[philistine]

It was literally the first specific announcement they made after they finished their introductions. Not anything iPhone related; they announced that Liquid Glass on macOS would move towards the older design. Goes to show that a year of anybody with any sort of clout complaining about the thousand little cuts of Liquid Glass on macOS will get a company to respond.

That and the guy who announced it last year fled to Facebook of all places.

[xoa]

>shows just how bad it was

>Goes to show that a year of anybody with any sort of clout complaining about the thousand little cuts of Liquid Glass on macOS will get a company to respond.

Worth remembering too that this isn't merely about "complaints", Apple has significant metrics on the rates at which users are upgrading to a new OS, or not. You can opt-out of sharing that data, but a lot of people (even technical people) may choose to check the box to share with Apple. Anecdotally, I myself and a LOT of other people have stuck with macOS 15 or earlier, but Apple should have a lot of hard data on it and adoption curves vs the past.

A real reaction does certainly suggest that this wasn't just a tempest in a teacup, but that they really weren't seeing the adoption on Macs they expected.

[lynndotpy]

Yes!! I agree with this entirely.

As far as I know, the best data the rest of us have is Google Trends. And based on that, it really does look like Liquid Glass elicited the largest negative reaction that Apple has ever had to an OS release.

"How to Switch to Android" hit 3x its all time peak, "iPhone revert update", hit 4x its all-time peak, "iPhone slow" hit 8x its all time peak, "iPhone bad now" hit 5x its all time peak, "iPhone fix battery" hit 3x its all-time peak (and 14x its five-year peak)

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=how%20to...

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=iphone%2...

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=i...

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=iphone%2...

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=iphone%2...

I mostly looked at this for iOS, but searches like "macOS slow", "mac slow", "fix mac battery", "fix mac", etc. all show similar hockey-stick jumps as Liquid Glass rolled out.

If this means a sudden highest-ever 10x shift in customer dissatisfaction - 1000% - then that has to have been significant.

[ksec]

There are probably other parts as well. Dissatisfaction against Apple for App Store has been high, may be for some Liquid Glass was the last straw. Omarchy had the highest number of Apple user switch to Linux. 100,000 downloads may be small numbers by Apple standards but even if half of that were developers coming from Apple Mac I think it is a pretty big shift.

The worst part, intentionally or not they left macOS 26 as the last release for all the Intel user.

[philistine]

> The worst part, intentionally or not they left macOS 26 as the last release for all the Intel user.

I cannot believe that Apple is that insidious to have planned a milquetoast release to be the last one for Intel, but I totally believe that Apple is insidious enough to see how they can benefit from it.

That they're literally marketing macOS 27 as we've listened to your complaints about 26 completely deflates anyone's interest in running macOS 26 on Intel. Their Intel users are being marketed hard to switch to Apple Silicon.

[rafram]

> Omarchy had the highest number of Apple user switch to Linux.

DHH's dotfiles repo is not a viable replacement for macOS, I promise you. Linux is fun, but macOS is already enough of a *nix for most developers, and it works well without much tinkering.

[philistine]

You just have to constantly tell the LLM to give you zsh commands, not bash ones.

[rafram]

You can easily install bash or any other shell on macOS, and set it as your default with chsh, same as on any other *nix. (Also easy to make the harness use a non-login shell by aliasing it with a $SHELL override.)

[yurishimo]

I and most of my dev friends didn’t update. The reality is that many of us work in a web browser and an IDE all day writing software for non-Apple platforms. The only incentive I have to update is new and compelling OS features or bugfixes. Since major security patches will likely be backported, that just leaves new features and the reality is that macOS’ only new “feature” worth talking about was Liquid Glass considering their AI offering was also an absolute joke.

Given the other emphasis placed on performance improvements (likely in service to helping to mask the slowness of LLM Siri) I’m really hoping this is a modern Snow Leopard release. I’m looking forward to the Apple nerds digging and offering a compelling narrative about why I should care about updating.

And to add on to that, if this is a bug-fix bonanza release, hopefully we’ll also see a lot of positive movement during the beta period to keep shipping fixes. We’re getting a freaking EQ on AirPods!!!!111!!1! It seems Apple is finally taking some things to heart about listening to their users and I’m 10000% here for it.

[dijit]

not just that, people keeping to older OS’s will actively avoid converting to new hardware sales..

I did not upgrade my laptop because it would come with the latest OS- I am not alone.

[05]

The other side of it is forced obsolescence where new OS makes your existing hardware slower. So I wouldn't upgrade my phone beyond iOS18.x purely for performance reasons but if there's a killer feature in a new iPhone I would still consider buying it because its hardware was built to handle the new effects and extra ram it needs.

[preg_match]

Yes, anecdotally almost every I know with an older iPhone (14 or older) is not upgrading their iOS. It’s rare for non-technical people to even care about the specifics of a new iOS, but they’ve heard too many stories of slow down and battery usage issues.

It’s a big problem, because running an old iOS is very bad for security. There’s still new vulnerabilities popping up in iOS, especially in the image and video decoders, that are fixed in newer point releases of iOS 26. I’m not sure if Apple is back porting all the fixes. I would definitely be a little afraid, because iMessage previews are a common attack vector and are zero-click. I don’t think anyone really turns off automatic previews; they’re very convenient.

[Someone]

> Apple has significant metrics on the rates at which users are upgrading to a new OS, or not. You can opt-out of sharing that data

How? Aren’t all update requests made to, and all updates downloaded from their servers?

Also, doesn’t the system that pushes emergency updates (https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/deployment/dep93ff7ea7...) have to know what OS you are running?

[05]

Opt out all you want do you really think Apple doesn't know what OS version hits their APIs?

[torben-friis]

It's still nice to see a company not double down on a fall! They seem to have been on a full year of tech debt and optimisation.

I still would have liked a more genuine walk back (they sold it as "iterations and adjustments" as if the rewinded stuff were new ideas) but overall reassuring.