Here's a breakdown of the key themes from the Hacker News discussion about Apple's "Liquid Glass" design, with supporting quotes:
Doubts About the Value of Translucency
A major theme is skepticism regarding the usefulness and desirability of translucent UI elements. Many users feel it adds unnecessary visual complexity and detracts from usability.
- "My Mac screen isn't transparent. Why should its UI be?" - lanna
- "I look at my Mac screen to see what is on my Mac screen. Whether there is a tabletop, a window, or a cat behind my Mac screen is irrelevant. If I want to see what is behind it I would be looking it that instead of my screen...The only place translucence sort of kind of makes sense is for video content but even then, it still totally optional. My experience of watching a video is not really degraded if the play button is opaque." - appreciatorBus
- "When multiple layers of different imagery shine through each other, I am not helped by this. The user interface placed on a semi-transparent panel is not more effective because it is set against a smeared mess of colors, nor am I emotionally fulfilled as a human being for knowing that the mess comes from a treasured personal memory." - karaterobot
Cynicism About Designer Motivations
Several commenters suggest that design changes are driven more by the need for designers to justify their jobs than by a genuine desire to improve the user experience.
- "When the company employs designers on a permanent salaried basis, those designers must make changes in order to assure their continued employment. To do otherwise risks the bean counters in the accounting department asking the pointed question: 'Why are we employing all these designers when they are not producing anything?'. The result is that there must be change for the purpose of assuring the designers continued employment. Result: translucent designs no one wants, but that looked great in the powerpoint presentations used to assure the designers remained employed." - pwg
- "I wonder how much of this is for the OS designer/UX/UI team to justify their existence at Apple. Suspect it’ll start out very glassy and gets flatter over time, so that they can claim ‘improvement to user experience’ over many years to come." - tanvach
- "I get the impression that as in architecture, the chief audience of the design is not the user, but other designers." - appreciatorBus
Potential AR/VR Implications
Some speculate that the increased use of transparency might be related to Apple's long-term plans for augmented or virtual reality devices.
- "I think what you're missing is that this is likely in preparation for some sort of AR glasses and something smaller form factor than the Vision Pro that will require transparency so you can see through to the real world etc..." - matznerd
- "Mark my words, this is coming. It’s doable (as an effect) - rear camera captures what’s behind the screen, face tracking adjusts perspective in real-time to make it seem transparent/have correct parallax." - whycome
Preference for Device-Specific UI
A few posters argue that different device types should have different UI paradigms optimized for their specific input methods and use cases, and that forcing uniformity is a mistake.
- "I don’t buy the argument that we need design harmony between platforms. If I wanted an iPad like experience on my Mac I would have bought an iPad. I paid for a mouse and keyboard centric experience. Liquid Glass actively takes away from that." - joshmarinacci
- "It is possible for different devices to have different interfaces optimized for those different interaction models. Apple has the money to support this." - joshmarinacci
Pushback Against Flat Design
A counterpoint to the criticism of "Liquid Glass" is a dislike for the current trend of ultra-flat, minimalist UIs, which some find difficult to use.
- "I'll take the bubble tea interface over the extreme flatness of every widget that dominates the UI these days where no cues are given as to what is just text, what's a button, an editable text input etc. While liquid glass is perhaps mediocre and distracting, the current "everything is just a text label or a stick figure icon" paradigm is pure hell. I dread learning any new UI because of how bad most are." - abraxas
- "Off topic, but I wonder if the youth of today will have nostalgia for hideous flat corporate design the same way I have a certain fondness for all those high gloss buttons from 2007." - nancyminusone
Historical Comparisons & Precedent
Several users draw parallels with past design trends, both positive and negative.
- "Apple re-running the entire Windows Vista Metro arc." - yborg
- "Back in the 1990s I remember CS professors taking a very chauvinistic idea of what an "operating system" was that stuck to the kernel, would probably exclude a CLI interpreter like bash, never mind the rest of the userspace and would particularly exclude anything having to do with GUI even if you had kernel drivers and tons of DLLs that came with the OS to support GUIs. Now you have Arstechnica, which should know better, which makes detailed reviews pixel-by-pixel of everything that changed between one version of MacOS and the next and seems to think the only thing that matters in an OS is the superficial things you can see, at least if the OS is MacOS." - PaulHoule
Acceptance of Subjectivity & Business Considerations
Some commenters acknowledge that design is subjective and that Apple's choices are likely driven by factors beyond purely technical considerations, such as aesthetics and branding.
- "This article acts as though design choices which are sub-optimal from a purely informational perspective, but which add personality and attraction to a product, have not earned Apple hundreds of billions of dollars in the past 25 years. ... Liquid Glass isn't immediately impressive to me either, but it will either succeed or fail not based on whether it is more effective or not, but whether people like it or not, and those are two different things." - karaterobot