Not surprising, Apple is going to make you say “I love glass” whether it works or not or if there’s pushback or not or if it makes your device worse or not.
Time to switch to a Linux phone where the UI doesn’t need to constantly be redeveloped for lifestyle + product manager promotions.
Remember when Snow Leopard came out? No new user features. It just ran faster. Greatest OS release in history. Why can't Apple just do that again with one of their OS's?
I don't understand this narrative anymore. The yearly macOS changes are objectively minimal. It's a mature platform. This year, a new design and a few power user features (Spotlight, Shortcuts, tidbits like Call Screening/Hold) and framework overhauls (Metal 4), that's it. Heck, new design excepted, I doubt Snow Leopard added fewer features than Tahoe.
Snow Leopard was mainly framework overhauls, but they're still doing those, year after year, only piecewise. People praise Snow Leopard as a golden release, but early on it was very buggy and, for many, slow (I still remember). It only became great after refinement. Now Tahoe seems stable enough (not counting minor UI glitches) that even Ableton/Pro Tools/SPSS/AdobeCC and other frequent troublemakers work fine on release day, an unusual feat. The "downhill" narrative seems to be nothing but baseless nostalgia.
Everybody also forgets that Apple always did yearly macOS releases except for a short gap around the iPhone and iPad introductions. That's not new either.
Given how many visual glitches persist on last year’s top-of-the-line phone, I’m guessing they’re far behind where they wanted to be and older phone performance got “appropriately” bumped
I’m willing to bet they moved LG up a year to help fill
I will say, wait at least a day before coming to this conclusion.
Maybe the iPhone 13 Mini really will stay choppy, but even my brand-new current gen iPad got super-choppy for the first couple of hours and I was freaked out. Turns out it was just that thing where iOS reindexes everything for Spotlight on a major version upgrade, or god only knows what it's doing in the background.
Granted I have the M4 Mac Studio, but it seems to be running just fine in my 3-4 days of use so far. Also the OS seems to be as stable as last version. I wonder if there are any issues besides the visual glitches and slowness? Also over the years I have found MacOS generally stable. I hope they will address the issues over time.
On the side note, I actually miss Snow Leopard release and in general miss the "Skeuomorphism" in all the software I use.
Thank you for the link to Robin Sloan’s blog and temporarily answering my question about whether I should upgrade iOS. I love his books and for some reason never thought to look to see if he wrote anything else online.
Counter example: 12 Mini runs fine. Health-wise, it's got 22 GB free, and the battery was replaced in February, 2025.
I really dig the redesign. I've been suffering through flat UIs since at least 2013, so having some volume back is very welcome. I know we probably won't go back to skeuomorphism, but that'd be great. Metaphor in design is important. It's a shortcut to understanding. As it stands, I'll gladly take Liquid Glass's volume and distortion as a indicator of interactability.
But, I am a "harbinger of failure"[1], (12 Mini, right?), so maybe this won't be long-lived either.
I am running iOS26 on my iPhone 13 Pro, and on my m1 iPad Pro. It runs fine on both, but I really regret upgrading on my iPad because the new window management options are terrible. It makes me actively dislike using my iPad now, and it used to be my daily driver.
I'm certainly regretting updating my iPhone SE (3rd gen) to iOS 26. It doesn't feel much slower, but the battery life seems to be a lot less than it was last week.
And I had to turn off my accessibility customizations (reduce transparency, etc.) so the interface didn't look completely terrible.
This is Windows Vista all over again! I remember people complaining their pieces of crap computers couldn't render the fancy desktop transparent windows
Alternatively, you can add my voice to the chorus of people with older phones who at first had a choppy experience and then it became perfectly smooth. Likely due to background indexing/updates. iPhone 14 Pro.
My Mac actually seems to run faster but I may just be imagining that (M3 Max MBP)
I'm puzzled why this very short 133 word blog post that offers nothing new — literally: "I will add my voice to the chorus" — is getting upvoted so much on HN.
I don't disagree with the blog post, but it's just not interesting, informative, or useful.
I haven't updated my iphone 14, and seeing posts like these makes me want to wait longer.
Does anyone enjoy or like the changes after the upgrade? Are there any worthy tradeoffs like "ok it's slower but at least I can now do $x or they fixed $y and I don't regret updating it".
Just got a brand new iPhone 17 Pro. Even in the setup flow there are tons of little UI glitches going on. Layout jumping around randomly, screens resetting awkwardly, icons not laid out well in their buttons. Not so great first impressions of Liquid Glass, and with absolutely no excuses.
My Mac Air M1 ran a lot slower until I reduced transparency. The glass change would be fine if the UI was objectively better, but it's an usability downgrade. Things are harder to see/read.
Meanwhile, I still get prompted by the OS whether I want to allow Chrome to access my local network after it asked me that 10 times already.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 46.5 ms ] threadTime to switch to a Linux phone where the UI doesn’t need to constantly be redeveloped for lifestyle + product manager promotions.
Snow Leopard was mainly framework overhauls, but they're still doing those, year after year, only piecewise. People praise Snow Leopard as a golden release, but early on it was very buggy and, for many, slow (I still remember). It only became great after refinement. Now Tahoe seems stable enough (not counting minor UI glitches) that even Ableton/Pro Tools/SPSS/AdobeCC and other frequent troublemakers work fine on release day, an unusual feat. The "downhill" narrative seems to be nothing but baseless nostalgia.
Everybody also forgets that Apple always did yearly macOS releases except for a short gap around the iPhone and iPad introductions. That's not new either.
I’m willing to bet they moved LG up a year to help fill
Maybe the iPhone 13 Mini really will stay choppy, but even my brand-new current gen iPad got super-choppy for the first couple of hours and I was freaked out. Turns out it was just that thing where iOS reindexes everything for Spotlight on a major version upgrade, or god only knows what it's doing in the background.
I really dig the redesign. I've been suffering through flat UIs since at least 2013, so having some volume back is very welcome. I know we probably won't go back to skeuomorphism, but that'd be great. Metaphor in design is important. It's a shortcut to understanding. As it stands, I'll gladly take Liquid Glass's volume and distortion as a indicator of interactability.
But, I am a "harbinger of failure"[1], (12 Mini, right?), so maybe this won't be long-lived either.
1: https://news.mit.edu/2015/harbinger-failure-consumers-unpopu...
And I had to turn off my accessibility customizations (reduce transparency, etc.) so the interface didn't look completely terrible.
Unfortunately there are a lot of visual bugs still with this setting, like clipped text boxes. And it removes your wallpaper for inexplicable reasons.
My Mac actually seems to run faster but I may just be imagining that (M3 Max MBP)
I don't disagree with the blog post, but it's just not interesting, informative, or useful.
Does anyone enjoy or like the changes after the upgrade? Are there any worthy tradeoffs like "ok it's slower but at least I can now do $x or they fixed $y and I don't regret updating it".
Meanwhile, I still get prompted by the OS whether I want to allow Chrome to access my local network after it asked me that 10 times already.