Even Vista did not have nearly as many problems as Liquid Glass. Most of the elements were static images, and the "aero" effects could be disabled, as well as the "Fluent Design" effects in later Windows 10.

Liquid Glass - with its wobbling jiggling jerking, shimmering and flashing, blurry and difficult-to-read, shifting and unpredictable design, and battery-demolishing performance - is so much worse. It's mindblowing how bad it is.

I would be very tempted to place a bet that nobody in the decision making chain used Vista or Compiz to any degree.

Commercial software coding glorifies denying anything older than 10 years exist outside of museums, let alone learn anything from it. The same has merely infected design world.

The golden rule from Apple in 2007 when they changed to flat design was icon or text - never both together.

Apple abandoned enforcing HIG for app developers around 2012 (Facebook tiled menu, modal abuse, and hamburger) but now seems to have given up on standards entirely.

The wall to wall interaction pattern is terrible too. Every time my hand brushes my phone some unexpected (and sometimes unknown) interaction occurs. Classic example is changing orientation while watching YT where accidental contact with the bottom-left (becoming top-right) part of the screen as you move the phone selects a new video. It’s becoming slop.

Apple's UI design started going downhill with the iOS 7 "flat design" release which was very shortly after Steve's death, and seemed to correspond to Ive being given a little too much free rein in the leadership vacuum that followed.

Jobs had his own flaws, but he was definitely a huge part of why Apple's UI design (and product design in general) has historically been as good as it has.

Jony Ive’s elevation was the problem: neither he nor his protege Alan Dye (who worked on the boxes) had UI training or experience and that has shown since iOS 7 where the focus shifted to things which looked nicer on the side of the iPhone box than they are in actual use - stuff like Liquid Glass shipping with an illegible lock screen keyboard is possible because they never put the lock screen in a presentation or product screenshot.

As a complete outsider, my impression is that this started slow because they had to politically overpower Apple’s actual UI group. Liquid Glass probably managed that with a unified look across all devices pitch which should’ve weighted the relative impact on the popular platforms much higher than the niche Vision Pro.

They don't notice, but they can _feel_ it. My aging mother, god bless, doesn't give a crap about design.. but she updated her iPhone and asked me what I thought about it because she hates it. And it wasn't nitpicking design choices - she just said 'it's so hard for me to do anything now and know where anything is'

They might not _notice_ but that doesn't mean it's not affecting their ability to use their computer smoothly.

With computers such a huge part of almost everyone's lives now, it's a travesty for one of the largest companies in the world to inflict something so subpar on so many old-style

I'll chime in with the others to say that "amateur" users still notice, even if my dad isn't calling me to say "Son, why does this new MacOS version have different icons for the `New` action across apps?"

I had to help him "get his bookmarks back" meaning see his bookmarks toolbar in Firefox. He must have hit a keyboard combo on accident. Since Firefox hides the menus by default, I had to tell him to tap Alt to see the menu, after which he was easily guided to View > Toolbars > Bookmarks Toolbar.

Bad UI design for novices is felt, if not conveyed outright.

I consider myself above average with UI design, but I still got confused with that dang "i" icon in the Preview app just yesterday.

I had to add my signature and write in the date so it looks like it was handwritten. So the plan was to just draw the date with a pencil tool and if that failed use the text tool to write the date.

First I instinctively clicked the pencil icon which turned out to be a highlighter. That's a great example where if they had added color for the tip and line it would have clearly looked like a highlighter. After that failed, I clicked that "i" icon because it looks like it's for inserting text. Honestly I was in such a rush I didn't even see the info pane popping up and was dang confused when nothing was happening.

I'm very familiar with info icons and have used them in my own apps, yet I had never seen one without the circle around it.

Reminds me of how OSX used to treat opacity in app icons as not part of the hithox. So I'd accidentally click the hole in the "O" for Outlook and it wouldn't open, haha.

Everyone makes mistakes every now and then. He also approved the Ping "music social network", and a few other nonsense products that no one wanted or liked.

But when you see mistakes made consistently, year after year, you know the problem is systemic.