syxApple Just Lost Me
The space allocated for "Apple has lost their way" has been maxed out for decades, so it bears stressing that this time is different. This Liquid Glass debacle has disillusioned everyone from hardcore Apple fans to normal people who otherwise don't follow tech.
Once the dust settles, this will be a case study for decades to come. Apple threw their hard-won reputational gains off a cliff for _nothing_.
Also most of the stuff people complain about is easily changed in settings (transparency, etc...).
Yeah. The vast majority of people simply don't give a flying shit, and many haven't really even noticed.
I think people are using "liquid glass" as a blanket term that includes other changes in iOS 26, like completely breaking message delivery with the world's dumbest spam filter, aggressively waking some people up in the middle of the night, siri somehow getting even worse, breaking the incoming call state machine (again), bluetooth regressions, regressions to their (already poor) UI accessibility, and so on.
Those other things add up and are definitely noticed by non-tech users that don't care that things like the alarm UI are massively regressed.
The Apple universe seems to be
a place where sentiment is driven by tastemakers and small-group consensus, not the mass of actual customers. So it doesn’t need to be a dominant complaint to have a big effect.
The griping I read about Liquid Glass is from the unhip nerds on HN (like me). I don’t actually know what the industrial designers and graphic artists in their Soho lofts think. I asked an exec designer that I know IRL and got a shrug.
My non-techie friends either barely notice Liquid Glass or go "ooo this is nice!". It has annoyed me on occasion, but I barely notice it any more. Much ado about nothing.
My personal experiences are the opposite of this. I have people in my life who are gen Z, millenials, and gen X who are befuddled by it.
We also have data to show people dislike this. Google Trends shows the largest spikes ever for "how to switch to android", "iphone revert update", "iphone fix battery", and "iphone slow", all only after the release of Liquid Glass (and particularly the increased tactics to get people to update starting in September).
My non techie friends all hate it. I don’t think there is a single Apple user I talk to regularly that hasn’t complained about it, or ask me why it is that way (being the resident tech person for some).
And besides a few odd posts on x, I haven’t heard anyone techy speak positively about it.
Maybe I’m the one in a bubble, but I’m seriously considering switching from Apple as a lifelong Apple user, largely because of the UI changes (Liquid Glass et al), so I don’t think the complaints about it are overblown.
I do think the glass effects do look great in certain areas, like pulling down Notification Center. But I find LQ for the most part to be change for the sake of it. Small things like replacing the Cancel & Confirm/Done prompts with larger X or checkmark icons bother me. They take up more space on screen, and honestly they don't always translate well. There are some cases where a checkmark has taken the place of "Done" and I have felt genuine confusion on how to get out of the editing mode or options screen.
I held off on upgrading because I heard how much people hated it. I bought the new XDR display last week and finally had to upgrade for it to work properly and... it's totally fine? I'm not sure what the big deal is. It's way more annoying on iOS than it is on macOS.
Apple has gone from 68k to ppc to intel to arm. The look of their desktop has changed so much over the years that showing a screen shot instantly tells you roughly the date it was taken. A graphical change at this point isn't moving the needle significantly.
The reality is that Windows 11 continues to get worse. I was an embedded Linux dev for 15 years, and even I don't really want Linux on my desktop. Apple has better build quality, long support periods, simplified updates, and for the most part just works. My personal computer is just an appliance and a means to an ends, Apple still is the best of many bad choices.
The liquid glass debacle seems minor compared to the crappy keyboard debacle five or ten years ago and that didn't really hurt them in the long run.
I don't have a Mac but my tablet and phone are both running liquid glass and it's... fine. I lost my favorite Sudoku app (Enjoy Sudoku) when they updated and for me that's the worst thing about it.
I think on forums like this that tend to have a lot of Apple fans and haters, the impact of UI changes is overblown. Normies mostly don't care. They notice the change when it happens and then two days later they have already forgotten what the UI used to be.
I don't understand the fuss around liquid glass. I've been using Apple stuff since before OS X and this just feels like another redesign; I understand that there are some accessibility issues (that I thought Apple had at least partially addressed) but I don't have any problems using it. In fact, I kinda like it. It feels like many people latched onto an extremely negative narrative early on, and can't let go of it.
I have much more of a problem with the terrible window management on the mac and ipad OSs. Not being able to snap and resize windows to the edges of the screen, like every other standard window manager that exists, is insane (I know they added some version of this recently, but unsurprisingly it sucks). And the entire mac OS is starting to feel slow, bloated, and janky. They completely ruined the cmd-space search in their most recent major release. They need to get their house in order.
> And the entire mac OS is starting to feel slow, bloated, and janky.
It appears you do indeed understand the fuss around Liquid Glass :)
The way I see it, "Liquid Glass" is used as a catch-all term to refer to all the UI changes across Apple's 2026 slate of user interfaces.
For one example, the annoying Apple Watch fitness app changes are "Liquid Glass" in my book because it exists only to show off the new wobbling refracting buttons,. The loss of performance and battery life is reasonably assumed to be tied to new Liquid Glass shaders Apple aspires to run 120 times a second on the phone.
If you're going to say Apple's reputational hit from Tahoe, and Tahoe's many problems, are merely narrative-driven, you need to at least provide support for that. For example:
- why the added transparency effects don't present accessibility/usability issues, despite what users report
- why the corner radius change (among other UI changes), including its absurd size and broken handle detection actually aren't a big deal (even though every other window toolkit NOT swiftui has to be updated for it)
- why it's okay that they added useless icons to menus that add visual clutter and violate of their own design standards
- why Rosetta is going away, even though so many things still depend on it
The bigger issue is that Tahoe was a frivolous cosmetic update with only a few actual improvements, despite all of macOS's bugs that haven't been fixed over the years. That's a long list, from broken keyboard shortcuts in most their newer apps (and System Settings) to persistent Airplay compatibility problems.
Why is Apple's hardware getting objective better over the years while the possible software gains are squandered year after year?
Any system of age verification will fail to satisfy the writer, because it is fundamentally the UK’s fault by requiring such draconian measures. Credit cards don't work ever time, but the other options of using AI or sending your data to a third company who will resell it are also not great.
The only other complaint seems to be liquid glass? It really feels strange because Apple feels on the upswing with their new office and their cheap, repairable mac.
Reading between the lines, the author of the blog post would have gone along with the verification with annoyance if the verification had worked. What seems to have prompted everything is the credit cards failing. The fact that they couldn't use Wallet and then tried manually with all five sort of illustrates that they would have gone along with it.
Edge cases like immigrants in a different land are typically unmet for these things. I remember once trying to re-activate my Google Fi SIM from my home in the UK before I returned to the US and getting a strange error message that didn't allude to the region. I got the rep on the line and they said "You're in the US, right?" and I had to bullshit something about "oh I had my VPN on" and then turned it on so I would like I was in the US and it worked then.
Anyway, there's clearly one cause and the rest is just kitchen sink argumentation.
> Edge cases like immigrants in a different land
It’s a brutal faux pas from Apple to consider immigrants an “edge case”. We are a significant group in many countries. (That said - I don’t have any banking products from my country of origin anymore)
I think it's unavoidable to end up triggering these since we're not really that common once it lands up with the specifics. It's rarely "immigrants" as a class but more "people with ID A in country B". I'm an Indian national with permanent residence in the US who lived in the UK. I have bank accounts in all three countries and I really don't expect them to work cross nationally reliably. If anything would, it would have to be the US stuff but I wouldn't count on it.
I mean, I'd consider it important for it to work, but when it doesn't I wouldn't consider it a brutal faux pas so much as a moment of frustration at the kind of engineer who only happy-path builds.
Tapping a UK passport to your phone works just fine for ETA apps and it would work just fine for Apple as well.
The fact that you think American corporation punishing foreign users for their laws is acceptible is sick upon itself.
How many people have a passport vs a credit card? If you travel a lot, sure, but some folks never leave their hometown.
More Brits have passports (86.5% [1]) than credit cards (64% [2]).
[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populati...
[2] https://www.money.co.uk/credit-cards/credit-card-statistics
> The fact that you think American corporation punishing foreign users for their laws is acceptible is sick upon itself.
Not really. I was hoping more large US corps would just not comply and force a big kerfuffle and force the UK government to rethink the OSA and other ridiculous legislation.
I think Apple's hardware has good to great since the end of the "butterfly" keyboard fiasco, but their software has been in a persistent, slow decline - both in terms of quality and design. So depending on what you look at/care about you could make the case that Apple is getting better or Apple is getting worse.
That covers the good and the bad. The ugly is the increasing presence of ads in Apple software - Maps being the latest example. Something that's going to push me out of the ecosystem eventually. I'm probably ditching Apple Maps for Google Maps this summer, because if I'm going to use an ad-infested product I at least want to get reliable directions out of it.
> it is fundamentally the UK’s fault by requiring such draconian measures
It would appear the UK doesn't:
> Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator, praised Apple for the decision, especially since it’s not required to implement age verification for the iOS or its App Store under the region’s Online Safety Act.
-- https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/apple-introduces-age-verif...
Apple has done this sort of thing before, where they don't like a law, they'll implement some unnecessary and shitty feature, and then say "hey don't blame us, blame your MPs!".
Sounds like you're talking about Apple disabling Advanced Data Protection in the UK? https://support.apple.com/en-us/122234
Weird take to shift the blame to Apple for that.
No, Apple adding fees "to comply with the DMA" because "EU made us do it":
https://www.macrumors.com/2025/06/26/app-store-eu-rule-chang...
Interesting, I would not have expected calling Apple out for their malicious compliance practices would be controversial.
I found this to be a very odd and strange rant. The author's three issues with Apple are:
1. Gatekeeping. OK, fine, but at the very least this has been Apple's stance for a very long time now (the author talks about faxing credit card details), so it's not like it's something new. If you wanted full unfettered installation rights, Apple was never the company for you. And while I think it's fine to argue against Apple's stance, I find most of the arguments are less than honest about the pros of things like developer verification for the end user.
2. mac OS26. I totally agree that this is a total fiasco from a design perspective, and liquid glass is unqualified shit. Still, I see Apple at least somewhat moving in the right direction by getting rid of Alan Dye.
3. Apple had a bug in their age verification protocol. Again, valid point, but Apple needs to follow UK law. I've seen a lot more missives arguing against requiring things like driver's licenses and other government ID, and so it seems like Apple is at least trying to go the least restrictive route by choosing credit card verification.
To emphasize, I'm not apologizing for Apple here. In particular, much has been written about how Apple has lost their way regarding the "it just works" philosophy. But it seems like the author's main beef is against Apple's level of control, and this is just a fundamental difference in Apple's stance that has existed for about 2 decades.
When I got the prompt it just said "your account age is old enough to prove your age" and didn't ask for any further info.
[dead]
What's odd and strange about this? Author clearly specifies this at the start:
> To summarise for yous there are three main issues for me and the last one happened today and is what pushed me through the threshold.
The compounding led to this, not that individual issues existed (and have been a problem) for a while.
Author here. Thanks for engaging is such gentle way, this is rare these days. Let me address some of your comments and maybe you'll understand my position a bit better even if you don't agree.
> 1.Gatekeeping. OK, fine, but at the very least this has been Apple's stance for a very long time now (the author talks about faxing credit card details), so it's not like it's something new. If you wanted full unfettered installation rights, Apple was never the company for you. And while I think it's fine to argue against Apple's stance, I find most of the arguments are less than honest about the pros of things like developer verification for the end user.
Apple been tightening that control over time. For a long time on MacOS X you could simply run apps. Then came notarisation, but you could still disable it. Now, even with a certificate, it still shows a dialog. I wish that apps that went through notarisation would simply run like the ones from the app store without a dialog showing.
> 3. (...) the least restrictive route by choosing credit card verification.
But not everyone has a credit card. Those are not something you're born with or required to have or even required to have them issued from the same country you're living in. That is not the least restrictive, that is a very large assumption. What I would have liked to have seen is them providing you with options: "do you want to use credit card verification? National ID? Passport? Credit check? Etc" and then it is up to each user to decide on their risk profile and what they are okay with.
As of now, my only way to verify it is by literally ordering a credit card from my UK bank when I'm pretty happy with my debit cards already.
I am in the same situation. French citizen living in the UK. I never owned a credit card and I have no use for it.
I can't pass the age-verification. I am 49.
This alone is quite irritating, but the overall developer-hostility of Apple and the quality drift of their software is convincing me to never buy an iOS device again.
And I'll probably not release any software on their platforms either.
Are you ruling out sending a photo of your driving license?
It's absolutely nuts that you have to. But it's an option?
that's the thing, it is not an option. The only option is credit card, that is what drove me nuts. If it had other options, it would still be bad, but I'd have a way to solve it even if made me angry. Now, the only way to solve this is literally to order a credit card from my bank and then use it. Which is bonkers.
Apple has shown a warning on downloaded-from-the-internet apps since Mac OS X Tiger. That's the only reason it's being shown, there is no scary warning that users need to step-through in some basement in System Settings as they would for a non-notarized app. The popup even says "Apple has checked this application for malware". It is the smallest of friction present to get apps to run, as I'd argue that the sandboxing requirement for App Store apps and the need for a sign-in make the App Store a worse experience.
And I say this as someone more or less utterly in the same boat as you. I bought a used Thinkpad last June after seeing the first Tahoe beta. It's clear Apple is not the platform for us anymore.
> Apple been tightening that control over time. For a long time on MacOS X you could simply run apps. Then came notarisation, but you could still disable it. Now, even with a certificate, it still shows a dialog.
Notarisation is just proof that the app went through an automated malware scan.
Windows, Mac, and Android have all adopted measures intended to warn and attempt to protect users from malware.
As far as age verification goes, this is a restriction being forced on companies by governments.
Apple previously allowed parents to set age restrictions on their children, or not, as they saw fit.
> but Apple needs to follow UK law
The Online Safety Act does not require device manufacturers to enforce age "verification" at the OS level. If Apple had not implemented this, it would still be in compliance with UK law. Apple is displaying anticipatory obedience here, which is the opposite of good citizenship.
Two things stand out from this fiasco:
1. Apple, and those who praise them for what they just did, don't appear to have learnt from history. Anticipatory obedience used to be known as "vorauseilender Gehorsam" during a particularly dark period in the history of a country a few hundred miles southeast of the UK. It was one of the factors enabling the darkness.
2. The UK is a small enough market for Apple to treat it as a test bed. Which it probably is in this case, and which means that removal of anonymity aka "OS-level age verification" is coming to a lot more devices in a lot more countries soon. See also the uncanny coincidence of lots of OECD countries pushing for online age verification at the same time.
What keeps me in the Appleverse is the hardware, and the software that Just Works with the hardware (I find that "Just Works" has been rapidly eroding in general, but naturally it still handles the hardware well). The alternatives are Linux on much worse hardware, or the non-starter that is Windows on anything whatsoever.
I'm told ThinkPads are getting to parity and have primo Linux support, but barring accident, my M3 MBP will probably last me a decade. Another reason I prefer Apple hardware.
https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/feature-support/m2/
still too many missing bits for me.
Almost any Linux distro will work find with any Thinkpad and has done so for almost two decades now.
I switched as a heavy Linux user to a MacBook because of this reason.
1. Battery is better than any other laptop out there
2. Touchpad is better than any other laptop out there. I don't even use a mouse anymore
3. Sound is better than any other laptop out there.
There is no other laptop that comes even close to this hardware.
The third point in this article is what really gets me. The credit card culture in Canada and the US is just insane to me, coming from a European point of view. You can get by without credit cards in Europe, and most of my family only has one for traveling abroad. So sure, they can use their credit card if they really have to, but it’s not a good default, as many others won’t even have credit cards. (And within EU, traveling without one is still fine for the most part).