Apple Liquid Glass: first thoughts, early fears

The company’s visually refreshed user interface looks nice enough but already gives cause for concern on several fronts

Apple Liquid Glass is the company’s new visual user interface style that more than a billion consumers will have access to in a few months. It’s sleek, it’s important and it’s already divisive. (Image: Apple)

It’s fair to say that — after months of careful information leaks, unsubstantiated rumors and wild speculation — the one thing most of us tech reporters were genuinely curious to find out more about during the WWDC 25 keynote was Apple’s redesigned graphics user interface. We all knew that the company’s new operating systems would get some minor or even major additions, we all knew they’d be named differently, but what they would actually look like was still anyone’s guess.

Well, now we know… and if Apple hoped that Liquid Glass would be the software slam dunk the company needs right now, one thing’s for sure: since feelings seem to be mixed already, that slam dunk it definitely isn’t.

What the company calls “Liquid Glass” is essentially a whole new visual style for all of its operating systems, unifying their look and, to some degree, the way consumers are expected to use them going forward (obviously depending on the nature of each device). It extensively uses variable transparency, layered translucency and refraction effects so as to create the impression of dimensionality, as “light” changes how all user…