Collecting a 'Being Right' Point

Back in March this year, Mark Gurman published his first reporting of the upcoming redesign that we would see in iOS 26. This article references visionOS as the reference point for a redesign. Future reporting from Gurman also spoke of a 'digital glass' interface that would see more transparency.

Gurman wasn't the only person to share information like this, and once the ideas of both 'visionOS' and 'transparent' took hold, the conversation over the last few months has been mostly focused on Apple creating some kind of system with see-through windows, or that all the operating systems were going to adopt the look of visionOS.

On last week's episode of Connected, I shared some thoughts I had been having regarding the impact of visionOS on the redesign (at approximately 0:19:20 in the episode, edited here for clarity):

I'm not sure that I just assume the glass-like look. I feel that everyone says it's going to look like visionOS and I wonder if that has been taken too much on face value and that it's not going to be a transparent operating system. But when we see it, we're like, oh, that's like this... I think one of the key things about visionOS is there is more physical layering, structure, and shadow.

I could imagine that more than transparent windows, which I feel like a lot of people think is going to happen. On visionOS compared to other operating systems, it really does feel like buttons and text and icons sit on top of something, right? That there is a physicality to the operating system, which doesn't exist on any of their other platforms, those just feels like these are pixels on a screen, not like physical objects that you can manipulate.

I am going to collect a 'being right' point on this one. I think it's pretty clear that where Apple took their inspiration from visionOS is in layering and tactility, not the ability to see through windows. In fact, transparency is not really a thing for windows in this version of 'Liquid Glass'.

As Alan Dye said in the keynote, 'Inspired by the physicality and richness of visionOS, we challenged ourselves to make something purely digital feel natural and alive'.

I know I am not the only person who thought this, and I don't think anyone got closer than Sebastiaan de With's amazing concepts – but hey – what's a blog for if not for being able to say you were right about something?

You know, now I have gotten to the end of this post I am not even sure if I should post it at all. Is this just bragging? Am I off-base? Who knows, but we're experimenting here, so let's see what you think.