How to Turn Liquid Glass into a Solid Interface
Apple’s new Liquid Glass interface design brings transparency and blur effects to all Apple operating systems, but many users find it distracting or difficult to read. Here’s how to control its effects and make your interface more usable. Although the relevant Accessibility settings are quite similar across macOS, iOS, watchOS, and tvOS, I separate them because they offer different levels of utility in each. I have no experience with (or interest in) a Vision Pro, so I can’t comment on Liquid Glass in visionOS.
macOS 26
To help you get a feel for how the various settings affect the Mac interface, I’ve taken all the screenshots below with the same screen content. For a quick comparison, download the images and then use Quick Look to flip back and forth between any two to view the differences. Select one image in the Finder, press the Space bar, and then use the arrow keys to change the Finder selection to the other image.
Default Settings
Here’s our starting point with macOS. Note the transparency in the menu bar, widgets, Control Center, and Dock. In the System Settings window, you can see that the sidebar is also translucent, allowing the wallpaper thumbnails to bleed through as they scroll underneath and letting the General item blur with Search at the top.
Reduce Transparency
The setting that makes the most difference in toning down the excesses of Liquid Glass is System Settings > Accessibility > Display > Reduce Transparency. It turns the menu bar opaque, prevents the wallpaper from being visible through the widgets, Control Center, and Dock, and eliminates the awkward bleeds under the System Settings sidebar. For those who take a lot of screenshots, like I do, Reduce Transparency is essential because it ensures that all screenshots have a consistent background. It would be highly distracting if screenshots had noticeably different colors due to being taken over different wallpapers or windows.
Increase Contrast (and Reduce Transparency)
To further clarify the interface, you can turn on System Settings > Accessibility > Display > Increase Contrast, which also automatically enables Reduce Transparency. It outlines most interface elements so they stand out much more strongly—no more light gray on lighter gray. Note that it also changes some colors, so if you ever see a system that has odd blues and greens in Messages, for instance, it’s usually this setting. I find the Increase Contrast setting jarring, but it might be a significant help for those with low vision.
Liquid Glass Off
Recently, Bob Pony revealed on Bluesky that there’s a hidden setting in macOS that lets you turn off Liquid Glass entirely. Enter the command below into Terminal to turn off Liquid Glass; turn it back on by running the command again after changing YES to NO. You’ll need to log out and log back in to see the full effect.
defaults write -g com.apple.SwiftUI.DisableSolarium -bool YES
If you compare this screenshot to the first one, you can see that it eliminates the glass-like look of items in Control Center, drops the background around the Dock entirely, and reverts to the less-rounded corners familiar from macOS 15 Sequoia. The sidebar in System Settings is no longer on a layer above the rest of the window, and the Search field appears only at the top of the sidebar list, not as a hovering object that remains in view as you scroll the sidebar contents. You can’t see it in this screenshot, but the icon names that appear when you hover over them in the Dock also lose their background, becoming almost unreadable. Also not apparent from this screenshot is that all menus on the right side of the menu bar become almost entirely transparent and difficult to use—presumably they’re managed by Control Center.
Liquid Glass Off, Reduce Transparency On
What disabling Liquid Glass doesn’t do—reasonably enough—is turn off transparency. When I add Reduce Transparency to the screenshot above, here’s what I get. The menu bar becomes opaque, which is good, and widgets become black. However, Control Center is completely borked, and the change makes no difference for the Dock.
Liquid Glass Off, Reduce Transparency and Increase Contrast On
Adding Increase Contrast to the mix does what you expect but doesn’t improve any of the problematic spots.
I can’t recommend turning off Liquid Glass entirely in this way. Although it does make macOS 26 look more like macOS 15, it suffers from several glaring mistakes that Apple has no incentive to fix. Stick to Reduce Transparency and add Increase Contrast if your eyes would appreciate it.
Liquid Glass Off, Per App
However, as Matt Sephton noted in TidBITS Talk, you can also turn off Liquid Glass on a per-app basis, at least for some Apple apps. He gives these commands as examples, and you can experiment with other apps by replacing their bundle identifier—the com.apple.finder piece—in the command below. To find it, Control-click any app, choose Show Package Contents, and search Contents/Info.plist for the CFBundleIdentifier key. It’s usually sensible, like com.apple.Home.
defaults write com.apple.finder com.apple.SwiftUI.DisableSolarium -bool YES
defaults write com.apple.Preview com.apple.SwiftUI.DisableSolarium -bool YES
Reduce Motion
There is one other setting that’s often recommended for solidifying the interface: System Settings > Accessibility > Motion > Reduce Motion. On the Mac, the main place I see this changing things is in the zoom animation when entering full-screen mode—it becomes a cross-fade transition instead. Turn it on if you like, but don’t expect it to make a notable difference unless you have specific vision issues that call for it.
iOS 26
iOS has all the Accessibility settings macOS does and then some, plus Increase Contrast can be turned on separately from Reduce Transparency. For each of the screenshots below, the original image is on the left and a screenshot showing the effect of the setting is on the right. iPadOS is similar, as you’d expect.
Reduce Transparency
I’ll start by turning on Settings > Accessibility > Display & Text Size > Reduce Transparency, which is again the most effective way to bring Liquid Glass to heel. As you can see, the big win is the notifications, which gain a solid background that makes them far more readable against the background. The Search button at the bottom also becomes opaque, as does the Dock’s border. The downside is that you’ll encounter some apps, such as Photos, where top or bottom toolbars have relatively few buttons and look strange because Apple expects the background to show through.
Increase Contrast
Turning Reduce Transparency off but enabling Settings > Accessibility > Display & Text Size > Increase Contrast offers an intermediate level of improved readability. The notifications are still see-through, but the extra contrast causes their text to stand out more. Increase Contrast applies solid borders to elements such as the notifications, flashlight and camera buttons, the Search button, and the Dock, helping to differentiate them from the background as well. Be warned that the blues and greens in Messages—and those used for switches through the interface—will look different from everyone else’s if you have Increase Contrast turned on.
Reduce Transparency and Increase Contrast
What about combining the two? It does exactly what you’d expect, eliminating the bleedthrough of the background nearly everywhere, boosting the contrast, and adding borders.
Bold Text
Perhaps the transparency doesn’t bother you, but you’re still having trouble reading text. You can try turning on Settings > Accessibility > Display & Text Size > Bold Text, which adds some weight to all text in the interface. (Happily, it doesn’t require restarting the iPhone anymore.) I think it helps, but not as much as either Reduce Transparency or Increase Contrast.
Reduce Transparency, Increase Contrast, and Bold Text
Since all these settings are independent, you can combine them for the ultimate in a non-transparent, highly readable interface. It’s more than I need, but there’s no shame if you like it best.
Reduce Motion
You may have noticed that Notification Center itself is a “pane of glass” with a curved edge that distorts the text above the bottom row of icons. That’s more annoying in static screenshots than in actual use, but you can eliminate refractions as well by turning on Settings > Accessibility > Motion > Reduce Motion. (While you’re there, test with Prefer Cross-Fade Transitions, too—I had trouble discerning what it did.) The right-hand screenshot below has only Reduce Motion turned on, but you can see that the edge of Notification Center’s pane no longer distorts the text under it, and it also makes the background noticeably blurrier. You can combine Reduce Motion with all the rest of the settings if you want. The downside of Reduce Motion is that some aspects of the iPhone and iPad experience may feel abrupt without their normal transitions.
Other Settings
For reference, here are the Settings > Accessibility screens I’ve been discussing. A few additional settings here may enhance your experience with Liquid Glass and the iOS 26 interface in general. You can increase the text size with Larger Text, although at some point, certain parts of the interface may look weird. It can be tricky to find examples of what turning on Button Shapes will do, but more buttons that are normally just text will get outlines and possibly be underlined. Enabling On/Off Labels adds a vertical line (for on) or circle (for off) symbol to all switches if the color change doesn’t work for you.
watchOS 26
watchOS has the same Accessibility settings as iOS, and for the most part, they serve the same purpose. That said, the Apple Watch display is small enough that Apple was more restrained in how extensively it implemented Liquid Glass, so reducing the impact of Liquid Glass is less necessary.
The easiest way to test these settings is through the Accessibility screen in the iPhone’s Watch app—changes take effect immediately on your Apple Watch. They’re also available in Settings > Accessibility on the watch itself, but it’s much clumsier to work with.
Default Settings
To set the stage, here’s what four screens of watchOS 26 look like with the Photos face. Obviously, what bleeds through the Liquid Glass will depend on your face; some faces work better than others. Nevertheless, you can see that the photo is fairly visible under the notification in the second image, and somewhat visible behind the Smart Stack in the fourth, but hardly noticeable behind Control Center in the third. (Ignore some of the numbers changing; it’s devilishly difficult to capture these screenshots precisely and in the desired sequence, so I had to retake a few.)
Reduce Transparency
Enabling the Reduce Transparency switch results in notable changes. The background disappears from all three screens with overlays. My take is that the notification text is much easier to read; the other screens aren’t markedly different in terms of readability.
Increase Contrast
Swapping Reduce Transparency for Increase Contrast keeps the black background under Notification Center, but restores it to Control Center and the Smart Stack. Nonetheless, the icons in Control Center stand out noticeably better thanks to darker backgrounds and brighter whites. For my eyes, Increase Contrast offers the best combination of making aspects of the interface—notably the notifications—easier to read while still retaining some of the background for aesthetic reasons.
Bold Text
Perhaps the problem is simply the text being too thin? This test, with the Bold Text setting enabled, shows that making the text bold helps slightly, but the notification text remains harder to read against the image background. Bold Text appears to affect only the text in Control Center, not the icons, but it does bold the orange Timer icon in the Smart Stack. Notice that it also bolded the date and temperature on the initial screen. To my mind, Bold Text is not much of a win on its own.
Reduce Transparency, Increase Contrast, and Bold Text
As expected, combining all three settings yields the most readable interface in watchOS. Reduce Transparency eliminates the blurry backgrounds, Increase Contrast makes the buttons in Control Center pop, and Bold Text makes all the text a bit thicker and easier to parse.
Other Settings
As with iOS, a few other settings in the Accessibility screen may also be helpful. You can increase the text size throughout the interface using the Text Size slider, although setting it too large will significantly reduce the amount of information that fits on the screen and result in some awkward wrapping. There’s also a Reduce Motion switch, but I couldn’t figure out what effect it has.
tvOS
I’ll admit a distinct level of apathy when it comes to Liquid Glass in tvOS 26. Because tvOS is primarily about consuming content, and Apple has already put a lot of work into making it visually striking, the Liquid Glass changes don’t make much difference. That’s even more true in apps other than Apple’s TV app since they all do their own thing anyway.
To illustrate what you can control, I combined three screens that change based on the available Accessibility settings:
- Left: The TV app with its Liquid Glass sidebar
- Middle: The tvOS Home Screen showing an Apple TV+ movie under the Liquid Glass-enabled Top Shelf of icons and Control Center
- Right: The screen at Settings > Accessibility > Display, where these settings live.
Default Settings
In the default state, note that the Liquid Glass sidebar on the left side displays blurry images of the icons underneath it, and the Liquid Glass-driven Top Shelf features a movie poster background surrounding the icons. Similarly, the Control Center icons show the poster background. The Settings text is provided for reference—no Liquid Glass is involved.
Reduce Transparency
Turning on Reduce Transparency eliminates the bleedthrough of the background in the sidebar, Top Shelf, and Control Center, and it slightly lightens the color of the Settings screen. The readability of the sidebar does improve, but the icons in the Top Shelf and Control Center are equally readable in either state.
Increase Contrast
Increase Contrast has a minimal effect in tvOS. Most notably, it makes the headings above the controls in the Settings screen brighter. The time and the Channels & Apps headings also become a bit brighter. The outlines around the Top Shelf and Control Center icons also become more prominent. Ironically, making the headings look more like the controls and sidebar items reduces contrast.
Bold Text
I actively dislike Bold Text in tvOS. For my eyes, the text in tvOS is easy enough to read to start, and making it bold muddies it and makes it slightly harder to read in general. Nor do I think it helps readability in the Liquid Glass sidebar.
Reduce Transparency, Increase Contrast, and Bold Text
Putting all the settings together does what you’d expect, and if your eyes prefer it, that’s fine. Since I don’t like the Bold Text changes and Increase Contrast has such a minimal effect, I wouldn’t use these settings.
Reduce Motion
tvOS has an option at Settings > Accessibility > Motion > Reduce Motion, but as with watchOS, I couldn’t figure out what impact it has. However, I’m thrilled I found it because that screen also contains the option to turn off Auto-Play Video Previews, which I hate with the heat of a burning sun.
Recommendations
As I hope I’ve been clear throughout, everyone’s vision is different, and you should choose the settings that make these various interfaces the most usable for you. If you’re looking for a starting point, here’s what I’ve done.
- macOS 26: Use Reduce Transparency to bring back the opaque menu bar and eliminate odd bleedthroughs in various parts of the interface. This setting is particularly important if you take screenshots for documentation.
- iOS 26 and iPadOS 26: If you can read notifications and don’t have trouble with readability in other apps, I recommend leaving all the settings off to start and only turning on Reduce Transparency if you decide you need it. It significantly improves readability, but at the cost of awkward interfaces in some apps that heavily rely on Liquid Glass elements.
- watchOS 26: My favorite setting for watchOS is Increase Contrast, which makes notifications more readable by eliminating the bleedthrough background and also causes some buttons in the interface to stand out more. Reduce Transparency isn’t much of a win and makes the interface less attractive.
- tvOS: I don’t see enough benefit in any of the settings that reduce Liquid Glass to bother with them. Reduce Transparency works as expected, but there’s relatively little transparency used, so it makes little real-world difference. But turning off Auto-Play Video Previews is a huge relief!
Let me leave with one final reminder. Liquid Glass is here to stay. Apple will continue to refine it in small ways throughout the rest of the OS 26 cycle, but there’s no avoiding it. Nor is it the worst thing ever—it won’t radically affect the Apple experience for most people, and with the judicious use of the Accessibility settings I’ve described here, you can reduce the impact of any changes that do make it harder for you to interact with your devices.
I wish I could react this as more than “Good Post”, more like “Fantastic Post”!!!
Combined with your article on LiqGla being as Apple says ‘about the content’, I am wondering what advantage this gives us in the examples provided… It gives us more sense of oneness with… the Wallpaper? I look forward to the issuing of 26.1 and ‘upgrading’ then most likely coming back to this post and turning off LiqGla.
Yet another reason to increase my membership contribution in Dec. I just checked and there is something called Boost in the TidBITS membership pages. Can you add a button for that here in the Discourse interface to make it easier to reward excellent posts?
Well Done @ace !
Thank you for taking the time to try all those different settings and take screenshots of them, so we can compare them! Seeing this makes me feel a little more confident about updating my phone when 26.1 comes out.
Some comments related to the Vision OS 26:
The Apple Vision Pro already incorporated many of the components of Liquid Glass. However, when I installed Vision OS 26 (because I consider the AVP a beta device, I have no qualms about installing betas there), I noticed that after any session lasting more than a few minutes, I experienced vertigo that persisted until I slept overnight. I turned on ‘Reduce Motion’ and the problem went away. The only noticeable effect of doing this was that I couldn’t activate some of the settings on the new Jupiter environment.
I should mention that I experienced similar issues when using the single elastic band instead of the non-elastic double band to hold the AVP on my head. As similar issues occurred when I used sunglasses that put pressure above and behind my ears, I attributed the issue to the elastic anchors being in a similar position. Relevant to my problem with VisionOS 26, I encountered similar issues after viewing user reviews of new cars on YouTube, which often included sections shot in a moving car.
The “Reduce Motion” setting in tvOS prevents the album art in Music from animating. I raised the distraction of the latest animations as an issue in a previous post and this was a solution.
I think turning on Reduced Transparency in i(Pad)OS just makes things look worse, as it highlights the unbalanced top/bottom margins of the controls (especially when scrolling, e.g., in an iOS Mail mailbox list with a light background).
Turning on Reduced Motion also does not appeal to me, as windows just seem to jump around rather than moving smoothly (e.g., the “all windows” view in iOS).
These settings are surely useful to people who for whatever reason cannot use the default interface. But they also highlight what I see as obvious design flaws of that default.
I already had Reduce Transparency and Increase Contrast enabled. When I logged back in after entering “defaults write -g com.apple.SwiftUI.DisableSolarium -bool YES” most of my menubar icons disappeared. Here is the before and after:
I was not expecting that. What am I missing?
Thanks, that’s all I can say!
I’ve experienced headaches, if not vertigo, when certain glasses or headgear put pressure above my ears, so I know what you’re talking about. But it’s freaky that it was also triggered by motion in the visionOS Liquid Glass changes.
Nothing, I’m afraid. Disabling Liquid Glass plays havoc with everything on the right side of the menu bar. It’s really not a solution.
One stunning stupidity of Liquid Glass is the use of colour in Contacts. Information is no longer presented legibly in black on white. In MacOS it is presented in black on a colour, and in iOS the text that is a mixture black, white and grey against a colour. There is no way to change this except for individual contacts, and even then a white background is not an option and the colours of the text are immutable. Has anyone found a hidden preference that will remove this “feature”?
I have always had Reduce Transparency switched on. So when I used the app Solid Glass to see what happens with Liquid Glass disabled in the Finder I couldn’t tell the difference. Reducing transparency really works!
Of course, the cause may be different. I also experience it if I watch too many YouTube videos shot in a moving vehicle (e.g., auto reviews when I was buying a new car). That may be the alternate cause to check.
The terminal command does not work for the Contacts app. When I copy addresses from the Contacts app to another, it pastes as white text.
There aren’t many other Contacts apps.
It also disables Bartender 6 completely.
I think it’s interesting how our brains can have difficulty dealing with seeing or hearing things that have been manipulated or generated by our gadgets. VR and other types of moving graphics can cause motion sickness and headaches, as we’re discussing here. A similar mismatch in our brains between perception and reality can cause a painful sensation often called “eardrum suck” in noise-cancellling headphones and earphones. Here are two articles I like that are about eardrum suck:
I have written extensively about optics and vision, and the best way I know the visual effects that make you sick is that they tire your eye muscles out. Your eye muscles pull on lens in your out, trying to reshape it so you can see clearly. This even happens if you are so old your eyes muscles cannot adapt well enough to change their focus much. How it affects you varies, but there are things most people can’t do. For example after a series of tests a few years ago, Canadian researchers said soldiers should not use Microsoft’ Hololens for more than 25 minutes. One of the bad things designers who don’t understand human vision do is to try to get your eye to focus on a surface an inch from the surface of your eye. I have published articles in Optics journals, but most of them are behind paywalls; ask me if you want a copy of one.
Although the LCD screen is physically that close, if the lens system is designed correctly, the projected image should be much further away. It should result in your eyes focusing at a natural distance.
The big problem isn’t so much the distance, but the fact that the distance to which you’re focusing never changes. All VR objects, no matter how near or far they appear, focus identically. So the muscles in your eyes responsible for shifting focus don’t do anything. They remain fixed at whatever virtual distance the lens system is configured to produce.
This is a similar problem with 3D movies - your eyes remain focused at once distance (to the screen) no matter how near/far the projected objects are.
Unfortunately, I don’t know of a good solution for this. I don’t think there (yet) exists a tech that would force your eyes to shift focus in order to look at (virtually) near/far objects. But that’s what we actually need.
If you put a suitable lens between the LCD and the eye, that can correct the problem. That’s what eyeglasses do.
I don’t have time to work out what’s happening in the other cases. It’s important to remember that eyestrain comes from straining eye muscles, so you can tolerate a few minutes of viewing but the eyestrain will get you eventually. Another issue can be differences in terminology between specialists in vision (e.g. ophthalmologists) and specialists in display technology. I was at an optics conference a few years ago where it was clear the two were talking past each other.
Reading the article and the comments is depressing. All these “improvements” may be great, but Apple ought to make them optional for people who really want them, when a new OS comes along, rather than make them the default, which people then have to figure out all sorts of work-arounds if they don’t like them.
Apple is too smart for its own good.
There is one way to avoid it. Don’t update your OS. I’d been holding off for the 26.1 releases but you’ve convinced me to avoid this OS set completely.
I’ve been my parents’ primary tech support for years. When they were in their early 80s, I watched as both grew increasingly exasperated by the annual changes Apple pushes out. Menus, settings, and their most used apps changed for dubious usability improvements. Really what’s going on is Apple designers chasing fashion, creating trends that trigger impulse purchases, and generally justifying their ongoing employment. Users actually don’t benefit from having to relearn processes every year.
This constant change for change sake could grow to be a significant issue as the population continues to age. My parents went from each actively using a Mac, iPad, and iPhone to never touching any of them. While we lost my mother to dementia last year, my father who will celebrate his 90th birthday in a few months is still vital and active (we’re planning an Alaska adventure for May) but Apple devices are too intricate and opaque for him. Instead he’s happy with his Kindle and Roku TV.
Agree with you. My Dad had the same problem with the pointless changes and switched to a simpler phone. I doubt I will be upgrading to iOS26 myself and will be looking at one of the new less complex smartphones. Don’t see why I should twist my brain into a pretzel trying to outsmart these never-ending and most dubious design decisions. Really a shame.
macOS settings help restore usability, but heck does it make it ugly — I spot about 4 different filthy grays.
What bugs me about this is that I am now apparently faced with this choice: pretty but unusable vs. usable but ugly. It should be $3T-Apple’s plethora of professional UX experts’ sworn duty to figure out how to give me both at the same time rather than forcing upon me an either/or. This dichotomy is tantamount to admitting UX mission failure.
Apple’s pretentious overpriced goggles failed and instead of moving on, now everybody, even desktop professionals, are being forced to adopt a UX designed for AR goggles and leisure/consumption. @ace is right that this is not going away. And that makes it even more infuriating. Instead of looking forward to an updated macOS with a fresh new appearance, we’re trying to see how far we can delay the inevitable while we exchange tinkering tricks and tips to mitigate the damage. This is not progress. And joy it certainly does not spark either. Shame for the missed opportunity.
You’re certainly welcome to do that, but I don’t think you’re doing yourself any favors.
Liquid Glass will be largely the same for OS 27 and so on. It’s not going away, so skipping OS 26 is merely a delaying tactic.
Unless you plan never to buy another Mac again (which may be out of your control if your current one dies), you will have to use whatever is current when you next upgrade. macOS 15 will never again be installable on a new Mac.
Even if you don’t upgrade your Mac, if you need to buy a new iPhone, iPad, or Apple Watch, it will come with whatever is current then, and although it might work backwards with macOS 15, there’s no guarantee.
In September 2027, macOS 15 will cease to receive security updates, rendering it at least theoretically unsafe to use. The longer you stick with it, the more like there are to be unpatched vulnerabilities, software incompatibilities, and eventually loss of functionality with Web browser security certificates and the like.
You’re suggesting that the cognitive load of adapting to something new is largely the reason to avoid upgrading. Assuming that’s true, the longer you wait to upgrade, the greater the cognitive load—very few people become more technically proficient and adaptable as they age through retirement years. In other words, it will only get harder, so it makes sense to devote the learning time now, while you’re as capable as you ever will be.
It is indeed an issue, and I grasp at the hope that the constantly changing tech ecosystem we’ve created will also create opportunities for companies to provide basic functionality at a more understandable level. As much as Apple tries to create systems for everyone, there are always people on the edges of the audience who won’t be able to keep up. If there are enough of them, we’ll see more apps and devices aimed at those niche markets.
Everyone vs. the edges, eh? I don’t subscribe to this modern tech faith that Apple has it dialed in for the vast majority and that the few for which that doesn’t work are the oddball outliers. Rings more dismissive than optimist to me, assuming that is what you were after. Just because Apple is a hugely profitable megacorp makes them neither infallible nor clairvoyant. And just because we remain hopeful for betterment shouldn’t give them a pass for various missteps along the way.
I’m not saying that Apple necessarily has it dialed in for the vast majority; I’m saying that Apple focuses on the vast majority. There’s a difference between “tries” and “succeeds.”
But in the context of @mark7’s post, where he was talking about his parents having more trouble using Apple devices in their 80s, I think it is safe to say that Apple is not focusing on the needs of that audience. I set my paternal grandmother up with an orange iMac back when those were new. I forget how old she was then, but she was able to do basic email and other things with no problem for a few years. However, well before dementia forced her to move to an assisted living facility, we had to take the iMac away because it just caused stress for her when she could no longer deal with anything that wasn’t exactly the way we’d shown her (and wow, could she mess things up in ways I couldn’t always figure out).
The eventual solution may have to be an abstraction of user interface so different people can engage with devices at their cognitive and experiential level. One size does not fit all when it comes to interface.
Whatever happened to “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”? I stayed on Snow Leopard until the browsers would no longer work on modern web sites. I still have an installation running on a Mac Mini that I connect to with Remote Access for applications that never updated to the latest Apple “improvements”. Looks like I’ll be staying on Sonoma for the foreseeable future. I had hoped we left these eye candy improvements behind when Jony (sic) Ive left.
Within a day of updating to Liquid Glass, I was not liking it, so I combed through Settings and used a lot of the settings mentioned by Adam “improve” it. Then, in another TB thread about liquid glass, one person, suggested a period of adjustment might be needed, so I switched back to the defaults, and have been adapting.
I owned the first Mac and was a zealous advocate of its graphical user interface (GUI) over the PC. As a programmer (as we were called in those days) and interested in GUIs I learned about the principles behind the Mac GUI from the writings of Bruce Tognazzini and Don Norman. To me they were the giants who laid down many principles in the new field of user interface design. So when I read an article about Liquid Glass on their website (though not by them), it held a lot of weight for me and made logical sense.
The arguments in this article convinced me that no amount time spent adapting to liquid glass, will be as good as just minimizing it as much as possible right now. So Adam’s article will be a big help in tailoring out what’s wrong with Liquid Glass.
I find it disturbing that Apple is releasing this “update” when there is so much changed that does not improve the user experience. As the old but tru comment states, “Just because you can does not mean that you should make these changes”.
Thanks to ACE for the suggestions on methods to mitigate this change.
I haven’t seen Liquid Glass yet, just like I have not tried Apple Vision or Apple Intelligence. On one hand, I really should try them to see how the technology is changing. But on the other, it’s not easy now to find find someplace where I could spend an hour or more testing those features to see if they would work for me.
Just before the Mac came on the scene, I drove up to a long-gone computer store a few files away to do just that. I sat down and tested the keyboard and tried typing with the three-finger commands required back then. I am a fast but erratic touch typist and quickly found that the cumbersome commands slowed typing to a crawl. I had set out to buy a computer, but the ones they had did not work for me. Several months later, I took my younger daughter, then 6 or 7, to the Boston Computer and watched her sit down and use one of the first Macs on display. She took to it swiftly and easily. Her experience – and my own testing of the Mac – sold me on the Mac.
There are 3 or 4 Apple Stores within a dozen miles of me in the Boston area, but they are busy places and I haven’t seen a place to sit down and test out the new features. I’m an old guy, and I’ve had enough experience with Macs to know things can go wrong that – if I’m lucky – may take hours or days to fix. I also know that my eyes don’t like tiny type on small screens. After cataract surgery, I no longer need glasses to see the world, but I need reading glasses for anything closer than two or three feet from my eyes. And having lived long enough to learn my limits, I’m cautious about adopting new technology without having a chance to learn how it works.
The most disappointing thing about these changes is that we already went through a period with transparency in MacOS that was (thankfully) abandoned. Seems Apple didn’t learn from that era of stripes, invisible menu bars, and illegible drop-down menus.
Most 3d party apps misbehave when you turn on a lot of these accessibility settings, especially in iOS. Lots of text gets cut off, menus get truncated, and things just look ugly. And many web sites are another awful experience with tiny fonts that the system can’t enlarge.
I primarily just enable Reduce Transparency on all devices. On the Mac, I also drop the display resolution on my monitor to get bigger text.
I wish Apple would address readability across all of their first-party apps. Final Cut Pro has some particularly awful tiny, dark purple text and icons on dark gray backgrounds.
It will go away when the Next Shiny ThingTM comes around - just like what happened to Aqua, brushed-metal, skeumorphism, etc.
But it may be several years and there’s no guarantee that what comes next will be any better.
Thanks for a great topic. For me, it just shows Apple, while claiming to be very attentive to accesability issues, and to a good degree they are, they seem to prize beauty over functionality. As someone with eye issues it is so frustrating to try to be able to read items that are far too light against bright backgrounds that seem pretty but are horrendous to read even using the accessibility resources.
When a new capability is introduced, designers initially go wild using it.
It even extends to hardware. Remember when blue LEDs were first economically produced? My ReplayTV’s power LED could light up a room.
I’ve a 2024 m4 Mini, still on Sequoia. But…
I also have “an experimental copy” of Tahoe on an external SSD.
The liquid glass paradigm doesn’t do much for me. I wouldn’t be surprised to see it “melt away” into something else after one or two more OS iterations.
I tend to stick with things I like, including OS versions.
My 2018 Mini is now moved over to “the back table”, and it STILL runs Mojave – the OS it originally came with when I took it out of the box six+ years ago…
Settings > Accessibility > Display & Text Size > Increase Contrast
kills colours in Weather app (iOS) and also in Weather app (macOS).
BEFORE
AFTER
The problem has been reported to Apple Bugreport.
Over the last two days, Acam’s article has gotten write-ups in Daring Fireball and 9 to 5 Mac, recommending it as the place to go to mitigate some of the effects of Liquid Glass:
So, Adam, myou’re now the expert on this!
“Tog” / Bruce Tognazzini must be aghast. Come on, Apple! PLEASE follow and respect the Human Interface Guidelines. Liquid Glass is an abomination.
My experience was that after a log out/log back in, all the third-party menu bar controls disappeared. Quitting and restarting the various apps made no difference. Boolean to NO, Number One, make it so.
great article - thank you.
this is preliminary as I have to do more testing, but following up on turning off glass in the terminal, if you turn it off with
as stated, THEN turn it on for control center with
then it can be off for everything else but control center will now be useable.
As far as the menubar extras go, it looks like the only ones remaining are the ones you have turned on which are from Apple, but you can turn at least some others on individually if you can figure out what they are called. For example, to get the OneDrive menubar item you can use
and then log out and in again of course. A good place to look for the names is in ~/Library/Preferences
Even so after all this, some things will still be not nice - like things that layer over windows might not have their correct background and might be difficult to read or use.
It remains to be seen how useable/workable this is, but it sure looks a lot better.
Good luck!
-= G =-
This article felt like one of those old-time Macworld or MacUser articles comparing all the popular email clients—a ton of work, but worthwhile in the end.
Very little of the information is new, but I hope I was able to provide context and visual aids that actually show what the different settings do. And we’ll be able to refer back to it as Liquid Glass evolves to see if Apple is making things better.
Getting old sucks. But all of this is true for many things in our lives. Cars are more complex (but safer). My grandfather complained that he now could buy his groceries at the dept. store and his clothes at the grocery store. Note that this was about forty or fifty years ago. Some of you won’t know what I’m talking about since it’s always been true for you. My father who died about ten years ago learned email in maybe his seventies or eighties eventually forgot how to use email and he didn’t have dementia. Something he learned late in life he just forgot how to do. Probably because it was always changing to some extent. Enough.
Thanks to Adam for putting this all in one place.
Unfortunately there are no “UX experts” left at Apple. Some left (/were fired; Don Norman, for example) when Jobs 86’d the Advanced Technologies Group; a bunch left when Jony Ive and marketing designers took over the design of iOS 7; a bunch left in all the years between and since. The only people who do design any more at Apple are BFAs, educated and trained to design posters and, apparently, make pixels wiggle. When I worked on UX in the IT department (for internal solutions) there was only one person besides me on a team of 50 who had a master’s in human-computer interaction, and we would groan about the stuff that came out from the product side, which showed no evidence that anyone had usability education/training or experience. Basically, since iOS 7, BFAs do what product managers tell them to do. Right before I left one of my junior coworkers even said, “I don’t think anyone cares about usability anymore.” I thought, “Maybe nobody here! But users sure do!”
Exactly. Sadly, Apple simply doesn’t know what it’s doing anymore. I won’t be upgrading and am in the middle of selling my RSUs. All of this has nothing to do with age but with the fact that they now contravene every design principle that was ever created while Jobs/Tesler/Norman/Tognazzini/etc. were there. They don’t even understand them, never mind implement them! They have given up and are just aping Android. They have lost me, and unless there is a turnaround in the area of HCI, I can’t imagine I’ll be coming back.
Oh my. I haven’t upgraded any of my devices, but I thought the iPhone and iPad might be usable with changes that Adam points out. After reading the NN article, I think that I’ll wait a while. I don’t want to spend my time dealing with all that. I’ll be deferring my purchase of an iPhone 17 Pro to replace my 13 Pro.
For what it’s worth - after playing around with this more, although what I decribed above will work, I think the most practical thing is to leave glass on system-wide, and then turn it off for the applications where it really bothers you. If you turn it off for the Finder, you will still have all the menu bar extras without doing anything special for them. You may still have some layering problems in certain apps for which you have turned glass off, but you can decide for yourself which is worse…
So happy with this new knowledge
My Mac is almost cured again from this Liquid Glass nonsense. To summarise:
Disable Liquid Glass globally:
defaults write -g com.apple.SwiftUI.DisableSolarium -bool YESTo fix Control Centre after globally disabling Liquid Glass:
defaults write com.apple.controlcenter com.apple.SwiftUI.DisableSolarium -bool NOTo fix the Dock:
defaults write com.apple.dock com.apple.SwiftUI.DisableSolarium -bool NOThen logout and login again.
Ernst.
The Jello controls in Safari and Camera on an iPhone bothered me. In the safari→tabs setting turn off “Compact” (which I guess is a euphemism for wiggly ;-)
I didn’t see a way to turn of the wiggly bubbles in the Camera app. Anyone know how?
This is so true! Print designers designing user interfaces. That’s not to say they aren’t capable, but it’s not a given.
When I worked at Apple—for a period of time either side of the iOS 7 release—things were already on this slippery slope.
Has anybody confirmed the toggles still work in the latest beta and/or release candidate?
My place of work just pushed back MDM required upgrade date from the end of October to the end of December (Happy Christmas/New Year, we’ve f*cked up your user interface! Enjoy!)
I had the exact same problem after applying the Terminal Command. For some reason the icons didn’t appear on the menubar and then I realized the the applications that show these icons will not load. I open them manually but I recieved an error. I went back to the Terminal, copied the command again and changed it back (by replace YES to NO). It helped.
26.1 set to address this issue per reports on beta.
Glad I waited before upgrading my wife’s devices. I updated because I upgraded from iPhone 13 Pro
Here’s an article from 9to5 Mac with some examples of applying the setting in iOS 26.1 Beta 4:
I’ll also add this article on the new Liquid Glass toggle since it contains a 2-min video showing side-by-side comparisons.
Loved this comparison. Super happy Apple is adding that toggle.
I wish CarPlay had Reduce Transparency/Increase Contrast options too. Or does it just do whatever the phone is set to?
I’m delighted they’re adding the ability to turn LG off. It’s been a disaster for my vision.
It’s not “off”, but the transparency is muted. A nice start for fixing LG’s problems.
Or he didn’t use it often enough to remember all the steps.
I have been hesitating for 8 months to transfer all from my mac mini m2 running sequoia to my mac mini m4. Only been using mac since early 1980’s - and very reluctant to upgrade to Tahoe. So before transferring anything of significane I finally upgraded my m4 to Tahoe ( and of course LIQUID GLASS ) I Ccan best sum up my impression of liquid glass as follows - this liquid should be used as an enema on those who made the decision to incorporate such a mess with NO easy way to simply xfer ALL previous adjusted M2 Sequoia ‘screen, texts, window, browser, desktop,etc settings with the OPTION tu ‘ upgrade/change/update/ all graphic etc settings to the latest gee whiz goodies that probably only a small select ‘ designers ‘ need or find useful. My guess is that somehow Apple got infiltrated with left over gatesonian microsquish window designers.
Help !!!