The redesign will address the shadows and “transparency quirks,” Gurman writes, as part of a “cleanup and refinement effort.” This echoes the company’s approach with iOS 8 more than a decade ago, when the radical changes in iOS 7 were polished and refined to make them more palatable to users, without losing the underlying design principles.
The interesting part of Gurman’s claim is that macOS 27 won’t reflect a change in direction on even a small scale. Rather, he reports, this year’s update will bring the Mac closer to the original vision the designers had last year but weren’t able to achieve.
“[This year’s] changes to macOS are meant to make Liquid Glass look the way Apple’s design team intended it to from the start,” he writes. “Last year’s operating systems didn’t necessarily suffer from design problems, I’m told, but rather a not-completely-baked implementation from Apple’s software engineering team.”
In the longer term, Gurman says, Apple hopes that Liquid Glass will become more palatable as Mac hardware evolves. In particular the OLED screen on the upcoming touchscreen MacBook Pro will suit the interface style better than the screens of current LCD-based Macs.
For all the latest news and rumors about this year’s software updates, bookmark our regularly updated WWDC 2026 superguide.
