macOS 26 vs Windows Vista： 20 Years Later..

The world's most valuable computer company has just unveiled a brand new OS with its biggest visual overhaul in a generation. Featuring a slick new glass-themed interface taking advantage of the latest in graphical technology, this is sure to define the look of its software for the next generation. But wait, is this Microsoft in 2005 or Apple in 2025? Ever since the announcement of Mac OS 26 and iOS 26 with their Liquid Glass UI, the go-to smartass comparison has been to Windows Vista and its AeroGlass interface. On the face of it, the two seem to share a lot of design DNA, with large parts of the interface being made out of this translucent virtual material. It's a common point of comparison online, plus let's face it, it is often fun to dunk on Apple for inventing things that are actually years or even decades old. So in this video, we're going to look at the link between AeroGlass and Liquid Glass, the history of that style of UI, and whether Apple really is just serving up reheated Windows leftovers from the mid-2000s. Let's jump in. AeroGlass was the translucent, glowy design language that defined the era of Windows Vista and Windows 7, and it has its origins in the Windows Longhorn project that eventually became Vista. Starting with various design concepts in the early 2000s, you could clearly see Microsoft was leaning into transparency in a big way. This interactive concept from way back in 2003 shows many recognisable parts of that Vista aesthetic, notwithstanding many more elaborate animations that ultimately didn't make the cut. And with the frosted blurring effect that came in the glass of retail Vista, this has that classic 2000s aesthetic that's been retroactively named Frutiger Aero. Aero from AeroGlass and Frutiger from the widely used Frutiger typefaces, similar to those used in macOS and Windows at the time. If you used computers in the 2000s, probably remember software and websites looking an awful lot like this, whether it's the shiny icons, rounded windows, or things like this floating little media player robot guy. As computers became more powerful in the early 2000s, we saw a move away from the boring, muted grey boxes that dominated the UI design of Windows and macOS in the 90s, and towards brighter, more colourful interfaces with greater visual flair. And as the mid-2000s brought new GPUs with pixel shader capabilities, the next logical steps were 3D elements and fancier material effects like translucent glass. AeroGlass in Vista was the way it was because it represented the peak of what the technology of the day could do. It even led to criticism of Microsoft at the time because of its fairly steep system requirements. If you didn't have a recent GPU that ticked all the right boxes, well, sucks to be you, you'd get the Windows Vista BASIC theme instead. While Microsoft launched Vista for the first time in 2007, Apple was shipping the first iPhones with where icons and panels looked like high-res recreations of physical objects and materials from the real world, a look and feel that was copied over from the macOS interface of the time. macOS 10.5 Leopard introduced a reflective glass shelf design for its app dock, but even going back to macOS Cheetah in 2001, you could see hints of these glass-like bulbous icons and menu styles. macOS 10.0 here actually predates Vista by a full 6 years and was the first to use Apple's Aqua design language. I'll let Steve Jobs explain in this dubious quality video from back at the launch event. So the fundamentals of Aqua 25 years ago, really not a million miles away from the idea behind liquid glass, and this lickable look stuck around in Apple software until iOS 7 in 2013. This was followed by macOS 10.10 Yosemite the following year as part of a big software refresh that saw the old skeuomorphism being yeeted into the long grass along with former software boss Scott Forstall. Design guru and British white void dweller Sir Johnny Ive took the helm across the entire Apple software suite. The app dock and some parts of app windows got the same subtle frosted glass effect that was applied to iOS's quick settings and notification panel, but even that Gaussian blur effect was itself aggressively flat, there was no real sense of depth to it besides the fact that you could obviously kind of see through it. That was the start of the flat era in software design that's continued more or less through until today. Other examples include Windows 8's metro UI and Google's material design. During the skeuomorphic era, higher res displays and faster graphics capabilities meant that machines could show off that power with deliciously detailed higher res icons and other visuals. But by the mid 2010s, that was old hat. Every computer could now display high res visuals that wasn't new or exciting anymore. And now we're starting to see what's next in software design trends after that era of minimalism. So with Apple's liquid glass in the latest iOS and macOS software, it's similar, but also kind of different. If you look at iOS 26 on an iPhone, there are parts of that UI that are extremely glassy. But even there, the glass elements tend to be things like buttons, controls and notifications. That's as opposed to Vista where at the risk of mixing metaphors here, glass was kind of the canvas which was then moulded into the UI that you used. The buttons, like in Explorer here, were glowy illuminated glass, but they also plugged into the larger frosted glass window pane. Certain apps and features could include more translucent elements, notably the iconic sidebar here, but mostly in Vista it was just window frames themselves that were translucent. I think the biggest difference, the biggest upgrade that you get in the almost two decades going between Vista and macOS 26 is the approach to animation and light. With Vista, this was very much stilted static glass, save for one or two glowy abstract effects in some bundled apps and hover effects for things like the start menu. Window wise, you had the blur effect and the subtle reflection beam here, but that was about it. Windows 7, which followed in 2009, introduced a little more visual flair with light effects in its taskbar, but otherwise looked mostly the same as Vista. But macOS 26 and iOS 26 are littered with small subtle examples of the liquid side of liquid glass. The bounciness, inertia and sense of flow that you get from Apple's latest UI is nothing like what was possible in the mid 2000s. This takes into account surrounding parts of the UI and gives a sense of depth by not just reflecting light from pixels immediately below them. Instead, you get the impression that light is radiating out in 3D space through the UI. So in a way, you could say Apple is going back to flexing with the kinds of UI that's possible with today's graphical hardware. There's also this extremely subtle effect where the spectral highlights of things like icons will change based on the phone's gyro sensor, something I almost didn't notice until I watched some of Apple's WWDC videos for designers. That means specular highlights here change based on the angle you hold your device. It just emphasises the importance of depth to Apple's new UI. And yes, tiny subtle details that 99% of people probably won't even notice is very Apple. The depth of the UI obviously is something that's shared with Windows Vista, but it's also a holdover from Vision OS, which for obvious reasons worked best with a more 3D approach to UI design. And this seems to have influenced all of Apple's 2026 software updates. And if you zero in on icons in particular, you'll see a key difference between the Vista era design and liquid glass. Microsoft's arrow style iconography was still very much part of the skeuomorphic era. Glossy 3D representations of real objects that aren't bound by icon boxes. Apple's new icons retain the abstract nature of the flat era, but bring depth into the equation. Instead of just a flat field of pixels, apps are represented by blocky images made of layered glass cutouts contained within a rectangular or circular frame. And Apple's approach to app icons allows for more customisability, either in dark mode or light mode or with a colour tinted overlay. With Vista back in the day, it was much more of a one size fits all approach, though admittedly Windows 7 did introduce some minor colour theming for those window frames. The way glass is represented on modern retina style displays is also worth touching on because back in the Windows Vista days, chances are you'd be seeing aero glass through a monitor with maybe 80 or 90 pixels per inch if you were lucky, a far cry from the high density displays of today. Higher res displays allow you to give that glass UI an added element of sharpness, especially in the edges and specular highlights that you couldn't experience in Vista with aero glass as more pixelated panels. Whatever you think of liquid glass and the pros and cons of a layered depth interface on a display that is still as flat as it was 10 years ago, you can't argue with Apple's attention to detail and those details in animations, inertia, reflections and even refraction of light are what sets Apple's glass of 2025 apart from Microsoft's mid-2000s effort. But wait a sec, because I actually have another theory as to why Apple has landed back on this glass metaphor for its latest design language. It used to be that new UI trends in software were driven by the power of the available hardware and that's still kind of true to an extent, but trends in fashion and art often tend to be cyclical and as hardware limitations have less of an impact on the way UI looks, I think we could be seeing some of that cyclical nature in software as well. The generation going through college and starting their careers having the money to buy their own Apple products now, Gen Z, a lot of them were growing up and using their first computing devices in the era of Vista and those early Aqua versions of Mac OS. There's quite a bit of nostalgia of late for that classic mid-2000s Frutiger era look coinciding with chatter among designers about how Gen Z views the flat era as boring, soulless and clinical. Contrast that with the look of Vista and Windows Live Messenger and even the Xbox 360 Blade UI back when life was simpler for many of us and maybe it's not surprising that Apple's going back to a modern reinterpretation of that era aesthetic to appeal to the under 30s. What's also interesting is how completely different Apple's design language is compared to what Google is doing these days. Google's Material 3 expressive is still very flat and very colourful though with an expressive edge that occasionally shares some design DNA with the iOS lock screen and it'll be interesting to see which design language resonates more with customers in that key demographic. So in my view what Apple is doing with Liquid Glass is different from Vista mainly because of the unique areas of attention to detail but I also think it's good that we're looking back on the Aero era and fondly remembering it because in my view this was an iconic style that was unceremoniously ditched probably too early in Windows 8. Instead of modernising Aero, Microsoft jettisoned it entirely in favour of the Metro UI from Windows Phone which worked great on handsets but not so much with a keyboard and mouse. It's also important to remember that Microsoft wasn't alone in this era of software design. Aqua actually came first and drew inspiration from the Apple hardware of the time. So in 2026 we'll be moving even more towards Apple's platonic ideal of their devices just being a magical piece of glass in your hand. We're still pretty early on in the iOS and macOS 26 beta period at the time this video is going live so sure some parts of it do look a little bit goofy and I would expect things to be dialed in further as we get closer to that stable launch but I'm curious, what do you make of Apple's new design language? Is it drawing on the greatest hits of the 2000s, reanimated with the tech of the 2020s or is it just reheated skeuomorphic leftovers? Share your thoughts down in the comments, be sure to check out our deep dive on Windows Vista for more on that OS and its development and also if you enjoyed this video be sure to subscribe and like and do all the engagement things to keep the algorithmic gods at bay but for now thanks for watching and I'll see you next time.