From Snow White to Liquid Glass

A follow-up to my November 2012 post, written in the week before WWDC 2026

Back in November 2012 I wrote about Snow White, the design language that ran through the white plastic Apple products I fell for, and about the white iPad mini I had just waited a fortnight to receive. I closed that post with the word "excellent" and the hope that it would long continue. Fourteen years later, with the iPhone 5's chamfered edges now a museum piece and WWDC 2026 opening on 8 June under the tagline "All systems glow", it feels like the right moment to revisit the state of the union. I have used Apple hardware, software and services for over thirty years. I say what follows as a believer, not as a critic looking for an easy hit. But I would be lying if I told you the last few years had all been excellent.

The thread from white plastic to liquid glass

The story of Apple has always been a story about a design language, and that language has shifted under our feet more than once. Snow White gave us clean white surfaces and an obsession with reduction. By 2012 the hardware had moved on to anodised aluminium and the chamfered bevel, while the software I was tapping on was still pretending to be leather, felt and brushed metal. A year later iOS 7 swept all of that away and replaced it with flat design, and whatever you thought of it at the time, the governing principle was clarity. Content first, chrome second, legibility above ornament.

Liquid Glass, introduced at WWDC 2025 and now spread across every platform Apple makes, inverts that principle. It is gorgeous in a keynote. Translucent panes refract whatever sits behind them, controls shimmer, and the whole interface behaves like something dipped in water. It is also, by the admission of Apple's own beta process, frequently hard to read. The early betas were mocked so widely for illegible menus and washed out text that Apple spent the summer quietly turning the effect down, frosting the glass, adding contrast, and burying yet more toggles in Accessibility so that those of us who simply want to read a notification can switch the spectacle off. Usability researchers were blunt about it. The interface, they argued, had started getting in the way of the content it was supposed to serve.

Here is what stings as a long-time fan. The Apple I signed up for prized clarity. The white iMac, the flat icon, the ruthless removal of anything that did not earn its place. Liquid Glass is the first design language in years that seems to prize the demo over the daily use, beauty over the boring business of being readable on a busy wallpaper at arm's length. "All systems glow" is a clever tagline. I just hope someone in Cupertino has remembered that I still need to see the text.

The iPad mini, all the way round the circle

If you want a single object that captures how the mood has changed, it is the device that started my 2012 post. The iPad mini I unboxed then had a non-retina screen I forgave within five minutes, a chamfered aluminium back that felt like jewellery, and a Smart Cover so flimsy I told readers to buy one and then immediately go looking for something better.

The iPad mini on sale today, the A17 Pro model, fixes the one thing I grumbled about. The screen is finally a proper Liquid Retina display. And yet the device has become a curiosity in the line-up rather than a star. It shares its silhouette with a model from years earlier, it sits near the end of its cycle with an OLED successor perpetually rumoured for "later", and it now starts at £499. The original mini arrived at 329 dollars. The little tablet I once picked up without thinking has quietly become a considered purchase, and Apple seems to update it only when it remembers it exists. The mini went all the way round the circle. It got the screen I always wanted, and lost the sense that anyone at Apple was excited about it.

The cult of thin

The clearest example of design drifting ahead of purpose is the iPhone Air. At 5.6mm it is genuinely astonishing to hold, a titanium wafer that makes a Pro feel like a brick. It is also a phone that trades a second camera, battery life and, frankly, a clear reason to exist for the single virtue of thinness. The market noticed. The Air has not sold well, its second generation has been delayed, and the rumour mill now expects Apple to go back and add the camera it should have shipped in the first place.

I wrote in 2012 about the iPhone 5 having a tactile, almost bling quality. That was thinness and finish in service of a device you wanted to use. The Air is thinness as the entire pitch. It is the difference between a beautifully made tool and a beautifully made point.

None of which has dented the wider iPhone business. The iPhone 17 line is, by Apple's own account, the most popular it has ever sold, starting at 799 dollars and climbing comfortably past 1,199 for a Pro Max. The phones are superb. They are also the anchor of a pricing ladder that has crept relentlessly upward since the days I was queuing for a white 3GS.

The Mac remembers how to have fun

So far this reads like a man losing his faith, so let me be fair, because Apple has just done something genuinely lovely. The MacBook Neo, launched in March, is a 13-inch aluminium laptop in silver, blush, citrus and indigo, each with a colour-matched keyboard, powered by the A18 Pro chip, and it starts at £599. iFixit called it the most repairable MacBook in fourteen years. Read that again. Colourful, affordable, and easier to fix.

For anyone who, like me, once bought an eMac partly because it looked gorgeous in white plastic, the Neo is a homecoming. It is the playful, candy-coloured Apple of the iMac G3 era brought back with a straight face, and it cheerfully undercuts the idea that the company only knows how to move upmarket. The Apple Silicon transition is the best thing to happen to the Mac in a generation, and the Neo proves that all of that performance and efficiency can be poured into something joyful and accessible rather than only into another four-figure Pro. When Apple is good now, it is very good. That is precisely why the lapses elsewhere are worth naming.

The edges of the range

The newer categories tell the same mixed story. The Apple Watch is the device where Liquid Glass arguably did the most harm, because a watch lives or dies on glanceability and translucency is the enemy of reading something in half a second. AirPods, by contrast, are the quiet triumph of the modern line-up, with the Pro 3 adding live translation and genuinely useful health tracking, exactly the substance-over-shimmer progress I wish the software teams would copy. And Vision Pro remains what it was at launch, a remarkable piece of engineering in search of a reason for most of us to spend the money, refined rather than reinvented.

What I want from the glow

WWDC opens on 8 June, and the headline will not really be Liquid Glass. It will be Siri, the assistant Apple promised two years ago, then delayed, and is now reportedly leaning on a Google Gemini partnership to finally deliver. "All systems glow" only means something if the systems underneath the glow actually work.

In 2012 I signed off with "excellent" and the hope that it would long continue. I still believe the second half of that. I have spent thirty years inside this ecosystem and I am not leaving. But excellent is a word I now reach for when I describe the MacBook Neo or the AirPods rather than the company as a whole. Apple has drifted, on software clarity and on price, and it has done so because it can, because the iPhone 17 sells regardless. The Neo is the standing reminder that it does not have to. Make the glass readable, give the mini a reason to live, and make Siri worthy of the wait, and I will happily write the celebratory follow-up. Until then, this is tough love from someone who still means every word of it.