Ask HN: Are iOS 26 and macOS 26 good yet?

[handsclean]

Apple released iOS 26.2 and macOS 26.2 a few days ago. Are they as at least as good as iOS 18.7 and macOS 15.7 yet? I’ve been holding off updating since trying iOS 26.0, but I heard they’ve been working on fixing it.

[latexr]

They’re definitely less buggy than 26.0. But good? I wouldn’t say so, no. Unless you really like the look of Liquid Glass (and don’t mind all the stupid ways in which it breaks legibility, takes up space, or obscures and confuses content) or really want some specific new feature, I’d say hold off.

On my personal machine and phone I’ll probably skip this release entirely and revisit on 27.

[0xCE0]

I don't like at all. My experience for iPhones is iPhone 6+ (which was amazing), then I've been at Android world (Sxx series), and now I have iPhone 17 Pro Max, and truly wonder what is the value proposition here. Feels really buggy, UI tries to be Jolla-like gesture-based, but fails to do that, default style reminds that it is made by/for a kindergardener. And there is no "home" button anymore, that resets my virtual position to something safe/familiar, now I'm trying to swipe up/down/left/right, and there is always some new screen layout.

On the macOS side, it gets more locked and buggy and inconsistent with every release.

This is just a general comment for Apple OSs today, not specifically version 26.2.

[PaulHoule]

My impression is that it's OK, I don't have any problems using it and getting work done.

Visually I think it's a regression, it doesn't feel like it makes a statement but rather there are some random transparency effects that look somewhere between neutral and a little ugly (like they are anti-antialiasing) but legibility doesn't suffer in any way that matters.

[enz]

macOS/iOS 26.1 had some minor (but annoying) UI bugs. Some of them are still here after having upgraded to 26.2, e.g., the menu displaying wrong Bluetooth device statuses (despite the device working as expected).