This is brutal.

It seems to me the Liquid Glass transition for Mac is a sacrifice for visionOS. Today, you can run iOS apps on an Apple Vision Pro, or create a virtual Mac display, but these are lesser spatial experiences: You still use a trackpad when interacting with Mac apps in Vision Pro, and you can't position their windows freely in space.

In Tahoe, hit targets are huge — toolbar buttons are 5,000 square pixels, ridiculous when using a precision pointer but maybe appropriate for eye tracking. Translucent materials make slightly more sense in augmented reality than a 2D desktop environment where no one ever complained about a lack of depth (before Apple went ultra flat and minimalist, anyway).

So despite to the apparent dud of the Apple Vision Pro as a consumer product, I doubt Apple would aggressively push a design "inspired by the depth and dimensionality of visionOS" a year and a half later without a strong reason. The recent Meta Ray-Ban Display shows the category is reaching a viable size and weight. I predict will soon see whether Apple's design gambit for spatial computing pays off or if they start to roll back towards a pointer-first UI on the Mac.