Okay. I finally installed ios 26 because of the DarkSword hack. I’m so pissed about how this looks immediately that I’m going to post what I hate to this thread. I’m going to be very rude because I’m in a bad mood and I’m starting to Hate Designers (speaking as a former)

all right first of all, something’s wrong with the way the keyboard works; it pops up the letter above in a way I can’t quite put my finger on but it looks like shit

the Squircling is out of fucking control. looks at this shit. WHY IS THERE SO MUCH NEGATIVE SPACE IN THIS TRASH CAN DOCK

Next. I fucking hate the pre-existing design of Screen Time warnings. But I need them, because I’m a goddamn obsessive and I need reminders to quit looking at socials.

But these MOTHERFUCKERS, in their endless pursuit of false tidiness, have HIDDEN THE OPTIONS BEHIND A SECOND TAP

you used to get the “one more minute” etc immediately. Now I tap one button and it POPS THESE UP?? halfway up the SCREEN? you assholes

the animation that bloops out when I tap the add media button? this sucks. it takes too long and it bloops out in an annoying way. I LOVE interface animation but this makes me mad immediately

Oh!! I just realized that I had my accessibility vision settings on; reduced transparency, high contrast, etc. I turned all those off so I can get the Genuine Experience and get real good and mad for a little bit

this floating shit above the keyboard? fuck you. these icons look so bad, the spacing is a fucking nightmare

some of these bloopy swoopy animations MIGHT be fine if they were twice as fast and didn’t have the goddamn glass blur

DONT MAKE ME WAIT FOR THE FUCKING INTERFACE YOU FUCKING AMATEURS

i know you know, but this transparency is fucking embarrassing. god DAMNIT
TAKE AWAY THESE DESIGNERS’ FUCKING GOURMET CRAYONS AND MAKE THEM GO BACK GO SCHOOL
I hate this flat ass duplo icon with my life
this has BEEN a problem, but it sure would be nice to see the whole title of basically any app. charlatans. give me an options for 2 rows of text. I’ll put fewer icons onscreen, I don’t give a shit. this sucks. have they given an option for app icons to be double-wide? I’d do that instantly. fuck the squircle
i don’t know why I even have this group. but this transparency!! fucking!!!!!! SUCKS

TWO TAPS TO OPEN ALL MY SAFARI TABS????

I OPEN THEM HUNDREDS OF TIMES A DAY

which, admittedly, I wish my life and brain were different but my ass reads a lot of internet

GUESS WHICH PART OF THE INTERFACE IS THE WEB PAGE AND WHICH IS THE BROWSER

bastards killed accessibility with a glass shovel

I’m going to turn ALL OF THIS OFF AS SOON AS IM DONE BEING MAD

but it’s a fucking travesty to ship this to a billion devices. truly, shame on everyone involved

gonna make myself go to bed for now. but I repeat: fuuuuuuck everybody who made and signed off on this. give me your fucking job so I can channel the ghost of good taste and scour your errors from the earth

why is this SO BIG AND UGLY
AND HALFWAY UP THE MOTHERFUCKING SCREEN

PUT THE CONTROLS DOWN NEAR MY FINGERS

AND DON’t MAKE EVEYRHNG A GIANT FUCKING CENTER ALIGNED ROUNDRECT

aahhhhHHHHHHHHHHHH

the fact that whoever made this toddler-ass reductive icon gets paid more than me is an existential crisis
for me, and for the planet

high pitched scream, all the fucking “glass” cracks and falls to the ground

hideous

HAHAHHHAHAAHA
I can only conclude that no one with taste works at Apple anymore. This is grotesque

to give credit where it’s due: I think a fair amount of the squash-and-stretch animations are cute. playful in a good way. when you pull down the command center, and the buttons all stretch? that’s cute.

glass looks like shit, but I’ll probably still think that’s cute when I Reduce Transparency

and I do appreciate the buttons that have big circles around them, in some of the cases I’ve seen. a big round checkmark is better than “Done” with no outline

and I appreciate how big the outlines get on lock screen buttons when held down. But I’ve been wishing they’d do this for the entire time iphones have existed, so points docked for being a decade late

every touch interface should visibly react when touched, BUT RESPECTFULLY

also nice: moving the Search button down to the bottom of Music.

But this is with Reduce Transparency, Higher Contrast, and several other accessibility settings. Let’s see what it looks like by default!

@splendorr fucking UGH. Shit like this in iOS 26 drives me CRAZY.

Honestly, if Apple implement the age verification thing on my phone, I'm leaving for a Fairphone. Fuck this shit.

@splendorr

It...it's Microsoft #iOS Vista™️

@msh yeah. and it’s somehow making me misremember “maybe Vista was… better than this?”

and maybe it was, because they didn’t distort things as much. but yeah. it’s in deeply poor taste!!!

@splendorr I'm so glad I'm not the only one raging at this right now.

I can't even read the goddamn clock on my phone after it wakes up because now it's OOOO TRANSPARENT FONT, and that's with reduce transparency on.

I had to manually go through EVERY APP ON MY PHONE (all 40+ of them) on Siri to disallow suggestions or whatever the fuck that is

@distractal oh i haven’t even got to the Apple Intelligence yet………..

yeah dude, this sucks so bad

@distractal maybe you figured out, but if you press and hold on your lock screen, then tap edit, then tap on the time, you can make it “solid”

which is still not clear enough but is better

@splendorr I did not, thank you for that
@splendorr I weirdly appreciate that Settings is in your Business folder.
@gastonrampersad It’s… mission-critical?? Settings is all business 😆 There used to be more work-related things in this folder. As apps were deleted, and I almost entirely use search to launch apps, we’re left with this lonely trio 😅

@splendorr > (speaking as a former)

You don’t stop being a designer. As evidenced by your criticisms. (With which I agree, BTW)

@morrick thanks. And, yeah, I still have the capability.

I’m being so unkind and uncharitable, which I NEVER do professionally or personally. But this is such a hideous mistake by such a wealthy company. It’s worse than I even thought from seeing other folks’ posts about it!!!

@splendorr Sometimes the truth is unkind and uncharitable.

A reader of my blog wrote me last week. It’s not the first time he writes me, so our correspondence is kind of informal. The entirety of his email was:

“I eventually did it, against my better judgment.

Now I fully understand why you refused to update all your devices to the latest versions. 😔”

@morrick Yes. What a profound sadness, actually, to have these once-beloved devices corroded by mismanagement.

I had a taste of all this because my work macbook was force-updated a couple months ago.

I will /never/ let this stuff touch my personal macbook (which I already dislike in many ways, because it came with whichever macos precedes 26, which was already annoying!

The shame is: there /are/ nice details in these. Not worth it!