Changing the look and feel of your Apple devices: Why it should be different for a particular screen size, and why it shouldn’t

At its conference, Apple announced Liquid Glass for all its devices. It has icons, tab bars and a text speacher that make it feel like liquid-y and glassy.

Aqua, which appeared in iMovie 2 in 2000 and was later seen in Mac OS X 10.0, is an example of how Apple has used glass themes in the past. A lot of new icons and a simpler layout were introduced in the new redesign of the macOS interface.

Microsoft has also been using transparency effects in its Windows operating system since it launched Windows Vista in 2007, complete with its own Aero Glass theme. The current version of Windows 11 now uses Microsoft’s Fluent Design language, which increasingly has more of a focus on 3D, colorful, and playful elements.

Steve Jobs used to say that design is how it works. The new design language Apple just announced, which is 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! So the little glass loupe that slides over text as you highlight on a webpage won’t feel like you’re moving something around; it’ll feel like you’re poking at a fake water droplet on the screen. The controls that appear to float above your content look just like a 3D effect to me. The navigation buttons on a webpage don’t look like physical objects because they are busy and hard to read. Apple executives frequently made a point of noting that Liquid Glass is minimalist and “keeps your content in focus,” but the constantly morphing interface feels to me like it might be even more noticeable.

It is logical that this is where Apple came from. It obviously wouldn’t, and probably couldn’t, fundamentally change the look and feel of every device it makes for billions of users around the world. No one wants that. In order to make the elements more universal, Apple took all the elements and made them different, a little less designed for a specific screen size. You know, a floating menu of black and white icons works well wherever you go. 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. The lowest common denominator is Liquid Glass.

Let me show you just how dramatically it changes things. Below, on the left is a picture of my iOS 18 lockscreen I shared with David Pierce for the Installer newsletter just last month, and on the right is my lockscreen today, on my iPhone 16 Pro with the iOS 26 developer beta (out now) installed.

The Control Center is a mess right now. The transparency of Liquid Glass makes it look cluttered, and that’s even with my gray homescreen. Apple should make the Control Center more translucent so that it is easier to read than it is now.

The Clock app shows a good example of the finer details that have changed. The bottom tab bar is round, and when you jiggle it you can see an animation that resembles a droplet of water on the tab. The effect is cool, as it allows you to drag it across the tab bar. The button to turn on and off the alarm is a bit less circular than before.

The phone still works the same as it used to. The spacing of the settings functions and Control Center are some of the small complaints I have. But I expect Apple will tweak and fix a lot of the bigger issues ahead of the official launch of iOS 26 this fall.