I hope they release a version of these fixes on iOS 18 in a form installable on an iPhone 14; I've been trying to stay away from Liquid Glass until it's actually usable. I really don't want to be forced to upgrade, since Apple seems to have replaced UX testing with "just ship it," as has become standard in the industry.
Liquid Glass looks pretty from a distance, but my biggest gripe with the design language is just how difficult so many things become to read or interact with. Given that the whole raison d'être of liquid glass is transparent effects, the options to limit that or otherwise increase contrast simply do not go far enough. I also balk at how much extra computing power is needed to generate effects I find no value in and would prefer to disable.
My hope was that Apple would be forced to course correct in subsequent releases but that doesn't seem to be happening.
> “My hope was that Apple would be forced to course correct in subsequent releases but that doesn't seem to be happening.”
I’m optimistic that they will eventually course correct on Liquid Glass, but we’ll have to wait until iOS/macOS 27, or perhaps longer.
There are parallels to Apple’s butterfly keyboard fiasco on the hardware side. Sleek looking on the surface but an objective step backwards in usability. Unfortunately it took Apple several years to reverse course on that one.
My biggest frustrations with it aren't even related to the look of things, its the all around disregard for user experience. The new screenshot UX on iOS is an insanely bad downgrade.
They almost certainly will course-correct in the next release now that the culprit responsible for Liquid Glass is no longer at the company. But they won't chuck it out wholesale; it will be a gradual evolution back to sanity.
> I also balk at how much extra computing power is needed to generate effects I find no value in and would prefer to disable.
I mean, "computing power" in a literal sense maybe, but does that matter if it doesn't translate to either "workload contention" or "electrical power"?
I think the Liquid Glass effects, similar to smooth scrolling, are mostly just running as pixel shaders on a spare tile of one of the SoC's GPU's Streaming Processors — a tile that likely likely would have been idle-but-burning-power-anyway, given that GPU power management occurs on the level of entire SPs. It's the same reason that ProMotion "smooth viewport scrolling" doesn't really cost anything.
I immediately enabled “reduce transparency” and “strong contrast” in the accessibility settings and didn’t really notice much difference to 18 then. Not a big deal at all.
Reduced transparency is somewhat ugly (the giant bars on the top and bottom of the screen in the web browser for example. But it isn’t obviously awful like the giant transparency thing.
They won't, it already didn't happen for 18.7.4 and 18.7.3 (only via beta channel for the latter), and the present fixes are being released as 18.7.5 for the iPhone XS/XR. Still I think that staying on iOS 18 is the lesser evil.
Re-indexing does occur after an update, but iOS 26 consumes more battery life than iOS 18 anyways.
Just in one example video ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eCUkYJ8A98 ) they see the phone get hotter and the battery drops 13x faster during non-static sequences like checking notifications, etc.
Just anecdotally, my iPhone 16 Pro seems to last half as long. Before iOS 16, I got from 80% to 20% without a problem. Now, I charge to 100% and I still need to recharge throughout the day. Apple simply fucked up our phones.
Apple used to make minor and patch releases available, but they've stopped doing that so as to increase Liquid Glass adoption. For that reason, iOS 18.7.5 is only available for the iPhone XS / XR series released.
They are explicitly choosing to only release security updates for 18.x to devices which are not eligible for liquid glass.
iPhone 14 was deemed capable of running liquid glass, even though it has worse battery life and performs sluggishly.
In the past, Apple has usually let you hold back on an older version and shipped security updates for all devices, not just ones that are incapable of running the new OS, but not this time.
Looks like this is for older devices only. “Available for: iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, iPhone XR, iPad 7th generation” so doesn’t include iPhone 16… nor is available on my device.
While I'm really glad they've fixed a bunch of important security vulnerabilities, I'm really hoping they fixed the screen flickering issue [1] they introduced in macos 26. It has been driving me insane and even impacts my Studio Display. My work computer is locked to 15.7.3 and has no such issues with either the internal or external display (The same display flickers in 26).
Really wish Apple would get their software quality up from the gutter.
A similar issue happens with Apple Silicon macs and external monitors since long time ago. A fix I found online [1] is to disable GPU dithering using the Better Display app.
The flickering was so bad in my case that the pixels got stuck for some minutes when it happened.
I tried that and many other things like changing the default color profile and it and it didn't work. A reboot fixes it for a few days before returning, so it definitely seems like a bug rather than a hardware issue. Both my work MBP (No issues, macos 15) and personal Air (macos26) are apple silicon.
I see flickering like crazy when I adjust the screen brightness on my M5 Macbook Pro on Tahoe.
But it's especially obvious when it dims itself based on ambient room brightness, I can actually see the vertical refresh happening as I move from a fully bright room to a dim one.
Is this related to the 'Screen Mirroring' problem?
When I connect my laptop to a projector, I can select an individual window, or at least I used to be able to select a window and just project that. However, now when I try to select the window, as soon as the mouse cursor gets near the selection button, the button disappears!!! It has been driving me absolutely insane.
iOS also flickers every time I exit an app back to the Home Screen.
Weird green tints for no reason.. bubbles that take so long to inflate, you think your tap was dropped. Round edges that no longer fit the text content. Stupid ellipses at the edges of wrapped text. And all the functions that now take two taps when one used to do it. Text rendered on top of text for crying out loud! Whole view panes clobberin* each other. WebKit is a mess of wasted black bars where menus were hidden. Multiple flashes of white and black between content changes. It hits Apple apps as well as trashing third party layout.
Too many defects to list.
Headline:
Apple celebrates 50th anniversary by burning down 40 years of human interface knowledge.
Careful if you're still on MacOS Sequoia, Apple has hidden Tahoe as a default under updates. If you click updated now it automatically upgrade you to Tahoe.
I believe it is new. I’ve never seen them:
- put a upgrade os version under “updates”
- then select the upgrade os version instead the current version when there are multiple updates ( os patch, safari or xcode)
Have they fixed all the keyboard bugs introducted in iOS 26.0 yet? I’m not sure how much longer I can put up with issues like this - I might need to switch back to Android if they don't fix these soon.
Seriously, how hard is it to correctly measure the keyboard height and not render important UI elements, such as submit buttons, underneath it so you can’t click “Send”? It's getting close to unusable.
So many bugs in this version of iOS, ive never seen anything like it. The UI for so many websites is mildly broken or misaligned now, keyboard randomly has a noticeable lag, audio does not return to normal volume if a background app makes a noise for a moment, and many more. Really awful, I’ve never wanted to downgrade iOS back to the old version until now.
They've been delivering empty-noop test updates through that new pipeline in the past couple weeks to beta users, which suggests that they considered it.
It's more the former. I'm assuming though that Background Security updates are basically the same thing as "Rapid Security Responses" was, which on the Mac I can recall being used once, 13.3.1(a) released the same day as 13.4 as an RSR.
Basically, the amount of stuff Apple can realistically change on the fly without restiching an entirely new system volume snapshot into place is quite small, so unless the stars align it can't be used.
I imagine scheduling lined up for the 26.3 release and it wasn't considered dangerous enough. They did this with 26.2 as well including a fix for a zero day. I wonder if they are leveraging that to get people to update sooner. Imagine some people might be turned off of updating with the bugs and visual changes in 26. It's not like 26.2 or 26.3 have any major changes that are enticing.
26.4 is likely to have 9 new emoji, as usual for a late-cycle OS release. That may not particularly appeal to the "7bit ASCII for life" subset here, of course, but it's definitely a driver.
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My hope was that Apple would be forced to course correct in subsequent releases but that doesn't seem to be happening.
I’m optimistic that they will eventually course correct on Liquid Glass, but we’ll have to wait until iOS/macOS 27, or perhaps longer.
There are parallels to Apple’s butterfly keyboard fiasco on the hardware side. Sleek looking on the surface but an objective step backwards in usability. Unfortunately it took Apple several years to reverse course on that one.
I mean, "computing power" in a literal sense maybe, but does that matter if it doesn't translate to either "workload contention" or "electrical power"?
I think the Liquid Glass effects, similar to smooth scrolling, are mostly just running as pixel shaders on a spare tile of one of the SoC's GPU's Streaming Processors — a tile that likely likely would have been idle-but-burning-power-anyway, given that GPU power management occurs on the level of entire SPs. It's the same reason that ProMotion "smooth viewport scrolling" doesn't really cost anything.
Sounds like you need to spend some money for a new Apple device! /s
Just in one example video ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eCUkYJ8A98 ) they see the phone get hotter and the battery drops 13x faster during non-static sequences like checking notifications, etc.
Just anecdotally, my iPhone 16 Pro seems to last half as long. Before iOS 16, I got from 80% to 20% without a problem. Now, I charge to 100% and I still need to recharge throughout the day. Apple simply fucked up our phones.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/126347
https://support.apple.com/en-us/126347
Very consumer-hostile behavior from Apple :(
They are explicitly choosing to only release security updates for 18.x to devices which are not eligible for liquid glass.
iPhone 14 was deemed capable of running liquid glass, even though it has worse battery life and performs sluggishly.
In the past, Apple has usually let you hold back on an older version and shipped security updates for all devices, not just ones that are incapable of running the new OS, but not this time.
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
Really wish Apple would get their software quality up from the gutter.
[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2025/12/18/macos-tahoe-studio-disp...
The flickering was so bad in my case that the pixels got stuck for some minutes when it happened.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/s/TDOa9Lb5rP
Deleted Comment
But it's especially obvious when it dims itself based on ambient room brightness, I can actually see the vertical refresh happening as I move from a fully bright room to a dim one.
When I connect my laptop to a projector, I can select an individual window, or at least I used to be able to select a window and just project that. However, now when I try to select the window, as soon as the mouse cursor gets near the selection button, the button disappears!!! It has been driving me absolutely insane.
Deleted Comment
Weird green tints for no reason.. bubbles that take so long to inflate, you think your tap was dropped. Round edges that no longer fit the text content. Stupid ellipses at the edges of wrapped text. And all the functions that now take two taps when one used to do it. Text rendered on top of text for crying out loud! Whole view panes clobberin* each other. WebKit is a mess of wasted black bars where menus were hidden. Multiple flashes of white and black between content changes. It hits Apple apps as well as trashing third party layout.
Too many defects to list.
Headline: Apple celebrates 50th anniversary by burning down 40 years of human interface knowledge.
https://daringfireball.net/2025/11/software_update_tahoe_con...
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
Seriously, how hard is it to correctly measure the keyboard height and not render important UI elements, such as submit buttons, underneath it so you can’t click “Send”? It's getting close to unusable.
Update: No they haven't
https://support.apple.com/en-us/102657
I suppose it’s not really working, or is the product of a team and no other internal team actually use it.
Basically, the amount of stuff Apple can realistically change on the fly without restiching an entirely new system volume snapshot into place is quite small, so unless the stars align it can't be used.
See: https://khronokernel.com/macos/2023/04/18/RSR.html
[0]: https://security.apple.com/blog/memory-integrity-enforcement...
Relatedly, did Apple baseband have similar vulnerabilities as Broadcom WiFi/Bluetooth baseband?
I feel I should be at least given the security patches if I don’t want to update to Apple’s widely derided iOS 26 UI awfulness.