Ios 26.1 Lets Users Control Liquid Glass Transparency
Posted2 months agoActive2 months ago
macrumors.comTechstoryHigh profile
heatednegative
Debate
85/100
Ios 26.1Liquid GlassApple Design
Key topics
Ios 26.1
Liquid Glass
Apple Design
The release of iOS 26.1 introduces a toggle to control Liquid Glass transparency, sparking controversy among users who are divided on the feature's usefulness and design.
Snapshot generated from the HN discussion
Discussion Activity
Very active discussionFirst comment
26m
Peak period
109
0-6h
Avg / period
26.7
Comment distribution160 data points
Loading chart...
Based on 160 loaded comments
Key moments
- 01Story posted
Oct 20, 2025 at 3:39 PM EDT
2 months ago
Step 01 - 02First comment
Oct 20, 2025 at 4:05 PM EDT
26m after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
109 comments in 0-6h
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03 - 04Latest activity
Oct 23, 2025 at 1:43 AM EDT
2 months ago
Step 04
Generating AI Summary...
Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns
ID: 45648266Type: storyLast synced: 11/20/2025, 8:32:40 PM
Want the full context?
Jump to the original sources
Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.
Odd I got the update 2 weeks before M5 launch.
Software as a means to obsolete hardware.
Trillion dollar company
I do have performance issues on my iPhone 13 mini, but I expected it.
OP probably has been hit by the electron bug, which does indeed kill the performance of the whole OS…
I'm still getting accustomed to the device size, the Mini was such a perfect device. If only app and web developers would actually preview their work on its dimensions, I probably would have just replaced the battery (76%).
Reduced Transparency is a hard requirement for iOS 26.
It's a more appreciable burden on older iPhones though.
That said, who knows how efficient the implementation is compared to other changes in iOS 26. I turned liquid glass off with "reduced transparency" because even 1% extra battery usage for it would be too much even though I kinda appreciated the new look.
I remember it being kinda like placebo - you did, you marvelled at how much faster it's working, but in reality nothing changed. I really liked the look, and it did run smooth unless you had something below the minimum spec(which a lot of people did at the time).
My friend had an Alienware laptop which absolutely screamed with Vista
Likewise, while it performs "fine," interacting with the UI still feels sluggish on Tahoe on my M4 Pro compared to Sequoia. I still have another M4 Pro with sequoia on it and it's a night and day difference, in favor of Sequoia.
There may not be any real performance loss but there is definitely UI latency and it's very noticable.
(Don't get me started on macOS and the un-disableable mouse acceleration override coupled together with Steam Link...)
There is no world where 50fps is acceptable in any game in 2025. Flagship GPUs on high end systems running Windows manage 4k @ max settings north of 60, nearly double that with RT off. To achieve anything close on a mac, you're dropping down to 1440p, at lower settings, with frame generation.
They’re about the level of a 4060 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LWfM7Ktsal0
They really are great gaming machines from a hardware perspective. I wouldn't bother with an x86 laptop for gaming if it weren't for the software (mostly DRM) side.
Even 1khz mkb input on an apple silicon mac connected to a 500hz screen has insane utilization just doing shit in the OS. They are also struggling with variable refresh rate, improperly dropping down to the minimum (as low as 24hz) with jarring, jagged jumps up to the maximum after a few seconds of use.
This is a solved problem on both windows and linux. Even Asahi does a better job.
In a similar vein, >120Hz screens are of doubtful utility. The performance gain is insignificant, considering top human reaction time to visual stimuli is ~150ms and the jump from 120Hz to 240Hz is -4.17ms, 1/36th or 2.77% improvement.
Even then, most pro FPS players also still play on 200-800 DPI when 1600 DPI and preferably even 3200 DPI is much better. Those low DPIs are purely cargo culted from the 2000s era CS Pros their .cfg, when sensors were still pretty crappy, and those players are effectively running lowgrade mouse smoothing.
Uneducated gamers are kin to uneducated audiophiles. Stop drinking the snake oil.
High refresh rate monitors are great, yes, but those are still sub KHz - you're talking about polling a mouse at 13x the rate of the highest end esports monitors as some minimum bar for when a machine can be for gaming - get out of here with that kind of artificial gatekeeping.
No complaints about Asahi though :).
Windows 8 got some serious hate back in the day, it had some sound ideas that were implemented poorly, but no one could deny it was lightweight. It had the smallest memory footprint of all the modern Windowses IIRC.
Mac OS X (and macOS still) never felt as good.
Electron based apps cause a huge system wide lag on macOS 26 due to the use of a private macOS API[2]. This bug has been fixed in Electron but not all Electron-based apps have been updated yet.
[1] - https://avarayr.github.io/shamelectron/
[2] - https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/48311
- they made and are still making the headlines for how many months ?
Any press is not always good press, but in this case it's not like their users were going to flock to android anyway. So same deal as the orange iPhone: they kept a pretty big place in the news cycle.
- not doing any changes to the OS appareance for more decades would make it exponentially harder the more it goes on.
Doing a shit job at it is still fine in that respect, they get leeway to fix it, and people will still praise Apple for having seen the light at the end.
As a parallel we had the port situation and the keyboard on MacBooks. They did a shit job and reversed it, and during that time sales didn't specially tank. They could afford to do two or three cycles of "here we fixed it", to scrap it all at the end, and people still love their MacBooks the same.
This new setting and the existing "Reduce Transparency" look a little different but same idea overall.
That’s what I get for carrying only Apple gear in the thousands of euros with me.
I've heard good things about Apple TV devices, but given what a pain Airpods are without the rest of the ecosystem, there's no way I'm going to try it.
I'd assume because they're using the share feature: https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/share-an-airtag-iph41...
You can also turn them off altogether in Settings > Notifications > Tracking Notifications.
The way it should work, is that if the keys are nearby the user that owns them, the tracker shouldn't be giving unknown tracker notifications to other nearby users.
You mean nearby the user's phone.. nowadays the 2 are almost interchangeable..
Maybe the wife doesn't take her phone when they go somewhere (yeah, implausible, but, maybe). Or she has several phones..
This bug somehow went through the beta releases and still exists:
https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/797468?login=true
I was the same way, couldn’t pay me 10k to switch from my iPhone. For 10 years. Then, liquid ass came along and made me consider ditching Apple more seriously than I ever have. This redesign is apple’s most colossal failure of the last decade and I desperately hope they keep moving in the direction of rolling back these changes. It’s not just that everything is blurry and tinted. They made the buttons across the UI far less space efficient, widening and making cartoonish random elements that worked fine before. They added animations that slow down my iPhone 15 Pro and have tanked its battery life (don’t tell me it’s indexing either it’s been weeks!). They completely broke my “dumb phone” layout for my home screen by adding these incredibly ugly borders to everything.
Every day I curse myself for updating to this slop and for not quickly rolling back while they were still signing the old iOS. It is so unbelievably stupid that they decided to do this.
Same. First it was unnecessary tinkering with phone shape which was introduced in apple way in no less as "revolutionary". I laughed but still used the iphone.
Now they started to break UX with their stupid "liquid glass" and I am contemplating switch to android. At least you can switch off unnecessary garbage there.
It took some getting used to here and there, but over all I've been happy with doing something new on this front.
I suspect I'll be looking at hopping back over a couple summers from now when they figure out how to make this design language work.
The Liquid Glass aesthetic isn't bad, it's just rough around the edges. It'll be a nice effect once reality reigns it all in. That's what happened around a year or two following iOS7.
The original liquid glass was my favorite UI ever, and I love to customize my UI.
Also, all the hate is really boring and lame.
A single kg is enormous likely saving tens of dollars per car, which sounds like nothing, but if a million of these cars are made the cost saving are in the tens of millions.
What does a software company save by their software running 10% faster on user hardware. Exactly nothing. In the case of apple they even have some incentives to make their software worse to get people to buy new devices.
The curse of software engineering has always been that there is very rarely a reward for your software being better. Software companies mostly make it on features and "good enough" stability.
Which is always a combination of many factors.
I do not believe that you can market performance to anyone but a niche audience. The metrics are often difficult to comprehend and do not mean much. The one industry which does this is gaming and they usually do not go above giving specs at which a certain graphics quality at a certain frame rate is achievable.
I do not see how e.g. productivity software could be marketed like this. Except for unverifiable claims about "good performance".
To be honest, I do not think most users even care. They are annoyed at it, sure, but they will use what they have always used.
As a user, I would have looked forward to a few years of simply fixing bugs and making the OS more efficient.
Allow me to disable all animations, rounded corners, opacity, white space and whatever else I don't need. Imagine how snappy and productive it could be!
This is sort of like walking into an art gallery and demanding they hang different art.
Apple has always been visually opinionated. That’s fine. Not everything needs to be customisable. The problem is their aesthetic historically varied between daringly great and daringly fucked. Nothing about Liquid Glass, on the other hand, screams daring, thought or even vision. It’s just a random new effect, completely unjustified, whose only genuine utility for me has been making app icons less engaging.
If I spend hours of my day using a device I should be able to theme it exactly to my taste. The customer is always right in matters of taste. You are supposed to serve your customers not the other way round.
And don't give me oh that is not the apple way. I don't care. People don't buy apple for liquid glass or whatever but because they have arguably the best hardware so people put up with the software side of things.
This attitude always cracks me up. Only with tech products and among techies do we hear these demands of infinite customization of the products and tools we use.
Can you imagine any other vocation or industry making such demands of infinite customization of their tools and products that they use? I know I can’t.
The real analogy here isn’t landlords and homes. It’s a carpenter demanding that Stanley ship moldable handles with their hammers so that it fits their hand one millimeter better giving them the ability to maybe hammer one extra nail a day.
Users can change the theme however they want.
Windows has extremely limited customizability compared to what is available on Android and Linux.
The key feature of both Linux and Android is that the main interface "Desktop Environment" or "Launcher" can be replaced by the user.
I don’t think that every OS needs to adopt every feature of every other OS that’s out there.
People will decorate their workplace. Imagine working in an office and not being allowed any personal items on your table, no family photos nothing, empty clean table. It would seem draconian.
It isn't just about efficiency and accessibility but also about individuality. Tech is already dehumanizing enough.
Plus accepting the same feature that Windows, Linux, literally any operating system ever had isn't exactly outrageous. It wouldn't be a big deal to implement for apple. They don't because they are pretentious wankers. Simple as that. If you had themes, everyone would deactivate that liquid glass shite and that would hurt their egos.
I’ve been using iOS 26, iPad 26, and MacOs 26 since the initial developer betas and it’s perfectly fine and perfectly usable for me. I like it well enough that I would prefer not going back at this point. I downloaded the 26.1 beta today, flipped off all the standard settings to minimize the Liquid Glass effects. It’s not exactly the iOS 18 experience, buts close enough. After 15 minutes I put them all back, I prefer the Liquid Glass. Everything is subjective.
Frankly, every time there is any sort of UI change on any public platform be it OS, site, or popular app, there are always detractors until they get used to it. Then they complain a few years later when the UI they complained about and ultimately adopted gets changed again.
1) A few years later and you (or at least I) can't remember what the previous UI looked like. So if I don't complain about the change, it's only because I don't remember enough to recall what it used to be.
2) Exception: Windows 8. Nobody complained when Windows 9 came out, because they remembered what Windows 7 looked like (indeed, many of us were still using 7). (Of course some did complain that 9 didn't look exactly like 7, but since 9 was such an improvement over 8, their voices were muted.)
Our brains might rebel a bit for a short period at the change, then we adapt.
There was a similar amount of hate around the iOS 7 design. Apple toned it a bit down (like they are doing with Liquid Glass now), but you can compare the screenshots before and after and iOS 7 was certainly better in hindsight.
One day my dad dug up his old iPhone that was still running pre-7 and the UI was kind of meh.
All the non-techies in my family don’t seem to care about Liquid Glass? They went ‘oh it looks slightly different’ and went on with their lives.
By the way, I don’t think Windows 9 exists. They went 8 -> 8.1 -> 10.
Fair enough, it's like the landlord telling you that you can't change the layout.
> don't give me oh that is not the apple way. I don't care
Fair enough again. Apple doesn't care about others' aesthetic preferences either, and that's worked well for Cupertino since the 1980s.
They’ve also gotten less effective over time.
And they don’t get rid of rounded corners currently.
But it still does have a positive impact on the busyness of the os
Has noöne located and disassembled the thing yet? The speculation is getting tiresome. (I don’t own an up-to-date macOS device and have never owned an iOS one, so no help from my end, sorry.)
We can stimulate light, but that's just a waste of ray tracing and introducing annoying complexities.
Are they so paranoid about secrecy that they can't do event the most basic of UX design processes?
"We changed the terms of service. Accept them to keep using this service."
Outside of that, not much in the way of communication. They change and you keep catching up to them.
iOS isn't clothing you can return to the store when you don't like the style. You're stuck with the update once you have it.
80 more comments available on Hacker News