The Apple Story: What Happened When Apple Opens its Apple Glass in iOS 13, iPad, Mac OS Tahoe, Windows 11 and tvOS

Apple is introducing a new Liquid Glass design across its software platforms today. It’s all about adding transparency and glass shine effects to Apple’s in-app interfaces across its renamed iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS Tahoe 26, watchOS 26, and tvOS 26 operating systems.

Apple has also used glass themes in the past, most notably with the introduction of Aqua, which first appeared in iMovie 2 in 2000 before rolling out more broadly in Mac OS X 10.0 in 2001. The MacOSUI was redesign with more rounded corners, easier use of transparent and translucent layers, and new icons.

Microsoft launched Windows Vista in 2007, and has had transparency effects in the operating system ever since. The current version of Windows 11 now uses Microsoft’s Fluent Design language, which increasingly has more of a focus on 3D, colorful, and playful elements.

Steve Jobs once said that design is how it works. It is not a new design language that Apple has just announced, as the company is calling it, Liquid Glass.

Leaving aside the somewhat wild decision to pivot your entire UI system around a prohibitively expensive headset hardly anyone has ever even tried, the thing about most of Apple’s devices is that they aren’t overlaying digital information on the physical world. They are just screens. The little glass Loupe that slides over text as you highlight on a website will feel like a fake water drop on the screen, even though you are not moving anything around. The controls that look like they float above the content, look like a hokey 3D effect to me. The navigation buttons that ripple as you scroll a webpage don’t look like physical objects — they just look busy and hard to read. Apple executives frequently made a point of noting that Liquid Glass was minimalist and kept its content in focus, but the constantly morphing interface makes it seem even more noticeable.

In that broadest sense, it’s logical that this is where Apple landed. It wouldn’t be able to change the look and feel of every device it makes for billions of users around the world. No one wants that. So Apple just took all its elements and made them more universal: everything’s a little more round, a little more contained, a little less designed for a specific screen size. I don’t think a floating menu of black and white icons is much different than anywhere else. Apple can’t have to make changes to every menu for every device and screen orientation because of the way menus are turned into lists. The lowest common denominator is Liquid Glass.