In summary:
- Macworld reports that Apple’s controversial Liquid Glass interface will remain in future updates, despite mixed user reactions regarding aesthetics and legibility issues.
- Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman indicates macOS 27 will receive a slight redesign addressing transparency quirks and shadows to better achieve the original design vision.
- Future OLED MacBook Pro displays are expected to enhance the Liquid Glass experience, while Apple already added transparency reduction toggles in iOS 26.
With WWDC on the horizon—Apple’s annual software extravaganza begins on June 8, less than a month from now—thoughts are turning to the OS updates owners of Apple products can expect this year. And there’s one big question: What will happen to Liquid Glass?
As part of the 26 updates unveiled at last year’s WWDC, Apple brought in a new unified interface design across all of its operating systems called Liquid Glass. This proved divisive. Many users thought that the new look, which uses transparency effects to make the interface look like shimmery glass, was gorgeous and futuristic. Others felt that it drew attention to itself, worsened legibility, and reflected a broken design process.
Apple responded to the legibility complaints by giving iOS 26 a toggle to tone down the transparency effects, but has shown little inclination to backtrack in a broader sense on the aesthetic change of direction. Which should come as little surprise to long-term followers of the company: iOS 7 was highly controversial back in 2013, but was retained despite widespread complaints and ended up influencing an entire generation of mobile interfaces.
A new report reiterates the consensus view that Liquid Glass isn’t going anywhere, at least for the next year of software updates, but it does offer a glimmer of hope for any Mac owners who are sick of the Tahoe look. Apple is going to “refine” the interface for macOS 27.
In the latest edition of his Power On newsletter, Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman says Apple is working on a “slight redesign” for macOS 27. Or, at any rate, that employees regard it as a slight redesign. It’s possible users will feel differently.
The redesign will address the shadows and “transparency quirks,” Gurman writes, as part of a “cleanup and refinement effort.” This echoes the company’s approach with iOS 8 more than a decade ago, when the radical changes in iOS 7 were polished and refined to make them more palatable to users, without losing the underlying design principles.
The interesting part of Gurman’s claim is that macOS 27 won’t reflect a change in direction on even a small scale. Rather, he reports, this year’s update will bring the Mac closer to the original vision the designers had last year but weren’t able to achieve.
“[This year’s] changes to macOS are meant to make Liquid Glass look the way Apple’s design team intended it to from the start,” he writes. “Last year’s operating systems didn’t necessarily suffer from design problems, I’m told, but rather a not-completely-baked implementation from Apple’s software engineering team.”
In the longer term, Gurman says, Apple hopes that Liquid Glass will become more palatable as Mac hardware evolves. In particular the OLED screen on the upcoming touchscreen MacBook Pro will suit the interface style better than the screens of current LCD-based Macs.
For all the latest news and rumors about this year’s software updates, bookmark our regularly updated WWDC 2026 superguide.
Author: David Price, Editor, Macworld
David has been writing about technology for well over two decades, and got on board the Apple hype train when covering the original iPhone launch in 2007. He is an enthusiastic Apple Watch evangelist and feels that the HomePod is misunderstood.