So. Farewell then, Liquid Glass. You made Apple’s software interfaces all transparent and arguably harder to read. “Why has everything on my iPhone changed?!” That’s what people said about you. When they were being polite. At other times they called you Liquid Ass.
Liquid Glass is (or perhaps we should say was) an all-encompassing design language foisted on to Apple’s main products with the OS 26 software updates. It was supposed to make the company’s ecosystem more consistent, but a clue to its real purpose came in a particularly striking launch statement. “Ultimately,” said Alan Dye, Apple’s vice president of Human Interface Design, “it makes even the simplest of interactions more fun and magical.” This was design as performance: flamboyance over function.
Users, unfortunately, did not find it either fun or magical. As one of my colleagues put it, “People seem to either hate Liquid Glass or… well, the Macalope has yet to see anyone who says they love it.” Apple might have put these complaints down to the usual stick-in-the-muddism that greets any major interface change, such as the death of skeuomorphism when iOS 7 arrived in 2013. But the issues clearly ran deeper. It wasn’t just that it was different, but that it was objectively worse on a functional level. Change is challenging, but new interfaces become familiar in time. Bad design remains bad design no matter how much you grow used to it.
Following the iOS 7 redesign, Apple stuck to its guns and refused to back down. It won users over, spawned legions of imitators, and became the dominant interface style for more than a decade. Less than two months after the public rollout of Liquid Glass, by contrast, Apple is waving the white flag. Of course, Liquid Glass isn’t officially dead: Apple put a huge weight of marketing behind the new design language this summer, and simply killing it off in one fell swoop would have been a truly humiliating U-turn. Rather, Apple is climbing down in stages.
As of the launch of iOS 26.1, expected to launch later today (check your updates! It may be waiting for you), you’ll be able to go into Settings and adjust the appearance of those intrusive transparency effects. And by adjust, I mean “put them back the way they were in iOS 18.” Other Liquid Glass elements will remain, such as the look-at-me toggles, but the single biggest annoyance will be zapped with the tap of a single overdesigned button.
Eagle-eyed readers may point out that it was already possible to reduce the transparency effect by using Accessibility settings. But those who’ve tried that process will know that the Reduce Transparency toggle is surprisingly well hidden and cannot be found by searching for the words Liquid Glass. What’s more, by putting this setting under Accessibility, Apple implied that the change would only be necessary for iPhone owners with vision or cognitive issues. By placing the new section under the Display and Brightness menu, and giving it an easily searchable Liquid Glass label, Apple is acknowledging that it’s something of interest to everything, and invites us all to use it.
Apple presumably hopes this is not the end for Liquid Glass. Maybe the company’s designers believe that users will make the switch and suddenly realise how much they miss the new design, then rush to turn it back on. But I wouldn’t be so optimistic. You can’t unring this bell; users are going to turn off the transparency effects and never look back. Worse, they’ve smelled blood and know they can win concessions by complaining. And my prediction is that the Liquid Glass settings menu is going to start filling up with other toggles.
And you know what? Good. Most of the time Apple knows best when it comes to design, but it’s not infallible. It got this one wrong, and I’m glad the company is making steps to acknowledge this (albeit only tacitly) and to make amends. This doesn’t have to mean a total change of philosophy, nor should the company start making every single new feature or interface tweak optional, otherwise nothing will ever move forward. But this wasn’t functional design; it was showing off. And Apple can and should do better, starting today.
Foundry
Welcome to our weekly Apple Breakfast column, which includes all the Apple news you missed last week in a handy bite-sized roundup. We call it Apple Breakfast because we think it goes great with a Monday morning cup of coffee or tea, but it’s cool if you want to give it a read during lunch or dinner hours too.
Have your say
Last week I spent several hundred words congratulating myself for predicting that the iPhone Air would be a flop. But was I wrong after all? A few days later I received a fascinating email from Aaron, who highlighted a report that says the Air is selling just fine, pointed out that many customers will be going with carrier payment plans which may not be showing up yet, and offered a few insights into the device’s appeal and potential routes to success.
“If you use a bumper case, you can put the battery on when you set down your phone and no longer ever need to plug your phone into the wall,” he wrote. “Just using the Air MagSafe battery to top up through the day when you’re no longer holding the device. Difficult to see so many individuals missing the point of having a separate battery that cuts the weight of your phone in half.”
As for the limitations of the camera? Aaron doesn’t see the issue. “Why would I buy a professional camera kit when all I need is taking photos and videos?” he asks. “If I wanted a Pro Max machine to do Pro Max work I would make that purchase.”
My thanks to Aaron for his message. If you’ve got any thoughts to share, please feel free to drop me an email.
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The rumor mill
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Software updates, bugs, and problems
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And with that, we’re done for this week’s Apple Breakfast. If you’d like to get regular roundups, sign up for our newsletters, including our new email from The Macalope–an irreverent, humorous take on the latest news and rumors from a half-man, half-mythical Mac beast. You can also follow us on Facebook, Threads, Bluesky, or X for discussion of breaking Apple news stories. See you next Monday, and stay Appley.
