This is Technology Bytes, episode 119 for June 15th, 2025.
Technology Bytes is a microcast where I share brief bites on interesting technology.
Enjoy, and here we go.
Well, you know what happened at the beginning of this week?
It was WWDC keynote time on Monday, and so today I’m going to be talking about WWDC 25, and I’m going to be talking about Liquid Glass.
If you’ve watched the keynote or read anything about what Apple announced at the keynote, you know the words Liquid Glass.
I think my son said, after he had just been watching it for a little bit, that if they say Liquid Glass one more time, I think I’m going to go crazy.
So definitely something that Apple talked about in a significant portion of their event on Monday.
So what is Liquid Glass?
Well, this is the title of the new look and feel of all of Apple’s operating systems.
Besides changing the numbers all to 26 so that they’re all aligned for the year in which they mostly live, this also represents in the Liquid Glass a form of how Apple is presenting all of their operating systems to their users.
And the function is, from what I understand, is supposed to be like you’re using glass, but it also has a form of water to it and how that moves and how that interacts with your finger.
And so there’s a couple of ways that you can talk about Liquid Glass as a wannabe pundit, and that is to read up on it, to watch videos of other people using it, or to use it yourself.
So how do you use it yourself?
Well, if you’re silly like me, you do it by installing the developer betas, and I have installed them on everything.
My MacBook Air, my iMac, my iPhone, my iPad, my watch.
What else do I have?
Everything that I have that can be updated has been updated.
Probably not the smartest thing to do because I use all of those tools for work, but I think I have dodged a bullet for the most part.
There’s some issues that I’ve had in the updates, and I’ll talk about those in future episodes.
In fact, probably WWDC is going to be fodder for many episodes coming in the near future for this microcast.
But the fact is that Liquid Glass in the reviews and just the initial reaction, many people don’t like it, but it is here to stay, I believe.
And so some of the things that I’ve heard is, well, they’re just trying to make their operating systems pretty so that people forget they’re faltering on Apple Intelligence or just so people…
It’s kind of like, look at the shiny so that you don’t see the dirty or something like that.
And some say it’s just a surface level thing that doesn’t really help usability.
Well, something that I’ve noticed in my life is people don’t spend a lot of time agonizing or studying or fawning over ugly.
They do that with beauty.
So I think that when you look at an operating system, something that’s going to be in front of you for hours upon hours if you live in an Apple environment, and it’s not so much that you’re just doing nothing on them except staring at them, but you are using them.
You’re using your iPhone, using your iPad, using your Mac.
And how you use it and how you feel while you use it is important.
So how it reacts, how it looks is in fact very important to the usability of the operating system.
The other thing is that when you use multiples of Apple products, having some similarities and some overlap and being able to recognize how the operating system works because of how it looks is also important.
And so I think when Apple is making this kind of change, and it’s been a while since they’ve done it, it’s not just to distract or make people look a different direction.
It actually means something to them.
So one of the things that I’ve noticed, I think the liquid glass update is super clean, and I think that has to do with looking through glass.
I also think it has to do with the layers that are existent, and this just has to do with our real world.
So much of our world, we are looking through glass.
I wear glasses, and so I’m always looking through glass, although I think mine are plastic.
But then watching TV or interacting with technology, there’s always a glass in front of us.
Driving cars, we have windshields that put a glass between us and the world in which we’re existing.
There’s just many times inside a building, inside of homes, the glass that you’re looking through makes a difference to how the world outside looks.
And so I think Apple’s done a good job of making it super clean.
It’s like someone came through and made sure the windows were spotless so that when you’re looking out, there’s nothing that gets in the way and you understand what you’re looking at.
Some would say it’s super modern, and I really don’t know what that means.
I guess modern means it happened now, so it’s the most up-to-date.
So I think it just depends on how you look at it.
But I think this environment, this liquid glass change has added something.
I was trying to put my finger on it.
It’s interesting because I was showing my wife something the other day, and I moved a slider.
That’s all I did was move a slider.
And she goes, hey, do that again.
And so I did it again, and she goes, wow, that’s pretty cool.
I said, yeah, that’s coming in a while for you because she won’t run the betas, and I wouldn’t want her to anyway because that would be a frustration potentially.
So she’s just in that brief interaction.
She’s noticed something different and had a positive reaction to it.
And so there’s just something about what Apple has done.
And I was talking to a person at work the other day.
He uses Apple products.
He’s not as fanatical about it as I am.
But he had actually spent time watching and reading, and he was talking about some of the videos that he watched and what it looked like.
And I said, you know, the thing that you see is layers.
I said, you kind of understand the operating because the very base layer is the app that you’re using, whether it be Pages or Numbers or Safari.
And then on top of that are the controls, and then on top of that are even finer controls.
And it just seems to jump off the screen and make using it a little more simple, a little more, what’s the word I’m thinking, a little more normal.
It just seems to react how you would expect an operating system to react.
And the fact is that when you switch through other devices and you get that same uniformity of design, that same uniformity of application and operation, then that makes that transition all the more easier.
And so overall, though some have complained about it may be hard to read and the colors are funny and the transparency might be silly and whatever else, I really like the new interface.
I think it’s super clean.
I really like the depth that it provides.
I like the interaction between my finger and the glass or my Apple Pencil and the glass or my trackpad and the glass, and I think it just works.
And that to me is enough.
So I will not be doing anything to turn transparency down or to lose things through accessibility or whatever.
I will use it as Apple has designed it, and I think I’m really going to like it.
Well, that is all I have for this week.
I appreciate, as always, you listening to the Technology Bytes microcast.
And if you have comments or questions, suggestions, you can send them to technologybytes at marigfamily.com, and I look forward to the next time we are together, taking another bite of technology.
