Planned Obsolescence OR how many resources are wasted

By now I’ve read a ton of reviews about {i;mac;iPad;vision;watch}OS, how people love it and others hate it. I spent hours with it while friends and family haven’t even heard of it. Now, that it’s released for a few days I wanted to note down my thoughts on this in a broader way.

Why they did this

With all the positive and negative feedback on the internet, I always wished to know some of the designers working on Liquid Glass to ask all the important questions:

• Do YOU think this is a design enhancement?
• Would you prefer working on this or on improving existing UI and UX with improved interfaces compared to a complete (visual) redesign?
• Is this something that was planned for years?
• What is the overall internal feedback, how do the employees at Apple think about it?
• Was it a manager level decision and your feedback was ignored?

We all know that we’ll get used to it. It reminds me a lot of the iOS 6 to iOS 7 update. All new icons, all new design, so many changes and yet after all the years one got used to it. And yet, this update concerns me more than all the Apple OS updates before.

Something new

I often forget that I live in a tech bubble. Surrounded by tech blogs, the whole day long on the internet, reading HN and opinions on the newest development and software tools. With Liquid Glass and with the all new iPhone 17 {Air;Pro}, I once again noticed that I’m just part of a small (tech) minority. Most of the end users are happy with a better camera and are fine with the best and most efficient processors of all time (yet). This year, when listening to the Accidental Tech Podcast I noticed that even they are impressed by the new colors. For me, this is incomprehensible. I simply couldn’t imagine that the most desired feature is a new color. But this is it. And it is probably similar when looking at cars: many people spent a lot more just to get a car with your favorite color.

This being said, I understand that Apple has to innovate something where there is nothing to innovate. It’s now the seventeenth iPhone with the last (visible) innovation being the iPhone X / 10. And that is the reason for a major visual operating system update. Otherwise, your customers get bored, and when there’s boredom you might lose them to a fancy Android app launcher. Now, people will notice (when updating to iOS 26) that everything looks different, feels a little bit odd at first but after a while it’s quite cool with the glassy optics and the transparent buttons. It’s exciting again. It is as if you’d bought a completely new phone (that’s different to your previous one). Kudos to Apple. Obviously they did a great job with it. They implemented a cool looking theme. A theme that no one knew he or she would need (and that no one in reality needs - but this will Apple keep for themself).

When I read MacOS 26 Tahoe Review and Dan Moren’s iOS 26 Review , I get the impression that the important UX improvements are also possible without the redesign of the OS. For example, Dan Moren wrote

The redesign is more than skin deep, however. Apple has rethought the way some of its most fundamental interactions work. For example, the increasingly long horizontal popover menus that hid options behind an interminable scroll have morphed into a dual-stage design. Tapping and holding on the screen brings up a popover with a few common options, but it now doesn’t make you scroll; instead, there’s an arrow indicating more options. Tap that, and you’ll get a big pop-up panel of all the available commands in a much easier-to-read and use format. As someone who frequently finds himself swiping through a very long list to find the one command I want (and somehow, it’s always the last one), this is a tangible improvement.

This is indeed a major improvement. Yet there was no need for a redesign for this to work.

visionOS

I talked with people about this. Many think Liquid Glass is here to stay. And it’s there to be a frontrunner in the AR world. It’s designed as the future of visionOS, for XR glasses. And for this use case it’s a great fit. But does this also apply for iPhones, watches or MacBooks? I don’t think so.

Apple is placing a big bet. They’re betting on the success of the visionOS and the Apple Vision (Pro). Yet, nobody knows if they’ll succeed. I’m quite skeptical with this (as you might have already known). And even if they succeed: why isn’t there a similar OS with the Meta Quest or any other XR product?

The bigger picture

I try to understand the reason for this design change and while I don’t really get it and no one at Apple will tell me, I automatically turn pessimistic and look at all the bad things.

Today’s software, a normal web application or mobile app, need no performance optimization. Computers and smartphones are getting faster and faster every year. A normal developer could use a bubble sort and nobody would notice. This does not result in a lot of idle time for your CPU but in a full CPU just running with useless and unoptimized operations. It is similar to task planning and execution: if you have a lot of time, your current task will fill this time gap. You need to define a deadline to keep track on the time spent. Another real world example is traffic: if there’s a lot of traffic on the roads building more roads doesn’t relieve traffic congestions. Roads will be even fuller than before. This is called Induced demand .

Apple has developed a resource-intensive new UI that looks good but takes a lot of computational power to compute glassy reflections and other shiny UI gimmicks. Nowadays, processors are a powerhouse. They are much faster than a few years ago. This is why something like Liquid Glass is now possible and might not be back then. But as I said, it comes with the simple downside that it’s more computational expensive than the previous iOS 18. I can imagine that this is quantifiable. If you’d run iOS 18 on a device and compare it with iOS 26 on the same device I’d expect it to drain the battery faster and/or consume more computational power. And this is once again some kind of induced demand: The SOCs are so good that this UI change can be made without anyone really noticing (without tracking and looking at the exact numbers).

Planned Obsolescence

Apple is implementing some kind of planned obsolescence. This is one big problem with all kind of software and hardware product. There’s (almost) no way to know exactly if it’s a planned, conscious obsolescence or not. With this new visual update, old device will get a lot slower resulting in more upgrades.

Greenwashing & a waste of resources

Apple is a company that is spending a lot of money to show the world that they’re a good company. Obviously, they’re a big corporate and they only want to earn money. When it comes to money, they do everything they need to do. It may be that they want to demonstrate their climate neutrality, but ultimately it’s all about money. They’ve shown this before, for example when they removed the charging adapter from the iPhone because it was bad for the environment (and their bottom line)¹.

Building a complex UI like Liquid Glass with a lot of computation required is something that has a bad footprint. Especially, when

1. the previous, existing UI had a better footprint (i.e. required lower computational resources)
2. many, many people all over the world are using this. This is not something only a few people use. This is something billion of people use every day. Just think about it: if it now takes you 1 extra charge per three months, this is at least 4 000 000 000 extra charges per year.

Taken from chatgpt:

✅ Answer: Charging an iPhone 4 billion times would take about 60 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of electricity — roughly $9 million worth at typical U.S. electricity rates.²

Now, you can also think about all the people working at Apple that spent hours and hours of time on a fresh new UI and all the people outside of Apple talking, testing and writing about it.

Liquid Glass is an easy step forward for Apple. They need to introduce something new³ and they need to keep their sales high. But it’s not that easy. There are a lot of other things to consider before deciding if this is good a bad.