By providing a needed security patch to an older version of iOS last month, Apple tacitly—but unofficially—acknowledged that avoiding the Liquid Glass aesthetic is a valid choice.
Now, according to anonymous sources who spoke to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, an upcoming update will address problems with Liquid Glass in macOS 26. If you haven’t updated because you hate it, or are worried the design flaws make it unusable, you are seen.
Gurman writes that Apple “is preparing what people internally consider to be a ‘slight redesign’ for macOS 27,” and that the company is looking to fix, “shadows and transparency quirks.”
Gurman’s sources sound a bit defensive, however. They tell him the Liquid Glass update “didn’t necessarily suffer from design problems,” but instead had “a not-completely-baked implementation from Apple’s software engineering team.” The fixes, then, are supposed to “make Liquid Glass look the way Apple’s design team intended it to from the start.” Got it? The designers thought everything through from the beginning, but the artless neanderthals who built their designs into software—this thinking goes—let them down.
My first impression was that it was overly generous of Gurman to give voice to this framing of the Liquid Glass story, but I have to admit that it’s also a genuinely plausible explanation for just how hated the design scheme ended up being.
For instance, while Apple has already chipped away at some of the bigger problems, Tahoe shipped with some issues that were beyond annoying and actually interfered with usability, particularly for low vision people. Before the 26.3 update in February, as OS X Daily noted, choosing the option to reduce transparency “would leave considerable transparent effects, including in sidebars, headers, titlebars, search boxes, and more, leading to situations where text would overlap and interface elements would be washed out with blurry colors and interface elements.”
Then again, some designs were heavily criticized on an aesthetic basis, not as bad implementation. There’s probably no bigger Apple fan than John Gruber of Daring Fireball, and his take on the redesign of some of the icons was scorching: “I don’t think the old icons for these apps from MacOS 15 were particularly good — Apple has mostly lost its “icons look cool” game. But the new ones in MacOS 26 Tahoe are objectively terrible.”
Gurman has claimed in the past that Liquid Glass is sort of a long game, rolled out in advance of the release of the 20th anniversary iPhone, which he expects to be a huge design milestone for Apple. Supposedly, that phone’s overall vibe will benefit from Liquid Glass. When all is revealed, maybe the world will agree.
In the meantime, macOS is getting some tweaks, and we should expect, Gurman says, “more of a cleanup and refinement effort aligned with the company’s wider push to polish its software this year.”
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