Opinions on the New Apple Developer Preview Software

Apple introduced a new design language called "Liquid Glass" at WWDC 2025, a presentation that I did not watch myself - but preferred to jump straight into action - and whereas I like the design language a lot - probably more than skeuomorphism itself - there seem to be severe performance issues on old and low-end devices, in addition to unsupported devices which some people will obviously use.

You may (or do) know what Apple's Liquid Glass design language is; it's basically the unification of different Apple software under one design, where we see the heavy utilization of the glass material and its properties in the aforementioned software series.

Unlike regular glassmorphism, which seeks to be reminiscent of glass without faithfully following its properties, Liquid Glass seems to simulate the actual properties of glass. While trying it out, when I moved the window below the dock, I noticed actual glass properties in action and not just some frosted glass effect unlike glassmorphism.

Hence, this is why it can be considered a form of skeuomorphism, as a real-life material (glass) is attempted to be faithfully simulated, or even emulated (successfully, in my opinion), considering Apple's heavy focus on the term "Hardware," which brings us to:

Apple mentions the term "Hardware" a lot. Here is one such case from their blog post:

"Inspired by the depth and dimensionality of visionOS, the new design takes advantage of Apple's powerful advances in hardware, silicon, and graphics technologies. The new material, Liquid Glass, is translucent and behaves like glass in the real world. Its color is informed by surrounding content and intelligently adapts between light and dark environments."

And I can indeed see that hardware is utilized in the 26 series through my tests. I installed the 26 series on 2 real devices (a 2TB M1 iPad Pro and a LattePanda Alpha via OpenCore) and a VM (one under M2 Ultra Mac Studio) - on which I didn't conduct a test - and I must say that my tests, while they pleased my eyes, got me worried due to the hardware utilization.

The "26 series" is obviously targeted towards late Apple Silicon devices, as not only did many recent Intel Macs - including my MacBook Pro 2019 with 4 ports - lose support, but also my tests on the M1 (16GB) iPad Pro (which is the main source of my worry) indicated that the iPad is barely usable for daily usage.

Due to the ridiculous situation where the Mac I bought for college lost support, I had to hackintosh a LattePanda Alpha, upgrading it from macOS Sonoma to macOS Tahoe directly (skipping Sequoia) for this test, and its performance was similar to the iPad - it was slightly better, but ran hot quickly and the fans were always on, as expected from Intel.

I'm a regular computer user with a great passion for Large Language Models and immersive virtual experiences, therefore I knew my tests wouldn't go far, as I knew only my Mac Studio could handle such tasks, a VM would cause performance loss, and since I had seen my MacBook Pro struggle running a 1.4B model, this was just not an option!

Instead, I went with the logic of a "quick first-impression," testing it for 5 minutes doing general navigation across the OS and the internet.

As I aforementioned, I just love the glass effects and the new layout on the 26 series - it greatly pleases my eyes - and the fact that they added multi-window multitasking to iPadOS 26 made me greatly happy - I had jailbroken an iPhone and an iPad just for this feature a long time ago - but the fact that it greatly lagged on LattePanda Alpha and ran hot quickly (expected as it's literally unsupported and not the target) and that LattePanda actually lagged LESS and was more stable than the iPad itself (which is actually targeted by Apple!) worries me.

Visuals always glitched on the iPad while using it, especially as the window count increased, whereas LattePanda Alpha had no visual glitches, but it took some time to generate those colorless glass icons and did not succeed in creating glass icons with color.

Both devices had performance issues; they were slow! (with LattePanda being slightly faster except in generation & processing)

This situation - speed, hardware, and stability issues while looking so good visually - immediately reminded me of Windows Longhorn before its development reset: visually promising, looks really good, but filled with glitches, stability issues, performance issues, and a messed-up structure that eventually had to be scrapped and gave us Vista (which I never used - I skipped from XP to 7 directly).

I would not use these development previews for any development work, though I hope to try them one day if possible, or for any daily work to be honest; but it's fun and eye-pleasing to use them for non-serious work and usage (such as spending some time with these devices navigating and doing general tasks).

Though, I hope that Apple is able to fix the issues I aforementioned, and that they won't give up this design (which I hear many people dislike) as I happen to be a huge fan of this design aesthetic, as it's my favorite thing about the "26 series" announced at WWDC 2025.