[torben-friis]

I’m surprised to see so little pushback in press to iOS/macOS 26.

I’ve been part of the public beta and it’s been so weird going from “this sucks but it’s a first beta” through “it really isn’t improving much as time goes by” to “we’re a week from launch, there’s no way they release this after the Apple Intelligence fiasco”.

And yet here we are. Performance issues, ui inconsistencies and garish design everywhere.

[Fwirt]

I was going to wait for a few bugfixes until I upgraded, but I was forced to update to iOS 26 because the AirPods Pro 3 that I bought required it for some inexplicable reason (which I didn't know until I tried to pair them). The AirPods are just fantastic in every way and a huge leap forward, I don't regret buying them for a second. But sheesh, none of the OS updates were ready for release. I found 3 obvious bugs (non-functional UI elements, invisible labels due to incorrect handling of dark mode, soft locks caused by guided access) not to mention a distinct pause when unlocking the device, GPU issues with Safari. It seems like the pendulum has swung from Apple making mediocre overpriced hardware and reliable software, to making best-in-class hardware and garbage software. I'm hoping that with the end of Intel support we get a "Snow Leopard" style polish and bugfix of the entire stack, but with their recent track record it seems unlikely. It's just inexcusable for a company with Apple's focus on consumer products and market cap. At least Microsoft has the excuse that they have a sprawling empire to oversee.

[_0xdd]

I'd hate to suggest this, but I'm concerned that outlets are hesitant to critize Apple for fear of them losing access.

[torben-friis]

That would make sense for the mainstream outlets, but I’d expect a large number of influencers jumping on the bandwagon of “apple in hot water!!”.

[pier25]

Tahoe is the worst macOS release I've ever experienced in 20 years. I think not even Yosemite was that bad.

[b_e_n_t_o_n]

I upgraded on launch and didn't notice anything too wrong. I like the UI and performance seems fine?

[coolspot]

Yeah, screen time for kids is absolutely broken in iOS 26.

[Fwirt]

I'm glad I'm not the only one experiencing this. They absolutely destroyed Guided Access in iOS 26 to the point of borderline non-functionality. I've had the system idle-sleep while in Guided Access and wake to a lock screen that I was unable to interact with in any way, including turning off guided access. Softlocked my device for about 5 minutes until panicked swiping and button mashing managed to snap it out of it. There appears to be a race condition with the lock screen and home screen, if the device idle sleeps in guided access mode then about 50% of the time it wakes to the home screen instead of the app. Sometimes waking it on iOS shows the lock screen for a brief second before the app starts. Also, exiting guided access sometimes doesn't recolor the apps on the home screen so it still appears as if all apps are disabled. Not to mention that they reclassified the pen settings dialog as a "software keyboard" meaning that in order for my kids to draw with the Apple Pencil I also have to allow them to enter text now. None of these were issues on iOS 18.

[MBCook]

I think you mean “since release”.

Hasn’t it always had horrible problems? I’ve never heard a good thing about it in use.

[Fwirt]

I used it from iOS 15-18 and it always worked great. We try to limit our kids' iPad use to drawing in Freeform and the occasional edutainment app, and I never had issues with them escaping Guided Access or it causing lockups. The fact that I can barely trust it to work properly on iPadOS 26 is a huge disappointment for me.

[MBCook]

I’ve never used it myself (no kids) but I’ve long heard tales of kids being able to get around it, it miscounting time used allowing too much use, etc.

It sounds really nice for the intended purpose, just not reliable for many.

[coolspot]

It’s just getting worse with each new iOS release. For example before iOS 18, screen time requests from kids would come as notifications, now they are coming in as iMessages, polluting history of your actual conversations, so you can’t have functional group chat with your kid & parents.

Now in iOS 26 they messed up calculation of how much screen time is spent, so an app can have limit of 3hrs/day and still lock up after just first 9 minutes of screen time spent in that app in a day.

It seems like they have zero QA.

[paxys]

You are describing every single macOS release. I still remember their permissions disaster which broke the majority of critical apps in people's workflows at launch. It's always best to wait a few months to upgrade.

[wswope]

> Performance issues, ui inconsistencies and garish design everywhere.

Hasn't that been Apple's norm for a few years now?

Not trying to land a cheap dunk here; I've honestly been running into rough edges and bad design with every major release for a long time.

[torben-friis]

>Hasn't that been Apple's norm for a few years now?

Not to this degree.

I’ve had 3 memory leaks in native apps, including the calculator. There’s basic alignment errors pretty much everywhere. In many places text can become fully unreadable (black on black, white on white, text over a transparent background with overlapping text below…).

It’s not slightly lowered quality, it’s the kind of inconsistency you expect mixing custom launchers and icon packs.

[nixpulvis]

Yep

[rpgbr]

I'm doing my job: https://manualdousuario.net/en/liquid-glass-2/

[leakycap]

Great writeup & points. I can't imagine sticking with Mac all this time if I had started on the rough 10.10 release.

> It’s a rare misstep from Apple — and an unprecedented one in scale.

There's a lack of taste & lack of respect for the user, too. Things that usually don't get fixed in point releases and take a long time to course-correct.

[torben-friis]

I won’t lie, with today’s apple the implied possibility that the resource hungry style is intentional is believable.

[leakycap]

I think the goal was to do something competitors could not easily pull off. They failed, but I think that was the goal.

With Android's diverse/fractured ecosystem, a similar "system wide" look with reflectivity would be hard to deliver across the board on Android with so many models having very bare specs.

[kayodelycaon]

It's possible that the majority of people are fine with it. I thought it would hate it but I love iOS 26. It adds much needed depth and allowed me to turn off accessibility options.

- Button Shapes: Buttons actually look like buttons.

- Reduce Motion: Animations are a lot more fluid and the parallax effects are more subtle. They don't trigger motion sickness like the previous ones did.

- Larger Text: The worst areas of the UI have better contrast.

- Reduce Transparency: While there's more transparency effects, they're a lot better.

- Increase Contrast: If I do need to turn this back on it is a much better integrated effect than previous version.

The changes in macOS 26 are half-finished. Anything with raised glass looks like plateaus in the middle of a flat desert. Only half the apps have the new rounded corners on window and they do not match the rounded corners in the rest of the interface. They even cut off parts of the interface like the bottom of every scrollbar.

It's disappointing. I loved Windows 7's aero theme.