Benefits of some kind. Improved legibility. Reduced overhead. Something. It's not my job to solve their problems.
As mentioned earlier, Apple is an iterative company. They don't release features unless it seems like it will help people. They never invented the first touch screen, the first digital music player, etc. If you understand the Apple ethos from day one you will realize this. Steve died and mobile phones have peaked just like computers have, so we don't have anyone at the top shaking things up and not worrying about failing. UI redesign doesnt really have major benefits, but there are some very cool new iOS26 features that will help people day to day.
I strongly disagree about the Material 3 design being ugly though. It's playful, colourful and customisable but can be toned down, highly legible, uses movement well. It basically hits many of the points I think Apple fails to hit with Liquid Glass. I'm not saying Apple has to do exactly what Google is doing, but they seems to be going in the wrong direction on multiple fronts.
As a high level designer, Material 3
looks pretty cheap. It will look more dated in a year or two, not to mention that Android, the only competitor to iOS, has so many different UI layouts due to different OEMs tweaking their layout the way they want. Example, Samsung's version of Android looks totally different than lets say another brand. I don't think LG is in the wrong direction, I just think this first pass is very rough and it will get better over time. The only thing I hate is how they stretch the fonts when you're dragging a context menu, which is a big no no in the design field. And the dimming will get better I think dark mode needs a lot of tweaking.
Dev betas are for fixing development issues, they should not be where the underlying design systems are worked out. That stuff should be pretty solid before it makes it out the door in any form. And regardless, you're the one saying we should expect it to take years for them to get it right from a design perspective. That's straight-up not ready to me.
No, Dev betas are not just for squashing bugs, they are also modifying the dimming, etc. Dev Beta 3 looks different than Dev Beta 1. If you watch the Dev tech demos, those are the designs that Apple would like to get to, but iOS26 will most likely not get to that level as 2 months is not enough. The tech demos are superb.
Liquid glass is slow? Are you sure we're talking about the same thing?
I'm talking about the beta being slow.
You're kind of proving my previous point. I expect design to make the product better. Liquid glass is not making anything better, and if anything it's making it worse in many ways. It's the ultimate UI tech demo. They figured they could render this glass effect and decided to ship it regardless of what it does to the user experience.
You still haven't brought up any good points tbh. When we went from Platinum to Aqua, it was a huge jump. The OS (under the hood) completely changed and the interface made it extremely user friendly for new comers. It redefined the 2000s. But these were the days that computers were still maturing. We are at the information highway age where no amount of UI updates will please anybody because computers and phones have peaked over all.
LG is not supposed to make anything better, it's supposed to unify all of Apple's devices as one. It is also supposed to set the future tone of
content awareness, as in the future is the visibility of content consumption. That is, the glass/transparency lets the user focus on the content and let the UI disappear. This is setting up for the inevitable evolution to glass displays, wearables, holograms, etc. Why do you think Meta and Google are investing huge amounts of money into wearable companies like Gentle Monster and Meta with Ray-ban, Oakley and now investments into Luxottica (The world's largest glass manufacturer)?
Think bigger, not smaller.
He's in charge of design, and design during his tenure (even before Liquid Glass) has increasingly had usability issues and bad design choices. If he's not responsible, who is? I'm not a developer, nor do I see it as my job to solve Apple's design issues for free.
He still has to answer to his managers and stakeholders. There are thousands of employees under Dye and many direct reports, it's not as simple as you make it out to be.
Overcoming technical challenges to degrade interface usability isn't the win you seem to think it is. And if they REALLY wanted to show off, they'd base the design on water, not glass. Make it not just transparent but also ripply! Every time you switch apps, you have to wait for the waves to settle! They could call it Liquid Liquid. (Call me, Apple, I have ideas!)
I never said it's a win or lose. My point was that
this is what we have right now for UI uniformity across all Apple products, which I welcome. We used to have Ripples on early days of Widges on Mac OS X, and it wasn't that great looking and it took too much time to get a response.
LG is not perfect and won't be for a while. Neither is current version of iOS. Nothing is every going to be perfect, but this is what we have.
