IMO a big problem with Liquid Glass is that you're trying to recreate an effect that's highly reliant on the sense of depth we get from binocular vision in a 2D screen.
When looking at glass in real life, your left eye and your right eye see slightly different refraction patterns since they're looking at the surface from slightly different angles. It might be minimal, but light refraction patterns can change a lot when looked at from slightly different distances. This is depth information our brains automatically interpret, and it makes easy to tell what is "the glass" vs what is "on the glass".
On a 2D screen both eyes see the same refraction pattern— your eyes are receiving no depth information. It's just up to color contrast and semantics to figure out what's part of the glass vs laid on top of it, so things that might look legible or easy to tell apart on physical glass will look messy on the screen.
The other problem is that the effect is so subtle everywhere until it gets in your way. Even on a system with actual binocular screens, the Liquid Glass effect is barely noticeable and has been since visionOS 1.0.
It's like a horrible compromise between the indulgences of early 10.2-era Aqua and the worst flat boring low contrast bullshit "mimimmumunlism" crap from iOS 7-18 and macOS from Big Sur onwards.
It’s technically impressive that they’re simulating the way light travels through glass. But a lot of the time it’s so subtle that I wonder if they could have just used simple semi-opacity and it would have had 85% of the same effect at a fraction of the CPU cycles.
I agree. Actual simulation would be an inexcusable waste of resources when the end result is simply indistinguishable from a normal distortion filer. Specially when their newest flagship has a smaller battery.
If you assume a fixed depth “behind” the screen and a fixed eye position, a lot of the math shakes out. It’s overkill for button backgrounds, but the actual implementation of a simplified simulation isn’t as computationally heavy as I think you’re imaging.
I'm not sure how but it doesn't seem to use that much processing power. My 5 year old apple watch seems to render the glass UI fairly well and I assume this thing has the bare minimum processing power.
I feel like this is a big miss for them. Am I really supposed to believe that the company making its flagship phones burn at 14W to simulate the travel of light through glass for a UI actually cares about the planet?
I strongly suspect (as I’ve said elsewhere) that there’s no simulation going on, just a bunch of precomputed refraction maps. Two dependent texture fetches are not nothing (and neither of course is the sequentializing nature of rendering a transparent thing over another thing), but I wouldn’t lose sleep over them if there was a point. Thus far I’m not convinced that there is.
Has noöne located and disassembled the thing yet? The speculation is getting tiresome. (I don’t own an up-to-date macOS device and have never owned an iOS one, so no help from my end, sorry.)
They received a lot of bug reports and negative feedback from developer and public betas. Guess what, they’ve still released the glass almost unchanged. “We know better than you” is a fundamental part of Apple’s mentality
Keep in mind the people complaining are more than likely the loud minority. Personally I had some issues in the early betas (too much opacity causes readability issues) but I haven't had any issues since July. Unfortunately Apple is listening to feedback when they should ignore it and continue improving their work (which is what they usually do).
I don't think that's the UI, it's some other bug. My M1 is still running at full speed after Tahoe. Some people have said there is a broken version of Electron which causes slowdowns on Tahoe currently, most but not all apps have updated to a newer fixed version of Electron.
It barely handles that, and even the M5 still cannot cope with 8khz mouse input coupled to a high refresh rate (>240) screen. I laugh every time they try and sell us on these things being able to play games
They really are great gaming machines from a hardware perspective. I wouldn't bother with an x86 laptop for gaming if it weren't for the software (mostly DRM) side.
?? isn't it objectively the fastest ST core out there, topping MT benchmarks as well? Depending on the variant the M4 plays cyberpunk at 50-120fps so what are you saying?
There's visible lag & stutters opening the control center on my Series 10.
Likewise, while it performs "fine," interacting with the UI still feels sluggish on Tahoe on my M4 Pro compared to Sequoia. I still have another M4 Pro with sequoia on it and it's a night and day difference, in favor of Sequoia.
There may not be any real performance loss but there is definitely UI latency and it's very noticable.
That's not how I remember it. Back in the day the first thing you did was disable the Aero stuff to claw back some performance on Vista.
That said, who knows how efficient the implementation is compared to other changes in iOS 26. I turned liquid glass off with "reduced transparency" because even 1% extra battery usage for it would be too much even though I kinda appreciated the new look.
>>That's not how I remember it. Back in the day the first thing you did was disable the Aero stuff to claw back some performance on Vista.
I remember it being kinda like placebo - you did, you marvelled at how much faster it's working, but in reality nothing changed. I really liked the look, and it did run smooth unless you had something below the minimum spec(which a lot of people did at the time).
If we follow the same pattern, iOS 27 and corresponding releases will be completely flat and look like Mac OS System 7. Chicago font wants to live another day.
Windows 8 got some serious hate back in the day, it had some sound ideas that were implemented poorly, but no one could deny it was lightweight. It had the smallest memory footprint of all the modern Windowses IIRC.
Nah liquid glass isn't just transparency and gaussion blur, it refracts/bends light around the rims as well as a kind of sub pixel colour splitting on some elements like when you have a water droplet magnifying your screen.
I think the liquid glass transparency is more complex than Aero - with curved glass objects distorting what's behind them significantly in some cases. Don't know how much more computationally intensive that is.
I migrated from a 13 Mini to a 17 Pro last week. Updated the Mini to 26 beforehand to mitigate any potential 18->26 issues with data transfers/backups.
I'm still getting accustomed to the device size, the Mini was such a perfect device. If only app and web developers would actually preview their work on its dimensions, I probably would have just replaced the battery (76%).
Reduced Transparency is a hard requirement for iOS 26.
Apple product managers are falling into the trap Microsoft did in the run up to Windows 8: a belief that unifying across Mac, iOS, Apple TV and Vision Pro will make them all stickier. In truth it really does just make everything obnoxiously bad.
I had to change my iOS wallpaper because of how bad the liquid glass distortions looked when swiping my home and lock screens. I get that Apple wants to control the experience, but ruining my own wallpaper ... a thing that is a very personal touch to many users ... felt beyond hostile.
In big engineering programs engineers are paid bounties for every kg they remove from the design. We need software developer bounties for removing CPU cycles and memory.
I switched from Android to iOS exclusively because of Liquid Glass. It's amazing. I'll just sit there and drag the glass back and forth over different things on my screen and stare in awe.
To be fair, it is an affront to usability, but it looks pretty the first time you play with the distortion of several confusing layers of Glass. I had to play with different wallpapers to find one who distorted the better.
But wait, have you noticed that it's named "Liquid Glass(TM)", but none of the glass is actually liquid, or even flowing? Everything is solid pieces of glass. You fooled us again, Apple!
I dont mean to impugn, but that sounds like how someone would describe a toddler being given an ipad. I turn off animations and use apps with an OLED theme.
The first thing I do every time I install a new version of iOS or get a new iPhone is disable all of the animations and enable reduce visual motion in accessibility. Not only is it faster in the countless cases where overambitious UI designers subject us to >0.2s animations, but it dramatically extends battery life
I mean I do remember the feeling of switching over to KDE from Windows around.....2005-2010 era and just being blown away by how pretty everything was. I yearn for that feeling again. But I have both android and iOS devices at home and the liquid glass is just......not that nice(imho). I hope I'll get that feeling of awe with computers at some point again.
This should have been in place from the beginning. The current state of large technology companies is really quite depressing. The intellectual capabilities of these companies have become completely stagnant.
Allow me to disable all animations, rounded corners, opacity, white space and whatever else I don't need. Imagine how snappy and productive it could be!
This is sort of like walking into an art gallery and demanding they hang different art.
Apple has always been visually opinionated. That’s fine. Not everything needs to be customisable. The problem is their aesthetic historically varied between daringly great and daringly fucked. Nothing about Liquid Glass, on the other hand, screams daring, thought or even vision. It’s just a random new effect, completely unjustified, whose only genuine utility for me has been making app icons less engaging.
No that is like my landlord telling me what kind of art I can hang in my own home.
If I spend hours of my day using a device I should be able to theme it exactly to my taste. The customer is always right in matters of taste. You are supposed to serve your customers not the other way round.
And don't give me oh that is not the apple way. I don't care. People don't buy apple for liquid glass or whatever but because they have arguably the best hardware so people put up with the software side of things.
What I really need them to give me is a way to disable the border around the Home Screen icons. They look ugly whenever a black or dark background is applied. Probably because glass itself doesn't look good in darkness.
If you cannot wait, you can already substantially reduce the transparency effect via Settings -> Accessibility -> Display & Text Size -> Reduce Transparency.
This new setting and the existing "Reduce Transparency" look a little different but same idea overall.
There were/are some horrible bugs with Reduce Transparency mode in iOS 26, let's hope this new mode gets added to the fully-tested set of configurations.
Upgrading randomly broke my ultrawide second monitor. Now macos can’t figure out what resolutions it supports and the only two options look awful and stretched. Can’t figure out the refresh rate either and defaults to less than half the correct value.
My mother iphone is still on iOS 18, I'm honestly afraid to make her update because I know she will be lost and I'll have to come to the rescue a thousand times.
I can't understand how they decided to work on that, they must know that a significant part of their customer is boomers that want things simple and intuitive. Liquid glass make everything hard unintuitive, how are you going to know that this button is important if you can't use contrast because everything is transparent ?
I'm an Android person, but I got an iPhone 4S for her first cell phone because it was straightforward and hard to mess up.
Now there are double-secret swipes, all other kinds of anti-user "features" that almost make her cry because she can't figure out her phone anymore.
Now I am thinking about getting an Android and finding a home app ("launcher") that makes it impossible to screw things up and lock down everything else that I can.
Edit: Crap. She does have an Apple Watch that she loves though. And Apple is not only a piece of shit company about their UI, they also don't allow their watch to play nice with Android. (Except that answering a call on the watch pipes the audio to her watch and not her hearing aids. Fuck Apple.)
I just want to pile on, to any Apple engineers here that might have some say: PLEASE STOP with the Liquid Glass. My god, what an unbelievably stupid ‘feature’. Warren Buffett famously talked about how Apple is so valuable because their moat is so strong. That if you were to pay someone 10,000$ to switch from iPhones - they wouldn’t. No other brand is like this.
I was the same way, couldn’t pay me 10k to switch from my iPhone. For 10 years. Then, liquid ass came along and made me consider ditching Apple more seriously than I ever have. This redesign is apple’s most colossal failure of the last decade and I desperately hope they keep moving in the direction of rolling back these changes. It’s not just that everything is blurry and tinted. They made the buttons across the UI far less space efficient, widening and making cartoonish random elements that worked fine before. They added animations that slow down my iPhone 15 Pro and have tanked its battery life (don’t tell me it’s indexing either it’s been weeks!). They completely broke my “dumb phone” layout for my home screen by adding these incredibly ugly borders to everything.
Every day I curse myself for updating to this slop and for not quickly rolling back while they were still signing the old iOS. It is so unbelievably stupid that they decided to do this.
Meanwhile, core functionality like “Find My” is completely and utterly broken. Leaving behind my stuff at a new place gets me at least two different messages on my Apple Watch at different timing. One for my devices, one for my Apple tags. One only has a “dismiss” button, the other has a “trust location” button that when I click, it says “content unavailable”, and if it works (which is only! over Wi-Fi), then it only works for that one device. I always need to go through the find my app at every new place since it’s an absolute UX disaster.
That’s what I get for carrying only Apple gear in the thousands of euros with me.
You should try it if you're only a step into their ecosystem. Kiddo got some airpods for use with his android phone. Registered them with 'find my' on an iPhone SE I have for work that sits on my desk, so that when they get lost, we have a chance of finding them. Now, we get to be alerted to potential trackers every time when travel with him... even he gets the alerts, because he travels with his airpods frequently.
I've heard good things about Apple TV devices, but given what a pain Airpods are without the rest of the ecosystem, there's no way I'm going to try it.
I just don't understand how more people don't complain about this all the time. My wife has an apple tracker on her keys and I get a notification about an unknown tracker travelling with me on my phone every time we go anywhere. Why isn't there an "I know this tracker, leave me the fuck alone" option anywhere???
Yeah, seems like we should be able to acknowledge known trackers, or something. Or be able to enroll multiple phones or other devices (of multiple OSes) as owners, so if the keys move with your phone instead of hers, that counts as 'not being separated from the owner', rather than throwing another BS alert.
Talking about core functionality, iOS `UISlider` api is broken in iOS 26. A lot of my users emailed me last few days how the font sizing menu in my hacker news app is broken because the sliders don't do anything. Turns out it's a bug many developers are facing.
This bug somehow went through the beta releases and still exists:
I wish settings like these would also increase UI performance in a way that would prolong battery life. UX is far more important to me than FX, I would run XFCE on iOS if I could.
And I really want the easy-to-understand, information-dense iOS 6 UI back. Too bad all the boring and lame hate for skeuomorphism led to "the great flattening" and "the great paddening".
IMO a big problem with Liquid Glass is that you're trying to recreate an effect that's highly reliant on the sense of depth we get from binocular vision in a 2D screen.
When looking at glass in real life, your left eye and your right eye see slightly different refraction patterns since they're looking at the surface from slightly different angles. It might be minimal, but light refraction patterns can change a lot when looked at from slightly different distances. This is depth information our brains automatically interpret, and it makes easy to tell what is "the glass" vs what is "on the glass".
On a 2D screen both eyes see the same refraction pattern— your eyes are receiving no depth information. It's just up to color contrast and semantics to figure out what's part of the glass vs laid on top of it, so things that might look legible or easy to tell apart on physical glass will look messy on the screen.
The other problem is that the effect is so subtle everywhere until it gets in your way. Even on a system with actual binocular screens, the Liquid Glass effect is barely noticeable and has been since visionOS 1.0.
It's like a horrible compromise between the indulgences of early 10.2-era Aqua and the worst flat boring low contrast bullshit "mimimmumunlism" crap from iOS 7-18 and macOS from Big Sur onwards.
It’s technically impressive that they’re simulating the way light travels through glass. But a lot of the time it’s so subtle that I wonder if they could have just used simple semi-opacity and it would have had 85% of the same effect at a fraction of the CPU cycles.
I seriously doubt they're doing anything more than a boring shader with some decent approximation.
We can stimulate light, but that's just a waste of ray tracing and introducing annoying complexities.
I agree. Actual simulation would be an inexcusable waste of resources when the end result is simply indistinguishable from a normal distortion filer. Specially when their newest flagship has a smaller battery.
If you assume a fixed depth “behind” the screen and a fixed eye position, a lot of the math shakes out. It’s overkill for button backgrounds, but the actual implementation of a simplified simulation isn’t as computationally heavy as I think you’re imaging.
They probably do because the effect can be pretty closely recreated with a displacement map in SVG.
Yes but that wouldn't slow down their older devices enough to make people buy new ones
I'm not sure how but it doesn't seem to use that much processing power. My 5 year old apple watch seems to render the glass UI fairly well and I assume this thing has the bare minimum processing power.
It's a GPU shader(s), so you'd have to measure its resource usage indirectly (device heating up; shorter battery life).
I feel like this is a big miss for them. Am I really supposed to believe that the company making its flagship phones burn at 14W to simulate the travel of light through glass for a UI actually cares about the planet?
I strongly suspect (as I’ve said elsewhere) that there’s no simulation going on, just a bunch of precomputed refraction maps. Two dependent texture fetches are not nothing (and neither of course is the sequentializing nature of rendering a transparent thing over another thing), but I wouldn’t lose sleep over them if there was a point. Thus far I’m not convinced that there is.
Has noöne located and disassembled the thing yet? The speculation is getting tiresome. (I don’t own an up-to-date macOS device and have never owned an iOS one, so no help from my end, sorry.)
How did they not do enough user testing to know users wanted this before it even got to beta?
Are they so paranoid about secrecy that they can't do event the most basic of UX design processes?
They received a lot of bug reports and negative feedback from developer and public betas. Guess what, they’ve still released the glass almost unchanged. “We know better than you” is a fundamental part of Apple’s mentality
I would’ve killed it even before user testing. It’s borderline malicious that this thing was shipped in the first place
Apple does zero user testing and AB testing, and has always worked that way.
Even in services?
My experience with corporate Apple services (MDM):
"We changed the terms of service. Accept them to keep using this service."
Outside of that, not much in the way of communication. They change and you keep catching up to them.
No communication does not mean no user testing.
Keep in mind the people complaining are more than likely the loud minority. Personally I had some issues in the early betas (too much opacity causes readability issues) but I haven't had any issues since July. Unfortunately Apple is listening to feedback when they should ignore it and continue improving their work (which is what they usually do).
What does it matter if they're a "loud minority"? To quote Apple themselves, "The best technology is designed with everyone in mind."
iOS isn't clothing you can return to the store when you don't like the style. You're stuck with the update once you have it.
So, so, much money, time, and resources poured into this update that only made things worse; and now again to roll it back...
I don't see it said enough, but liquid glass slowed my M3 noticably.
Odd I got the update 2 weeks before M5 launch.
Software as a means to obsolete hardware.
Trillion dollar company
I don't think that's the UI, it's some other bug. My M1 is still running at full speed after Tahoe. Some people have said there is a broken version of Electron which causes slowdowns on Tahoe currently, most but not all apps have updated to a newer fixed version of Electron.
The M3 can run modern 3D games at high frame rates, surely it was something else about the update than the glass effect in the UI causing slowness??
It's a more appreciable burden on older iPhones though.
It barely handles that, and even the M5 still cannot cope with 8khz mouse input coupled to a high refresh rate (>240) screen. I laugh every time they try and sell us on these things being able to play games
Even looking at pro CS players, a single 8 KHz entry is found in the table at https://liquipedia.net/counterstrike/List_of_player_mouse_se..., so it's a really odd hill to try to die on.
They really are great gaming machines from a hardware perspective. I wouldn't bother with an x86 laptop for gaming if it weren't for the software (mostly DRM) side.
?? isn't it objectively the fastest ST core out there, topping MT benchmarks as well? Depending on the variant the M4 plays cyberpunk at 50-120fps so what are you saying?
The glass transparency effect is just very computationally expensive.
The glass UI renders on my Apple Watch 6 just fine and that thing has probably 0.5% the GPU power as the Macbooks.
There's visible lag & stutters opening the control center on my Series 10.
Likewise, while it performs "fine," interacting with the UI still feels sluggish on Tahoe on my M4 Pro compared to Sequoia. I still have another M4 Pro with sequoia on it and it's a night and day difference, in favor of Sequoia.
There may not be any real performance loss but there is definitely UI latency and it's very noticable.
I just don't understand how if Visa could render its transparency efects smoothly on Intel 920 grade GPUs with 128mb of ram.
That's not how I remember it. Back in the day the first thing you did was disable the Aero stuff to claw back some performance on Vista.
That said, who knows how efficient the implementation is compared to other changes in iOS 26. I turned liquid glass off with "reduced transparency" because even 1% extra battery usage for it would be too much even though I kinda appreciated the new look.
>>That's not how I remember it. Back in the day the first thing you did was disable the Aero stuff to claw back some performance on Vista.
I remember it being kinda like placebo - you did, you marvelled at how much faster it's working, but in reality nothing changed. I really liked the look, and it did run smooth unless you had something below the minimum spec(which a lot of people did at the time).
Vista problems were largely nvidia driver crashes and low spec machines. Otherwise vista was fine.
Wasn't Windows 7 doing this same stuff back in like 2009?
If we follow the same pattern, iOS 27 and corresponding releases will be completely flat and look like Mac OS System 7. Chicago font wants to live another day.
Windows 8 got some serious hate back in the day, it had some sound ideas that were implemented poorly, but no one could deny it was lightweight. It had the smallest memory footprint of all the modern Windowses IIRC.
Nah liquid glass isn't just transparency and gaussion blur, it refracts/bends light around the rims as well as a kind of sub pixel colour splitting on some elements like when you have a water droplet magnifying your screen.
I think the liquid glass transparency is more complex than Aero - with curved glass objects distorting what's behind them significantly in some cases. Don't know how much more computationally intensive that is.
I think LG made the finder windows buggy as they have issues focusing when I click on them. Didn't have this issue before Tahoe
I have an M3 max and see literally no difference in performance. YMMV I guess!
I do have performance issues on my iPhone 13 mini, but I expected it.
I migrated from a 13 Mini to a 17 Pro last week. Updated the Mini to 26 beforehand to mitigate any potential 18->26 issues with data transfers/backups.
I'm still getting accustomed to the device size, the Mini was such a perfect device. If only app and web developers would actually preview their work on its dimensions, I probably would have just replaced the battery (76%).
Reduced Transparency is a hard requirement for iOS 26.
I mean your M3 Max has a 3-5x bigger GPU than OPs base M3, you'd certainly hope it could rip through those new shaders.
I haven’t noticed any performance issues on my M3 Air, other than the Ghostty / Zed scrolling lag issues that were fixed in a software update.
Four trillion
Apple product managers are falling into the trap Microsoft did in the run up to Windows 8: a belief that unifying across Mac, iOS, Apple TV and Vision Pro will make them all stickier. In truth it really does just make everything obnoxiously bad.
Unifying the look and feel to such a literal degree on desktop was a weird choice and I hate it a lot on my personal and work machine.
Exactly what happened with iOS 7 as well. 7.0 make all the text incredibly thin and light and then 7.1 made it darker and bolder.
I had to change my iOS wallpaper because of how bad the liquid glass distortions looked when swiping my home and lock screens. I get that Apple wants to control the experience, but ruining my own wallpaper ... a thing that is a very personal touch to many users ... felt beyond hostile.
In big engineering programs engineers are paid bounties for every kg they remove from the design. We need software developer bounties for removing CPU cycles and memory.
I switched from Android to iOS exclusively because of Liquid Glass. It's amazing. I'll just sit there and drag the glass back and forth over different things on my screen and stare in awe.
You forget that HN is incapable of detecting even the most obvious sarcasm
To be fair, it is an affront to usability, but it looks pretty the first time you play with the distortion of several confusing layers of Glass. I had to play with different wallpapers to find one who distorted the better.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
At this point the comment is more for internal vs external pleasure.
But wait, have you noticed that it's named "Liquid Glass(TM)", but none of the glass is actually liquid, or even flowing? Everything is solid pieces of glass. You fooled us again, Apple!
I dont mean to impugn, but that sounds like how someone would describe a toddler being given an ipad. I turn off animations and use apps with an OLED theme.
The first thing I do every time I install a new version of iOS or get a new iPhone is disable all of the animations and enable reduce visual motion in accessibility. Not only is it faster in the countless cases where overambitious UI designers subject us to >0.2s animations, but it dramatically extends battery life
I mean I do remember the feeling of switching over to KDE from Windows around.....2005-2010 era and just being blown away by how pretty everything was. I yearn for that feeling again. But I have both android and iOS devices at home and the liquid glass is just......not that nice(imho). I hope I'll get that feeling of awe with computers at some point again.
KDE to Windows? You missed out on peak Enlightenment.
This should have been in place from the beginning. The current state of large technology companies is really quite depressing. The intellectual capabilities of these companies have become completely stagnant.
Today I discovered you can’t downgrade from iOS 26 to iOS 18. It’s that bad.
About to switch from stable to beta - purely so I can get get rid of liquid glass and hopefully the other bugs in 26.0.
Give me proper theming support.
Allow me to disable all animations, rounded corners, opacity, white space and whatever else I don't need. Imagine how snappy and productive it could be!
> give me proper theming support
This is sort of like walking into an art gallery and demanding they hang different art.
Apple has always been visually opinionated. That’s fine. Not everything needs to be customisable. The problem is their aesthetic historically varied between daringly great and daringly fucked. Nothing about Liquid Glass, on the other hand, screams daring, thought or even vision. It’s just a random new effect, completely unjustified, whose only genuine utility for me has been making app icons less engaging.
No that is like my landlord telling me what kind of art I can hang in my own home.
If I spend hours of my day using a device I should be able to theme it exactly to my taste. The customer is always right in matters of taste. You are supposed to serve your customers not the other way round.
And don't give me oh that is not the apple way. I don't care. People don't buy apple for liquid glass or whatever but because they have arguably the best hardware so people put up with the software side of things.
> that is like my landlord telling me what kind of art I can hang in my own home
Fair enough, it's like the landlord telling you that you can't change the layout.
> don't give me oh that is not the apple way. I don't care
Fair enough again. Apple doesn't care about others' aesthetic preferences either, and that's worked well for Cupertino since the 1980s.
There are settings under the accessibility heading that let you adjust transparency and some other things.
They’ve also gotten less effective over time.
And they don’t get rid of rounded corners currently.
But it still does have a positive impact on the busyness of the os
What I really need them to give me is a way to disable the border around the Home Screen icons. They look ugly whenever a black or dark background is applied. Probably because glass itself doesn't look good in darkness.
Is this just https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uiglasseffec... ?
All of this baloney they added to their OS they now need to support for who knows how many years across who knows how many devices. What a waste.
Perhaps it was a move to ensure job security.
As a user, I would have looked forward to a few years of simply fixing bugs and making the OS more efficient.
If you cannot wait, you can already substantially reduce the transparency effect via Settings -> Accessibility -> Display & Text Size -> Reduce Transparency.
This new setting and the existing "Reduce Transparency" look a little different but same idea overall.
There were/are some horrible bugs with Reduce Transparency mode in iOS 26, let's hope this new mode gets added to the fully-tested set of configurations.
Unfortunately “Reduce Transparenxy” does a bunch of other stuff too, like remove your background/wallpaper.
Upgrading randomly broke my ultrawide second monitor. Now macos can’t figure out what resolutions it supports and the only two options look awful and stretched. Can’t figure out the refresh rate either and defaults to less than half the correct value.
On Tahoe the only difference I notice with LG is the icons on the dock look worse and the corners of the windows look blurry.
My mother iphone is still on iOS 18, I'm honestly afraid to make her update because I know she will be lost and I'll have to come to the rescue a thousand times.
I can't understand how they decided to work on that, they must know that a significant part of their customer is boomers that want things simple and intuitive. Liquid glass make everything hard unintuitive, how are you going to know that this button is important if you can't use contrast because everything is transparent ?
Same (though a slightly newer version).
I'm an Android person, but I got an iPhone 4S for her first cell phone because it was straightforward and hard to mess up.
Now there are double-secret swipes, all other kinds of anti-user "features" that almost make her cry because she can't figure out her phone anymore.
Now I am thinking about getting an Android and finding a home app ("launcher") that makes it impossible to screw things up and lock down everything else that I can.
Edit: Crap. She does have an Apple Watch that she loves though. And Apple is not only a piece of shit company about their UI, they also don't allow their watch to play nice with Android. (Except that answering a call on the watch pipes the audio to her watch and not her hearing aids. Fuck Apple.)
I always wanted them to turn the traffic lights from Jaguar into a fully shader based orbs. Full @2x/Vector Aqua Liquid Glass in all it's glory...
It's @3x these days.
TANK YOU, better than nothing.
I just want to pile on, to any Apple engineers here that might have some say: PLEASE STOP with the Liquid Glass. My god, what an unbelievably stupid ‘feature’. Warren Buffett famously talked about how Apple is so valuable because their moat is so strong. That if you were to pay someone 10,000$ to switch from iPhones - they wouldn’t. No other brand is like this.
I was the same way, couldn’t pay me 10k to switch from my iPhone. For 10 years. Then, liquid ass came along and made me consider ditching Apple more seriously than I ever have. This redesign is apple’s most colossal failure of the last decade and I desperately hope they keep moving in the direction of rolling back these changes. It’s not just that everything is blurry and tinted. They made the buttons across the UI far less space efficient, widening and making cartoonish random elements that worked fine before. They added animations that slow down my iPhone 15 Pro and have tanked its battery life (don’t tell me it’s indexing either it’s been weeks!). They completely broke my “dumb phone” layout for my home screen by adding these incredibly ugly borders to everything.
Every day I curse myself for updating to this slop and for not quickly rolling back while they were still signing the old iOS. It is so unbelievably stupid that they decided to do this.
Does it let me read my fucking title bar while I'm using safari? I can't tell what time it is or what my battery level is anymore.
Meanwhile, core functionality like “Find My” is completely and utterly broken. Leaving behind my stuff at a new place gets me at least two different messages on my Apple Watch at different timing. One for my devices, one for my Apple tags. One only has a “dismiss” button, the other has a “trust location” button that when I click, it says “content unavailable”, and if it works (which is only! over Wi-Fi), then it only works for that one device. I always need to go through the find my app at every new place since it’s an absolute UX disaster.
That’s what I get for carrying only Apple gear in the thousands of euros with me.
You should try it if you're only a step into their ecosystem. Kiddo got some airpods for use with his android phone. Registered them with 'find my' on an iPhone SE I have for work that sits on my desk, so that when they get lost, we have a chance of finding them. Now, we get to be alerted to potential trackers every time when travel with him... even he gets the alerts, because he travels with his airpods frequently.
I've heard good things about Apple TV devices, but given what a pain Airpods are without the rest of the ecosystem, there's no way I'm going to try it.
I just don't understand how more people don't complain about this all the time. My wife has an apple tracker on her keys and I get a notification about an unknown tracker travelling with me on my phone every time we go anywhere. Why isn't there an "I know this tracker, leave me the fuck alone" option anywhere???
> I just don't understand how more people don't complain about this all the time.
I'd assume because they're using the share feature: https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/share-an-airtag-iph41...
You can also turn them off altogether in Settings > Notifications > Tracking Notifications.
Yeah, seems like we should be able to acknowledge known trackers, or something. Or be able to enroll multiple phones or other devices (of multiple OSes) as owners, so if the keys move with your phone instead of hers, that counts as 'not being separated from the owner', rather than throwing another BS alert.
Talking about core functionality, iOS `UISlider` api is broken in iOS 26. A lot of my users emailed me last few days how the font sizing menu in my hacker news app is broken because the sliders don't do anything. Turns out it's a bug many developers are facing.
This bug somehow went through the beta releases and still exists:
https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/797468?login=true
So now I have to go to settings to get rid of it. That's worse. Even more work for me.
I wish settings like these would also increase UI performance in a way that would prolong battery life. UX is far more important to me than FX, I would run XFCE on iOS if I could.
Now all we need is a "disable kindergarten mode" button to remove the superfluous whitespace in macOS.
Now can they fix all the other usability issues?
I really want the original, highly translucent liquid glass back from beta 1. Pleeease?
The original liquid glass was my favorite UI ever, and I love to customize my UI.
Also, all the hate is really boring and lame.
And I really want the easy-to-understand, information-dense iOS 6 UI back. Too bad all the boring and lame hate for skeuomorphism led to "the great flattening" and "the great paddening".