Apple’s Liquid Glass user interface isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Apple’s new design language stems from a multi-year development process that began with visionOS. Given the extensive timelines and deep integration across iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and other platforms (as seen with the unified rollout in 2025–2026 versions like iOS 26 and macOS Tahoe), any significant pivot or reversal from Liquid Glass would almost certainly require years to plan, develop, and implement.
Mark Gurman for Bloomberg News:
To that end, the latest internal versions of iOS 27 and macOS 27 don’t reflect major design changes, and there’s no sign that another overhaul is currently in active development.
Liquid Glass was a massive undertaking across Apple’s entire design organization, and I haven’t been able to find any evidence suggesting there were designers internally opposed to it during development. Apple’s executive team was also fully behind the interface.
In interviews during WWDC last year, Apple marketing chief Greg Joswiak and software engineering head Craig Federighi were both effusive about the new design language. “Glass has some really useful properties when it comes to user interfaces,” Federighi told Joanna Stern. “It just looks super cool.” Joswiak added that users “love” the visionOS interface that inspired it.
And if Apple has actually entered what some think is a new design era, it’s been a bumpy start. The first icons rolled out under the current regime — the ones for Apple’s new Creator Studio apps bundle — are some of the most underwhelming from the company in a while.…
There are legitimate concerns about readability and the way certain transparent elements overlap with text and icons. And while the design works particularly well on the iPhone and iPad, it still needs refinement on the Mac and Apple Watch.
For that reason, I expect years of gradual improvements — much like what Apple went through following the introduction of iOS 7.
MacDailyNews Take: It’ll take time, but it’ll get there. Liquid Glass has already improved during the first beta rounds. The decision to speed up the spread of Liquid Glass (developed over years for visionOS) across Apple’s platforms was recent, due to Apple’s AI misses, stumbles, and delays.
Liquid Glass is a six-month rush job because it’s meant to be a shiny object to distract from the current lack of Apple Intelligence innovations as that catch-up work continues, BUT, Liquid Glass shows much promise!
Yes, Liquid Glass sometimes presents legibility issues, but those can be solved and, likely, are being solved as you read this.
When, not if, Apple launches a Siri — or whatever name with which they, hopefully, rebrand it; “Siri” is just too tarnished at this point — that is not an abject neglected embarrassment (reportedly by WWDC next June, at the very latest), Liquid Glass will be much further along and a lot of the current readability issues will have been tackled. – MacDailyNews, September 17, 2025
Please help support MacDailyNews — and enjoy subscriber-only articles, comments, chat, and more — by subscribing to our Substack: macdailynews.substack.com. Thank you!
Support MacDailyNews at no extra cost to you by using this link to shop at Amazon.
If Steve Jobs were still alive, Liquid Glass would not have been released without its legibility issues ironed out. Steve Jobs would’ve said, “It’s a piece of crap. Fix it!”
The “next bench syndrome”:
“Liquid Glass was a massive undertaking across Apple’s entire design organization, and I haven’t been able to find any evidence suggesting there were designers internally opposed to it during development. Apple’s executive team was also fully behind the interface.”
This is what almost sunk HP’s PC business back in the 80’s. Ask the engineer the next bench over what he/she wants in the product. It turns out that is all too often very far from what the public really can use next.
Avoiding this was Steve Jobs’ greatest capability. Yes, he made huge mistakes, e.g., the hockey puck mouse and the toaster Mac, but overall he really could see the future. Apple has no one, truly no one, with that kind of vision today. Hence no real Mac Pro, no real high end monitor, or so many other things.
And, Steve Jobs was very big into the aesthetics of typography and the WYSIWYG interface. Legibility was sort of his thing. That’s why he was willing to pay Adobe an outrageous sum for Display Postscript on NeXT. That’s why the early OSX interfaces were what they were. It would not surprise me if someone had presented “Liquid Glass” to Steve Jobs that he would have shown them the door, permanently.
ANOTHER unfocused feature!
I can fix Apple!
In 1 year!
It is time for Tim Cook to GO!
If you own Apple shares, next round of votes for the board, vote ALL of them OUT!
ALL of them!
The focus is on colors, decorations, styles and NOT substance, growth, innovation and marketing. It’s beyond embarrassing to watch Apple sit on the sidelines, watching other grow in numerous fields, when Apple has more money than any of them, to hire the talent to create the same ecosystem, and better, as Apple has deeper pockets. THAT is a better investment of time and money. Even a possible acquisition; but Tim’s history of that has been a failing F. (See beats deal).
Tim, ride into the sunset and let someone else run the company more aggressively and efficiently. Otherwise, you will go down as the biggest failing CEO in American history.