What makes you think that? Do you have a specific example from the keynote in mind?
There must be something since you've never actually used this design system yourself. Or is this just your pre-judgement?
Their example of the music app. You have a translucent bar showing the currently playing music app.
It gets harder to read when it overlaps with the background music album covers. I can very easily see a situation where you need to scroll to an empty bit, just to be able to read what it is actually playing.
Now, imagine you have a visual impairment. It's already hard to read with mostly normal eyes. This will be impossible for anyone with bad vision, probably even worse if colorblind.
It is genuinely unreadable, and a mess visually.
Almost every button and menu they showed was harder for me to read than the ones on my current generation Apple gear. The icons on buttons are indistinct, the text is hard to read. The buttons themselves seem to sink into the content "below" making both the buttons and the content hard to see.
Some examples:
- the tabs at the bottom left of the photos app
- the address bar in Safari (what a complete mess... you can't see the content beneath because the address bar blurs it, but you also can't read the address bar because the glass effect destroys contrast
- in the colourless "translucent" colour way, all the icons look the same
- the (admittedly cute) "squish" effect when tapping menus and some of the buttons looked like it would slow down all interactions
- the highlights and light/colour bending effects are utterly distracting, catching your eye when you really want to be skimming the content or overview to orient yourself in the UI
True, I've not used it... but I was watching along with the launch video with rapt Apple fan-boi attention and I was surprised by how uncomfortable the new UI seemed to be. I've never felt that before.
This new design style is certainly "fun", but it looks like it'll get in the way of fast use of the tools.
I want my OS to promote clarity of affordances, and then to recede away from my attention so I can get on with doing what I was trying to do. This new design style looks like it's trying to hold on to my attention all the time I'm using the devices. (Admittedly today's keynote was an ad for the new design, so that sense of attention grabbing was hopefully accentuated over day to day use... but I'm skeptical.)
Every single example of the five are hard to read, especially the second.
At least half of the example screenshots and videos I've seen in the keynote and on various Apple website pages are hard to read. The lense effects, only visible in the animations/videos, are technically impressive, visually stimulating, but terrible from a utilitarian perspective (unless you consider convincing people to buy iPhones using attractive visuals in a cinematic sort of way but not actually trying to use the devices as some sort of utility to Apple).
I can personally see how others would find it hard to read, just really doesn’t bother me. I can imagine being unconvinced that anyone really finds it to be that bad, and thinking it’s just HN contrarians being annoying, as usual.
Have you used it yet?
> That's a huge loss to productivity and ease of use
They haven’t used it and haven’t lost any productivity because of it (outside of the time they’ve spent complaining about it online).