#372  5th September 2025

Through the Liquid Glass

We are back! Sadly, the summer hiatus is over, and we are all returning back to work. Apple definitely is, their annual September event will be on Tuesday, Sep 9, 10 am PDT. iPhone and Apple Watch announcements are expected, as well as release dates for the 26.0 system updates, which, if Apple follows the schedule of previous years, should be a week later, so Sep 15 or 16.

Are you ready?

With the 26.0 platforms comes the new Liquid Glass UI, which has garnered... skeptical reception amongst developers and beta testers. Especially on macOS.

I am not a huge fan of the changes either.

We had this before. Steve Jobs proudly showed off translucent menus in Mac OS X beta which highlighted the capabilities of the new Quartz rendering engine and Aqua UI. Over the subsequent Mac OS X upgrades the translucency was toned down, because, well, it really serves no purpose to see the windows behind the menu. It only makes it harder to read. I guess Apple designers will have to learn that all over again.

You could have a transparent Terminal window background since the Mac OS X beta. Everybody tried it because it looks really cool, when the Terminal text floats over the desktop picture. But then, when you have dozens of windows open, because you are, well, actually working, everyone realizes quickly that transparency is very impractical and just renders everything illegible. There's a reason we write and read on opaque paper.

Apple claims this new UI "brings more focus to content" but in practice, toolbars and sidebars in macOS Tahoe take up significantly more space. Much like modern economy air plane seats, the Xcode 26 UI on a 13" MacBook suddenly changed from "ok" to "cramped." You can pay for an upgrade, I guess...

User interface consistency across platforms make sense up to a point, but different platforms have different strengths, weaknesses, and purposes. Those strengths and weaknesses need to be expressed in that platforms UI. Transparency makes sense for certain elements in visionOS, but on the single-app-per-screen of the Apple Watch and iPhone, it really does not. Apple doesn't really let you attach a keyboard and pointing device to the iPhone (except for accessibility) and doesn't optimize the interface for that. They have been reluctant to do that with the larger and more powerful iPad, but that seems to be changing now with the new windowing system on iPadOS.

I understand designers like to have clear white or black backgrounds for color consistency, but most of us don't need that most of the time. Color, shade, different shapes, and visible borders help distinguish windows and controls from each other and the content. There is no need for everything to be glaringly white or deep black all the time.

Hiding UI elements behind buttons or gestures might make sense on the smaller iPhone screen, but is really unnecessary on larger screens on iPad and Mac, especially when you can attach external displays. Pointing devices are more accurate than finger taps, so there is no need for the UI elements to keep growing and infringe on the content. Don't get me started about the clear icon mode. Like the transparent Terminal window, it looks cool for a few minutes…

I will wait for pendulum to swing back. One of these days, it'll have to, right?

On the bright side, aside from the interface changes, macOS Tahoe 26.0 seems to be fairly stable and not very disruptive. Apple admins can look forward to a bunch of useful new features, such as MDM migration, more device information in Apple Business/School Manager, and streamlined Platform SSO setup. Some features, like the new app deployment controls will have to wait until the device management service providers catch up, which is not always a trivial task.

I am looking forward to all the posts that many fellow Mac admins are surely preparing right now.