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THE USEFUL TECH
🔍 THE USEFUL FIND · MONDAY DISCOVERY · ISSUE #003
👋 HEY, IT'S RAJA
Usually I bring you an app. This week it is a setting, because it fixes the single loudest complaint Mac users have had for a year.
When Liquid Glass arrived in macOS Tahoe, I liked the look and hated reading sidebar labels at 11pm. Apple's answer back then was two presets, Clear and Tinted, which gave you two points on a spectrum you actually wanted all of. macOS 27 Golden Gate finally hands you the whole spectrum.
⚠️ Heads up: this lives in the macOS 27 Golden Gate public beta, which opened on July 13. Betas break things, so if this is your only Mac, install it on a separate APFS volume or wait for the September release.
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🔍 The find: the Liquid Glass slider
One continuous control that takes the interface from barely-there glass to heavy frost, and it applies everywhere at once.
What it does
Apple replaced the two-option Clear and Tinted setting with a single slider. Drag it left for a clearer, glassier interface. Drag it right to add tint and opacity until text stops competing with your wallpaper. The midpoint is Apple's default, so you always know where home is.
The part I did not expect is that the preview redraws in real time as you drag. You are not backing out of Settings to check your work, you are watching it change under your hand. And the setting is system-wide, so Control Center, folders, app overlays, and Lock Screen notifications all shift together.
How to turn it on
Open System Settings on your Mac.
Click Appearance, a section that now gathers the interface controls that used to be scattered across Display and Brightness.
Find the Liquid Glass slider and drag it while you watch the preview.
Same control, same place on iPhone and iPad running iOS 27 and iPadOS 27, under Settings then Appearance.
If the slider is not enough
Two Accessibility options push it further. Reduce Transparency strips out nearly all translucency and leaves flat, solid backgrounds. Increase Contrast sharpens the boundaries between buttons, text, and whatever sits behind them. Both live in System Settings, then Accessibility, then Display and Text Size.
💡 Pro tip: the slider is not the only readability fix in Golden Gate. Sidebars are no longer floating, they run edge to edge, and sidebar icons have colour again after Tahoe stripped it out. If the sidebar was your specific complaint, that is fixed even before you touch the slider.
💻 Platform: Mac, iPhone, iPad
📍 Where: System Settings → Appearance → Liquid Glass
🧪 Requires: macOS 27 Golden Gate, iOS 27, or iPadOS 27
🔄 Replaces: the two-option Clear and Tinted setting from the 26.1 updates
While you are in there
This is one of those settings I change before I do anything else on a Mac. There are seven more like it, the ones that quietly make a machine faster and cleaner, and I put them all in a free download.
Thirty seconds, one slider. Reply and tell me where you landed on it, and I will see you Wednesday with the full Golden Gate picture.
Keep it useful,
Raja · The Useful Tech
P.S. Enjoyed this? Forward it to a friend who loves their Apple gear a little too much.