Is Apple’s Liquid Glass as doomed as Windows Vista?

People seem to either hate Liquid Glass or…well, the Macalope has yet to see anyone who says they love it.

Engadget’s Devindra Hardawar comes the closest in saying “Apple’s Liquid Glass is Windows Vista done well” but admits “I can’t really convince you otherwise if you think it looks ugly, as many of my Engadget colleagues do.”

Still, some people will probably unreservedly love it. On a stock iPhone using one of Apple’s standard wallpaper options, Liquid Glass is going to look great. In the store and in ads, it’s going to demo very well. The problem is going to come when people install it on their phones with their wallpaper.

But, of course, by then it’s too late. Suckers! You’re in our stats now! Haha! So many upgrades!

Apart from Hardawar, others have asked in a much less favorable tone whether Liquid Glass is Apple’s Windows Vista. Do the kids remember Windows Vista? Let us go back to January 30th of 2007 (please). The iPhone had just been unveiled, Beyonce was topping the charts with “Irreplaceable” and Microsoft had, at long last, released the successor to Windows XP, Windows Vista.

And people hated it.

So, despite having been asked several times since about other Apple OS releases by people eager for Apple to fall on its face, the question seems relevant now because Vista introduced Aero, a transparent look and feel much in the vein of Liquid Glass.

When Apple released Beta 4 of its xOS 26 operating systems last week, users found it had turned the transparency back up from the more dialed-back Beta 3. This brought no small amount of consternation to Apple observers on Mastodon.

Federico Viticci, for example, compared Pocket Casts and Apple Podcasts and, yeah, it’s hard not to agree that Podcasts’ controls are demonstrably harder to read because of the transparency. Gedeon Maheux asks if you can tell which tab in Safari is selected in a macOS Tahoe screenshot. Now, you probably can, but WHY IS IT SO HARD?

It’s not just controls that have been glassified. John Gruber notes the envelope in the Mail icon also appears to be transparent. Now, this is going to bounce off most people, but what level of exhibitionism is it when you start mailing things in clear envelopes? The Macalope doesn’t want to kink shame, but that seems unhealthy.

The unfortunate thing here for Apple is that it is delivering Liquid Glass at a time when there is a fair amount of nostalgia for the design ethic of the mid-2000s. There was no need to go full Felt (that is to say both Marker and green), but anecdotally, the Macalope can tell you that he’s heard from more than one Apple fan parched for a bit of that ol’ time skeuomorphism. Instead of going back to Microsoft’s ethic, maybe it should have gone back to its own.

Still. That’s liquid under the bridge at this point, and it doesn’t mean this is Apple’s Windows Vista. Because Vista’s real failing wasn’t Aero. Aero was just the fall guy.

Sure, Aero was hard on the eyes, but Vista’s real problems were that Windows XP was stable and entrenched and that under the blurry hood, Vista had a number of technical issues that Hardawar describes. There were driver and application incompatibilities, a longer boot time and its licensing requirements were more restrictive. You couldn’t even run Aero without a decent GPU.

Apple’s xOS operating systems have none of those issues. The Macalope fully believes this will get ironed out in the long run. Much as the iOS releases after 7 moved away from the unbearable flatness of being, subsequent OSes from Apple will likely become more opaque, despite Beta 4’s shift backwards.

Interestingly, the people complaining are, historically, some of Apple’s biggest fans. The Macalope certainly recalls the same level of complaint about the implementation details when Apple released betas of iOS 7, but maybe not as much about the validity of the effort. Liquid Glass represents a change to the look and feel of Apple’s operating systems, but not how they function. In that regard, it does almost feel like an argument the company would rather have than ones over, say, when it’s going to deliver an updated Siri or how it’s doing with any number of regulating bodies across the globe.

But, then, Smoke Bomb isn’t a great name for a new design style.