David Pierce: The Unbearable Sameness of Liquid Glass

It’s all part of a trend within Apple right now toward a total collapse of the gaps between devices, in an attempt to make everything be everything to everyone all the time. This fall, your new software will also bring a full-featured Phone app to your Mac, a menu bar and Mac-like window management to the iPad, lots of widgets to basically all your screens, and lots of other features that make every device a little more like every other. Many of these are good and handy features! But it’s an enormous and somewhat surprising shift; from a company that has so long believed in using the right hardware for the right job, the context collapse is strange to watch.

I've written different versions of this over the last couple of years, but it really has been academically interesting to watch Apple overtly merge their operating systems to the point where their stated goal is to deliver the same experience across all of their devices. iPhone and iPad apps have long acted basically the same, just on different screen sizes. The SwiftUI era brought that mentality to include Mac apps as well. And at this point, I could show you a zoomed-in portion of an app made by Apple, and you'd be hard-pressed to tell me if it's for the iPhone, iPad, or Mac. These UIs now differ at the edges rather than at any fundamental level.

We can see this most with iPadOS, which went from "this is different from the Mac" years ago to "let's see how macOS solved this problem and copy that" in the last few years, but it's consistent across their product line. As many have already commented, WWDC keynotes, which go from one OS to another, feel antiquated given how things work in 2025. They seem to have a set of features they're going to release everywhere, and the keynotes is an almost random selection of which features get shown rueing which OS segment. Like a feature you see in the iPadOS segment? Don't worry, it's also coming to the Mac as well. Like an iOS feature? It's naturally coming to the iPad as well. The features are demoed where they demo best, but they almost always live everywhere.

Apple's new design language only continues this trend and makes it visual in a way that is impossible to ignore. More and more, the company that professed unique experiences across their platforms has become the company laser-focused on making those platforms run the same apps, look the same, and behave the same. It feels to me like any differences you could point to that prove that statement wrong are actually just todo items Apple just hasn't gotten to yet. Maybe they'll start to diverge again, but I haven't seen much evidence lately to back that up.