I'm honestly curious why Apple (and other OS vendors like MS and various Linux distributions) still feel the need to tweak their UIs many, many years after having reached maturity.

How many iterations does it take before you get it right?

I get that there's a certain sense of fashion to it, but so often these changes are either neutral or worse, and it just seems so pointless. I don't see any concrete benefits of this year's UI design over what was already there 10-20 years ago.

Operating systems from the biggest companies are rather stable and feature rich beneath for years now but that doesn't make these attractive in long term. Certainly not for the daily consumers. So they introduce all sorts of meaningless "featurettes" and UI/UX changes to pretend they work hard and thoughtfully on their products to create these never-ending "exciting experiences".

It's not about polishing to get it right nowadays but rather making a change for sake of changes because that looks good in terms of marketing.

As for this particular Apple case with all "26" versions and Liquid Glass: the backlash they got in June puts their actions along Microsoft's with Windows 8/8.1.

No one gets a promotion for saying “yep still looks good. “

  > I'm honestly curious why Apple (and other OS vendors like MS and various Linux distributions) still feel the need to tweak their UIs many, many years after having reached maturity.

though one then has to wonder, why do we need a new os every year...