coolfactor

The company called Liquid Glass its "broadest design update ever," but the claim is a bit of an exaggeration.

By "broadest", they are referring to across all operating systems, so that makes it true.

Liquid Glass is not just a visual redesign, but an architectural one, so does qualify as major.

Interface elements dynamically handling light is not just a paint job. They are actual "objects" that light is passing through, in a virtual sense.

Exciting times!

Rogue01 said:

So it is Aqua, without any color, from 2000.

With iOS 7, the heavy transparency was awful because everything blended over itself and over the next few iOS updates, the transparency was significantly reduced so you could actually see what you were doing without elements from behind bleeding into everything else.  I imagine the same will occur again.  The screenshot above showing the Home Screen looks just like iOS 18, with a few minor tweaks to the icons.  Not that much of a change.  Not exactly a 'radical' design change as all the websites claimed.

So many negative comments being posted about Liquid Glass based on pictures and video demos. Once you start to use Liquid Glass, you'll see it's way beyond Aqua (and Vista). Interface elements have physical attributes that extend way beyond just a visual appearance.

mikethemartian said:

I used to enjoy when Steve Jobs would give presentations “live without a net”.

Steve had backup plans, not to mention very thorough practice sessions. Once, a Mac had froze and he had to switch to a backup one, joking about it with grace.

(Aside: When will AppleInsider fix this broken forum software? Daily headaches)

Apple is a platform provider first. Hardware platforms. Software platforms. Apple's real opportunity is to embrace the fuller market, not try to compete with it. They could spin Apple Intelligence as a "platform of AI solutions"... a secure, private gateway to 3rd-party solutions. Trying to compete head-on seems destined to fail at the current rate of advancements. Ride the coattails, Apple. Think Different.

brianus said:

Good. It has always annoyed me that macOS switched to 11.0 after 10.15.. not only did it seem totally random, it makes it hard to remember which number follows which (I had to look up what the last 10.x release was). If they had switched to 11.0 after 10.10 that would have made much more sense. 10.8 (8th revision of Mac OS X), 10.9 (9th), 10.10 (10th), 11.0 (11th), 12.0 (12th), etc.

Worse, doing it in 2020, when iOS was hitting version 14, made it seem like macOS was “younger” than iOS, and in any event it’s hard to recall which iOS goes with which macOS based on number alone. 

This is kinda like how they name cars. “The new 2026 Ford Ginecticazoink…”. Given all their OSes are on a yearly cycle and have been for like a decade or more, this makes a lot of sense.

Mac OS X was not "Mac OS Ex", but rather Roman Numeral 10 .... "ten".

Once they switched to just "macOS", dropping the "X", it was time to advance the numbering, too.

Makes perfect sense.

I'm not so sure about the year-based numbering.... feels like a dated approach. However, some alignment of version numbers --across-- their operating systems would definitely be good thing. If they do go with dated, they should bump the release ahead to January instead of September/October. They'd miss out on the Christmas season marketing, though... so a tug-of-war.