100% this. I recall watching their launch video about Liquid Glass. It was filled with ego-driven "we're changing the world here" nonsense. They were designing in a bubble and wanted to do something different so they could justify the work. It was never about the user.
My hot take on this is that there is a business goal to Liquid Glass that extends beyond ego - but it's about the restoration of Apple UI as an exclusive status symbol, not as a usable experience.
Apple looked at innovations in hardware form factor and, rather than trying to out-innovate in that sphere, said, instead: how do we make something in software that nobody would ever try to imitate, and thus position ourselves as the innovators once again?
And the monkey's paw curled and said: Liquid Glass is a set of translucency interactions that are technically near-impossible to imitate, sure, but the real reason nobody will try to imitate is because they are user-hostile to a brand-breaking extent.
And Apple had nobody willing to see this trainwreck happening and press the brakes.
The business goal is clear: visionOS. Liquid Glass is designed with AR in mind, that's the only place where it actually makes some sense. Pretty much the same thing as Microsoft did with Windows 8, trying to unify the UX and visual style across PCs and phones. And it's going similarly well.
we saw this exact playbook with ios 7. i don't think you need to attribute malice or read into it much.
ios 7 relied heavily on blurring effects-- a flex at the time due to the efficient graphic pipeline vs android they had. this was coming off the heels of Samsung xerox'ing and they wanted a design that would be too expensive for competitors to emulate without expensive battery hit. liquid glass is following in this tradition.
and similarly to ios 7, the move to flat design was predicated on the introduction of new form factors and screen. flat design lent itself well to new incoming screen sizes and ratios. prior there was really one or two sizes and that was it, easy to target pixel perfect designs against. as apple moves to foldables and more, this design flexibility is once again required.
as for no one trying to emulate it, i'm not so sure, OriginOS 6 ripped it off back in October.
A design system I am required to use made a recent "major" update announcement: "Styles have been converted to variables. Styles are out and Figma variables are in".
Where what we really needed was a stable release version (now a year late from the original promised date) so we can build out UI components for the content editors to use that don't require constant design tweaks.
You know the designers are:
a) Just fucking around having fun
b) Making busy work to drag it out as long as possible
As it's now 4 years since they began working on the "design system", there's a good chance it will get canned as there's some more modern design they will want to use.
There is a product I have to use that updated its ui design some years ago, only the functionality is partially implemented and the new design has some functional elements that weren't present in the old configuration.
This has been solved with a button that switches the layout between the two designs, when I'm making changes it is sometimes necessary to flip back and forth between the two mid-change.
I used to work for one big company.
Every newly hired design director desperately wanted to create a new design for the corporate portal because it would add a new line to his resume.
Who was driving that, though? If the project has high-level management buy-in, the people in the scripted videos are going to be on message if they want to stay employed.
Microsoft totally screwed up the windows interface with windows 8 to suit tablets which they viewed as the future of computing. Not only were they wrong, they also really broke the UX for the users they did have for a new product that hardly sold and still doesn't (windows tablets). Eventually they had to cave in but Apple is more stubborn than Microsoft.
Even if Apple is right, why shoehorn the future into the present on devices unsuitable for its new paradigms? The iOSification also only worsened the macOS UX. It's one of the reasons I moved to Linux with KDE which I can configure as I like.
If they want make the AR OS of the future then make it on the vision pro where it belongs.
Microsoft may have "caved", but we're still stuck with two different settings menus and a start menu that prioritizes ads and search results over your own programs.
2 settings menus? We have every version of Windows from 3.1 all the way to 11 styled settings menus, sometimes multiple styles depending on which settings you want to look at. It's a total shitshow.
Windows is borderline unusable to me without Open Shell / Win 7 settings. I refuse to learn yet another icon idiom, just to have it change 2 years later. Thinking of trying Bazzite for my new upcoming 2nd gaming machine (for daughter) build because I'm tired of Windows. If it goes well, may convert multiple Win 10 HTPC/gaming machines.
Apple just reduced Vision Pro production, but Liquid Glass was in motion well before that. What leaves me scratching my head is I never got the impression Apple believed in Vision Pro. It launched because after years of research, management wanted to see if the effort was worth continuing to invest in, but that wasn't a vote of confidence.
I'll have to second this. It's not even on Apple's homepage! I hadn't heard it mentioned for months before today. It had its niche share of users who actually found it useful, but apart from them it seems that the world is not ready for spatial computing (or maybe current spatial computing isn't ready for people, who knows?).
I'm hoping the new Valve headset will be like, 60% of what the Apple vision is. My boss got the Apple vision on launch day and it is really premier hardware, visuals that are almost exactly like seeing the thing you're looking at in real life, and the hand sensing / interactivity was the best I have experienced, even though it still had flaws.
But being tied to Apple's ecosystem, not being really useful for PC connection, and the fact that at least at the time developers were not making any groundbreaking apps for it all makes it a failure in my book.
If Valve can get 60% of that and be wirelessly PC tied for VR gaming then even if they charge $1800 for their headset it will likely be worth it.
Exactly. More expensive than a high end desktop or laptop while having less useful software than an iPad. No thanks.
If it were around the $500 point I’d pick one up in a heartbeat. Maybe even $1000. But $3500 is nuts for how little they’re offering. It seems like a toy for the ultra rich.
I assumed the price would eventually come down. But it seems like they’ll just cancel the project entirely. Pity.
I’m assuming Vision Pro is viewed as what the Newton was to the iPhone. It will provide some useful insight way ahead of its time but the mainstream push will only happen after a number of manufacturing breakthroughs happen allowing for a comfortable daily driver UX. Optics and battery tech will need multiple generational leaps to get to a lightweight goggle / sunglasses form factor with Apple-tier visuals, tracking, and battery life…
Magic Leap 2 and HoloLens 2 proved that we still haven't cracked the code on AR/XR. Similar price point, plenty of feasible enterprise use cases for folks willing to pony up money to hire Unity or Unreal devs. And I'm sure there are enough of them tired of being flogged to death by the gaming industry. But they both went splat.
It's going to take a revolution on miniaturization AND component pricing for XR to be feasible even for enterprise use cases, it seems.
It has incrementally improved, and gotten cheaper, to the point that I now see them everywhere. When they first came out, they were pretty expensive. Remember the $17,000 gold Watch (which is now obsolete)? The ceramic ones were over a couple of grand.
But the dream of selling Watch apps seems to have died. I think most folks just use the built-in apps.
The $17,000 Apple Watch was a (rather silly) attempt to compete in the high end watch space. However, they also launched the base "Sport" model at US$349.
Not really anything like the watch, the existence of a stupidly expensive "luxury" version doesn't change the fact that the normal one started at $350.
I think the current rumor is that development of a cheaper XR headset has been shelved in favor of working on something to compete with Meta's AI glasses.
I have a vision pro (obtained on day 1 for development purposes), and have given demos of it to a number of non enthusiast/non techie people.
All of them immediately hate that it’s bulky, it’s heavy, it messes with your hair,
messes with your makeup, doesn’t play well with your glasses, it feels hot and sweaty. Everyone wants to take it off after 5-10 minutes at most, and never asks to try it again (even tho the more impressive 3D content does get a “that’s kinda cool” acknowledgment).
The headset form factor is just a complete dud, and it’s 100% clear that Apple knew that but pushed it anyway to show that they were doing “something”.
Did they commit to additional production of the Vision Pro? I read their announcement as quiet cancellation of VR products. They announced some kind of vaporware pivot, but I didn't read a single analyst projection that Apple ever intended to bring another wearable to market. Customer usage statistics of the Vision Pro are so low Apple hasn't even hinted about reporting on them.
Wearable products, outside of headphones, have a decade-long dismal sales record and even more abysmal user retention story. No board is going to approve significant investment in the space unless there's a viable story. 4x resolution and battery life alone is not enough to resuscitate VR/AR for mass adoption.
That's probably regional then. In my area most people using watches nowadays are usually into sports.
I must admit I don't understand the point of a smart watch when most people have their smartphone in their hand a significant amount of time a day and said smartphones screen sizes have been increasing over the year because people want to be able to doom scroll at pictures and videos and interact with whatsapp all day. I don't know how you can do that from a tiny screen on a watch.
Those like me who don't subscribe to that way of living don't want distractions and notification so they use regular watches and would see as a regression a device that needs to be charged every few days.
Some people said payments but I see peolle paying with their smartphone all the time since they have it at hands or in a pocket very close anytime having it in a watch doesn't look like a sigmificant improvement. I'd be curious to see a chart of smartwatch adoption by country.
Apple watches have the highest marketshare in a lot of the world's markets. According to this analysis[1], watchOS (Apple watches) make up around half of all smartwatches used in Europe. Global sales puts Apple around 20-30% market share, with brands like Samsung and Garmin around 8% [2]. I haven't found good US-only statistics to show what the market share is of watchOS is, but I'd imagine its probably close to 50% or more.
I do agree though, anecdotal experiences will vary depending on the kind of people you hang out with. For the people I know heavily into running and cycling, brands like Garmin are over represented. Meanwhile lots of other consumers practically don't even know these are options.
Recent moves have convinced me that Apple is getting ready to push Vision Pro substantially harder.
In recent weeks, I’ve been getting push notifications about VP.
They hired Alex Lindsay for a position in Developer Relations.
And there’s the M5 update.
Just remember, it’s a lot cheaper than the original Mac(inflation adjusted). Give it 40 years – hell, given the speed of change in tech these days, it won’t even take 10.
I think they bought the metaverse hype and hurried up. If only they had put half the energy on AI, we'd have a createML with something else than yolov2 in 2026
. . . so other devices are required to have the same interface? No, they're not. Just because you want to share enough design cues to make people understand they're dealing with the same brand doesn't mean you have to hammer square pegs into round holes.
Not to mention the fact that first, you have to get to a point where AR wearables are commercially viable, and we don't seem to have hit that point yet.
I think this is the right read in terms of intent but I also feel it offers a lens into the silliness of Apple's current strategy around all this. VisionPro appears to be currently floundering, and no matter how much they try to make it unintrusive and airy and transparent in its interface, it's presently an unwieldy device not designed to leave the home or office. Predicating company-wide design systems on this line being the future feels aspirational at best and delusional at worst. And what good is liquid glass on a Mac? To show me an obscured glimpse of my desktop background and add visual clutter?
(Apologies to @cyberge99 if my tone comes off intense, this is not to come at you but rather is just me venting my frustrations with Apple. I think you are correct in your assessment of the idea here.)
What’s frustrating about the VisionPro is their absolute refusal to address it as a giant screen.
All people I know describe this usecase first: “Will be awesome when it replaces my 2x34" screens”. I described it to the salesman when he asked me why I wanted to try it. He never showed it. Gave him 0/5, he complained, I explained this is specifically what I asked. You can emulate one screen in VisionPro but it’s absolutely obnoxious about making it about apps and iPhotos 3D whatever. Users desire it. Apple is hell-bent in not addressing that usecase, and addressing family usecases first.
Imagine they find a proper UI to visualize an infinite Typescript file. Something like flinch and you find yourself in a method, look elsewhere and you immediately see the other method. Make it viral by making it possible to write files in a way that is not practical to normal-screen users, like the old “max 1 screen height” limit. View your team in the corners of your vision. THE tool for remote working.
Workplaces would look futuristic. Your experience at the workplace would be renewed thanks to Apple.
And then, reuse the desktop’s UI on VisionPro instead of the desktop using VP’s concepts.
But no, Apple prefers killing off VisionPro and imposing LiquidGlass to everyone. (In waiting for my threat letter from Steve Jobs for suggesting ideas now).
No, this is the fault of a company and industry with way too much money and not knowing what to do with it.
So they hired a bunch of artists who would otherwise be carving wood in a decrepit loft somewhere after taking half a mushroom cap. These people now decide how computers should operate.
I remember watching a documentary from the 80s where Susan Kare explained how every pixel in the Macintosh UI was deliberately put there to help the user in some way. One lady did the whole thing, the whole OS.
Now we have entire teams of people trying to turn your computer into an avant-garde art piece.
> a bunch of artists who would otherwise be carving wood in a decrepit loft somewhere after taking half a mushroom cap. These people now decide how computers should operate.
…brother, you’ve just described the history of the personal computer and the Internet. It’s not the hippie artists causing this problem, I promise you that.
Eh, I would disagree as there's nothing in it where you go "Oh wow, that's why they did it" in the context of Vision Pro or wearables.
It seems much more likely that the driver here was to produce a UI that was resource intensive and hard to replicate unless you control the processors that go into your devices as well as the entire graphics processing stack that sits above that as well. It seems created to flaunt the concept of "go ahead and try to copy this" to Google and Microsoft.
If it's a strategic play, it's a terrible one that douses usability in gasoline and sacrifices it at the altar of visual novelty for no real gain. Apple has spent literal decades working on and refining their Human Interface Guidelines for different devices. Between Tahoe and Liquid Glass, they seem to have just tossed them on the bonfire for no justifiable reason.
VisionPro was meant to literally overlay its interface over your field of vision. That's a very different context and interaction paradigm. Trying to shoehorn the adaptations they made for it into their other, far more popular interfaces for the sake of consistency? It's absurd.
> Apple has spent literal decades working on and refining their Human Interface Guidelines for different devices
Things like “human interface guidelines” get written by nerds who dive deep into user studies to make graphs about how target size correlates to error rate when clicking an item on screen.
Things like Liquid Glass get designed by people who salivate over a button rendering a shader backed gradient while muttering to themselves “did I cook bro???”
They’re just two very orthogonal cultures. The latter is what passes for interface design in software these days.
It's like the KDE developer who reluctantly gave out the script to set "border offset" from a window back to 0 (i.e. how close you could snap/drag the window to the border of the screen). He had defaulted it to something like -5 (i.e. at minimum, 5 pixels between the edge of the screen and the window, no matter WHERE you tried to place it), because "otherwise, how would you use the negative space, bro?". I.e. left-clicking JUST outside the window brought up a context menu for the window. WTF? I've been doing GUIs since 1987. Don't make "clicking outside the window" a way to interact WITH the window. I very nearly threw KDE out before he gave the fix.
