Mastodawn

Glyph Sep 18, 2025

please boost for reach if you don’t mind, I am curious about broader reception here

Also, since so many people are asking, I guess that if you are sort of "meh" on it, particularly if you have a device that has been upgraded to a 26 OS and it's working fine for you, just go with "like"

cognitively accessible math Sep 19, 2025

@glyph I don't and won't have an apple device.

@glyph not a huge fan of Liquid Glass but I’m sure I’ll get used to it. Outside of that, I have noticed massive battery drain since installing ios26.

@greg I notice a big battery drain / device being hot for a day or two after every upgrade these days. I assume that they have some kind of Spotlight indexing happening in the background, my iPad/iOS devices have calmed down now

@glyph have you updated to Tahoe? any issues there?

@greg I have exactly 1 serious issue with Tahoe: Bartender (the 3rd party app for managing menu bar icons) is extremely, almost kind of shockingly, badly broken, despite having a version (6) that supposedly works with Tahoe. Otherwise everything seems fine? OmniFocus looks a little nicer (they don't enable the new UI look unless you're on Tahoe) but otherwise most apps are the same. The minor visual refreshes on stuff like the Dock are nice, and even Squircle Jail is growing on me

@glyph ok I might do the upgrade later this week. I’m still on bartender 5 so I wonder how that will behave. Good about OmniFocus! I have a lot of bugs with it on iOS.

@greg Uninstall bartender 5. My system was unusable for 15 minutes after first boot until I ssh'd in to kill it. Bartender 6 is better in that it will stop glitching out for long enough for you to just quit it normally every 2-3 minutes.

@greg They're apparently feverishly working on an update to 6 that fixes some issues people are having, but they announced the current version as "out of beta" and "ready", so, my confidence is low.

@glyph thanks for that info. I just experienced the updated CarPlay. That I do like.

James Bennett Sep 17, 2025

@glyph It is Spotlight. Apple documents that now to head off people who insist they’re ruining batteries for “planned obsolescence”.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/125039

About Apple software updates - Apple Support

Apple regularly provides software updates that improve your device with new features, important security enhancements, and bug fixes. Learn more about why they are important and how they work.

Apple Support

James Bennett Sep 17, 2025

@glyph “Immediately after completing an update, particularly a major release, you might notice a temporary impact on battery life and thermal performance. This is normal, as your device needs time to complete the setup process in the background, including indexing data and files for search, downloading new assets, and updating apps.”

إمي ❄️🏳️‍⚧️🇵🇸Sep 17, 2025

@glyph I have a mac mini that I use at work but it's not my main work machine. I'm neutral so far, but I've only used it for a few hours.

Paul Moore Sep 17, 2025

@glyph You don't have a "Don't have liquid glass yet, reserving my opinion till I see it in action" option. I have an older iPad, and I'm not sure whether to install iPadOS 26. Battery drain comments are worrying, and in general new features tend to stress older hardware. Liquid Glass is honestly surprisingly irrelevant to my thought process at the moment.

@pfmoore "show results" it is, I guess!

@glyph I kinda need a “I don’t hate it option”. It’s fine but I wish they hadn’t done it. But all the posturing and handwringing leading up to it was once again stupid and has shown how we can’t have normal conversations even about the shapes of icons without making it weird

@hynek Why do you think it was stupid? What would a normal conversation have looked like?

@glyph The opposite of “my timeline is full of posts declaring they’ll never update and quote every shred that can confirm that bias” would’ve been nice. I had a completely wrong impression of how it’ll look/work like based on that — which kinda sucks

@hynek yeah okay I could have done without that

@hynek looking back over my own takes (which were wrong, but I think defensibly not-extreme) I do think that this was kind of an own goal by Apple, in that their marketing materials made it consistently look much worse than the product itself. I'm re-watching the original announcement and many of the videos were showing far more transparency and far more wibbly wobbly nonsense than shows up in any app I have interacted with thus far, and the editing techniques they use accentuated it a lot.

@glyph I mean I’m not stoked even now, but how the fuck did that become another righteous crusade!? I only updated after you were publicly surprised it’s fine

Chris is.Sep 17, 2025

@hynek @glyph I updated to an earlier beta because I basically filtered for “people who I know have excessively hot takes” and weighted their feedback a lot lower. Tone helped, too; any time someone got as outwardly angry about iOS widgets as I internally feel about the creeping growth of US fascism, I ignored their opinion outright.

All told, this is one of my least favorite iOS UIs, but, eh, it’s … tolerable.

Paul Moore Sep 17, 2025

@hynek @glyph Yeah, for me it just looks sort of different. Not that big a deal either way - then again, I lived through Windows XP 🙂 I'm not a huge fan of the look, but we all lost control of how our computers looked years ago.

@pfmoore @glyph This is much closer to Vista tho ;)

@hynek @pfmoore we are so back https://frutigeraeroarchive.org

Frutiger Aero Archive

A website dedicated to the Frutiger Aero design aesthetic, featuring 4000+ downloadable wallpapers, a music player, videos, icons, history, and more.

Paul Moore Sep 17, 2025

@hynek @glyph In my head Vista is the "Thank God it's not XP" release, so anything with that vibe automatically feels better than it deserves 🙂

Laura Langdon Sep 17, 2025

@hynek @glyph I’ve been on it since Beta 1 and liking it the whole time*, but deleted every post I started to write about liking it because I didn’t want to deal with reply guys screaming at me that I was a shill or lying or whatever. 🤷🏻‍♀️

* I did have a few transparency issues on Beta 1, but that didn’t stop me liking it otherwise and getting mad at imperfection in betas makes no sense

Chris Hasenpflug Sep 17, 2025

@glyph have capable devices…. Not upgrading yet. Will wait until this weeekend after the new phone forces me to accept it

abadidea Sep 17, 2025

@glyph I have held back on updating not because I expect to hate liquid glass but because I expect it to ship a little underbaked. I never do big apple feature updates first day.

gullevek ☢️ 🇯🇵Sep 17, 2025

@glyph There has to one. Like have one, don’t care. Because I don’t care. It doesn’t bother me. Except during upgrade where the top row of keys in they keyboard viewer had not margin at all.

grmpyprogrammer Sep 18, 2025

@glyph Where is the option for “I have a device with Liquid Glass and don’t care one way or the other?”

Dmitry O.

Sep 18, 2025

@glyph liquid glass’s fine. The other ui and ux changes are a nightmare

Glyph Sep 18, 2025

@emocoder what other changes are you referring to?

Dmitry O.

Sep 19, 2025

@glyph like this for example. Its just I don’t know. Ugly?

Min RK Sep 18, 2025

@glyph I don’t see the option for “looks fine, even good sometimes, but the catastrophic legibility failures are a serious problem, and if you turn on accessibility options like ‘reduce transparency’ and/or ‘increase contrast’ it’s pretty nice, actually, so maybe that should have been the default”?

@minrk I'm really curious about where folks are hitting catastrophic legibility failures in live use; rather than, say, in a screenshot. Have you experienced these directly?

Min RK Sep 19, 2025

@glyph yeah, my lock screen is a fairly pale yellow birch tree. The default white/translucent no-border text is illegible over that. Turned on reduce transparency, and it looks fine. Not to mention on upgrade it automatically turned depth effect on, literally hiding my widgets entirely behind a tree.

Janne Moren Sep 19, 2025

@glyph
Not in the ecosystem so I didn't vote. But as somebody with aging eyes I would be really concerned about the low contrast and distracting background this seems to create.

Android just made a major step forward in that respect; my impression is that iOS is moving in the other direction here.

It does seem that on Macs the effect is more subdued and shows up in fewer places so it probably works better there.

@jannem part of what the poll is about is that as someone with similar vision concerns, I have been pretty surprised by the practical ways that the UX comes together, which is generally far more legible and much more subtle than the screenshots or even apple’s own ads suggest. Preliminary results seem to be bearing out my hypothesis, which is that folks who have only seen pictures of it *hate* it, and people who have used it like it a lot better.

@jannem I was expecting more like 70/30 like/dislike for the users who have tried it and it’s more like 50/50, but still; among non-users it’s like 1/99

jonathankoren™Sep 19, 2025

@glyph smocking the search bars to the bottom pisses me off more than any of their superfluous effects

RockyC Sep 19, 2025

@glyph I’m not going to deny the usability improvements, which I like a lot, but there’s just too much transparency, and some of the effects are just ridiculous.

Also not a huge fan of all the rounded corners. I wish they were a bit sharper.

It’s like Aqua, GNOME, and Vista had a demon spawn baby.

Ben Sep 19, 2025

@glyph Positively surprised, feels like Apple took a risk making things more weird and alive than they needed to be and for me that’s laudable. It does serve the function if making the navigation clearer in many cases too.

gullevek ☢️ 🇯🇵Sep 20, 2025

@glyph I like it. But fuck does it make the device slow. Also so many bugs and design problems. Steve is rotating so fast in his grave you could power humanity to eternity and back

emma (dumb) 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️Sep 20, 2025

@glyph the deign philosophy itself is relatively within the realm of “tolerable, if undesired” for me, but the accompanying changes to things like the camera app to make them “simpler” are absolutely on the “do not like” side of things

emma (dumb) 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️Sep 20, 2025

@glyph (i have been daily driving both a device with it and one without since june)