The freshly announced design is apparently the crown jewel of Job’s Mob’s latest developer love-in WWDC . Alan Dye, Apple’s vice president of human interface design, managed to say with a straight face, “It’s our broadest design update, ever,” before trotting out words like “universal” and “optical qualities of glass” as if no one saw Windows Vista in 2007.

Liquid Glass slathers transparency and shine across iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS Tahoe 26, watchOS 26 and tvOS 26. Buttons, sliders, menus and sidebars now react in real-time to movement. Sounds fancy until you realise it’s what Microsoft has been doing for years under the banner of Fluent Design.

You get a shiny dock, a see-through lockscreen, and camera app menus that look like they're floating on a foggy day. It's inspired by visionOS, which means it's another case of Apple rummaging around in its own drawer of niche products looking for ways to reuse old assets.

The Tame Apple Press is spinning this as a design renaissance, conveniently forgetting that Apple already had a go at glass-heavy design in the early 2000s with Aqua and again with Big Sur. What they won’t say is that this sudden focus on UI gloss is happening because the rest of WWDC has been a bit of a damp squib.

No Siri relaunch. No proper AI platform. No hardware. No magic. Just a UI refresh that Microsoft would have quietly rolled out in a Tuesday patch.

The new design is, of course, “available later this year,” which gives developers just enough time to squint at transparent sidebars and redesign their apps so they don’t look like 2009 leftovers. Apple’s pushing updated APIs so third parties can add a bit of sparkle to their widgets.

This glass obsession is the only vaguely new thing Apple had to show. The rest of WWDC has been a collage of recycled features, awkward delays, and half-baked AI promises. No wonder the Tame Apple Press is latching onto Liquid Glass like it's the second coming of the Retina display.