I've always had an Android phone, but since my parents have Apple devices, I'm the one who has to help them with any technical issues.
I tried to minimize the horrible glass design as much as possible because they couldn't see the text bleeding through the background. In my opinion, Liquid Glass is the worst design I have ever seen. It looks like a crappy GeoCities design from 1999. The team who designed it should be fired and replaced with people who priorities a professional appearance and usability.
I have a sneaking suspicion that the Liquid Glass redesign was something they had to push out the door to distract from the absolute trainwreck that is Apple Intelligence.
> The team who designed it should be fired and replaced with people who priorities a professional appearance and usability.
Eh, I disagree about who should be fired. The designers and implementers are not (necessarily) the ones who decided it was their job. As far as I know, and probably depending on department, Apple internally works in annual cycles and sort of decides what the mission is up front. Any designer or engineer voluntarily taking on what was probably the inane grandiose idea of a higher-up should be commended for their ambition even if they knew it wouldn't go. More likely (imo) people are working on what the company has decided they work on, and the people trying to make it work are grinding themselves down in service of that goal and keeping their jobs in a crazy economic time.
Scott Forstall was the one to be fired for having basically bad taste with regard to iOS6 (as far as people knew outside the company), which was the right move if anyone was to be.
In this case, it's whoever made the call to try and overhaul multiple OS' in this way in the span of probably a year or two, and who clearly didn't prepare sufficient escape hatches or internal feedback mechanisms for the project. The people working on it are just working on it, and sometimes you gotta grit your teeth and try to make something happen that every part of you knows won't happen.
As an analogy, any iOS or Mac developer knows XCode sucks, but we shouldn't go calling for the XCode team to be fired, because the current team are basically the museum curators and it would be stupid to try and overhaul a 20-30 year old insanely complex critical piece of infrastructure like that in any short period of time without massively disrupting everyone who relies on those tools. Improvements and refactors need to be relatively conservative from an end user's perspective, and aligned with business goals from the company's perspective. To fire them would imply they're actively deciding not to make it better at the lowest levels, but it's doubtful to me that they have the power, time, or resources allocated to them to do that. If they were to be given the go-ahead to do that, they'd probably at best produce as effective of a result as the team who were tasked with redesigning all of the OS' this year and given no way around launching it in alpha. In that case, it would be more fruitful to be mad that Apple isn't investing in a better newer alternative development experience or editor while XCode chugs along, and likewise with OS26, we should be vocally annoyed at the initiative, timeline, and arrogance of releasing it in this state, but the team is probably doing their best at this point to incrementally improve what is probably to them a failed project on a massive scale that they didn't likely have much of an option to commit themselves to.
I work at a FAANG (but not Apple) -- your characterization is accurate, and I think it's important to not "shoot the messenger" here. The team of UX+SWEs probably made valiant efforts to reify some "vision" from a higher-up who cannot be contradicted.
It reminds me of Visual Studio 2012, back when some higher ups decided that the way to "align" with Windows 8 and its Metro design language was to switch the main menu to use ALL CAPS.
The dev team immediately hated it, but despite the internal feedback, it was pushed into the public beta, where it turned out that users hated it also. The higher ups behind that decision first tried to push back by writing some aggressive blog posts about how everyone is "holding it wrong", citing internal UX studies on how it actually improved everything etc. That got even more angry comments.
And then it turned out that the devs have quietly snuck in a hidden setting - a registry key - that reverted the change. This was leaked to the public, and spread like wildfire.
In VS 2013, they officially made that an option. In VS 2015 (IIRC), they changed the default to match the original behavior.
I tried to minimize the horrible glass design as much as possible because they couldn't see the text bleeding through the background. In my opinion, Liquid Glass is the worst design I have ever seen. It looks like a crappy GeoCities design from 1999. The team who designed it should be fired and replaced with people who priorities a professional appearance and usability.