Apple showed one of the biggest visual redesigns in the past couple of years. But Liquid Glass feels more like smoke and mirrors to me.
iOS 26 has been officially announced (rolling out in September) and along with the new numbering convention, one of the most substantial changes lies in the design. Many industry experts, alongside Apple itself, label the new Liquid Glass look as the biggest design overhaul in years.
“Inspired by the depth and dimensionality of visionOS, the new design takes advantage of Apple’s powerful advances in hardware, silicon, and graphics technologies. The new material, Liquid Glass, is translucent and behaves like glass in the real world”, says Apple in an official press release.
This is all fine and dandy, but it raised a couple of questions in my mind immediately. Do we NEED a translucent interface that behaves like real glass? And what does that even mean? That if you swipe or tap too fast or hard, it would break?
The second thing is right there in the text itself. Liquid Glass takes advantage of the hardware processing power of Apple’s silicon. I can’t help myself but wonder, don’t we have better and more useful ways to utilize hardware than to make things look like “glass in the real world”?
And finally, what are the chances Apple is throwing sand in our eyes in order to deflect our attention away from much more important stuff? Such as the fact that Siri is nowhere (mentioned just two times during the official event), and that Apple Intelligence still feels like a bad copy of what every other LLM has been doing for a long time now.
But first – let’s talk about Liquid Glass.
Form over function – people like pretty things
There are a lot of reasons why we love polished and good-looking things, smartphone interfaces included. Some of these things are rooted deeply in our brains from prehistoric times, while others we’ve learnt to value a bit later in our evolutionary journey.
