Ask Paul: June 13 (Premium)

Every day feels like Friday the 13th this year, so let’s kick off the weekend a little early with another great round of reader questions.

✈️ I’m leaving on a jet plane

train_wreck asks:

Happy Friday (the 13!) Quick question, what airline do you usually fly to Mexico, and how is the experience WRT delays, service quality, etc. Are you able to get direct flights or do you connect?

Before the pandemic, I flew a lot for work and pleasure, and I developed a series of habits over that time to make that as painless as possible. Since then, things have changed, of course. I only fly several times a year now, and it’s mostly back and forth to Mexico City, with one or two other work-related trips (usually Seattle, so far) and then one or two other longer flights (Berlin for IFA last year, for example, and Hawaii later this year for the Qualcomm Snapdragon Summit). And so some of my habits are a bit less well-honed than before. This is both good and bad.

Among my habits are flying direct as much as possible, flying as early in the day as possible, and always carrying on my luggage. Combined, these things are an attempt to thwart the issues that routinely come up every day for airlines, airports, and their customers, where any number of things can go wrong and then have an escalating impact on the rest of the day. This is what made my return from Seattle the week of Build so infuriating: That plane had sat at the gate for two hours, and it was only after everyone got onboard that the airline figured out there was something wrong with the entertainment system; the flight was delayed by 30 minutes, ensuring that I would miss my connection in Chicago. Instead of getting home around 5 pm–I had woken up at 4:00 am in Seattle–I got there after 11 pm. That whole trip was like a proof point for my habits.

So why did I even have a connecting flight? A couple of reasons. Microsoft had scheduled a late Sunday afternoon on campus that I wanted to attend (as it turns out, it was almost pointless), and my direct flight from Newark would have arrived too late. There’s a local airport that’s only 20 minutes from home, and if I flew out of there, with a connection, I wouldn’t have to deal with the nearly 90-minute drive to Newark, which would either be a costly Uber or a very long drive for my wife (almost 3 hours roundtrip). Reasons. I don’t know.

Anyway. For Mexico, we have consistently flown on United, which has two nonstop flights to/from Mexico City every day through Newark. We have status on United, part of that grandfathered in a year after the pandemic, and then maintained since we fly enough, usually to Mexico City. These are day flights, about 4 to 4.5 hours in the air, and with only one exception I can think of, we’ve been able to fly business class on every flight, which is another part of those habits to help things go smoothly. A lot of this is credit card points: We use a United card to pay for everything and it racks up. We can board the plane in the first group–I have been the first person to board more often than not, excluding preboarders–get our bags into bins before the rabble shows up, and then start relaxing.

For the Mexico flights, we always sit in the first row. These are bulkhead seats, so we can’t have even a small bag out. But because we’re on the plane early and can stow our stuff right there in the bins, I just take out a laptop, an iPad, and my headphones, plus a charger. I have plenty of space and I can get writing done. This has been consistent for the past three years or whatever. And it’s always been a good experience. This is what matters to me, especially, but to my wife and me both. Turning flying, which can be one of the most horrible times imaginable, into something that’s at least bearable.

Related to this, because we’ve started spending more and more time in Mexico, driving ourselves to Newark and leaving the car somewhere stopped making sense. For a week or less, standard airport parking is OK. Longer than that, there’s long-term parking and hotels next to the airport where you can stay overnight the night before the flight, both with shuttles. But once you get past two or three weeks, those don’t make sense either. We can book a “flight” from Allentown to Newark that’s really a bus, and it’s a nice bus, but it’s still a connection, and you’re on their schedule, and that doesn’t always work out. We had neighbors who use a ride service for this kind of thing, but that seemed expensive to us And so we’ve just been using Uber. It’s about $125 to $150 before tip, but compared to whatever parking solutions we could come up with other options, it’s not that bad. If you think about a four-month trip and paying, say, $200 on each end for drives to/from an airport, that’s not bad.

Anyway, we’ve gotten used to this. But a few things have changed over the past several months.

First, Aeroméxico has started offering non-stop flights between Mexico City and Newark and Philadelphia. When we first moved to Pennsylvania, I had expected to fly out of Philly a lot, but I’ve only done so once or twice because Newark is a United hub and it has many more nonstop flights than Philly. It’s a little closer than Newark and usually a slightly shorter drive, though the traffic where I-95 and the PA Turnpike meet can be horrible. And the Aeroméxico flights seem cheaper than on United, at least for now. I get flight alerts through Google Flights and Going (formerly Scott’s Cheap Flights), and Aeroméxico has risen to the top.

Second, we’ve flown twice now in Mexico (to/from Puerto Vallarta and Oaxaca), and one of those was on Aeroméxico, and it was a very good experience.

And then the kicker was that we still had a lot of points left in American Express, and there was a points transfer deal that worked out to 1.6 points at Aeroméxico for every 1 point at Amex. That’s a really good deal, these things are more typically 1:1. And so that kind of put it over the top. We’re not “switching” from United to Aeroméxico, but perhaps we evaluate this on a flight-by-flight basis going forward. For now, what we have done is booked our first trip from the U.S. to Mexico City on Aeroméxico. We used points to pay for it, and we’re in the first row, out of Philly. So we’ll see how that goes.

Regarding Newark, it’s obviously been in the news a lot this year. We didn’t have any issues in January when we left, and we didn’t have any on the return trip in May. But ahead of that trip, we got alerts about wind issues in Newark, and United recommended pushing the flight back a few days. My wife wanted to do that, but I pointed out that this was five days ahead of the flight and all they were really doing was helping themselves by having customers flying later open up seats needed by those who were impacted by the delays. They had no way of knowing whether there would be wind issues when we flew. So we went home on the flight we booked, and though the captain noted that we might have to circle a bit when we arrived thanks to the other issues Newark was having at the time, we actually landed early. No problems at all.

On my return from Seattle, I was supposed to fly back to Allentown from Chicago, but I missed my connection, so I ended up getting a flight to Newark instead. On that flight, the captain made the same announcement, but here, too, there were no issues (other than the many issues I had experienced earlier that day). Well, my wife came to Newark to get me and we had to drive home. But no airport-related issues.

Long story short: Fly early. Fly direct. Carry-on. Get on the plane as early as possible. Be as close to the front/door as possible. Get through it.

? I have a Notion

ken_loewen asks:

Paul, what tool(s) do you use for “stuff I need to remember”. I’ve long used OneNote for URLs to websites I want to remember, code snippets and solutions, and similar but that’s become a bit difficult with a recent IT policy change at work.

I use Notion for this sort of thing. And I use it a lot. Notion is one of those near-perfect tools that just keeps sticking the landing for me.

A few examples.

I told this story somewhere, but we were sitting with friends at a bar when another couple came in. We all knew them vaguely, but Patty, the woman we were sitting with, started asking them questions about their child, by name. This really impressed me. I’m terrible with names, especially. And so when the other people moved on, I asked Patty how she remembered that sort of thing. She didn’t; She keeps notes of people’s names on her phone that she references and adds to all the time. Brilliant. So I started doing the same, and my Names page (or note, or whatever Notion calls it) is always right at the top on my phone because I use it so much. It’s handy here, it’s handy in Mexico, it’s amazing. And obvious, in hindsight. I should have started doing this years ago.

I have a Gym page/note for the machines I use at the gym and the weight/rep count for each.

Most of what I have in Notion is well-organized, and I have sections for Thurrott.com, Eternal Spring, Windows Weekly, Hands-On Windows, and so, as you’d expect. But it’s the random stuff in Notion that always makes me smile. Something will happen when I’m out in the world and if I want to remember it, I grab my phone, open Notion and start typing.

One of my friends is a fan of Plymouth Gin for some reason and though almost no restaurants or bars ever have it, he always asks, and so another friend and I always make fun of this. Last year, we were at a guy’s night get-together when we witnessed the first friend asking someone else about which beer they were drinking. The guy responded with, “some Italian beer.” And then our friend started lecturing the guy on which Italian beer was best. I looked at the second friend and said, “It’s the Plymouth Gin of Italian beers.” We burst out laughing, and I must have put it in Notion, because it’s at the top of page/note called Amazing.

There is also this set of lines, which a friend’s wife told us when we arrived at a hotel.

All you need to know is that the room number is 8719

It’s on the 7th floor

My reply, when this was said to me with a slight pause between the two lines, was, “So I guess that’s not all” I need to know.”)]

There’s a Music night page/note with such entries as:

It’s right where I would have left it

And this one, which my wife said out loud when I commented on something she had made:

Cocktails should be plotted out like a multicourse meal

I think my reply there was, “Settle down, princess.”

I use Notion for Wi-Fi passwords. Recipes. Whatever. To-do lists of all kinds. When we leave Mexico, I always add to a note called What we left behind that documents exactly what I have there, from clothes to electronics to toiletries, and I leave a note at the top of things I know I will need for the next trip. The current list is short:

Blink cam battery
Extra shoelaces

Nothing major, I guess. We do have a lot of stuff there now.

Anyway, Notion is amazing. I think similar tools like Obsidian, AnyType, Joplin, and so on would work similarly. But that is what I use.

? Move reasonably fast, don’t break things

helix2301 asks:

Paul many documentaries are coming out about ocean gate and titan. They ran the company like start up move fast break things the Napster’s of ocean fake it till you make it. That attitude works on websites and apps not in subs titan or health care as we heard in thanos. Just wondering your thoughts.

First, I’m fascinated by this kind of thing. The Titan submersible tragedy is one of those things that really captured my attention. I assume you saw the recent update where the people monitoring it remotely wondered aloud, “What was that bang?” when they heard what was later determined to be the sound of it imploding. Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes, the same thing. I don’t remember the order anymore, but I listened to a podcast series about that, watched the documentaries and movies, and read at least one book. The new book about Facebook/Meta, called Careless People, falls into that category, it’s fascinating and everyone involved is terrible in that case.

(Outside of tech, even things like the Gabby Petito story always resonate. There’s a new documentary about the OJ Simpson stuff, and there’s actually a lot of new information in there, which surprised me.)

So on one level, I guess we’re drawn to these kinds of stories, where things go wrong, people behave badly, or whatever. I read an argument one time that horror movies were in some way healthy because they show a world that is more terrible than what we’re (hopefully) experiencing in the real world, and that seeing that can help put our own problems in perspective. I guess there’s some sense to that.

But what you’re really asking here is about what happens when companies use technology in ways that could hurt or kill people. So not a silly dialog box in Windows that somehow shipped with no quality control, but rather a blood test that’s fake that tells someone they have cancer, which is bad, or in another case tells a person with cancer that they are cancer-free, which is worse. Or something like the Titan, which is a combination of hubris, lack of regulation/oversight, and an over-reliance on unproven technology. These things are sometimes avoidable. Sometimes, it’s difficult to know for sure. You can tell a child that the stove top is hot. But they need to touch it before they believe you, in some cases.

I’m not sure if Netscape invented this per se, but when that company was coming up in the world, it was tied to the term, “Internet time.” (There’s a good book about this time period called Competing on Internet Time, too.) In the mid-1990s, Microsoft was solidifying its control of personal technology, but its software development models–this varied by team, in some ways–were based on a world in which you created software that shipped to customers on floppy disks, and getting updates later was either impossible or difficult. And so the quality bar was high (with the understanding that many didn’t feel that way about Microsoft at the time). Netscape came about because of the Internet and the World Wide Web. And while there were, in fact, floppy disk installers for Navigator, many and then most customers just downloaded it from the Internet. And Netscape could update the software more easily, and more often, and put that update, or at least the latest software version, on the web where anyone could download it.

Some at Microsoft saw the problem immediately, others had to be dragged into this new era kicking and screaming. But Microsoft gradually got the memo and adapted, and history is history. But history is also messy. And I can think of a few Microsoft-related stories off the top of my head that are absolutely tied to this. Either directly or just by theme.

The first is Microsoft’s decision to not just bundle Internet Explorer with Windows but to fully integrated it unnecessarily into the OS stack. Most know this story to some degree, but one of the many unintended consequences of this and to Microsoft’s rush-to-market needs was that this software infected NT as well. It was included with the NT Option Pack that customers got with the first version of the IIS web server, and it became part of that OS too. At the time, I complained that this piece of garbage written by kids with little quality control had done the impossible by making NT unstable.

The second was when Microsoft was shifting to the Xbox 360. I’ve told the story about seeing these two giant PowerMac G5 workstations tethered together with a wired Xbox controller, and how I wondered aloud how on earth all that power was going to fit into the relatively tiny, white form factor Microsoft had just previewed for the console. But one of the other revelations that came out of that meeting was that Microsoft was going to allow game makers to update their titles after shipping them on disk. For the first time, the physically media wasn’t the end of the road. It didn’t have to be perfect, because it could be fixed later. You can read the resulting article, from 2005, here. The relevant is under the heading “Game updates and service packs.” And I was nervous that this then-new capability would lead to lower quality. Which it did. I mean, of course it did.

Today, you can see the worst possible outcome of this mentality in Windows 11, where we get new features in preview and in stable every single month, and not just a few, but often a lot. It’s constant churn, and if something goes wrong, maybe it gets fixed later. And it’s not just Microsoft, it’s an industry-wide issue. Meta/Facebook has/had “move fast, break things” as a motto as if that were cool or desirable in some way. The term “Agile” is beyond cringe. Here’s an idea. How about shipping software that’s been adequately tested? What’s the rush? Why not get it right?

The problem is that if you don’t cut corners–quality, time, whatever–a competitor will. And so we’re in this vicious death spiral. This is why Apple’s approach to AI–which is really it’s approach to everything–is so refreshing, despite the complaints and criticism we all see. This isn’t “slow and steady wins the race,” it’s that quality matters. Giving a shit, too. Caring about people. And when you’re one of the richest companies on earth, as Microsoft, Apple, and Google are, it says a lot when you ship crap in a chaotic fashion, just as it does when you don’t.

Software running on a device on your desk is one thing. As technology spreads everywhere, the danger grows. AI is an amplifier for all kinds of things, but for now, at least, that includes errors that can lead to real problems. We joke about using AI to write a resume or a legal brief, but what about when it’s flying a plane? Or whatever. This doesn’t discount human error. But again, AI is an amplifier. It can amplify bad as well as it can good. And people can be lazy, selfish, and stupid.

Good luck out there. 🙂

? I always forget, is it treasonous or traitorous?

Tied to the above, OldITPro2000 asks:

I know you are or are planning to read Apple In China. The Smarter Every Day YouTube channel just put out a video on attempting to make a grill brush fully in the US and what challenges that entail. It’s worth a watch in light of the book.

Oh, I read this weeks ago. I was hoping to review it before now, but I still will. I’ve told dozens of people to read this book, including Brad, who read this week on vacation. It’s incredible, and it makes the case for how Apple has basically sold out the United States and its technology to China to the point where there is no going back. Apple cannot build iPhones anywhere else, and China could shut down that company immediately. Like, permanently. It’s incredible.

Strong recommendation, but I will publish a review as soon as I can. I will check out that video as well, but it’s literally not possible to build iPhones in the United States. Or India, or anywhere else. China is involved in 95+ percent of this process, from the components to the manufacturing, and just assembling these things somewhere else is prohibitively expensive. In the U.S., impossible. This is not solvable, Apple already sold us all out to China. So did Tesla and Uber. And probably others. Again, this book is incredible.

Update: I was wrapping up this article when Brad texted me. He’s written me a few times this week to comment on the book. Today, I guess he finished it. He wrote, “My official review of this book is ‘holy f#$k.'” Concise and accurate.

⚫️ Spaceballs, the sequel

spacecamel asks:

With today’s announcement from Mel Brooks on Spaceballs 2 that will probably ruin another of my favorite movies, is there anything Hollywood will not try to remake…… badly? I know Hollywood is running out of ideas but there has to be a limit. I guess I am depressed that a movie that I quote from all the time is about to be tarnished. May the schwartz be with you.

The Spaceballs 2 thing was amazing timing for me. I know this has come up many times, but it was always one of my favorite movies, and something I’ve watched again and again. I quote from this movie routinely and extensively, and it’s become one of those geeky testing moments for people to see whether or not they understand what you’re even talking about. I can’t find this for some reason, but I’m sure I told the story recently about how my son Mark was given a list of movies to watch by his older coworkers because he didn’t understand some of their references to 1980s movies like Spaceballs and The Princess Bride. I was positive we had watched both with the kids, but when he was home last month, I made sure he finally saw Spaceballs. Predictably, he loved it.

I was always surprised that Brooks never made a sequel. That’s especially true when you consider all the spoof movies–and spoof movie series, like Scary Movie–that have happened. But it’s been a long time. Joan Rivers, John Candy, and others have passed. Everyone else is much, much older. And while I can be cynical about this kind of thing, I semi-respect Brooks not going back to the well for so long. This is, after all, the man who made The History of the World, Part 1.There is no part 2, he gets it.

So I’ll get it a chance. Like the Star Wars prequels, it will have to have a new cast, but like the sequels, it could have some cameos from the original too. That could be fun. I do like his line in the trailer, “After 40 years, we asked ‘what do the fans want?’ But instead we’re making this movie!” Classic.

But yes, Hollywood is devoid of new ideas in general. The scrawl in the Spaceballs 2 trailer lists a lot of good examples. Perhaps that self-awareness will be key to Brooks and company doing right by this. We’ll see.

I did enjoy that I discovered this was happening yesterday, and while watching the trailer, I realized I would have to text Mark to tell him about it. But then my phone buzzed. He was texting me. “Incredible,” he wrote.

Indeed. We’re surrounded by a#%holes. 🙂

?‍? Microsoft hardware and branding, two great success stories we’ll never forget

OldITPro2000 asks:

Regarding the next Xbox being a NUC, I was wondering if the next Xbox will be sold with Surface branding. I read this week that the Xbox and Windows groups have been working more closely together to improve the Windows gaming experience so it wouldn’t surprise me to see the next round of Xbox hardware really just be Surface devices. In other words, a ROG Ally with a Surface logo on the back and an Xbox button. Might make some sense internally for Microsoft to do this. What do you think?

I’m all over the place on this.

Between all the leaks, the public statements by Phil Spencer and others, and the bits of real-world news and software updates we’ve seen, a picture is emerging of what Microsoft is likely planning for the future of Xbox hardware and software. On the hardware side, it’s added a new category of Xbox-branded devices in these gaming handhelds. They run a modified Windows that’s optimized for gaming and could form the basis of a future combined Xbox/Windows gaming platform that could be used by future first-party or third-party consoles.

Too, we know that Xbox hardware has never been profitable. That Microsoft has spent close to $100 billion between Activision Blizzard, Zenimax/Bethesda, and whatever other studios and/or major game franchise (Bungie/Halo series, Gears series, etc.) acquisitions. And that there’s an obvious answer there, involving Microsoft not making hardware.

Even before the recent news, I’ve thought that the future of Xbox was software and services, and not hardware, and that Microsoft stating otherwise, and teasing next-generation hardware, was really about fan service, an attempt to prevent defections in the interim. And it has done incredible work building out Xbox as a platform. Some seem to hate the cross-platform efforts, etc. But come on. Microsoft is a major games publisher now, perhaps the biggest in the world. It can’t do that by only selling its games on PC and Xbox consoles. It needs to meet gamers wherever they are. Mobile. Competing consoles. New types of devices, like living room streamers and smart TVs. Whatever.

If Microsoft does move forward with Xbox hardware, it will likely be a temporary stop-gap measure or, worse, a proof point for Amy Hood to put a stop to all of it. The recent rumor of Microsoft delaying its own gaming handheld was almost certainly related to that: It would cost too much, have terrible margins, and never be profitable. This is the type of thing that’s best left to dedicated hardware companies.

And that has a fascinating potential outcome. That future Xbox hardware will simply be PCs, with modified and optimized hardware and software, that run the same games as traditional PCs. It allows Microsoft to license–or better still, give away–the Xbox OS and platform to hardware makers, giving gamers more choice. It’s better for developers, etc. It’s better for everyone.

So when I consider whether the next Xbox consoles would be Surface hardware, essentially, I don’t know. There are several issues tied up in this.

One is that Surface is a failure. It’s a failure financially, which is why Microsoft now hides its revenue declines inside a business that also registers revenues from PC makers, which is quite successful. It’s a failure as a brand, based on its nonexistent market share. It’s been scaled back dramatically to see whether it makes sense as a smaller, less ambitious business. And when that fails, and it will, Amy Hood will kill it. I’m surprised it’s lasted this long.

Surface is such a bad brand that Microsoft, at one point, removed the Surface brand from the PCs and replaced with the Microsoft brand. Xbox, meanwhile, is still a good brand. It’s a better brand than Microsoft. We over-analyze this in the Microsoft community, but it has great and positive recognition. It’s why the gaming handhelds are branded as Xbox and not Windows, a brand that is from the past, tied to productivity and work, and old-fashioned.

So on some level, yes, I guess I could see something that is really Surface hardware but branded as an Xbox device. But then I think about how Microsoft described the optimization it did on Windows to make the first software for these devices. And it doesn’t feel like this came out of Windows per se, though Windows and Xbox are in the same business unit. It feels like it came out of Xbox.

Consider this quote.

“We were able to take people who have been working on the Xbox OS for 20 years or more and have them work directly on the Windows codebase and start reimagining what that operating system looks like for this form factor,” Xbox vice president Jason Beaumont said.

That tells me that this is an Xbox thing. Obviously, people from Windows were involved to some degree. But in the sense that the Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S were both built using Hyper-V, a Windows-based platform, by people like Dave Cutler who previously invented such things as NT, Hyper-V, and Azure, this new platform is also Windows-based but from Xbox. So the combination of Surface hardware and Xbox branding seems less likely.

I guess we’ll see. I do think that Microsoft and PC makers could put Xbox stickers or buttons or whatever on their PCs to denote some compatibility with some Copilot+ PC specification and certification. And that these gaming handhelds are pointing to something. Some future, outlined—guessed at–above.

But if I were Amy Hood, or Microsoft, or whatever, and Phil Spencer came to me with plans for a first-party Xbox gaming handheld, and it even made remote sense financially, I can’t imagine I’d want the Surface or Microsoft brands on that thing. Xbox is the brand. It’s the device. It’s what fans want, and what gamers expect. And I feel like it’s more likely that Surface disappears.

(To keep qualifying everything I write about Surface, I do love the brand, the products, and the Surface Laptop I now own. But it just never made sense as a business, and I don’t think it ever will.)

I do worry that Phil Spencer will have his Panos Panay moment, where the cuts he’s forced to endure cut too deeply into his aspirations for the platform and he just gives up and leaves. If that happens, we’ll know that it was Amy Hood and cost-cutting behind the shift, as it was with Surface. And that the hardware losses were never countered by adequate revenues from software and services. Perhaps Game Pass has peaked. Maybe Xbox still needs to be spun out. I don’t know.

? Liquid gas

gg1 asks:

Having used the developer betas of the Apple OS’s, what’s your take on Liquid Glass? I’ve been reading in the design community that it’s quite controversial. I wasn’t particularly impressed by it myself.

These things are tough because we all have whatever knee-jerk reaction, and then our experience actually using it may or may not be different. Plus, what Apple delivers now will be improved/changed by the final release of iOS/etc. 26, and then again in future version upgrades, as was the case with previous designs. (Think about how crappy Windows 11 was at launch compared to today. Even the biggest critics have to admit that things got better over time. That’s what happens.)

Apple is divisive. It markets minor changes as life-changing milestones so routinely that we sometimes don’t even pay attention or immediately dismiss what it’s doing because of the way it communicates. With Liquid Glass, we see this all over the place. This is the weight of Apple’s marketing machine bearing down full stop, in part to make us forget about the negative reactions to Apple Intelligence, and in part to goose iPhone sales that have been flat for a long time. I get all that.

I have installed the ’26 developer betas on my iPhone, iPad, MacBook Air, Apple Watch, and Apple TV. Of those, the only ones I use daily, currently, are the iPad and the Apple TV, as I’m using a Samsung Galaxy S25+ that I will soon review and thus my Pixel Watch 3 as well. And I have all these laptops to review, so taking time away from that to use the Mac feels like maybe it’s not ideal.

That said, I am using the Mac to write this article this morning, after spending time last night removing some cruft in the form of virtual machines and other things I wasn’t really using that were just taking up disk space. I had installed the Synology Drive client as part of bringing up the NAS and switching to that for my day-to-day work, and so I also removed OneDrive and Google Drive from the Mac. But it occurred to me that I was still using a handful of utilities that make macOS more usable, meaning more Windows-like, and now I’m wondering whether I should remove those to see whether the core system was any better now in this regard.

Part of the reason for that was my positive experience using iPadOS 26. The previous system on iPad, with a limited Stage Manager and window tiling options, was terrible. But now it’s all there, and it works properly. Maybe there have been similar fixes on the Mac side, given how inconsistent and frustrating I find macOS multitasking. So I’m sitting here using it. I don’t know.

To your question, Liquid Glass in its current form impacts each platform a bit differently. It’s barely if ever noticeable on Apple TV. It’s more in your face on the iPhone and iPad. The Mac experience will vary depending on how you configure it. So where I think that clear glass makes little to no sense on a phone, and it actually harms the user experience in some cases, it’s kind of cool on the desktop with the Mac. I hide the Dock by default, and having clear or dark/clear (colorless) dock icons has a nice minimalist vibe. On the flip side, making the menu bar transparent doesn’t solve a single issue I have with that UI. And I have several, all tied to that inconsistency comment and how terrible the interaction between full screen and non-full screen apps is on the Mac.

I keep experimenting on the iPhone. I am likewise running the One UI 8 beta on the Samsung, and the Android 16 QPR1 beta on my Pixel 9 Pro XL, and trying to compare where each is and where they’re going. On the iPhone, and probably elsewhere, Liquid Glass feels like Mac OS X did in 2001, or Windows Vista in 2006, where we have this cool idea, but half-baked, and in need of refinement. In early Mac OS X versions, the translucent effects on menus especially looked muddy. On the iPhone, the glass effect doesn’t always mesh well with what’s underneath, like a bright background behind home icons. There’s a weird transition in glass toolbar as you scroll that shows a similar: The glass is see-through over solid colors and then opaque over white. It’s weird.

To me, the bigger deal with Liquid Glass has nothing to do with “glass,” and is something that could very easily have been achieved—in fact, more easily achieved–with the previous flat UI: The controls you see on-screen adapt to what’s happening. This, too, is inconsistent, because it’s early and because you don’t see it everywhere. In Safari on the iPhone (but not on the iPad, oddly), the default controls are all at the bottom, and they’re pretty minimal, with a Back button, an address bar, and a “…” menu button for more commands. If you start scrolling, the two outside controls disappear into the middle address bar control, which resizes to a small pill that just displays the high-level name of the site you’re visiting. If you tap that, or scroll back up, it expands and the other controls appear. This feels good to me. It’s nice. And some other apps (News, Camera) have similar behaviors. Others don’t.

It’s far too early to say anything definitive here. But going back to my original comment, I was dismissive of this when it was first announced. I’ve come around to a lot of it now that I’m using it. The mileage varies depending on the device. It will improve over time. I feel like it’s going to be positive overall. But for now, it’s the new adaptive controls that I like the most, not so much the glassy bits.

I may write up macOS 26 at some point. I’ve said this before, but I feel like Apple is much more respectful to this product and its users when it comes to updates than Microsoft is with Windows 11. There are problems with the Mac that I’m not a fan of. These feel surmountable, though. They’re not as dramatic as the issues with the iPad, and Apple did fix that. Anything is possible.