What is the point of launching the iPhone? How I’m disappointed by Apple’s new home screen and how I don’t see anything new

I don’t believe I’m impressed or optimistic. Apple is at its best if it has strong opinions about how things work, even if the attempt to leave the way and let your content dictate everything feels wrong. Plus, I’ve spent the past year tinkering with Apple’s new tinted and color-matching iPhone homescreens, which mostly serve to make your device uglier. I don’t see a reason that Liquid Glass would make my devices better, simpler, or more personal. I can see there are buttons that are hard to read.

Aqua, a glass theme first appeared in the 2nd iteration of iMovie in 2000 before being rolled out more broadly in Mac OS X 10 in 2001. macOS 11 Big Sur also introduced a big redesign to the macOS UI, with more rounded corners, greater use of transparent and translucent layers, and a slew of new icons.

Microsoft has used transparency effects in its Windows operating system since it launched Windows Vista in 2007. 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.

Design, to quote Steve Jobs-ism, is how it works. Apple is just announcing a new design language that is called Liquid Glass and it is nothing new at all.

Apple doesn’t put digital information on the physical world of most of its devices, despite the fact that the entire system is pivoted around a headset. They are just screens. So the little glass loupe that slides over text as you highlight on a webpage won’t feel like you’re moving something around; it’ll feel like you’re poking at a fake water droplet on the screen. The playback controls that seem to float slightly above your content, refracting its light and colors, look to my eyes a little like a hokey 3D effect. The navigation buttons on a page don’t look like physical objects; they look busy and hard to read. Liquid Glass is minimalist and keeps your content in focus, but the constantly morphing interface seems to me like it might be even more noticeable.

In that broadest sense, it’s logical that this is where Apple landed. It obviously wouldn’t, and probably couldn’t, fundamentally change the look and feel of every device it makes for billions of users around the world. No one wants that. Apple made its elements more universal by including a little more round, a little more contained, and less designed for a specific screen size. A menu with black and white icons works well wherever you go. Apple didn’t have to make every menu work for every device and screen orientation due to turning menus into lists that pop out of buttons. Liquid Glass is the lowest common denominator, done about as well as you could.

Let me show you just how dramatically it changes things. On the left is a picture of my lockscreen that I shared with David Pierce in the Installer newsletter a month or so ago, but on the right is a locked screen on my iPhone 16 Pro with the iOS 26 developer edition installed.

Here’s the Control Center, which is frankly a mess right now. Liquid Glass is transparent and makes it look cluttered, like with my gray homescreen. I hope Apple makes everything under the Control Center a little more opaque so that it’s easier to read at a glance.

The Clock app shows a good example of the finer details that have changed. The bottom tab bar has a rounded surface and when you tap one of the different tabs, the animation shows a water droplets moving across the tab. The cool effect is that you can drag it across the bar by pressing and holding it. The alarm is turned on and off by a button that’s more rounded than a circular one.

The phone still works the way it used to. I have a lot of small complaints about the spacing of settings and Control Center. But I expect Apple will tweak and fix a lot of the bigger issues ahead of the official launch of iOS 26 this fall.