Is Apple Glass What It Can Tell Us About Your Devices? How Windows 11 and Liquid Glass Have Different Themes and Their Effects
Liquid Glass and Windows Aero have good ideas. They are about helping people understand where they are and what they are doing on their device. Apple has long been unmatched in executing this kind of stuff, too, and the demos we saw at WWDC today suggest that this layered, three-dimensional effect will work smoothly across all of Apple’s devices. But for all the epic language of the unveiling, I don’t see much in Liquid Glass that will matter. Maybe we’ll get more in the months to come, and maybe developers will figure out how to make the best of the layers. There will be lots of places where this kind of translucency makes sense, but they will look like a mess. I don’t think it will change anything about how you use your devices or the way you look at them. The thing is… slightly different.
Apple has also used glass themes in the past, most notably with the introduction of Aqua, which first appeared in iMovie 2 in 2000 before rolling out more broadly in Mac OS X 10.0 in 2001. macOS 11 Big Sur also introduced a big redesign to the macOS UI, with more rounded corners, greater use of transparent and translucent layers, and a slew of new icons.
Microsoft has been using transparency effects in its Windows operating system since it launched Windows Vista in 2007. Windows 11 uses the Microsoft Fluent Design language, which has a focus on 3D, colorful, and playful elements.
Design, to quote a wildly overused Steve Jobs-ism, is how it works. The new design language Apple just announced, called Liquid Glass, is nothing new at all.
Leaving aside the somewhat wild decision to pivot your entire UI system around a prohibitively expensive headset hardly anyone has ever even tried, the thing about most of Apple’s devices is that they aren’t overlaying digital information on the physical world. They’re just screens! The little glass Loupe that slides over the text on a webpage won’t make you move around; it will feel like you’re poking at a fake water droplets on the screen. The playback controls that seem to float slightly above your content, refracting its light and colors, look to my eyes a little like a hokey 3D effect. The navigation buttons on a page look busy and hard to read, they don’t resemble physical objects. It’s not uncommon for Apple Executives to note that Liquid Glass is minimalist and keeps your content in focus, but the constantly morphing interface feels more noticeable to me.
It makes sense that this is where Apple got its start. It would not be able to fundamentally change the look and feel of every device it makes for billions of users around the world. No one wants that. So Apple just took all its elements and made them more universal: everything’s a little more round, a little more contained, a little less designed for a specific screen size. A floating menu of black and white icons works pretty much anywhere, you know? By turning menus into lists that pop out of buttons, Apple prevents itself from having to optimize every menu for every device and screen orientation. Liquid glass is the lowest common denominator.
