In John Gruber’s Talk Show #453 with Louie Mantia, the familiar point comes up again: Liquid Glass is particularly bad on the Mac, where it is least well thought through. On the iPhone, it is at least somewhat tolerable. If Apple devoted as many resources to the Mac as it does to the iPhone, it would be fine there, too!
I think it is not just a matter of resources. Liquid Glass’s poor quality as a design system shows up fundamentally more clearly on the Mac than on the iPhone simply because the Mac itself is more complex and richer: it is used for more complex tasks by more demanding users. The Mac is much more sensitive to interface quality. Compared with it, the iPhone is a toy. It is harder to break with bad design, because there is far less there to break.
The iPhone has become worse with Liquid Glass too, of course. Take the unstable positions and shapes of elements, which make it harder to develop habits. Or uninformative feedback that makes it difficult to tell whether a control has received your input or not. Or background blur that makes text harder to read. But people notice this less on the iPhone because they do not do anything serious on it for long stretches of time.
I understand that there have long been people who actually work on an iPhone — people who grew up with one and have barely used a computer. But it is hard to draw conclusions from them, because they have neither efficient habits nor high standards. They do not realise they work many times more slowly than they could. And even when they have a computer, they use it as inefficiently as they use the iPhone, because they do not know that things can be done differently.
No amount of resources will make Liquid Glass good on the Mac. Only correcting the mistakes built into it will. And the iPhone will benefit from that too.