There’s been a lot of talk recently about Liquid Glass on MacOS, and it being an abomination (epic rant from Nilay Patel there). OK, it’s not recent, but there’s still a lot of talk and Nilay’s rant got me thinking:

If Apple was to move away from Liquid Glass on MacOS, how would they do it?

As I was futzing around with Acorn’s plist I realized that maybe the answer might already there. Mac apps that haven’t been linking against the newest SDKs or have the UIDesignRequiresCompatibility plist flag set to true get the MacOS Sequoia look and feel. What if that setting was system wide? What if there was an Apperance toggle that said something along the lines of “Use the pro look and feel”, and all apps got a variant of the Sequoia UI, but spiffed up a bit more? It’s Gizmo vs. Platinum all over again.

It wouldn’t solve all the problems people are encountering, but it would be an interesting place to start.