at some point, some team will get back to Dieter Rams 10 principles and hammer it into an UX experience. We were so close in the 90’s.
Maybe we can agree on: make the os maximally unobtrusive by default but include options to customise to taste?
It's Aqua 2.0, or at least, I hope it's going to be like that.
Apple know their customers and what they like.
I am actually Apple-phobic, a diehard linux user and incapable of doing simple tasks on Apple products. However, I think they have got a winner here. Although people talk of Vista Aero, it is more sophisticated than that, and, when this rolls out, Android will look distinctly old fashioned and low status, even if it is better as far as accessibility. I like what they have done here, even if it is not for me.
Disagree on almost all points. Glass and the relative absence of color, texture and patterns make it look cold, detached, almost inhuman and absent of anything your eyes could rest on. There are ways to make this approach look cool and futuristic, but it suffers from the same downside as a lot of the white/glassy modernist architecture: the human eye abhors lack of detail and natural/organic patterns and texture. (It makes for a great canvas for graffitti though...)
Meanwhile, Android's Material You/Expressive design language is taking almost an opposite approach. Personally, I prefer it to Liquid Glass by a wide margin.
Architecture without structural integrity is terrible no matter how it looks. User interfaces that aren't usable and clear are bad no matter how they look. Sure the human eye enjoys looking at trees with thousands of leaves, but you won't find a person who enjoys a UI with a thousand buttons on screen.
To me visual noise in user interfaces is a severe distraction and I tend to prefer applications with minimal UIs (not minimal features). I disabled text cursor blinking in the browser and use a program to auto-hide the mouse pointer after a few seconds because it can distract me from reading.
I do like this new UI Apple shows here, though I would probably get tired of the effects if I had to use it for extended periods of time. Just like animations look satisfying until you realize they slow down everything you do on the computer because often their main purpose is marketing and not usefulness.
Going from the ratio of adjectives on the page, it is 2.5 times less functional than beautiful.
It’s going to be really interesting to see how this UI paradigm pans out. I think this captures a shift toward the extreme in responsive, fluid, convergent, whatever-you-want-to-call-it, design.
We’ve had books/scrolls for thousands of years, laid out in beautiful proportion, and now it has all melted in the oven!
There is a 'Reduced transparency' mode which you can enable in system settings. Safe to assume this will still exist in the new OS versions.
This will be a massive improvement in usability over flat design, which made UIs only learnable by trial and error.
I don’t see a lot changing about the problem of labels and active controls still being hard to distinguish, and the like.
there is a setting labeled “increase contrast” under Accessibilitt > Display & Text Size. That may help? i haven’t tried it.
It helps only in some limited ways, while also making some elements look more ugly. It does too little to solve the overall issue.
There is, they outline it in this video. It looks like there are three ways to turn it off: high contrast, reduced motion, and frostier glass. So it looks like there's just a way to have a full basic icon with just the icon and the outline and a white background.
PSA: High Contrast mode on MacOS, incidentally, destroys theming on Microsoft Edge (I know, I’m a weirdo who uses Edge on Mac). I use theming to differentiate between several browser profiles. For months I thought Edge had decided they wanted the themes to be ultra lame and subtle, but it was my usage of that setting that broke it.
Besides that huge dealbreaker though, HC mode is amazing for people like me who think UIs should be clear, obvious, and functional first rather than “elegant” and pretty as the main priority.
The future is translucent tablets ( smart glass pads ). It's not about what this UI is - it's about where it's going. This is the UI to bridge to the next hardware modality and begin to train people to prepare for (at first) HUDs everywhere, then smartglass and holoprojective displays.
What the heck would I want translucent displays for? To be able to increase my screentime even more? And have a harder time reading stuff when I do?
Presumably the display can fade opaque, or translucent to give a readable background to text or when desired.
Many applications for see-through screens: HUDs, AR, literal camera viewfinder, tile-ability, low-weight.
Also just the general flex and coolness that a "no visible seams" (I mean no visible wires/metal) approach will bring - a case of form meeting function - the screen in the abstract sense is an abstract - a general portal through which anything can appear. A "pure screen" is the physical realization of that.
Haven't been able to turn it off yet. It's so awful looking and distracting, even with "reduce transparency" and "reduce motion" enabled. I actually think these settings are making it stutter more. It's definitely slower than iOS 18.
The translucent blur is... alright. The refracting edges look incredibly distracting for me.
Yep, nailed it. This is such regressive, ignorant junk. I mean... WTF? Welcome to the failed "transparent UI" fad of two decades ago. Apple tried to revive this trash a few years ago, but then seemed to back off (or maybe I just disabled it)... and now this?
Even for the current sorry state of Apple's design regime, this is disappointing. It's way beyond a squandering of desperately-needed-elsewhere engineering resources; it's a dated-looking degradation of usability (and potentially performance).
Depressing.
The "liquid glass" design changes shown by Apple look mostly like slight tinkering around the edges of how widgets look/feel. Way less of a design change than the move to flat design was.
Yes, knowing Apple, this has probably been in development for years and seen a million internal iterations.
I think it's going to look alright on iOS/iPadOS where apps are inherently full-screen and the "background images" are really "foreground content" where you do kind of want the controls to "recede".
On the other hand, I can already tell I'm going to despise this on macOS. I always work with windows maximized on my laptop, because I just want to concentrate on the document I'm editing, or code I'm writing, and have maximum space for that. And the past couple of versions of macOS by default make your menu bar a weird pale purple or pink or green that is hugely distracting because it's a blurred image of your desktop. Fortunately you can turn that off with the "Reduce Transparency" accessibility option, which I do.
But the idea that people using Macs want to always being seeing some colorful desktop image around the edges and at the top just seems bizarre to me. iPhones and iPads are more for consuming, so this makes more sense. And within apps on Macs this seems like it'll be fine. But I hate that it doesn't seem designed to let me "tune out" the desktop image while I use an app. It's taking existing translucency and just making it worse...
Someone put the Windows phone screen against this design, with opaque colorful blocks and clear text - and I was like "yep, I wish we go back to that. That is the future."
I'm sure they will continue to allow disabling transparency in accessibility settings, given that the current OS version has transparency throughout which can already be so disabled.
I'm not autistic and I don't like this upgrade, at all.
It looks so tacky.
They say the text color adapts to the background based on contrast.
I'm just wondering if Apple is going to make matching CSS updates in Safari so web app developers have matching visuals.
I'm just wondering if Apple is going to make matching CSS updates in Safari so web app developers have matching visuals.
https://webkit.org/blog/16929/contrast-color/color: contrast-color(rebeccapurple);The problem is the background can be more than 1 color.
Which is why the gaussian blur was invented...
People pretend this isn't a solved problem.
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Yeah. On Windows some apps (the new Terminal) used to have the opacity set to 0.9 or something by default. First thing I did was set it to 1.0. Having the background bleed through is distracting for no real value.
I’m usually a big fan of Apple design and UX. Any change faces some initial resistance, but this is first real “Ugh, hard no” reaction I can recall after seeing some of those.
Same same. And yes, I hate the translucency in Windows terminal as well and immediately turned it off. I do not understand the insanity of turning these things on by default.
A "hard no" is where I am with this "improvement".
There will undoubtedly be optional low-transparency and high-contrast modes, just as there are in iOS now.
Apple is pretty good on accessibility but sometimes it does involve changing some settings.
I find transparency annoying enough that if it becomes more prevalent on MacOS in a way I can't turn off, I may switch to Linux for that reason alone.
You can turn off the current transparency (just search for transparency in settings)
It's not a layer … it's a new material
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Their existing glass effect is distracting enough.
So change the background to solid color then.
I used to like solid background, but lately screens got so good that it makes sense to put something up.
Background meant anything behind. Not wallpaper.
I imagine they overdid just in case and will receive enough feedback to dial back the translucency just a tad.
> accessibility nightmare.
It’s also annoying, slow you down, and anyway useless if you don’t have a physical issue with them.
i think apple has historically always shipped their products with plenty of accessibility settings. Even today it’s possible to easily increase contrast, reduce transparency, reduce animations, and way more on ios.
i’m not too worried, but let’s see. The new design is super ugly though.
iOS currently has "Reduce Transparency" in Accessibility settings. I suspect they will have some sort of similar feature across devices. What will it look like... that's the real question.
Apple takes accessibility more seriously than most. I would be shocked if there isn't a setting to instantly remedy this for people with any sort of vision issue.
I bet there will be, but let not dismiss that good accessibility is when the UI is readable/accessible by default.
Anyway, I also bet they will tone this transparency stuff down a lot in the betas leading to the stable version in September. iOS 7 all over again…
Let's also not ignore that, whether apple has actually achieved this or not, the highly-accessible version of something necessarily excludes many design idioms and either looks worse or relegates one to a limited range of creative expression. As such, most designers will not want to design for that by default.
''Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like,'' says Steve Jobs, Apple's C.E.O. ''People think it's this veneer -- that the designers are handed this box and told, 'Make it look good!' That's not what we think design is. It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.''[1]
Interface design is not a place for unlimited creative expression. But recent user interface trends exclude many design idioms and relegate one to a limited range of creative expression also. Some people think they look better. Some do not.
Accessible interfaces have become uglier in ways which did not improve accessibility. And recent trends have made them less accessible in some ways also. Choose not enough contrast or too much. Choose contrast or color where both were before.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/30/magazine/the-guts-of-a-ne...
Since when did we care about what designers want? It's called User Experience, not Designer Experience. The target audience is not people who are intimately familiar with digital idioms, that's why skeuomorphism is remembered more fondly than the iOS 7 design.
Reminds me of when Jony Ive had the run of the place and gave us the bending iPhone and MacBooks with no ports. All for the sake of "Designer Experience".
In some ways. But they have many failings. It’s completely Impossibly to make the gui larger, for instance.
Not so.
https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/zoom-in-iph3e2e367e/i...
https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/customize-the-text-si...
Try making the window chrome bigger on macOS. You can’t do it.
You absolutely can do this: https://support.apple.com/en-il/guide/mac-help/mchl86d72b76/...
That isn’t an actual solution as it requires running the display at a non-native resolution and thus seriously compromises text readability. It’s basically just low tech digital zoom.
I want to make things bigger in pixel resolution, not make pixels bigger.
It's enough of an actual solution for Apple to have been using as all of their best-selling laptops' default setting since they switched to Retina in 2012.
Seems like they could not choose between flat and not flat.
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> This seems like an accessibility nightmare.
One of the accessibility features included in macOS for visually impaired people lets you reduce transparency for exactly this reason.
I’m bothered by how swaywm leaks the background into transparent gaps in windows, but I should be thankful tbf— macOS is just another level of nightmare entirely.
they will not. Apple has accessibility features for all of the use cases and surely for this as well.
Also, Apple is already bad at translucent UX as if it were beneath their consideration.
If there's a bright blue background behind the control panel buttons (like the wifi button), you can't tell if it's blue because it's on or because it's off but the background is blue.
Slide down the control panel when the blue weather app is open to kinda see what I mean.
> I’m autistic, but this won’t only affect autistic people. A lot of people are going to have problems with this. I hope there’s a very prominent way to turn it off.
How can that possibly be? Didn't he say it will: "bring joy and delight to _every_ user experience"
That means YOU as well. No way he could over-selling something. Inconceivable.
Apple has historically been above average in terms of considering usability. So, I think seeing this new design as being asinine is not an unexpected opinion.
