This sounds overly dramatic. You may not like the design but its 100% usable.
My hope was that Apple would be forced to course correct in subsequent releases but that doesn't seem to be happening.
I’m optimistic that they will eventually course correct on Liquid Glass, but we’ll have to wait until iOS/macOS 27, or perhaps longer.
There are parallels to Apple’s butterfly keyboard fiasco on the hardware side. Sleek looking on the surface but an objective step backwards in usability. Unfortunately it took Apple several years to reverse course on that one.
There are also parallels with the original pinstripes-and-transparency-everywhere aqua UI. I am also optimistic that it will be toned down over time but retaining the responsiveness.
Personally I prefer the new behaviour.
But eitherways: it’s just an option.
Hopefully iOS 26.x releases will continue to correct Liquid Glass, but I'm guessing iOS 27 is well down the path with it still integrated. Maybe iOS 28 will see sanity return???
It was not an entirely bad concept for the device it was conceived for, but Apple has a habit of unifying their technologies to all their products and sometimes, like with Liquid Glass, that seriously doesn’t work.
I mean, "computing power" in a literal sense maybe, but does that matter if it doesn't translate to either "workload contention" or "electrical power"?
I think the Liquid Glass effects, similar to smooth scrolling, are mostly just running as pixel shaders on a spare tile of one of the SoC's GPU's Streaming Processors — a tile that likely likely would have been idle-but-burning-power-anyway, given that GPU power management occurs on the level of entire SPs. It's the same reason that ProMotion "smooth viewport scrolling" doesn't really cost anything.
Animating the Liquid Glass widgets (i.e. changing their position or shape), on the other hand, does seem to cost a lot / produce lag.
I get the impression that this is down to the UI toolkit not being optimized for whatever Liquid Glass is doing in terms of recalculating constraints during animations. (When the GPU overruns its time budget while computing shaders for the compositor, the visual effect is of [double-buffered] texture buffers dropping/repeating frames, not slowdown. Actual "lag" in a GPU-composited UI is either from CPU work, or from one-shot CUDA-type GPU "prerender jobs".)
I get the sense that Apple rushed out some shitty code that has some of these components re-evaluating a bunch of their placement and sizing constraints on every non-static animation frame (rather than just giving the Liquid Glass shaders the ability to do declarative tweens.)
Or maybe the shaders already do declarative tweens, but Apple are doing tons of redundant on-CPU per-frame recalculations, to re-do any constraint-based layout for everything around the component during the animation, that might be impacted by the component's current tweened state. I dunno.
Either way, it's definitely silly, and could be re-engineered to work a lot better.
But it's also not really "Liquid Glass's fault" (i.e. something inherent to the visual design); it's just (AFAICT) bad implementation engineering, rushed to give Apple something to talk about besides its failure to launch Apple Intelligence.
You can report an issue by typing applefeedback:// into Safari if you want.
Sounds like you need to spend some money for a new Apple device! /s
Really wish Apple would get their software quality up from the gutter.
[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2025/12/18/macos-tahoe-studio-disp...
When I connect my laptop to a projector, I can select an individual window, or at least I used to be able to select a window and just project that. However, now when I try to select the window, as soon as the mouse cursor gets near the selection button, the button disappears!!! It has been driving me absolutely insane.
But it's especially obvious when it dims itself based on ambient room brightness, I can actually see the vertical refresh happening as I move from a fully bright room to a dim one.
The flickering was so bad in my case that the pixels got stuck for some minutes when it happened.
Weird green tints for no reason.. bubbles that take so long to inflate, you think your tap was dropped. Round edges that no longer fit the text content. Stupid ellipses at the edges of wrapped text. And all the functions that now take two taps when one used to do it. Text rendered on top of text for crying out loud! Whole view panes clobberin* each other. WebKit is a mess of wasted black bars where menus were hidden. Multiple flashes of white and black between content changes. It hits Apple apps as well as trashing third party layout.
Too many defects to list.
Headline: Apple celebrates 50th anniversary by burning down 40 years of human interface knowledge.
https://daringfireball.net/2025/11/software_update_tahoe_con...
I suppose it’s not really working, or is the product of a team and no other internal team actually use it.
[0]: https://security.apple.com/blog/memory-integrity-enforcement...
I have called and opened tickets, and I keep hearing it'll be fixed real soon now.