The new design of iOS and macOS 26 this summer has been controversial to say the least. To my eyes the glass effects do, in fact, look cool. But many aspects of the design make no logical sense. Apple’s obsession with “getting the UI out of the way of your content” is absurd and when you look at how they executed on this idea, it’s clear they didn’t achieve that goal: The new UI is more distracting, less predictable, less stable, and less readable than ever before.

I’ve been using Apple’s new design language on my iPad and Mac, following the discourse and reception to it, and it has me thinking about the design industry as a whole. Apple’s reputation looms large in the design world. Many designers look up to Apple. We look to them for guidance to define what it means to make “a good app.” My concern at the moment: if Apple has lost its way, will the world of design blindly follow, or will they think critically and assess if Apple’s vision and direction is any good?

There is certainly a level of craft and quality achieved within Liquid Glass, some (but not all) of the transitions and effects are kind of mesmerizing. Underlying this layer of unusable glass is seemingly nothing. There used to be a solid foundation of human-computer interaction principles that sat beneath the visual quality of the design from Apple. In fact, they were trailblazers and founding-members of this discipline. The Apple designers of the past understood the importance of contrast, differentiating controls, and studying how users thought and felt about their interfaces by studying their behavior. It’s clear that this approach to design is no longer in power at Apple.

I consider Episode 428 of The Talk Show to be required listening if you design or build software. There are too many quotes to pull from but trust me, just listen to all (3 hours) of it. Louie Mantia is the guest and I have the utmost admiration and respect for his taste and work. His recent blog post, A Responsibility to the Industry, covers many of the same points I’m making here. It was this post (and others) that sparked John Gruber to invite Louie onto the show.

The conversation revolves around the new operating systems featuring Liquid Glass. One thing that struck me is how design has shifted over time to say UX (or user experience) as opposed to UI (or user interface). This episode talks about the “how it works” of software design but it also covers a ton about how it “looks and feels”. You could argue Apple’s new design language over-prioritizes “looks and feel” and leaves behind the “how it works.”

In 2025 I feel too much of the design industry has lost the attention to detail and focus on the “look and feel” of software. Over the past 10-15 years UX practitioners have had to beg and claw to get a seat at the table at companies. We’ve had to prove and argue what a good experience is worth. This absolutely helped grow our industry and bring design thinking into many more organizations.

As part of this transition to power, however, we’ve too often cozied-up to the “suits” to ensure we’re delivering value and we’ve pitched ourselves as “we’re not just UI designers, we think about the entire user experience”. While this sounds good, the issue is that it implies that making nice interfaces is not valuable in-and-of itself. This is false! Think of slide to unlock from the original iPhone debut. Here’s Louie around 2 hr 14 min:

The first interaction we had with iPhone was slide to unlock. [Jobs] did it twice because everyone was so into it. There is an important part of making things make sense, making them joyful. There’s delightful thing because if you don’t have that, then the entire system looks like something you don’t want to touch.

Of course software needs to solve a problem. I think Tony Fadell captures this well with his “make painkillers, not vitamins” quip, but we’ve lost a lot of craft and appreciation for making great interfaces that work well and feel amazing.

It needs to be both. We need to help solve customer problems and we need to make the interactions wonderful. We’ve discredited and downplayed visual design but that’s the actual thing customers touch and click! In the name of getting a seat at the table we threw away the art of making apps look and feel great.

There must be a better balance.

I’ve pulled a few quotes from the episode. Here’s around 1 hr 50 min:

John Gruber: I had a friend who, recently-ish, ex-Apple, he had been there doing design work for 15 plus 20 years? I don’t know, but he left somewhat recently, and he watched [the Aqua introduction video]… and said, “I forgot that Steve talked like that about using UI design lingo, like key window and input focus and things like that.” He said to me that he had meetings with Alan Dye’s team in recent-ish years and that he’d used terms like that. And he said, “I never got cut off, but there was always an underlying tone of shut up with the UI nerd stuff.” That they didn’t use terms like that, and that when describing an idea, that their eyes would roll back in their head, “Here goes another one of these key-window input-focus guys again.”

Meanwhile, they’re the fucking team that shipped an iPad multi-window interface for 7 years where you couldn’t tell which half of the screen was active.

Louie Mantia: You and I have talked about this before, this exact thing like years ago, but we solved that problem like over a decade ago. Why are we doing this right now where we are backtracking on the things that we already know to be true? I mean, it doesn’t really make any sense to me why it’s hard to distinguish the inactive window.

There’s so much in this episode. This snippet in particular highlights that there’s a disdain for making interfaces usable within Apple. I’m not sure it’s even their third or fifth priority. I worry it’s not even on their list.

John Gruber also had the opportunity to ask Alan Dye years ago about how Apple Watch handled overlapping hour, minute, and second hands on analog watch faces:

Every physical watch with analog hands, the hands are stacked in the same order: where the hour hand is on the bottom, the minute hand is on top of the hour hand, and if there’s a second hand, it’s on top of the minute hand so that the hours, minutes, seconds are going forward.

An Apple Watch renders the hands in the same Z-axis order. It’s not perfectly flat. And they render a sort of shadow around things so that you could see like when the minute hand is slightly overlapping…

I had a question about the light source for the shadow, and I was like, oh finally, I get to ask Alan Dye about this.

And he was like, “Oh, we render a shadow?”

I just instantly realized: you’d never really even looked at it that closely. Like somebody at Apple has, but Alan Dye didn’t… I just remember thinking at that very moment, it just suddenly came to me, “oh, he doesn’t do what I thought he did.”

Related, a bit later (around the 2 hr 31 min mark) from Louie:

[Steve] had a level of familiarity with [details]. I don’t just know this because my team worked on it. I know it because I use it every day.

At first blush, it may seem unfair to criticize a VP at a multi-trillion-dollar corporation with this sort of minutia. But this is the watch face of the Apple Watch. (It’s not some obscure macOS system settings screen where the default system colors have now changed and now it’s impossible to distinguish which item is selected.) As someone who uses an Apple Watch I have personally seen this shadow. Once or twice in the 10 years of wearing this dang computer on my wrist I’ve looked down at my wrist and it’s been 1:05, 2:10 or 3:15, and so on. If you have an Apple Watch, you, (yes, even you dear reader!) probably have seen this shadow too.

It’s like Alan Dye has never used the computers his teams are responsible for designing.

There’s a great segment about John’s Auteur Theory of Design where he talks about how authorship differs between books (Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn), film (Steven Spielberg’s Jaws), and software (an app, and operating system, etc) as the number of people involved increases:

John Gruber: My conclusion was that the level of quality of the work of a company, whether it’s hardware or software or something in between, eventually rises or falls to the level of taste of the person who’s ultimately in charge of it and gets to say yes or no. And I think we’re seeing Apple’s UI design, not the styling, which is a separate issue, but the quality of the semantic design of the user interface, sort of fall apart because like you said, I don’t know that there is person. It’s like trying to make a movie without a director.

Louie Mantia: I think all of these people can collectively say, “this is their app”, or “this is their OS that they worked on,” that they are the author. I think everyone who works on this stuff is entitled to say that they made it — unequivocally. But there has to be this person and that everyone’s meeting that vision. And I’ve used the word “vision” to describe this thing like directorial stuff. There is someone’s vision that they have and when it meets that, that’s when we’re shipping.

There’s a great analogy of a costume designer for a Wes Anderson movie. That person (likely) doesn’t dress like a Wes Anderson character every day in real life. But when they to work on a Wes Anderson movie, they know what’s expected of them and they rise to that bar and adjust their taste. They know the assignment.

From Louie Mantia, around 2 hr 32 min:

My question that I’ve had is, why does [Alan Dye] have this job? Why is he the person that does it?

Even if you don’t think Wes Anderson makes the best movies, I think we have to agree, he is the definition of that auteur — one-million percent that kind of person — so you have this clear vision and everyone is in service of that. You see it in the people that are the cinematographers, you see it in the people that are the actors that he chooses, everyone there is fully committed to the vision and I think that was true when Steve was there.

Everyone, and I’ve talked with friends at Apple that have been there, that used to work there, people I used to work with, everyone agrees about this: Everyone was happy to let go of their own personal idea of how things should be in service of the vision that Steve generally had. Yes we were still making all these individual decisions. Yes we were still deciding how, but we were all in the back of our minds, “like what is the thing that we are guiding towards?” and it was always toward the vision that Steve.

When I rejoined John Deere a couple years ago we were going through a transformation (following the Silicon Valley Product Group model). We had someone whose title literally has “director” in it who started establishing large reviews for upcoming features with a few goals: increase awareness across the organization, break down silo walls, improve collaboration, and raise the quality bar. This person would attend these reviews and provide honest (and fair!) feedback. Quite often their critique was not that the designs “weren’t good”, but that the team hadn’t considered all the various parts of our ecosystem and failed to loop-in teams should have been looped-in.

This person’s goal was to elevate the quality of the entire organization. This level of scrutiny and attention to detail meant that everyone started thinking differently. We all started thinking, “we better do a good job on this and think end-to-end because we know we’ll get that feedback from you-know-who.” Over the years I’ve noticed this director’s presence a bit less in these reviews (except for big things) but the process and practice changes have remained. We know that this person could show up and we all strive to do better work because of it.

That’s what I think about when I hear about Gruber and Louie talk about vision and improving quality. We have to aspire and reach to make things of high quality. It doesn’t happen just by hiring talented people, you have to push a bit.

Around 2 hr 40 min:

Gruber: [Talking about Aqua] The language of that era of Apple design encompassed that range that Steve Jobs set out to cover from novice to pro.

Louie: The style of Aqua was so adaptable and that’s what made it work. Those productivity tools (Final Cut, Logic) didn’t ignore Aqua. They acknowledged Aqua. They understood what it was trying to do. They adapted it to their product. Aperture was entirely graphic, right? Even GarageBand was super playful, right? GarageBand had wood on the side of the thing but it took away almost no screen real estate… but it puts you in a mood. It puts a visual clarity on what this app is versus what this other app is. At no point did it look like it was not part of the same system. There was a visual richness to Aqua that was like: so the system looks like this. Even if we have buttons that are rich Corinthian leather, even if we have buttons that are wood, right? Even if we have these other materials, they need to match this level of quality, of this visual quality that [Aqua] has.

Everyone is working on this movie, right? Everyone sees what the direction is and everyone’s like, okay, so in the “Aqua Cinematic Universe”, there’s actually more room for it than just Aqua, right? And that was true on iOS too. Early iOS stuff, when it was iPhoneOS: iPhone OS had all of these different kinds of material qualities to it where any app could do whatever we wanted, especially because it was taking up the full screen at the time. You could do anything and it was not incongruous with the system. As long as you acknowledged what the system was trying to do, then you could play with a little bit.

Can you do that with Liquid Glass? Because it feels to me that if it doesn’t look like Liquid Glass, then it looks wrong on the platform, right? There’s no alternative quality. There’s no alternative material to use. It’s not like you can suddenly use paper, but make it looks like it belongs in the “Liquid Glass Cinematic Universe.”

Gruber: And that’s why I’m so disappointed overall with the big new UI [redesign]. We didn’t even know what it was supposed to look like, but there were rumors for the last year that Apple’s doing a big platforms-spanning UI redesign and that it’s going to add some kind of texture and glass and something. I was so hopeful that it would bring back some of that era. Some of that tactical quality, some of that richness.

There’s a lot to unpack here and I just loved this segment.

After some time with macOS Tahoe, I find myself getting lost at glance in a sea of sameness. As an industry we’ve been chasing down consistency and design systems for basically forever. Familiarity has amazing qualities. It means you can learn one piece of software and have that translate across the system. (For example: once you learn system features like the macOS menu bar or Customize Toolbar, all your apps open up to you. To borrow an old Cocoa/AppKit analogy: you’re starting on the third floor instead of the basement.)

This sea of sameness across macOS presents itself: every window is expanse of white with glass buttons (with terrible toolbar gradient shadows). Nothing is visually identifiable at a glance.

From John Gruber, around 21 min:

But say what you want about the [stitched leather]. “Oh, I like the way that looks” or “I like the gimmick” of the way it looks. It undeniably made the Calendar window instantly recognizable.

Not only is there very little character left in these apps they’re overly same-y and harder to differentiate when using the system as a whole.

On platform familiarity, here’s around 2 hr 20 min:

John: Xcode is a pretty good example of standard good Apple Mac UI design. And I know that you [random developer] have been using it for years because you’ve been making iOS apps for years. But somehow you’ve been using Xcode and not paying any attention whatsoever to the interface?

Louie: I’m not saying this is the cause, but I do wonder, over the years with the iOS-ification of a bunch of things and with iOS becoming like a more dominant platform in everyone’s hands, there’s also been simultaneously a decrease in macOS. … A lot of people use Safari as an interface for web apps that they use a lot more. Some people’s docks look like Finder, Safari, Trash. And you’re like, “what? I can’t even imagine it.” But that is how some people live.

I do have hope for the future. My suggestion to all designers, whether you work at Apple or anywhere else, is to take some time to understand the underlying foundations of what makes the Mac great. I worry designers who sit in front of a Mac 8 hours a day don’t understand just how great it is beneath the surface (how menus work, how keyboard navigation works, etc) and are content with throwing a design over the wall to their developers.

As a result you’re only thinking surface-level about your designs, putting together LEGO-pieces from your design system and that’s about it.

Before I sign off for this post, I also want to direct your attention to a complimentary podcast episode:

In ATP 650 John Siracusa talks about how UI design is a science and an art. It has to be both. How well does this design perform (science) and how does it make people feel (art). Siracusa’s argument is that the balance is completely out of whack at Apple. You have Alan Dye in charge of interface design, influencing how the entire world of millions of designers think about UI and it’s clear he is completely unqualified to do the job:

Alan Dye, who apparently comes from like a MarCom background, which is marketing, communication, like in print design, doesn’t even have a background in user interface design…

But I assure you, user interface design still is a field of study, at least in the academic world, where people try to make interfaces more usable to people by using reason and testing things and not just having a whim and deciding I want stitched leather because I think it’s cool and reminds me of seat backs on my private jet (or whatever the heck the story behind that was…)

That’s an important part of it, but there has to be a balance. I feel like the balance is way, way, way, way, way too far in the direction of the art and emotion side, which again is an important factor, but it’s can’t be the only factor.

And if you’re on way on the art side and you make an interface that people don’t find appealing, now you’ve got a real problem because it’s not usable. It’s not useful. You’re making the interface worse and people don’t even think it’s cool looking.

Understand what makes and interface great — both art and science — and push for your teams to take both seriously.

PS: I got these quotes thanks to a combination of macOS Tahoe’s transcription model via Yap by Finn Voorhees, MacWhisper Pro, and the unofficial transcript from David Smith’s podsearch.