Nice find!

Apple's new glass UI seems to draw a lot of ire, but I... kinda like it? It feels like the OS has some actual personality again instead of just being flat and boring. I can visually tell the size of click targets now and the buttons are finally visually distinct from text again. I view it as a welcome change. It's not just "nostalgia" either. It has actual utility.

I installed the iOS 26 Beta to test some things on the websites I maintain in advance of it going public, and while there are some issues here and there I think the overall direction to add more personality back into the OS is a good one. Normies will love it.

> Apple's new glass UI seems to draw a lot of ire

Some of it is because of looks, but the overwhelming majority of criticism is due to bugs and legibility and accessibility issues. Liquid Glass is at best half-baked, especially on macOS. It got tweaked so much from their WWDC presentation, you can tell it was rushed and no one really thought it through.

As a short example, go into System Settings, do a search, then scroll the view and look at the search bar. Or go into a folder, scroll it, and watch the contents screw with the title.

> Normies will love it.

Here’s a sample of one hating it.

https://www.threads.com/@chrispirillo/post/DOpUPrIiYdX

I like the glass effects and aesthetics, but I think the functionality in a lot of the apps isn't as good as it was. A lot of things that were easy-to-reach buttons are now tucked away in menus, and harder to find.

> I can visually tell the size of click targets now and the buttons are finally visually distinct from text

The bar is high

My suspicion is that genpop is not going to like it, broadly, mostly because the only people who seem to think that operating systems should have "personality" are techies. People just don't think like that; most people view these systems as means to an end, and anything that isn't in service to that is, at best, simply an interesting diversion for the first few days.

One thing I dislike the most about liquid glass is the new bottom tab bar that's been inserted into every first-party app. Apple Music got it the worst. There's now an additional click required to "move" between the Search interface and the remaining four tabs (Home, New, Radio, Library). When you click on Search, you need to click the the Search Box again to get a keyboard. All of these interactions have extremely sophisticated and slow animations; e.g. when on Home, clicking on Library slides a bubble across the tab bar that blows up beyond the tab bar itself, reflecting the intermediate tabs and underlying content, in a way that is tremendously distracting and serves no purpose. Neither Reduce Transparency nor Reduce Motion have any impact on these animations, on the latest release.

In fact, many of Apple's first party apps appear to have forgotten that Reduce Transparency and Reduce Motion even exist as accessibility options, or at best have half-assed their implementation. For example, with Reduce Motion enabled, clicking on an album in Apple Music deploys a much more subtle animation (good); clicking the back button uses that same subtle animation (good); but swiping back from the left uses the flowery, unnecessary animation that you'd get with Reduce Motion off. Apple Podcasts has the same problem. iMessage, as far as I can tell, totally disregards the Reduce Motion setting and does nothing different, and implements the Reduce Transparency setting not by softening the transparency as other apps do, but instead underlaying a #000000 black background on every item that did have transparency. There's dozens of examples all across iOS, and we're quite literally days from release; dropdowns such as the Apple Notes or Apple News hamburger [...] menu should animate less under Reduce Motion, but don't; when buttons are disabled on the keyboard, such as Apple News -> Search -> empty search box, the Enter button is greyed out in the wrong, barely legible color, only when Reduce Transparency is enabled, the list goes on.

Count me in the "I think this look is horrendous!" crowd, along with the "What were you thinking, Apple?!?!" crowd.

It's just terrible.