My non techie friends all hate it. I don’t think there is a single Apple user I talk to regularly that hasn’t complained about it, or ask me why it is that way (being the resident tech person for some).

And besides a few odd posts on x, I haven’t heard anyone techy speak positively about it.

Maybe I’m the one in a bubble, but I’m seriously considering switching from Apple as a lifelong Apple user, largely because of the UI changes (Liquid Glass et al), so I don’t think the complaints about it are overblown.

My personal experiences are the opposite of this. I have people in my life who are gen Z, millenials, and gen X who are befuddled by it.

We also have data to show people dislike this. Google Trends shows the largest spikes ever for "how to switch to android", "iphone revert update", "iphone fix battery", and "iphone slow", all only after the release of Liquid Glass (and particularly the increased tactics to get people to update starting in September).

I held off on upgrading because I heard how much people hated it. I bought the new XDR display last week and finally had to upgrade for it to work properly and... it's totally fine? I'm not sure what the big deal is. It's way more annoying on iOS than it is on macOS.

I would not even have noticed it if not for visiting this website. It's possibly worse on iOS than on MacOS, but I don't have an iPhone.

Now, if I was developing software for MacOS and it broke all my UIs, I would be at least as irritated as the author.

Yes, the thing people notice is the keyboard not working.

Yeah I couldn't care less for liquid glass but it's not as horrible as people make it out to be. The amount of hate is irrational. New Coke vibes if you heard of new coke.

Oh allright, your few imaginary friends are the gold standard for the world now?

If you're going to say Apple's reputational hit from Tahoe, and Tahoe's many problems, are merely narrative-driven, you need to at least provide support for that. For example:

- why the added transparency effects don't present accessibility/usability issues, despite what users report

- why the corner radius change (among other UI changes), including its absurd size and broken handle detection actually aren't a big deal (even though every other window toolkit NOT swiftui has to be updated for it)

- why it's okay that they added useless icons to menus that add visual clutter and violate of their own design standards

- why Rosetta is going away, even though so many things still depend on it

The bigger issue is that Tahoe was a frivolous cosmetic update with only a few actual improvements, despite all of macOS's bugs that haven't been fixed over the years. That's a long list, from broken keyboard shortcuts in most their newer apps (and System Settings) to persistent Airplay compatibility problems.

Why is Apple's hardware getting objective better over the years while the possible software gains are squandered year after year?

> And the entire mac OS is starting to feel slow, bloated, and janky.

It appears you do indeed understand the fuss around Liquid Glass :)

The way I see it, "Liquid Glass" is used as a catch-all term to refer to all the UI changes across Apple's 2026 slate of user interfaces.

For one example, the annoying Apple Watch fitness app changes are "Liquid Glass" in my book because it exists only to show off the new wobbling refracting buttons,. The loss of performance and battery life is reasonably assumed to be tied to new Liquid Glass shaders Apple aspires to run 120 times a second on the phone.

The menu icons are really annoying, especially because some apps don't have them, and everything looks off-kilter. Finder sidebar morphing as the window resizes, also annoying.

But you're right, it's still usable, unlike the window management.

Lucky for me i convinced my boss to buy me a PC about a month after they forced the Tahoe update on my old work MBP

The Apple universe seems to be a place where sentiment is driven by tastemakers and small-group consensus, not the mass of actual customers. So it doesn’t need to be a dominant complaint to have a big effect.

The griping I read about Liquid Glass is from the unhip nerds on HN (like me). I don’t actually know what the industrial designers and graphic artists in their Soho lofts think. I asked an exec designer that I know IRL and got a shrug.

Yeah. The vast majority of people simply don't give a flying shit, and many haven't really even noticed.

Also most of the stuff people complain about is easily changed in settings (transparency, etc...).

That's fair, by "everyone" it's probably only several million people.

Other than that, I stand by my statement exactly. This is very bad.

I think people are using "liquid glass" as a blanket term that includes other changes in iOS 26, like completely breaking message delivery with the world's dumbest spam filter, aggressively waking some people up in the middle of the night, siri somehow getting even worse, breaking the incoming call state machine (again), bluetooth regressions, regressions to their (already poor) UI accessibility, and so on.

Those other things add up and are definitely noticed by non-tech users that don't care that things like the alarm UI are massively regressed.

Are you from the future? Because on the current timeline it's much too early to tell if it's overstated or understated.

Likewise, on macs since OS7, don't care at all. People might as well be comparing the tread on their car's tyres

That's why I emphasized this is different.

Apple fans bemoaned the Settings menu changing from a grid to a list, or the battery getting a skeumorphic icon, but that doesn't really matter.

The Liquid Glass stuff was forced on users in ways their other OS updates weren't, and it has caused serious performance, stability, and usability problems throughout the entire OS.

Those features also have a shrinking user base over time, so they get less resources and attention.