The problem of the new liquid glass design from Apple

Liquid glass is an elegant party trick. The new design systemIt was built for almost all Apple products It comes out this weekIt is based on the idea that the facades should be three -dimensional: in the world of liquid glass, the buttons and menus sit over everything you do or look at, and change the color and the graphic light of the acquisition like material beings. You are supposed to feel that the glass does not do it in the real world. It is visually impressive, and all of this is business! You can install it, spend a minute to see the buttons that change, it has been accomplished very well.

I have been using liquid glass, in the different Betas of Apple, through a number of devices in the past two months. The system is actually I got very better Even at that short time: The lists that were once very transparent were not readable now A little more frost And much more clear. The latest experimental version still removes the life of the iPhone 16 battery, but it seems to be improving over time. decent.

There is only one ongoing problem with liquid glass: it’s the wrong idea. Apple tries to make a single interface borrowing completely everywhere, and it does not do so. Frankly, I am not sure any The comprehensive design language can feel the network on everything from hour to phone to a TV to a headphone. But I know that liquid glass is in particular, which is suffering from hell to make everything feels deeply, physically and classically, and it often seems to be chaos. He feels the least at home on the most important and popular Apple devices.

All this is part of the trend inside the Apple now towards a complete breakdown of gaps between the devices, trying to make everything everything is for everyone all the time. In this fall, your new program will also bring a full feature phone app to your Mac, which is a Mac Lists and Window Management List to the iPad, and a lot of operating devices for all your screens mainly, and many other features that make each device more like each other device. Many of these features are good and useful! But it is a huge and somewhat surprising shift. From a long -term insurance company using the appropriate devices for the appropriate job, the collapse of the context is strange to see it.

Liquid glass is a symbol of the entire voltage, and shows all the ways it shortens. On Pois Pro, for example, the entire idea is logical: headphones program He should You feel 3D, as if you were moving in the real and digital world together. All liquid glass is, in fact, a way to see things through other things, so you do not need to switch an application for the real world. In The Vision Pro, there should not be a “interface”, only the things and the world around you. Likewise, on a Mac, the liquid glass is mostly out, because it is not actually all the interface created on the system on the Mac. You control the place where things go and how they use them, so everything is a little more transparent.

On iPhone, however, the entire idea collapses. Because every application and experience of a complete screen, you are so constantly Facing the iPhone interface. You are inside and outside the home screen, control center, notification. You turn between applications, you fluctuate through the menus, you write, click and move all the time. This is good! It is just how to work iPhone. But liquid glass does not integrate buttons and menus smoothly with everything you are looking for. Since you see the entire screen at the same time, it makes it clearly clear, because things change the color and its size in front of your eyes. It is not material and digital alignment. It is just a screen in front of another screen.

It is still very easy for liquid glass to completely collapse. If you download a colorful web page in the new Safari, you will barely see the search bar that floats on it. If you have a crowded wallpaper or lock screen, half of your notifications will appear like a paint explosion. (A few days after installing the iOS 26 trial, I changed the wallpaper of my walls to black, and made everything more likely.) Even Apple shots show the menu options that are difficult to read and the symbols that are difficult to distinguish from each other.

It is worse in Watchos 26. The Apple Watch function is to be canceled, to show you information briefly and quickly, and liquid glass makes everything more difficult. I have never faced a difficult time to find a working control interface, because liquid glass loves to make time mix with the wallpaper of the walls smoothly. I am not looking for a mixture! I am looking for time. Any light “reflects” outside the screen makes it difficult to see.

Apple bet in the long run here is very clear. It is clear that the company is pushing for the future in which the AR glasses and VR headphones are completely prevalent. Liquid glass may be the correct idea for this world – we may want a system that makes physical digital, which makes the user interface on the wall look like an hour on the wall. In this future, we will not have many devices that contain a lot of different screens. The whole world will be a screen. The screen will be the world.

I don’t know if Apple is right in the future, but this is definitely not the world we live in now. We live in a world that has a lot of screens, each one with different needs and points. Apple used to understand it better than anyone else, and did a good job in building programs that felt officers for each device. The last time she has a comprehensive change in her design spirit, iOS 7 was about creating a unique hair design Digital, Get rid of industry jamming of something already interact with the device in your hand. The buttons do not have to obtain shades and drops of dropping because we know the location of the interface. It was not a matter of pretending that our screens were the world, but about the embrace of being screens.

Apple is now swinging in the other direction, not towards the almost spinning rotation, but almost beyond it, to a scientific future that looks great but meaningless. There is no real world on the other side of my iPhone screen. I do not need it to obey physics or reflect light. Just show me the time.