You can hate iOS 26 and Liquid Glass but the Steve Jobs nostalgia needs to stop
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The launch of iOS 26 and the new Liquid Glass UI last week caused a stir and mobilised the Apple Defense Force; no one liked it, and some even hated it. We reported on the iOS 26 jokes and even Microsoft’s Liquid Glass jibes. There was also a train of thought that began to circulate, that had Steve Jobs still been with us, he would have hated Liquid Glass. He would have taken the designers ‘into a back alley and kicked the sh*t out of them’. I’m not so sure.
The idea that if Steve Jobs were alive today, things would be better recalls a sense of nostalgia and longing for a time that maybe never existed; as Apple launches a new update, subscription model, or product, these same people sigh and hit Twitter with venom to demand the tech giant change direction.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth: Steve Jobs would almost certainly be doing the exact things you may now hate. He would have loved Liquid Glass’s realism and the idea of unifying Apple’s tech.
Steve Jobs was a visionary, yes, absolutely, but he was also a ruthless businessman, a relentless simplifier, and someone who believed in controlling the tech ecosystem. If you think he’d be upset at a lack of ports or Apple’s increasing reliance on services and subscriptions, think again. He’d likely be doubling down – unifying and simplifying.
Just look at iOS 26’s new Liquid Glass UI, a dramatic visual overhaul that, while dividing the design community, also features a fluid, reflective near hyper-real, almost tactile, interface filled with subtle AI-assisted animations and ambient depth. Critics say its style of substance and confusing, while others love its visual trickery; but here’s the twist, I think Steve Jobs would have loved it.
Why? Liquid Glass follows the same principles that guided Steve Jobs’ design and business decisions from the start. Let’s not forget, he loved skeuomorphism – interfaces that mimicked real-world textures and objects to help users feel comfortable in the digital world – and many of the Jobs-era Apple releases drew from this approach. Leather stitching in iCal, Apple’s Game Center looked like a tacky casino, buttons that looked like actual buttons. His design philosophy was never about minimalism for its own sake; it was about humanism. Interfaces that felt intuitive, physical, but also a little wacky.
(Image credit: Apple)
Liquid Glass recalls ‘weird’ 90s Apple
If you ever wanted to bring back the iMac era of the late 90s and early 2000s, then Liquid Glass is coming close; it feels like a spiritual successor to that legacy and, in particular, Steve Jobs’ desire to unify Apple design. This is a UI and UX design that aims to integrate Apple’s growing AI features under one cohesive design language in the same way Steve Jobs streamlined Apple’s tech design. The glossy light refraction and the sense of physical depth, it’s the new skeuomorphism, just evolved for the AI era.
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Aside from the look of Liquid Glass, it’s with how it potentially controls and evens out AI that I can see Steve Jobs leaning in and loving this new release. AI is new, powerful, and easily misused, so an OS and UI that curates and checks what AI is doing and how it’s being used, stifling chaos, is something I believe Jobs would have loved. His ‘genius’ wasn’t simply about inventing things, but wrangling those breakthroughs into one singular, elegant system.
This is what I see Liquid Glass doing: it’s drawing together Apple’s loose mix of AI tools and features, and those developed by third parties, into one ecosystem, wrapped in the goofy UI and animations 90s-me would have loved.
Admire him, yes, but stop pretending Steve Jobs would hate a release like iOS 26 and a design like Liquid Glass. If anything, he’d be all-in and going further. It’s time to let the myth go.
