It seems to me the Liquid Glass transition for Mac is a sacrifice for visionOS. Today, you can run iOS apps on an Apple Vision Pro, or create a virtual Mac display, but these are lesser spatial experiences: You still use a trackpad when interacting with Mac apps in Vision Pro, and you can't position their windows freely in space.
In Tahoe, hit targets are huge — toolbar buttons are 5,000 square pixels, ridiculous when using a precision pointer but maybe appropriate for eye tracking. Translucent materials make slightly more sense in augmented reality than a 2D desktop environment where no one ever complained about a lack of depth (before Apple went ultra flat and minimalist, anyway).
So despite to the apparent dud of the Apple Vision Pro as a consumer product, I doubt Apple would aggressively push a design "inspired by the depth and dimensionality of visionOS" a year and a half later without a strong reason. The recent Meta Ray-Ban Display shows the category is reaching a viable size and weight. I predict will soon see whether Apple's design gambit for spatial computing pays off or if they start to roll back towards a pointer-first UI on the Mac.
It could simply be the inertia of having started down this path. Perhaps the gambit was that VisionOS would have gotten more consumer acceptance, so let's go ahead and make everything closer in UI.
It seems to me like a ridiculous bet. Macs aren't a huge portion of the computer market, so alienating existing users even more was a cavalier choice. The golden days of HCI-respecting macOS are behind us…
It seems to me the Liquid Glass transition for Mac is a sacrifice for visionOS. Today, you can run iOS apps on an Apple Vision Pro, or create a virtual Mac display, but these are lesser spatial experiences: You still use a trackpad when interacting with Mac apps in Vision Pro, and you can't position their windows freely in space.
In Tahoe, hit targets are huge — toolbar buttons are 5,000 square pixels, ridiculous when using a precision pointer but maybe appropriate for eye tracking. Translucent materials make slightly more sense in augmented reality than a 2D desktop environment where no one ever complained about a lack of depth (before Apple went ultra flat and minimalist, anyway).
So despite to the apparent dud of the Apple Vision Pro as a consumer product, I doubt Apple would aggressively push a design "inspired by the depth and dimensionality of visionOS" a year and a half later without a strong reason. The recent Meta Ray-Ban Display shows the category is reaching a viable size and weight. I predict will soon see whether Apple's design gambit for spatial computing pays off or if they start to roll back towards a pointer-first UI on the Mac.