iOS 7 > Liquid Glass. There, I said it.
Something Is Wrong
We’re getting close to the end of August and moving into September, which means Apple’s usual rush of new product launches. We already know quite a bit about Apple’s upcoming iPhone. We also know that Apple’s unifying Liquid Glass is likely to cause major issues when it encounters hundreds of millions of devices. We can probably expect Apple to be in damage control again. And I’ll probably have to explain why Apple did this to my friends and colleagues.
Usually, around this time of year, I would have one or two articles ready to publish about all this. But not this year. I won’t upgrade to the iPhone 17 Pro Max, even though I normally would every two iPhone generations. I’m voting with my dollars by skipping this year, because I disagree with Tim Cook’s (and Apple’s) stance on the orange clown.
Something is wrong.
Out of curiosity, are you considering getting more RAM with your next computer to run local LLMs in the future?
If Liquid Glass is about unifying all Apple’s platforms, why is it so toned down on the Mac? Asking for a friend.
Do you remember the SETI program? I think this is what it was called. Anyway, it was about providing or contributing personal computing resources to help find extraterrestrial life from background noises or signals coming from space. You would install an app on your computer and when you weren’t using it, its processing power was diverted to the app for computing purposes. Now, fast forward to 2025: could something similar be done e for running LLMs on personal computers? This could then generate usage credits applicable to the AI provider.
I am curious to explore other providers of generative artificial intelligence services. I am a paying subscriber to ChatGPT, but I haven’t seriously explored other alternatives yet, though I plan to do so. I fear missing things out if I ever leave OpenAI behind. I tested Perplexity, but I don’t believe in their business model. I think Claude from Anthropic seems to be the most interesting candidate. They have an iPhone and iPad app, just like OpenAI. From now on, I will systematically query both ChatGPT and Claude for my research needs and compare their performance.
I started documenting before-and-after comparisons of different betas of Apple Liquid Glass. Search for “beforeandafter” in the document to locate those comparisons. Honestly, things are improving. That wasn’t expected.
Discovered a fun Easter egg in iPadOS 26 beta6 Preview.app. It’s documented as exhibit #50 right here.
Am I starting to like Liquid Glass for the good and the bad things? Like they say: with beta6, it might be growing on me.
People are excited with generative AI and this is legitimate but this excitement overshadow a question we should ask more often about genAI (and about any new tech trends): what do we lose in return? My guess is that we lose a lot but we’re not sure what exactly. When we start to learn about the losses through experience and studies, we will question, hopefully, our use of AI in general. That’s my hope.