The unbearable sameness of Liquid Glass

"The new design system, which was built for nearly all of Apple's products and is rolling out this week, is built on the idea that interfaces should be three-dimensional: in the world of Liquid Glass, buttons and menus sit on top of whatever you're doing or looking at, changing color and refracting digital light like they're physical objects. It's meant to feel like glass does in the real world."

"I've been using Liquid Glass, in Apple's various betas, across a number of devices for the last couple of months. The system has actually gotten vastly better even in that short time: the menus that were once so translucent they were unreadable are now a little more frosted and a lot more legible. The most recent beta has still been decimating my iPhone 16's battery life, but it seems to be getting better over time. It's fine."

Liquid Glass is a design system that treats interface elements as three-dimensional glass, with buttons and menus sitting visually on top of content, changing color and refracting light. The effect is visually impressive and often works in quick demonstrations. Early betas showed legibility and translucence problems that have improved, though some builds still harm battery life on devices like the iPhone 16. The system attempts one universal metaphor across watches, phones, TVs, and headsets, producing a layered, physical look that can feel cluttered and out of place on smaller or most-used devices. The approach reflects a move to collapse visual differences between device platforms.

Read at The Verge