WWDC 2025 - iOS 26 + Liquid Glass
Thoughts on WWDC 2025 / iOS 26 / macOS 26 / Liquid Glass
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Video Transcript
Apple's WWDC for 2025 was different from what we usually get.
So right off the rip, all of Apple's operating systems are getting renamed numerically.
So instead of individual OS history version numbers,
they're all just being renamed for the next iteration to just 26,
in reference to the year that the majority of devices would be running these new operating systems.
So the big change across all of their devices is a visual change that they call Liquid Glass.
And it's a design that's inspired by how real glass interacts with light,
like it bends and refracts and reflects light across different layers of the interface.
And when you think about it, there's a lot of stuff happening when light interacts with glass.
And they've tried to capture a lot of those details in the visuals of their new UI.
But the name of Liquid Glass is just so on-brand for Apple.
It's not like Apple is the first company that has come out with like a transparent glass UI, right?
I mean, Windows Aero did it years ago, and a bunch of operating systems for phones have it.
And Apple's iteration of it, I must say, at the very least, it's like the most high effort.
Like, if you look at just the zoomed-in shots of this stuff, it looks really cool.
Like when they were punched in on the text, it looks like a bubble of water, like how it bends the light around the edges like that.
It's visually very interesting to look at, especially when it's a device that's close to your face like your phone,
but they've applied it to all of their OS's.
The other one that I thought was interesting was like the TV OS, where, you know, the UI pops up.
It's not just some simple translucency effect.
They have all these little details that make it look like there's different thicknesses of glass in the elements.
Oh, sorry, of liquid glass across the UI.
It has a lot of detail and a lot of effort put into it
But there's a few things that come to my mind. First is that as
Cool as these transparency effects look it's one thing to just like kind of admire them from afar
But it's another thing to use it
I find that a lot of them are just
Distracting when you're actually trying to get stuff done or just like use your device as an example if you're trying to just look at
Text punched in you just want to see that the enlarged text
You don't want to see all these like little text effects on the side that make it look like it's looking in a glass bubble
As cool as it is, I just find it...
For me, I think I would just turn off all of that stuff if I could.
I think a lot of people would do the same.
But the other thing, all of these visual effects, the transparency, the different layers,
all of it, you gotta use the GPU and RAM and consequently battery life on these devices.
Like, all of it...
definitely taxes the system in some form or another.
And when you look at the list of phones that can run iOS 26, it's nothing crazy.
They even have like the iPhone 11 on there, so I imagine any iPhone with 4 gigs of RAM or more could do it.
But the devices with less capable hardware have some kind of like adaptive rendering,
or maybe they just have a lot of the visual effects turned off.
But when it comes to the Mac OS devices, it's a little bit different.
For the laptops, if you're running Apple Silicon, you're good.
But if you're running one of the older Intel chips, you need one of the more powerful Intel laptops
Like you can't run the 2020 MacBook Air that seemingly won't be able to pull off Mac OS 26
I don't know how much of that is a GPU requirement versus RAM requirement for the AI components
But it's just it's disappointing to see a five-year-old device just not being supported by this operating system
Now let's talk about AI for a second
I'm thankful that they didn't have like a whole thing about AI
The AI stuff they did talk about was like spattered throughout their whole presentation
