Apple has redesigned the volume and brightness sliders that pop up when you adjust either one from the keyboard. The change showed up in the second beta of macOS Golden Gate 27.2, seeded to developers earlier today.
It’s a small visual tweak buried inside the beta Apple released less than a week after the first one. macOS Golden Gate 27.2 itself is expected to ship widely toward the end of October.
You’ll see the new look by pressing the dedicated volume or brightness keys on a Mac keyboard. Instead of one smooth bar, the slider now shows a segmented row, with each notch matching one increment of volume or brightness. That makes it easier to tell exactly how much a single key press changes, instead of guessing from a sliding line.
Apple used a similar segmented design in macOS Sequoia, before Liquid Glass replaced it with a smoother, more translucent bar. This new version doesn’t fully reverse that. It keeps Liquid Glass’s rounded, layered look while reintroducing the older segmented structure underneath, landing somewhere between the two designs. Apple has been making adjustments like this throughout the Golden Gate beta cycle, including bringing 3D depth back to window controls a few betas ago after early builds flattened them out too much.
Instead of matching icons on both ends, the slider now shows one larger icon on the left side only. It also appears wherever its matching menu bar icon sits, so if your sound icon lives in a particular spot in the menu bar, the volume slider now pops up right below it.
None of this touches Control Center, those sliders, the ones you click or drag with a mouse, keep their existing look. The redesign only applies to the overlay triggered by keyboard shortcuts.
Our Take
Small as it is, this is a good sign for how Apple is handling Liquid Glass criticism a year in. Rather than scrapping the aesthetic, it’s going back through individual controls and fixing the ones that traded away clarity for style, which is exactly what Liquid Glass’s legibility complaints had been asking for since launch.
