I've been using it for several months since the developer beta came out; overall I'm extremely positive on it. One of their better releases that seemingly focused more on quality and refinements than new-features.
Siri is definitely worth using now, even if it remains still a work-in-progress/needs continued refinement. It can surprise you in good ways, but it isn't consistently good yet.
The keyboard remains unfixed, as is tradition. The same issues they've "fixed" like three or four releases now, seemingly are identically broken, and I'm lost faith they CAN fix it.
The iOS Keyboard and Search on Windows, are like the perpetually broken things that both companies have "fixed" every year for the last ten+ years and yet... It is almost farcical as this point.
Apple's search is so comically bad. For example, I can click on my applications, and I have an app called Chess. I can often type letters C-H-E-S-S and have it not show the Chess app. This is inside the applications folder!
Many people have complained before. Honestly I ONLY search for app names in spotlight search or application window, it should be trivial to make it actually work. Maybe i just need to vibecode some alternative search bar :(
It’s so much worse than that. This happens to me on a daily basis with both MacOS and iOS. Say I’m searching for Chess, I’ll get to the C-H and it’ll show the Chess app, but enter that next -E and it’s totally gone. It feels like the system is designed like “Well, I showed them Chess when they entered CH, but they kept typing, so they must not actually want Chess.” This ends up breaking for me like 95% of the time, and the only way around it is to search like “C”…wait for results…”H”…wait for results…etc. It’s maddening.
This, and then, if you notice, and backspace to remove the 'e', it doesn't put chess back into the search results, since it figures that everything that matches 'che' also matches 'ch', and so doesn't update it. Sometimes, if you add the 'e' again, it _will_ find chess, sometimes you need to type the 's', or even the final 's' before it gives you chess back again.
And sometimes, it finds what you want, but before you can select it, it decides that it has found something better, and places that in the place where you wanted to select, causing you to select the wrong thing. And then it thinks that because you selected this, it must be what you want, and starts to push it to the top…
Weird, the same stupid crap happens with Windows. I’ve had to learn the exact N character search to find the things I use often; any more or less and the result with that name is buried. It’s like Microsoft and Apple are just pip installing same broken search package.
I switched to Everything for search a while ago and haven’t looked back. For the start menu I replace it with Open Shell, which seems to find apps much more reliably.
Always turn off searching the internet as much as possible on both. Helps a ton. I think I set both windows and iOS to only search local applications and settings
Firefox's "awesome bar" behaves the same way. I guess it's either inherent to the problem somehow, or else everyone is sharing a library (unlikely), or else everyone just makes the same mistakes.
It's worse than this! You Type C-H-E then you go to press enter, and it changes the results as you're pressing it, opening the wrong thing! I've turned off all the search targets, except for applications and folders.
Yes. "UI Speed" should be a configurable thing, so that if the UI changes as you're choosing an item, it acts instead on _what was there_ at a brief moment in the past, e.g. 20-50ms ago.
Don't worry, airdrop does it too! I've accidentally sent airdrop requests to strangers from their profile picture moving under my finger as I'm approaching to touch someone else's. The single most idiotic design I've ever seen in UI. I don't use airdrop for anything sensitive anymore, obviously.
I really wish apps stopped doing that "search on type" thing in search boxes. You either need to have only a couple miliseconds of response time, or you need to confirm that you want the search process to start. Or maybe at least have some feedback showing "more content is loading, watch out, don't click".
The amount of misclicks daily because of crappy slow-but-should-be-fast search probably offsets by 10x the amount of time required to hit "enter" for the search to start.
For me search has been that way since the first MacOS 26.0 upgrade and apparently never fixed.
But speaking of quality overall (outside of the search glitch) - I use dual 5k LG monitors with my work MacBook and can get the MacOS Display Manager process to crash if I just enable variable rate refresh and put the computer to sleep, then wake it up. Apparently a known issue for a few years, still not fixed.
It's probably asynchronous reranking doing something weird. My guess is that the underlying ranking algorithms in these desktop search bars are very ropey, and they can't debug or diagnose because privacy reasons means the developers don't get to see what results were generated for different query/index combos. Also search is probably just not staffed most of the time.
So many platforms with search have a variation of this problem now.
The other issue with Mac search is that it never tells you when it’s done, so you can’t tell if it searched and failed to find something or is still searching.
'calc' used to bring up calculator, but now it becomes some widget to calculate distance inside the spotlight box. The worst thing is you can't even backspace out of it.
I'd take the widget! For me typing "calc" finds the "com.apple.calculator" folder. If I continue to "calcu" etc, it suggests "com.apple.ncplugin.calculator" instead. Brilliant intelligence right there.
For me the big one is whenever I type "sys" to get system settings, it pops up for a half second and then for some reason the top result is like "reset some system setting" and then I invariably get flashbanged because it turns off dark mode and there's no confirmation dialogue lmao. Maddening.
I've deactivated every single type of data in Spotlight except Applications. It goes out of its way to still suggest files like C system files or header files, like "system_library.c". It didn't wait for AI to turn against us.
I was trying to see what happens here. It does give the Sound settings panel as the first hit. But when I then press Return, it opens System Settings, but does not actually go to the Sound settings, but General.
Also, search inside the Settings app has been broken for many releases now. I always wonder if anyone inside Apple is actually using macOS or iOS.
I had this problem on Spotlight, I solved it once and never happened to me again, there is a setting to reindex all the files, which solves the issue. On iOS however I still have this problem.
I wish all this shit would just stop trying to search as I’m fucking typing. It’s like that person we all know that can’t hold their tongue for five fucking seconds and let you finish a sentence before the blurt something out.
Ah, but hitting enter now takes you to the top result! Therefore it has to search as you type, so there's something to activate as soon as you hit enter! /s
...I've been seeing this search style in more and more places recently, and I hate it. Let me type my search, then hit enter, then you can go find what I asked for. Don't slow everything down by searching on every character I type.
It’s called incremental search and it’s useful, but only when there’s some debouncing involved and the search results is presented at once or the items are sorted by the order they are found.
I can't search for Apples own Notes app. I've tried the name in my local language, I've tried the original english name of the app. Nothing. It will show me OneNote which isn't even installed anymore, but not the Notes app. Very strange.
- Or is the goal to disturb the user and make something impractical like in Google, so that people click on ads? Software has turned into a curse. The machines have risen.
I always assumed that was intentional to save you arriving through options. I find that behaviour quite useful as I can hit anything beginning with CHE just by typing more letters.
>> the only way around it is to search like “C”…wait for results…”H”…wait for results…
Some people don’t like that. I don’t know why you like having to wait but if they showed Chess for CHE you could still find other apps if you kept typing.
Maybe there are also people who like the lottery of results changing the instant you click on the app you want because it adds excitement to their lives.
FWIW, I find if I’m pushing the disk limit, Spotlight search becomes unusable. So I free up ~100GB (easy to do with iOS/Android dev artifacts, emulators, etc.) and then force a Spotlight re-index from the command line:
sudo mdutil -E /
You can check indexing status with:
mdutil -s /
After that it’s usually fine again until I start pushing the disk limit.
Every sibling comment's issues I've experienced. But a reindex after freeing enough disk space seems to be a semi-stable solution for me. If only I could write a tool to remind me to free disk space before it screws up spotlight. It would be nice if MacOS put the index on its own partition.
Spotlight worked best in OS X 10.4. It was near instantaneous on what is now considered ancient hardware. It's been steadily downhill from there.
Mostly because people still expect to use it to find "Recipe for Egg Salad.docx" without searching the entire Internet or executing some bizarre natural language query.
A common one I hit is "blu" showing bluetooth settings, but "blue" does not. Very frustrating to see the thing you are hoping for popup, but then go away as you type more if its name.
Android keyboard does that too. When I start typing my email address, for example, the keyboard app suggests the correct email after a few characters, but if I keep typing it disappears from the suggestions.
I have to send a daily email that always has the subject starting with "Work Diary". If I type "W", it doesn't come up. If I type "Wo" it comes up as the 3rd auto-complete suggestion. If I type any more characters, I have to type the entire two words. This is on Android, but I have a feeling it's no better on iOS.
I'd love to know the algorithm they're using for this. Fuzzy search seems like it was a mostly solved problem 20 years ago, and it's definitely worse than it was 10 years ago.
It would be interesting to learn what over engineered solution to fuzzy string matching is being used here to exhibit this behavior, so we never make the same mistake.
Seems like someone got updated KPIs and decided to try the most ham-fisted enshittification move to raise registrations. Oh, it is now possible again to see about five top reviews per item. Seems like loss of traffic was rough.
Just tried this on iOS 27 and both blu and blue showed me bluetooth settings. I saw someone in a different thread of this discussion mention resetting dictionaries helping with autocorrect, I wonder if there is something that would apply to this situation which helps.
At some point I got the damn Chess app every time I wanted to switch to Chrome. You know, typing cmd-space, ch and enter. I've learned I can't remove Chess from my computer. After numerous incantations of various spells and reboots and updates I think it started working normally again.
Breaking interfaces, Linus Torvalds had something to say about it that Apple should heed.
I struggle daily with Finder's search. It cannot find files in my Downloads folder even if I type the exact name. Do I need to rebuild some index or some other setting?
It couldn't hurt. I don't have problems like that.
mdutil -E -a
That command will erase and rebuild Spotlight index on all volumes.
Since Tahoe, Spotlight has multiple modes. You might have better luck forcing it into folder & files mode. That's command-2. So command-space, spotlight UI appears, keep holding command key, press 2. There's also 1 for applications only, 3 for "actions" and 4 for clipboard history.
The annoying thing with Finder is when you're in a folder, you start to search, and then it defaults to "This Mac" and not the god damn folder you're in.
That's because you have that set in your Finder Settings.
With the Finder open, go to Settings > Advanced, and change the drop-down at the bottom to "Search the Current Folder". This is something I do on the first run of every new Mac I set up.
On my incredibly midrange PC that has a midrange SSD in it, the Linux `find` and `grep` commands usually can find stuff much quicker than any 'accelerated' and 'cached' desktop search, even though the only caching they usually get is when the files are in the page cache because I have interacted with them. Even when that's not the case, it's faster AND more accurate that GNOME search or whatever search is in Windows Explorer.
Windows is the same - searching the fs is faster and more accurate than using these 'quick search' tools, which are borderline broken.
Search feels like it used to be much better in finding a balance between showing app vs files vs web - feels really broken somehow and I wonder if there’s any setting I can change.
The good part is you have the source so you can just fork it, fix the code to prioritize results properly, compile and install it to fix Ubuntu, then see if you can get your patch upstreamed. /s
For me it's gotten way better in iOS/macOS 27. It's also way faster. They claim to have rewritten the spotlight index to handle the new Siri integration.
The new Siri UX needs improvement and to match the UX of talking to chatGPT. At least in settings have an option to keep the Siri window always on top (just have a prominent X out to go to the screen below) and always listening ready to continue your conversation like the experience is with chatGPT.
Been running the beta since June -- on the latest beta now and 8 out of ten times to continue the conversation with Siri (most notably in the car with my phone docked) I have to constantly say "Hey Siri."
One thing it's current UX has over chatGPT voice tech as it shows you the text and provides visuals while chatGPT's UI shows no text and or visuals.
I did just that. Took me half a day. I haven't used Spotlight since. I did try alternative launchers, but they are all bloated. I just need an app launcher and simple arithmetic - that's all it does.
Check out TinyStart. It’s 5€, and the best 5€ I’ve spent in ages. It’s super fast, and handles basic math. Even lets you put the results on the pasteboard!
Spotlight works for me across files and apps on Mac, iOS, visionOS, pretty well - it has failed occasionally but usually it's because my disk is full. I haven't really found anything better (Alfred is good but is just a wrapper around Spotlight)
I quit Apple Mail (due to its poor handling of Gmail accounts) and started using Mimestream years ago. Truly excellent mail client. Actively and thoughtfully developed.
They did fix it (macOS 27, my experience). I have like 600,000 mail messages - there was a period where Mail search was awful but these days it's fast and accurate. It really comes down to whether you need to rebuild your index.
I’ll have it not show Xcode. It’s apples main developer ide. Most of the time it works. Then it gets into some weird loop. Only shows the Xcode website. Very helpful.
Raycast2 has its own index and it's way more reliable and fast.
I don't understand how Apple does not care about many of the core services of their OS. Searching in Mail is a coinflip
Ever since they re-did Spotlight I've had issues. When I type something and press Return it should activate. I shouldn't have to wait for it to populate the results and then press Return a second time. Moreover they've broken the ability for me to use Cmd to locate files quickly. I have to awkwardly Cmd-double-click the result with my cursor because trying to Cmd-Return triggers Ask Siri!
Turn off all the web search and other domains that the index uses. Apple took a really brain dead decision to include web search in the results, and they are the worst. It is completely useless, and even though the recall has expanded, the precision is abysmal.
Alfred is wonderful for launching applications and custom actions, but it’s actually worse than Spotlight search for searching for files and folders. It finds a lot of results but inexplicably it likes to rank partial matches ahead of exact matches.
It’s really sad, because they mostly aped search from BeOS and had best in class search for a decade or so. Now indexing frequently breaks or works when an external disk is not attached, but won’t find local files after it’s connected.
It is sad, and as one of the several former BeOS employees who went to Apple to add our experience to OSX, I can say that most of us have moved on. This isn't to say that others can't do what we did; they certainly should be able to. The OSX team back then was much smaller and we all had a maniacal attention to detail. One reason is that we were micromanaged by Steve J. and did lengthy weekly reviews with him and he was direct and brutal. He wasn't always right, but he did have the final say. This is all gone and even though Steve Lemay (now head of UX) was there during this time, he was also present during the overall rot of the user experience.
/meta let me just say how cool it is to cool it is to make a comment on HN and have responses from folks who worked on legendary teams. Thanks for your work on BeOS.
Now that we are living in The Future, I am dumbfounded how e.g. dynamically populated lists change their content reliably to something I did not want, during the phase of interaction where my finger is descending onto the target. Click! Not what I want.
Feels like a lost art which will be "discovered" again in the next 15 years.
Why do filesystem indices get stale? The OS can track what files get accessed, isn't inotify watertight?
I know that Windows has some equivalent stuff, that the antivirus uses to disallow opening files before they got scanned, so I'd wager that API is functionally required to not miss any changes.
Yet Windows indexing is one of the worst pieces of software in existence and frequently gets out of sync.
Even with inotify failing, if the system is plugged in and idle, it could quickly do a scan for files with update date > last known indexed time and index those. Like once per day maybe. Wouldn't take much load or memory, IMHO.
Any improvements to voice to text? I use iPhone 13 Mini and so keyboard has always been hard to type on. But voice to text..man..it is an absolutly miserable experience that I wish I could swap out for any other competitor.
I normally don't complain that iOS/MacOS isn't customizable because the defaults are good enough to work for me but that voice to text man its like they completely forgot about it.
Hear hear. The insistence upon prioritizing names in my extensive contacts list as well as certain geographic names leads to so many unnecessary manual edits.
They have some nasty "dynamic tap zones" algorithm that dynamically resizes the hitbox for keys based on what it predicts you will type in order to reduce miss-taps. Anecdotally, it has just steadily been getting worse with every update. I swear I can be pressing the center of a key and it will select the next one over and immediately autocorrect to a completely different word than what I typed.
I had the pleasure of typing something on an Android the other day and it was such a breath of fresh air when it actually accepted the keys I was pressing...
In addition to this, there is a delay in the suggested word such that when you see the options above the keyboard, decide you see the word you want, stop typing and move to select it, it changes right as you land your finger.
That drives me crazy. What's crazier happens when the suggested word is the one you are going to type. You hit the next letter in the word, recognize that it has already been suggested, yet right after you hit the letter, it decides to suggest another word.
Compliments of product managers, engineers, etc making millions and millions of dollars to produce a much worse end user experience, if it wasn’t painful enough
Oh wonderful. That’s what’s happening to me. I’m an author and Apple‘s dictionary appears to be missing about half the more uncommon words in the English language. It’ll never recognize “prescient” in dictation for example. Some words it marks in red because it thinks it’s a spelling error. I know it’s not because I’ve used it, read it, and it’s in online dictionaries.
At least I’m macOS I can use Talon instead of the system dictation.
Thank you for putting a name to this phenomenon. I hadn't gone through my yearly attempt to figure out why iOS was terrible for text entry. I figured since I only have an iPad and not an iPhone, and infrequently type in it, that it just hadn't learned my habits or words. It's incredible that they've developed these kinds of algorithms that have made every facet of text entry from speech to text to spell checking to typing itself such a miserable experience.
Try turning off slide to type. It's under Settings > General > Keyboard.
I did it earlier this year. It seems to be much more accurate and confident with which key it thinks I want. I do occasionally miss the sliding but it's worth it overall.
Yeah, I’m not a dedicated iPhone user and my personal phones are androids so my iOS experience has been iPod Touch 2G -> employer owned iPhone 8 -> employer owned iPhone XR -> iPad Air M3. Each of those big gaps have seen the UI shift and the keyboard decline.
Interesting. Because I have a much harder time typing on my Pixel. In fact, I hate it. I wish I had a blackberry.
When I use iOS devices, it feels better but I don't use them enough to have used them in anger. Ok, well, yes they have made me angry but for other reasons than the keyboard hence why I'm on Android lol.
I used a Clicks keyboard with a folded Moto Razr for a while and it was Blackberry-esque. The keyboard is a little narrow compared to the Blackberries of yore, though. I'm somewhat hopeful about the Clicks Communicator which is wider, but sadly still only a four row keyboard.
To be clear, I only kind of recommend the keyboard. I stopped using mine after a while because of how awkward it was with the Razr unfolded and never actually found it faster or more accurate than the on screen keyboard.
someone posted high speed videos a few months ago where the keyboard will popup the key you thought you pressed (therefore did press, as far as the UI is concerned) but iOS will insert a different character anyway.
Some of those videos are misleading. They sometimes slide a finger off one key onto another: taps need to not move.
Personally, I use the slyde to type rather than tapping to type and have gboard installed for when slyde doesn't work (I think the Apple algos are not quite as good as Google's).
Yep; this has been the case since the very first iPhone, it can't be disabled, and there is no feedback it happens other than the typos. It is very crazy making and mind boggling.
The best way to put it is it really wants to type what it wants to type, and if you deviate from that it will often end up just ignoring it. Whether it's the dynamic tap zones as mentioned elsewhere, or just auto correcting backwards and changing words you've already typed. Also when you go back and change a word it will also often insert additional spaces around the changed word. Or worse still if you mistype a word like say banana then backspan to ban and retype ana, it will display banana... Until you hit space and it turns it into "ban ana".
Try an android keyboard and go back to an iphone. Having switched back and forth between both systems it’s quite remarkable how bad the iphone keyboard is. In practice , typing on an iphone means constant typos, bad autofix, and bad suggestions.
Completely agree. I switched from Android to iOS... 6 years ago now? and the keyboard immediately felt off. I thought it was just something related to needing to adjust, but I reused my old Android (Pixel 3a) for the first time a few days ago (cuz I'm working on an Android app and wanted to try it on an actual phone) and the keyboard just works. No typo, no ass completions, I can actually type fast as I feel it and the text ends up mostly (99%) correct on the first try. On iOS I sometimes really struggle writing exactly what I want (the worst offending situation is iOS "correcting" a word when I hit send, so what's sent is literally not what I typed)
As someone who has had an iPhone since the 3GS (I'm so old), but tries Android out every now and then - I can wholeheartedly agree.
The only real advantages iOS have left are not being run by an advertising/tracking company (which is reducing as Apple looks for services revenue) and the quality and variety of indie iPhone and iPad apps (yet Apple are happy to make those same devs extremely unhappy).
I would actually go one step further and claim that typing has not come back to the speed and accuracy of Blackberry and Nokia phones with physical keyboard. It's taking so long that we may actually destroy humanity with AI before we have fast and accurate keyboards again.
I used to have galaxy S phones with some aftermarket keyboard whose name I forget. It was quite popular at the time, and was fairly happy with it.
When I moved from a gs5 to an iPhone 7, I was amazed at how much better the typing experience was. But it has now gotten to a point where I feel like a drunk monkey would type better than I do.
I switch between Android and iPhone every few cycles, and I really do miss my swipe keyboard on Android.
iPhone swipe and tap keyboard always gives me trouble. I hate that it keeps trying to type my contacts’ names.
Also, text selection OSS frequently maddening. Yes, I swiped “is” and it decided I’m a fan of open source software… When I try to select some words or position my cursor, iOS always wants to put the cursor far away from where I held my finger. Doesn’t make a lick of sense.
I personally use the swiping keyboard on ios and it seems to detect the wrong word with an almost malicious frequency. It also randomly Capitalizes things.
Unfortunately for us swipers, disabling slide to type on an iPhone makes typing significantly more accurate. I can only guess as to why, but after seeing anecdotal reports over the last year or so from people raving about how much better typing was with swiping disabled I finally got fed up enough to give it a shot myself. It is much, much better, to the point where I'd never re-enable slide to type until Apple finally fixes this.
Sometimes I swipe the same word 5 times in a row and it gets it wrong every time, despite me being slower and more precise each time. I give up and type it by hand. Note: this is NOT the censorship issue, that's separate (where it will not allow you to swipe certain words or phrases AT ALL, no matter how hard you try. Like if you type "kill" it won't let you swipe "him" or "her" after it, though some other words work. There are many instances of this)
For some reason, the one word that it just will not let me swipe is “and”. Which is, you know, somewhat common. I get all kinds of random things instead.
And’s! Fucking and’s! Every goddamned time, regardless of the fact that I have never once intentionally typed and’s (until now, which probably means that it’ll now either appear constantly or never again).
This drives me crazy. Sometimes I'll just put the phone down and move to a proper keyboard to type what I want. It definitely makes me use my phone less, maybe that's a good thing overall.
you most likely have an Abe in your contacts, I don’t have an Abe but have a similar issue with a last name from mine. the behavior sort of makes sense if I squint and crane my neck around a bit but I have no idea how the weightings are so bad.
That is common. The one that I haven’t seen lately is “Abbas”, like the Palestinian politician. Except, I don’t ever write about Middle Eastern politics. At all.
I know the autocorrect is broken -- I consistently hit a bottom row character like "n" instead of spacebar, and it's simply unable to comprehend that you might have hit a letter instead of space. It comes up with all kinds of insane, implausible suggestions for the autocorrect, but never the obvious one that's 1 character from what i typed.
Yes! The way it tries to be smart about what you actually wanted to press but has certain areas that are exceptions to that rule — like space bar — drives me crazy.
It's unclear to me if they're alleging that it's recently broken. I switched to iPhone at my wife's insistence 3-4 years ago and I have pined for Swype the entire time. It's so bad and I was spoiled by Android.
You can install a different keyboard if you want. I used 3rd party swiping keyboards but ended up using the system one for the last few years because it doesn't bother me.
I switched to iPhone for 2-3 months but the keyboard was so back I switched back to Android. If Apple can't get a keyboard (any keyboard!) to work in a decade, I'm going to an OS that works.
It's crazy that SwiftKey was terrible too, even though it's the one I use exclusively on Android.
I can't comment knowledgeably. I just regularly have to try over and over again to get it to produce the word I want, and my memory is that this happened rarely on Android.
Wait! I do have a specific criticism!
There are certain two-word sequences it will not produce ("kill myself", "white women") and I could do without that little bit of editorial oversight thank you very much.
And expletives. If I want to say fuck, that's my business, I don't need my phone refusing to allow it. If not for how embedded I am right now in the ecosystem, this keyboard & vocabulary behavior they force on me might be enough to make me switch.
Yep, there's a whole set of censored phrases. Kill won't let you type a lot of things after it, including "him" and "her" (well, I haven't tested on iOS 27 yet). I haven't tried the white woman one though, that is cracking me up.
update: Okay I tried and sure enough, I'm laughing even harder now. The closest I could get it to swipe was "womanhood". Lots of Wohan's though.
Lmao I never noticed this. I wonder if this is just risk aversion, since they don’t care if I type “white women make me want to kill myself” normally and even autocorrect half the sentence.
I am so very glad to see all of my complaints with ios text entry so thoroughly articulated in this thread. My first thought with the iphone duo is "how many people are going to develop a repetitive stress injury with these awful text entry interfaces and giant heavy devices?"
Typing is more important than ever. We're a ways off from BCIs and there should be responsible and serious consideration for this problem.
I have an English/Italian bilingual keyboard set up as my default.
Every single f**n time I begin a sentence with "È" (Italian for "she/he/it is") - which is an extremely deliberate gesture - you have to keep the E tapped until the accents pop up - it will immediately correct it back to an unaccented "E". It's nuts.
There is a metric ton of intent behind my selecting, keeping tapped, waiting for the accents, picking one - it's so obviously NOT accidental, and this utterly cretinous piece of junk changes it .
Can't "autocorrect" be replaced to "autosuggest" instead like on android devices?
I have never been fan of autocorrection tools (especially as I am regularly writing in 4 different languages) regardless of the OS but definitely use autosuggestions to correct potential spelling errors.
Yes, the keyboard is pretty bad in various ways. I’m still surprised how many comments in this thread (and similar threads in the past) are mentioning the autocorrection, implying that they haven’t turned it off.
I have French / English and every time I start my sentence with "The" (obviously the start of an English sentence), it autocorrects as "Thé" (tea). There's veeeery few situations in French where a sentence can start with "Thé".
Typing German and Swiss German is entirely broken while English is fine on the Swiss German keyboard layout. It very often registers the wrong key even though a slow motion video shows very clearly that the finger hits the correct key initially.
try using swipe-type on an android and you'll see. the funny thing is it's been this way since the iphone 1 because iphone 1 didn't have swipe-type while very early android did (via "swype").
This! So many times have I hit one of the keys in the row above space. I think this might actually be caused by them resizing the hitbox because I am not that fat-fingered.
1. Auto-correct inserts the wrong words into my sentences despite correct spelling and grammar. Think, "what a ducking joke". This has suddenly gotten better recently when it comes to typos, though.
2. The keyboard's AI will also helpfully misinterpret key presses and sub the wrong letter, which doesn't get corrected. For example, common acronyms get corrected to other acronyms I _never_ use. FFS turns into FFA regularly.
Your specific usecase has a native solve. Tap the status bar on any scrollable content view to scroll immediately to the top of the page. This has been around since, I believe, iPhone OS 1.
Command+up arrow and down arrow behave exactly as you say on my computer: like home and end do on PC/Linux. Command left and right for how it also behaves on Linux/PC if you're in a text field. They always have? I use that combo all the time and only have issues in Safari tabs that overload the arrow keys with bullshit.
Marginally better? What kind of queries are you giving it? It's obviously not as capable as GPT, etc, but it's leaps and bounds better than the old Siri. There's no question about that.
I don’t recall exact queries. What I do remember is giving a demo of the developer beta to friends thinking it’s gotten much closer to ChatGPT and it embarrassing me. And being much slower, requiring a gesture at the top of the screen to dismiss etc just made me deactivate Apple Intelligence. It’s embarrassing in 2026 for Apple.
Meh, I don't think it's so clear cut. It's so much worse than the AI that all of us are used to using, that's it's not worth using as AI. And it's now much slower at the few tasks it used to be good at (phone calls, timers, etc..)
So while yes, I would say overall it is much more powerful than it used to be, it still sits in the "every few reasons to use it" bucket for me. I'd sooner just reach for Grok/Chat/Claude
edit: keep in mind this is my experience over several months of beta. I haven't installed the public release yet.
In my experience the new Siri is marginally worse for everything that I used to use Siri for. It's much slower to respond. It asks for obnoxious classifications. It doesn't know that when I say "call Mike" I mean the Mike I call every day vs the other Mike in my contact I have never called in my life. It defaults back to Apple products for everything, old Siri knew I liked Spotify but now if I ask it to play a song it will complain about my Apple Music subscription. I could go on.
My experience with the new Siri is objectively worse. I am on an Iphone 17 Pro Max and all searches are very slow, accessing utilities has slowed down quite a bit, lagginess when settings timers. Failure to make new notes or reminders. Stuff just not working. I've been using the OS since the RC. I give it a flat 0/10
> Siri is definitely worth using now, even if it remains still a work-in-progress/needs continued refinement. It can surprise you in good ways, but it isn't consistently good yet.
I really wish we could add our own custom prompts for the new Siri. My most common usage of Siri is "Remind me at XX:00 to do XYZ." The most common response from Siri now is, "Sorry, did you say XYZ or XZY?", where XYZ and XZY are two very similar things between which the difference is inconsequential.
Dealing with this "Sorry" response has made reminders take annoying extra steps. Wish I could throw in a "If I'm setting a reminder and you don't quite hear me, just put both things in one reminder and I'll figure it out myself" to the prompt.
One pretty bad regression is that the Spotify client now from time to time has pretty bad audio glitches on my M1 Pro Mac (of course this may end up as a typical fingerpointing issue, e.g. whether the bug is in macOS or in Chromium - but it definitely regressed from macOS 26 to 27).
Otherwise macOS 27 is mostly okay-ish though, especially compared to 26.
The first part of this one is more hilarious when you ask "Find me the nearest Starbucks" while CarPlay is actively providing you navigation: "I'm sorry, I don't know your location".
"""One of their better releases that seemingly focused more on quality and refinements than new-features.""" - Compared to a lot of others, this one have introduced more bugs than I have ever experienced in more than 10 years.
I have stopped submitting bugs because of the tedious bug reporting app, only submit really bad ones. Can't they give some helping functions to finding the correct categories based on problem description?
Search on Mac has been very broken for a while, whatever they use to get the text results from files just can’t handle code, one node_modules folder and that list will just be hundreds of JavaScript files no matter what you type.
What is the issue with the iOS keyboard? The support for third party keyboards is garbage but the default keyboard is reliable for me. Search is horrible on iOS and Mac though
Sure I feel that the Apple bundled apps are better, the design is better, but frankly Golden Gate broke more third-party apps than Tahoe did, including some third-party apps where I had an old perpetual license and had not updated for many years.
I was starting to think I was getting old and senile with how hard typing has become on the iPhone. It's a misery. I have to type so insanely slow to have any chance of getting the right keys now. I don't have this issue on other virtual keyboards, iPad etc.
Even weather was/is comically bad. Ask it anything specific and it would fall over, repeating the broadest, least helpful version of weather data, even if all that data is clearly available in the ios weather app. Specifics on wind, precipitation hourly, etc.
So no, you can't really ask a homepod for the weather either - Homepod's weather was more like a shitty version of sticking your head outside and looking up at the sky.
I've been using the Safari MCP in a "grocery agent" tool I built. It takes the weekly menu my wife puts together, turns it into a shopping list, and then uses Safari to add things to the shopping cart on Walmart's website. It's pretty solid, I like it more than the Chrome dev protocol I had been using before Safari.
I've actually never had it trip any bot detection, captchas, or anything like that, and haven't built anything into it for evading detection. If I had to guess, it's because I make sure to manually sign in to my Walmart account before it begins adding things to the cart.
Not on macOS but have my own browser extension basically doing the same with Firefox, for use with agents.
It's using a clone of my real Firefox profile, and can "ping" me if it encounters a page that needs my human input, like a login page (as I don't give it access to my password manager) or captcha page. Although sometimes it "bypasses" the captcha page by itself, even though I've instructed it not to...
Unfortunately, not well suited for stealth use cases for personal automation. Here's a comparison to an mcp tool that allows driving your live safari via osascript:
Given that Safari needs the most debugging and automation tooling for Safari was hardest to come by, this is a welcome change. I wonder if it works with pages on a connected iPhone though? Anyone tried it? Because debugging on iOS Safari is the most maddening. (No, responsive design mode doesn't cut it, iOS Safari has its own special bugs that don't manifest in desktop Safari merely emulating a phone viewport.)
No disrespect to you for posting this, but those iOS/iPadOS/MacOS are almost identical launch pages. Feels like a waste of time even having them be separate.
I was at WWDC for the Vision Pro launch and asked someone a technical question about tvOS. He said, 'ah, [Jim] could answer that, but he isn't here today'. When I asked if anyone else from tvOS was here the reply was, '[Jim] is the only person on tvOS' and I am pretty sure he was serious.
I’ve heard this kind of thing about Apple fairly regularly (the iTunes Remote app comes to mind). While there are issues to large teams, I feel like there is a middle ground that doesn’t result in a single point of failure. What happens when Jim wins the lottery?
It seems like Apple could very easily turn the AppleTV into a proper game console, but not with only one person on it. I guess it’s still just a “hobby” for them.
> It seems like Apple could very easily turn the AppleTV into a proper game console
Apple could turn the Mac, iPad or Vision Pro into a proper gaming console, too. It's just not something they are willing to do, no matter how well-positioned they are for it.
Apple wants you to buy your games through the App Store, so they can take the 30%, which means competing with Steam. Which means getting licensed games on the App Store.
Apple already fought one such license war over music and won. They're currently doing Apple TV as well.
However, for the gaming industry they're complete strangers. Unlike music (which is mostly made on Mac) and TV/Movies (which are often made on Mac, at least partly), gamedev is very much Windows focused.
Pushing for ports and licenses is an uphill battle, and probably not one Apple wants to take on. They have plenty of other profitable ventures.
Especially in the last few years, preservation has been a big topic. Gamers want their purchases to keep working in the future, not being broken by an OS update as it often happens with macOS (compared to Windows)
A lot of game industry operates on a "release and move on" model; nobody has time to keep updating an old game hardly anyone buys instead of working on a new thing. On PC and console this is fine because your games keep working more or less indefinitely.
But the vast majority of the games I've purchased on iOS can't be installed anymore. It's not great. In some cases the games still function, but I can't download them on new devices because the developer closed shop and disabled their Apple account.
I think you’re responding to “gaming” and thinking of AAA titles which are flashy and splashy but are a smaller market than mobile games. I guess gp might have been thinking of mobile or casual where Apple does have a significant stake and interest but no appreciable focus.
I'm thinking of gaming as in Steam, including indies, AA and AAA.
Of course Apple is doing perfectly fine for mobile gaming, and is giving more than enough tools to developers to implement mobile games perfectly well.
I am talking about PC gaming, and more specifically modern DXVK/Wine support. There's no need for ports, as the Steam Deck showed.
Apple Silicon GPUs are all capable of supporting Vulkan 1.3 and translating DirectX code. Proton 11 supports ARM/FEX natively, which would make Apple Silicon a first-class citizen if you use Asahi drivers. macOS users will be stuck with Game Porting Toolkit and it's lackluster support; iPad/AppleTV/iPhone users have no options whatsoever, presumably to redirect their attention to the App Store that Apple profits from so handsomely.
This is entirely a misleading point. DXVK, Wine and Proton are full of patches that exist to support individual games.
It is not just a translation layer, as much as a great effort of the open source community to force-port every game in existence to Linux. The effort also includes stuff like ntsync that gives the Linux kernel Windows-y APIs for performance.
I doubt Apple has any interest in any of that. I don't really blame them.
And purely in principle, why are we all going through so much effort to save game devs from writing good OS-independent arch-independent code?
That is the point. Valve is maintaining the patches; Apple has to do nothing besides support compliant Vulkan 1.2+ drivers (which their community already does).
Apple doesn't need to implement ntsync to support Proton or DXVK, either. macOS' synchronization primitives do the job just as well as esync or fsync does.
> why are we all going through so much effort to save game devs from writing good OS-independent arch-independent code?
Because Apple doesn't support OS-independent APIs. They also don't support old runtimes, so users will inevitably have to run the Windows version once the native code breaks.
Valve ported several of their games natively to macOS, and almost every single one of them is broken on modern Macs. Valve didn't change the game tech, it's all runtime breakage.
From what I understand you're saying that Apple should provide 2 things: (1) Vulkan drivers and (2) backwards compatibility forever.
I don't really know enough about graphics to discuss point (1). From what I understand, Apple GPUs don't really fit the Vulkan model too cleanly, and the Asahi Vulkan drivers are significantly less performant than Metal (how much of that is due to beta/community status vs. architectural bottleneck I have no idea).
But let's say they provide (1).
Providing (2) would simply be a big mistake. It is a huge mistake of Windows, of the C++ programming language and of the x86 ISA (none of which are very good). Linux distros do not provide this either, beyond the core kernel syscalls and glibc. It is certainly a very big ask and not something trivial.
I'm only asking for (1); Apple can keep breaking APIs forever as long as they support the libraries that enable Proton.
(2) is precisely the reason why nobody can port games to macOS anymore, and largely why ARM is a second-class citizen in PC gaming too. You cannot depreciate things like AVX or 32-bit library execution modes, and then demand native builds get made to 20-year-old games. Apple Silicon's ISA extensions like AMX are not a replacement for x86's SIMD extensions, it's not standardized through Arm or supported in Asahi either. Native Mac games need to incorporate Apple's proprietary and unstable tech like Metal and the Apple Silicon microarchitecture, which makes their games unstable and difficult to support in the long term. Translation is Apple Silicon's only choice for game preservation and mainstream game support.
> Apple GPUs don't really fit the Vulkan model too cleanly
This is a misconception that stems from Metal's preference for tile-based deferred rendering pipelines. Vulkan 1.3 is fully viable on the M1 onward, which is enough to support DirectX 12 translation in Proton. The performance of Asahi's drivers are not any worse than the official Vulkan drivers that Arm provides for TBDR-optimized GPUs like the Mali line.
Games should simply not be written for a particular architecture. The rendering part of the game engine should already be abstracted away from the particular rendering API (there are other significant platforms which do not support Vulkan: PS5 and Xbox, which your game should be capable of targeting). And the math library should have fallbacks to standard C (or standard C++ etc.) and then specialized implementations for AVX, NEON, SVE, etc.
Nothing else needs to be architecture specific.
Now, sure, NEON is slower than AVX-256/512. But backending to NEON or even standard C is certainly going to be faster than running stuff over an x86-to-ARM translation layer.
Sooner or later the Steam Deck 2 will release, probably on an ARM platform (if the Steam Frame compatibility layers go well), and millions upon millions upon millions of dollars of electricity will simply be wasted running x86-to-ARM, Win32-to-Linux and Direct3D-to-Vulkan dynamic compatibility layers when, if the games were well written in the first place, they could simply be trivially recompiled.
> 32-bit library execution modes
If your application assumes pointers are 32-bits, or any particular size, or even any set of particular sizes, it's completely broken.
As for (1), if Asahi Vulkan drivers are really good, that just goes to show why Apple isn't supporting Vulkan. Metal applications seem to be faster, and Apple wants to push devs to make their apps for the faster API.
You're welcome to disagree with me about (2), I don't care what macOS picks in this regard. It's not going to help games get ported to macOS or Apple Silicon any faster. There are hundreds of thousands of video games that will never be updated again, macOS will never support these games without translation. Your ideal world where programmers support and recompile games 3 decades after release does not exist in reality. This is why efforts like WoW64 and FEX exist in the first place; you will never recompile the majority of Windows games. Ever.
(1) is just common sense. Go ask your favorite LLM; does hardware-level TBDR optimization degrade basic Vulkan support? No, it doesn't, and we have dozens of mobile GPUs that support Vulkan to prove it. Metal is not "faster" and it's architecture does not preclude high-performance Vulkan drivers in any way. If you don't believe me, ask anyone else.
> millions upon millions upon millions of dollars of electricity will simply be wasted running x86-to-ARM, Win32-to-Linux and Direct3D-to-Vulkan dynamic compatibility layers when
x86-to-ARM doesn't have to be slow. Accelerators like Apple's AMX can leverage autovectorization during translation, which is significantly faster than NEON and potentially more efficient than x86 SIMD.
D3D-to-Vulkan and Win32-to-Linux is almost always more power-efficient for most GPUs/games. Wine is much thinner than a full-fat Windows runtime, and DXVK can translate DirectX code into batched calls with a shader cache even if the game itself doesn't support it. Do you think the Steam Deck runs games better on Windows, somehow?
Why are you deltaing to windows? You should be deltaing to native.
Obviously an IBM 704 program will run faster on an IBM 704 emulator than on a hardware IBM 704. That's not an argument to keep writing apps for the IBM 704 and "just translate them".
> Your ideal world where programmers support and recompile games 3 decades after release does not exist in reality.
Happens in literally every other programming industry though.
The reason this cannot happen in the games industry is that game developers are not good software developers. They are much more akin to physics-numerical-methods people who can write some magic spaghetti-Fortran that runs really fast and does black magic, but no one can maintain, debug or integrate.
For casual kids gaming, Apple TV and Apple Arcade is a fantastic combo. It's been plenty enough to keep my kid occupied, using hardware I already owned.
It streams videos. It works. I'd rather they don't mess with it.
However, the guy who decided to put a useless button on the side of the remote that interrupts whatever you're watching, should get fired immediately. It's almost every day I grab the remote and press it by accident, and have to switch back to what I was watching, and resume playback, because Netflix exits out of the stream.
Sadly, Apple TV is the only Hollywood-approved streaming device that isn't a total trash heap.
No. Dishwasher rinse aid in beverages happened yesterday but I’ve also had makeup remover in condiments and various other fun ones. I have an iPhone 16 so it’s not like the hardware is terribly underpowered either. It may be dependent on regional settings or something but Siri shopping classification has been hilariously terrible for me. If I make a shopping list of 10 items there is always at least one that is wildly misclassified - I leave it on because it makes me laugh.
The other thing that has been terrible for me in 26 is they made some sort of change to the pronunciation in “maps” when it gives directions. It seems like they tried to make it clearer or something but it breaks loads of UK street names in hilarious ways. For example, there is a street near me called “Speldhurst road”. You would normally say this “spelled hirst” or similar. Siri? No. Siri says “Spellduster”. There are many like that. It’s kind of ridiculous.
There is a setting in the “Reminders” app where Siri will automatically categorize your reminders into certain categories. If you have a shopping list and you add chickpeas and red beans for example it might put them into a category of “pulses and grains”. I think the idea is you probably buy all the things in a particular category from the same kind of store (or the same section of a supermarket or whatever).
For me yesterday I needed to buy dishwasher rinse aid so when I added it to my shopping list siri put it into the “beverages” category, and when my wife on a different occasion asked me to buy some makeup remover for her siri put that into a “condiments” section.
I have not done anything (on purpose) to make the classification like this by mistraining it or whatever - it’s just been that bad out of the box.
We can have these micro easter eggs clearly indicating that flawed humans were involved, or we can have perfectly proofread Opusplaining. Enjoy the former while you can!
This is going to sound like a really weird and irrelevant nitpick, but I dislike how they changed the version numbers to be year+1. I like that they all unified and have a relationship to the current year, but we're not buying cars. We're getting operating systems and not being confused about chronology is pretty important for bug tracking or other minutiae. Plus, the Mac lineup use(d) the year of release. Why move away from it? Is it really necessary to market and sell an operating system like it's a car or the latest Microsoft Office suite?
They’re telling you the year where the new OS will be stable enough that it’s a good idea to upgrade (joke’s on them, I still haven’t “upgraded” to Tahoe…)
TBH Tahoe feels like an especially buggy .0 still. I'm updating as soon as my laptop shows it as available in the hopes that it'll feel closer to a .1 than what Tahoe is.
From a psychological standpoint, maybe customers thinking 26 is old on their brand new device in 3 months isn't exactly good. People might start expecting 27 in 3 months when actually 27 is going to be around for most of the year.
It's not year+1, it's the year that most overlaps with that OS being the latest. 27 will be the latest OS for ~9 months of 2027 and only ~3 of 2026.
I also don't know why this would be considered more confusing for chronology. The year is in the name, whereas it was previously at best, years since version 1, or something more confusing in the case of macOS. I couldn't keep track of all the latest OS versions before, now we will be able to going forward.
They do yearly major releases in September for all their OSes. They are directly tied to the year.
But Ubuntu sticks to the year and month the OS was released. I think OP was complaining about MacOS using year+1 as the version, even though the OS is being released in the current year.
I personally find Ubuntu's versioning to be the easiest to understand because you know when this Ubuntu version was released. It would be very annoying if they called Ubuntu 26.10 Ubuntu 27, though.
As someone who has been doing iOS programming for ~16 years I'm glad they did something. Nothing better than running Xcode 16, on macOS 15, to do iOS 18 work. Unless, of course, you also have watchOS 11 work too.
This feels like the kind of thing where the mismatching version numbers bugged some influential people internally. But I suppose a practical application could be recommending matching versions if customers run into issues since they are trying to integrate devices more.
Reminder to wait a couple of months before upgrading macOS! Every single time issues are found after a new macOS version, give it a little bit of time before jumping right away on your work machine :)
But my experience with 26 hasn’t been great. From the top of my head: Random repeated flashing window chrome in the background, notifications that keep on showing while everything is disabled, Finder tooltips from four windows down, tooltips that don’t disappear, Java update interruptions that hijack your flow - just when you where about to hit enter for something else the pop-up shows and bam: you’re installing it. There is nothing right about the update process of Java anyway. Spotlight search has completely stopped working. People I’m mailing with for over a decade are not suggested when drafting a mail. Clicking on the dock icon does not reveal the app. The list goes on and on. It has been a total grueling experience. Worst in all my experiences since System 7.
I’ve shut down the notification system at some point, which alleviated the constant reminders of non-compatibility with the next OS version. Being reminded of that four times a day for months on end is just insulting, even if I used compatible versions. There was no way to shut it off. Notifications are lazily designed and completely uninspired, as they could also adjust the app icons and so on and actually do it right.
I promised myself to update once it came out and then just screen record everything to collect residual garbage to help the Apple team make this stuff work well for everyone.
Sorry to let this all out, but it has been on my mind for a while and I’m happy they say they focussed on quality. Therefore I’m upgrading asap this time.
To refine my statement on lazy or non-design. Notifications can be valuable, for me i'd like backup notifications and find my messages. Only those, ever. When only those are enabled, MacOS has their own secret settings and is allowed to nag about updates, incompatibility and maybe some other things i don't remember. Part of the problem is the illusion of control, and being spammy about self-importance of new OS versions. Great for some users, insulting to me.
This is made even worse by "focus" which still shows notifications but without the text. Then i'm distracted AND i don't know why.
I'm still on Sequoia (which took me ages to jump to from Ventura). :)
For anyone jumping versions: remember that Apple messed with the login keychain not being able to be backed up in the most recent Tahoe release [1], which means that issue will be around in Golden Gate.
I was on Sequoia as well, and just updated ... first thing I noticed is LaunchPad is gone.
The Tahoe Dock "App View" / Spotlight just lists my 30 installed apps intermingled with Apple System Apps, which I hardly ever use. Hard coded categories, no way to re-order as far as I can tell.
Seems like the closest thing to LaunchPad is dragging ~/Applications to the Dock.
The other thing I have noticed is scrolling in Firefox is more choppy, and animations are more Janky than Sequoia on this old MacBook Air M1.
I feel pretty good about the 27 series in a way I haven't in the past (I've been running iOS 27 and it's working well), except for one thing, they remove x86 support (no more Rosetta), so just keep that in mind in case that might disrupt anything for you.
Yes, 27 is the final Rosetta version. The warnings are worded in a way that makes sense if you already know that but are easy to misunderstand if you don’t. I think they initially didn’t want to commit to the next version being called macOS 28. The final 27 release has started explicitly saying it’s going away in 28 which makes it a lot more straightforward.
It's also worth pointing out that the developers at Mozilla literally decided to make a brand new programming language (Rust) that eliminated an entire categories of bugs and started working on a new browser (Servo) where its components could be switched into firefox.
Then Mozilla fired the team working on it.
Lesson 1: Better tools and processes eliminate bugs.
Lesson 2: If you don't have the tools, make them.
Lesson 3: Mismanagement leads to security vulnerabilities.
Yes, and even after introducing and using Rust, there were still vulns in the remaining code.
FWIW, Rust is my main language, so I am grateful to the humans that created it, and it is indeed a monumental effort. But vuln finding is a different kind of creative endeavour, and one that is heavily weighted against defenders.
You would choose rust (from a security standpoint) because it massively reduces memory safety issues (which from a Microsoft study was responsible for around 70% of bugs).
Then you look at things like linting, fuzzing, design by contract, proofing, deterministic test runs, etc...
Yes, I should have been clear - I don't mind AI working on patches or vuln-hunting; my issue with MacOS 27 is the amount of AI included in the OS that is not opt-in. I use Claude Code everyday - but it doesn't run locally on my main production machines.
If Apple wanted to make the OS more secure, they would make the OS more modular, allowing users to reduce the surface risk by not installing bloated components
You have the same long list for Sequoia 15.8, so how is that better? Besides, newer OSes are also more likely to have uniquely knew bugs from both AI slop and in general all the shiny new broken features
This seems to be the consensus viewpoint but outside of a few highly specific and known-in-advance incompatibilities on work laptops, I have been essentially a day-one adopter since Leopard and I cannot recall any issues that rose above a minor annoyance.
There have certainly been changes like Liquid Glass that were for the worse overall (though the degree of which had been highly overblown). But outside of directional disagreement with a release, I can’t say I’ve ever seen an issue where I’ve regretted pulling the trigger on an update.
yes. I have been waiting 12 months already because Tahoe didn't convince many people, and I dread the moment I upgrade my mpb m3. Maybe I should just keep the factory OS
I finally upgraded to Tahoe a couple weeks ago after putting it off for ages. As soon as it came up, my external monitor (connected by DVI to a caldigit dock) started being flaky af. I have to reconnect 2-3 times to get it to properly detect.
I don't understand this viewpoint. So, the release version is 27.0 build 26A428. That build is static, how can it get more stable than it is right now? Lets say 27.1 comes out in 2 weeks - do you update to 27.0 instead of 27.1? When is it snappy enough?
There have been far more buggy iOS releases than stable ones. A few years in particular were absolute disasters until December or January. It is very sound graybeard advice to wait until the .1 release. Apple has not earned the trust to upgrade on day 1.
I don’t understand what you mean by snappy. Apple is notorious for releasing buggy macOS major versions. You wait 6 months, then upgrade without having to be their tester. Snappiness has nothing to do with that, any macOS version on apple silicon is snappy
Taking this at face value they say wait for the incremental updates. I think some big rollouts have had fringe issues and they are saying to minimize the probability you get a random bug it's better to wait for a 27.x or 27.0.x before upgrading, and to upgrade to that one, not 27.0
In theory that makes sense, in practice I've never had any issues with updating on day one and it's often necessary if you want to develop for iOS / macOS anyway unless you have a dedicated developer machine.
I used to always do this but I hate liquid glass with such passion that I even upgraded to an iOS beta just to get any improvements to it. Worst UI update in the history of the company.
You do you. I backup and install once the RC goes live. Have done for years. Only problem I recall was a few years ago Homebrew got in a tizzy for a day.
One exception maybe is for music producers. For some reason AU/VST/DAW developers don't seem to take part in the beta programs and their software can take a while to get updated. But I've happily been playing with Bitwig (with some Arturia VSTs) over the weekend on Golden Gate without issue.
I keep the studio computer OS a full version behind.
My impression from audio developers is that the audio infrastructure is very badly documented (like so much of MacOS nowadays) and using it properly requires a combination of luck, WWDC videos, and devrel threads. Also, Apple introduces changes that are genuine improvements in theory, but break undocumented assumptions.
The lack of rigor is a bit surprising given that audio is probably the only mission-critical hard-real-time thing MacOS does. People routinely run an entire live concert on a Mac and an audio glitch is not OK! (Yes, if it’s Taylor Swift budget then there are at least two machines in sync with a big red button to switch over…)
But given what they’re dealing with, I understand why it’s more involved than just “the developers didn’t try the betas”.
Did they fix the thing where you have to wait like 2 seconds for the context menu to open up when you want to paste something? Does anyone else notice that you tap on the screen and it takes literally 3 full seconds for the little pop-up where you can press the paste button to appear,
100% not sarcastic. I disabled all continuity options and the annoying delay to bring up the context menu is gone. My phone is my only apple product. I don't need it.
So after disabling this I realised since I only have an iPhone (and no Mac or other Apple devices) I should disable anything and everything in the settings that syncs stuff between devices. There was also one about the Focus options (like Do Not Disturb) and some other ones. I figure this can only simplify everything and speed up the phone if it never has to check for any (non existent) device to sync settings against. Still have all my local phone settings backing up to iCloud
You think that's ridiculous, try sharing a video on WhatsApp that's longer than a minute. See how "easy" that process is, especially if you walk away from your phone while it's "processing" or "preparing" the video.
The problem with this is that iirc, this also signals to web pages that you do not like a lot of motion, which IS a nice UX enhancer for some pages, but might supress animations from (auto)playing where it's not what you want because the animations are the reasons you're visiting that page.
I’ve spent a lot of time testing the new Siri. Overall I like it and believe this will become a very powerful tool but definitely think it needs work.
- Example: “Siri for the lights that are already on in the family room, can you put those lights to 50% brightness?” -> All the lights turn on incorrectly. This is a two step process. Get information from Home and then execute command with that info.
- Example: “Remind me to call back Joe at 5pm.” -> Siri oddly has trouble with this. Asking me what time after I give this command. Is it not hearing full command?
- Example: It seems to ask me to clarify the name of something when that name is readily available in recent personal context. Like recent 5 messages. It should be able to know some of this stuff as I’m most likely operating on recent stuff.
It seems to be hampered in some way. Gemini should be able to handle that tool call really easily.
Other things are great. Like I have my checking account and routing number buried in Notes somewhere. When I’m in safari and ask it to autofill with the routing number from notes. It does it. Amazing.
I’m so bullish on LLMs and my personal context but there are some kinks here that hamper performance so far.
I've had the latter with Gemini in Android Auto. In fact, my scenario was even worse.
Me: "Send a message to <wife>".
Gemini: "OK what's the message?"
Me: "Can you bring Tylenol I'm having a headache?"
Gemini: "I'm sorry, I cannot help with that. If you need medical advice..." <-- or something to that extent.
Up to this point, I thought when Gemini would prompt for a message, it would simply accept whatever I said essentially as plain text - and maybe with the new Rambler feature on Pixel phones it may cleanup my message slightly.
But now I can see scenarios where Gemini would possibly need to parse my input. And it should have been obvious since I would often say things like "cancel" and I never questioned it.
It’s really pathetic. I would think even the lowest quality LLMs could figure out tool use like this. It has to figure out the tool and most of the time, it’s stated in the command. Like remind me or put this in notes, so why can’t it do this more easily. I’m just having trouble figuring out why. I’m curious if they still have tons of rules in the background in a way that is muddying the pure LLM experience.
I don't use voice often (I'm also not quite sure what you're asking with 'three fifty', but if I just type '50F' into the new Siri it immediately shows '10C'. Hopefully the voice recognition continues to improve.
Ah, doh! I just tested it and it worked. Siri clearly can answer the question, now it seems more like a speech to text issue. I wonder if everything is using the new models or if stt is still using the old ones?
So, is it better (faster, stronger, etc) than iOS 18? Everyone says iOS 26 was not good at all and iOS 27 is much better, but it seems like it's fairly simple to make something that's better than iOS 26. A more interesting question is whether it's better than iOS 18? Does anyone have any experience switching from iOS 18 to, say, some beta of iOS 27?
It's "better" if you like eye candy, animations are more drawn out and deliberate. Otherwise they're functionally identical (and has ever been since iPhone X).
For me 26 absolutely chews through battery compared to 18 (I have the last gen iPhone SE). Hopefully 27 doesn't make that worse, but i'm holding off on upgrading. Really took me by surprise.
Definitely made it worse for me. I'm on 15 pro, and when I have anything intensive open (ranging from youtube video ~ games), the phone starts burning through my hand and the battery in it. I would've kept 18 forever, except the camera on the old one died out and replacement came with 26 :(
That's a nice overview, but it seems to compare iOS 27 to iOS 26. Isn't iOS 26 known to be terrible, though? I'd like a comparison to a "known-good" iOS version. Basically I skipped iOS 26 (so I have zero experience with it) and am now wondering whether iOS 27 is any good
That's dramatically overstating it. iOS 26 was just... alright. It wasn't great. It also wasn't the devil incarnate in a phone. iOS 27 has been legimately good since the early public betas.
> The good news is there are some places where things are just better across the board. In general, iOS 27 feels peppy. I know, we always talk about snappiness, but given the time Apple has spent on improving performance and removing bugs with this release, it’s reassuring to see that it’s borne out by my experience. Apps launch quickly, photos sync faster via iCloud, AirDrop transfers are especially rapid, browsing my NAS via the Files app was downright speedy compared to earlier versions.
"Better" is subjective. I've been using iOS 27 beta and other than a few bugs it hasn't been that bad. I only had some minor downgrades in Safari UI, but those are minor and personal.
One thing I hated was a downgrade in Photos app on iOS 26 though, that hasn't improved in 27. Unfortunately it seems I was the only one loving Photos on iOS 18.
I did jump from macOS 18 to macOS 27 beta though and Safari's UI is abhorrent.
> The good news is there are some places where things are just better across the board. In general, iOS 27 feels peppy. I know, we always talk about snappiness, but given the time Apple has spent on improving performance and removing bugs with this release, it’s reassuring to see that it’s borne out by my experience. Apps launch quickly, photos sync faster via iCloud, AirDrop transfers are especially rapid, browsing my NAS via the Files app was downright speedy compared to earlier versions.
I didn't see a single reference to iOS 18 in that article. So while I understand it would be faster than 26, those of us wondering about the comparison to iOS 18 are still in the dark.
Siri AI feels like a beta version (I think it officially is?). It’s unaware indexing isn’t done yet so it just tells me “I can’t find any photos of Italy” although there’s many thousands. Then it tells me how to let it access my photos using nonexistent iOS settings, even though permissions aren’t the problem. Amateurish.
It is still not multi language. I mean I can talk to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, fucking Grok in any language I want and it will understand / respond in given language. Apple being Apple, I have to choose a language in Siri menu and it has to be the phone language for some reason.. Otherwise it downgrades to old Siri.
Apple's incompetence in AI / Assistant etc stuff has to be studied.
I think Apple's top-down approach is showing here. Google is more bottom-up, which has its flaws, but it's more suited for cases like this one. I seems that unless one of Apple's higher-ups notices a problem nobody is going to do anything.
For example, Android and Google Assistant has had excellent support for Polish for more than a decade. Siri still doesn't support Polish at all, even though all of Apple's AI suppliers support Polish perfectly well...
> Apple's incompetence in AI / Assistant etc stuff has to be studied.
Why should Apple focus on technical excellence when the company and their products are touted for literally gimmicks? In the end this is what brings the money and profits through the door, can't blame a company for providing what the market craves.
Apple’s scatterbrained OS-bundled software is just embarrassing at this point. Half-baked release after half-baked release. I’m convinced that modern Apple simply can’t ship good software any longer.
The “headline features simply must not slip” cadence is ruining the products. The moneymaker, the iPhone, needs the new OS to work (iPhone 18 hardware has never run on iOS 26), so the OS release can’t be delayed for any reason. The other OSes are lashed to this sinking ship, quality-wise, because they all come out together.
Once per year, everyone has to crunch against an impossible deadline, and something has to give. That thing is quality.
Its crazy to insist on releasing all new operating systems for these devices at the same time. I didn't realize they were doing that. If one team is behind they would still have to ship it anyway
This is precisely what it is, which is why 27.0.1 will come out so rapidly, and will fix the immediate jank, and then 27.1 the next month (tbh it is probably already massively underway right now and 27.0.1 is likely in testing).
I agree. I worked at a company where we transitioned to big releases aligned with a yearly event and it was a disaster. It became all about marketing and bodges.
Yes, I've been encountering this for weeks (because that's how long it has taken indexing to run...) and my workaround has been to switch to GooglePhotos since I backup everything to it.
Apple search in Photos has always been garbage so I almost always flip over to Google Photos anyway.
My phone kept saying it couldn't find anything, until I realised I turned off Spotlight Suggestions for photos, contacts, mail etc. Once I turned them on, Siri could access it.
Why Apple doesn't say "I'm sorry but your photos aren't accessible because they are being sorted and indexed at the moment"?
I didn't know inadvance why Siri can't access my photos (turns out it's because indexing isn't done) - at the beginning I thought there was some sort of other problem. Later I figured out (after going through privacy/permissions stuff) that it's too stupid to know why it can't see my photos.
Don't get me started as well on how the iCloud plans jump from 200gb to 2TB with absolutely nothing in between. Apple really knows how to extort their customers!
That's not just an Apple thing though. Google does the same thing. Dropbox only offers 2TB plan. OneDrive is just as expensive but offers 1TB.
They are all counting on you not using all of that space in the 2TB plan. So the avg user is subsidizing the usage of some small fraction of power users. They don't want to offer pay-per-use pricing plans because then they would have to increase the price ($/GB/month) to keep their existing margins.
This is one of the very techniques under which the entire Apple Empire has been built. They take the "sweet spot" for $product and intentionally offer options on either side of that sweet spot. They also nerf the lower-end option in other ways (i.e. fewer ports) so to make the upgrade more enticing. This enables them to offer "Prices starting from...." that are dead-end options (like 8GB RAM or 128GB HD's).
Lots of companies do this across various industries. But it works best when the brand name is really strong and/or the competitive landscape is very weak.
I've grown to accept that it's just how they operate.
Apple should not be allowed to have a monopoly on iCloud. They ought to be forced to have an open spec such that competitors could offer alternative cloud storage services.
Glad to see that Shared Albums are now full resolution!
Now, please:
1. Allow us to edit the photo order of the Shared Album (instead of the order that the photos were added to it). Currently, my wedding unfolds in the wrong order, and my kid turns 6 months old before being born.
2. Fix identification/clean-up of duplicates.
3. Give us a way to tidy up facial recognition.
4. Allow us to join "best quality possible" collectives, which will replace our poor-quality photos with higher-quality originals from somebody else's library.
It’s a study in the rather tricky double edged sword of the Apple walled garden; on one hand they have control that allows providing extremely satisfying interactions and performance, on the other hand, because it’s been a soulless line-go-up corporation, it has very low pressure incentives to take anything beyond the 85% level.
So we are all stuck with an 85% very performant, e.g., Photos app, that has 15% extremely annoying and/or lack of features and functionality; because Apple cannot let go of control, but also fails in its responsibility, as is typical of controlling entities.
> 1. Allow us to edit the photo order of the Shared Album (instead of the order that the photos were added to it). Currently, my wedding unfolds in the wrong order, and my kid turns 6 months old before being born.
I don’t want a new screen time experience , I just want it to work. Much to my surprise, it’s extraordinarily brittle, to such an extent that it’s virtually useless.
As a parent of kids with iThings, the parental controls/screen time experience is incredibly bad. I have no idea why they are not interested in having it work.
100% agree. We had to turn it off because it was too frustrating for everyone involve. Now we’re at “trust, but verify” where “verify” is looking at Screen Time stats at the end of each week.
My only plausible explanation is that no one who works at Apple has kids.
I've never been quite clear that the numbers are completely trustworthy, but at least the counting is more solid than the restrictions and the passwords.
One thing I've noticed on my own device, that, counter-intuitively, screentime also seems to include time when the screen is off, e.g. playing music through Safari with the screen turned off.
As an example of the fragility of the screentime passwords, the password on a child's device can often be removed by simply turning off the screentime password - it will not always prompt for the current password. Until recently, I actually thought that it was intentional that a password was not required to disable the screentime password on a child device.
I recently had a crazy experience where many restrictions and a screentime password seemed to suddenly get enabled on a child's device. We had just turned on screentime, but without restrictions or a password. It seems as though a bug caused the restrictions to revert to those used a long time ago during an exam period, with very strict time restrictions. It was almost unusable, and no one knew the screentime password. The crazy part is that I tried dozens of passwords - many on the first day, and then one a day for weeks. I was certainly the only one touching the device from that point. One day, when I tried to turn off the screentime password, it just turned off. Unlike every other day for the past few weeks, it did not prompt for a password at all.
> So you’re telling me that I can trust the on device numbers enough?
Not at all :-) But at least this process doesn’t lead to pain and suffering because either the ScreenTime notification doesn’t arrive on a parent device, or the “Allow” action isn’t picked up by the child’s device. The whole messaging part to get permission to do something is really unreliable, at least in our household.
I expect the following from such a system : I set a time limit per app/set of apps,and the phone locks said apps once the limit is reached. In theory, this is what it does, in practice it almost never works : it doesn’t lock, gets broken whenever you upgrade the os, gets broken whenever your child upgrades the os, can be trivially bypassed by a kid, cannot be unlocked when you want it to unlock remotely etc I’ve also seen trivially bad data ( phone usage when it was in my pocket ). It’s worth noting you also need an Idevice to set it remotely - if your significant other has an android device he or she is out of luck.
I was very surprised at how appallingly bad it was - just try it for a few weeks and you’ll immediately notice it’s badly broken but somehow doesn’t fix it.
Contrast this to google’s system which, well, works.
Edit : it’s so mind bogglingly bad that I’m genuinely curious to talk to someone who works at apple about this.
So I don't have kids but in the keynote I remember them making a big deal about totally revamping it in 27. I know they definitely added a way to officially lock it (with a passcode) so your kids won't be able to theoretically just deactivate screen time. I think before you technically could do sorta the same thing (you can restrict almost any app to require FaceID or passcode to unlock).
There's also the assistive access or whatever which really locks the phone down but that seems more like for old people.
Alternatively if you wanted to get advanced you could maybe (not sure if it's free) create an Apple business account and try to manage the phone like corporations do. Or you may just be able to generate a configuration profile for free and add to the device. I would expect that process to be a lot more robust generally. You can control pretty much anything. Downside is if you don't have an MDM your stuck with whatever settings are baked into that config profile. Depending what you want to restrict you could pair it with something like NextDNS and lock it down to only safe sites.
Sounds like Android is way better though in this regard. Having to setup a child specific account at the beginning of setup sounds like a pain. If I ever have kids makes me really want to only give them a dumb phone or something like the new (unreleased as of yet) Commodore Callback - has some smartphone features but intentionally no social media
The main problem here is that even if they revamp it, it likely still won’t work since the most basic features don’t work as advertised . It’s like buying a car and it won’t start every other day and will only move backwards.
My least favorite part is how the parental controls are locked into iMessage. There's no way to manage parental controls from anything other than another iDevice. I suppose this is a sales strategy for them - parent must buy an iDevice as well.
How depressing this first demo video about mum, grandma and the fruits.
These are basic things of our lives that make us humans : caring about others, remembering what they say, knowing how to recognize a fruit, enjoying colors of the fruits with your eyes, not through your retina display, thinking about the food recipes that we know.
I don't know if this is because I'm european and the gap keeps getting larger across the Atlantic, but what a depressing life those giants are telling us here.
I got the same feeling from the scene about the new Apple Watch features in the media event on Wednesday. Having a device listen to your conversations for you, so that you can avoid the hassle of having to ask someone to repeat themselves when you zone out, seems a little depressing to me. It makes Apple seem a little out of touch as well. (Are AI note taking "pins" and hardware devices really something people want? Why emulate them?)
Yeah, few hours/days after the meeting about a minor detail... In a business settings meetings are routinely recorded and transcribed because everybody is just lazy.
I went to see the video expecting to agree with you, but actually I agree with the parent poster.
The video comes off as she doesn't care about her mom, or the recipe, or cooking, and the person doesn't even know what a peach is. The tone in which she says "what did mom mention...", as if she's clearly distracted thinking about something else, probably her busy NY job, and just have AI deal with this annoyance of family as fast as possible... plus she needs AI to read the email and tell her which peaches to get? I dunno, read the email and interpret it yourself, you probably know your mom better than Siri? And call your mom in case of doubt? Maybe I'm too Spanish... but it felt quite dystopian...
All of these AI demos have the same vibe "You'll save so much time now AI can reword your mum's text messages". I don't know what these SV guys are doing, but writing shopping lists, talking to my friends, or booking a haircut doesn't take me very much time at all.
What I want is an AI that detects I'm scrolling social media and closes the app. That would save me many hours a week vs trying to save 30 seconds on reserving a table for dinner.
Who wants to spend time with family, cooking, taking care of self, when there are the shareholders, who need bigger yachts? Seriously, you guys are so out of touch... Why care for any of these, when we are loosing the AI race, and maybe it won't be "our" (employer's, or even favorite product manufacturer's) AI obliterating human race, but a competitors? /s
What did you expect on this SV VC funded site? There is a serious selection bias here, and in all SV.
This is actually how it works in silicon variety. Tech workers are expected to give 100% to the company, families and other matter like a kid are seen as “disturbance”.
This reminds me so much of the movie Her, where the main character’s job is to write heartfelt letters to people’s friends, family, even lovers, that they can’t be bothered to write themselves.
I would typically never install a .0 release, but as an 18 holdout who begrudgingly had to finally "upgrade" to 26, I have to say 27 really is an improvement. The egregious bugs are gone. Safari is usable again. You can pretty much disable liquid glass. It feels faster. This is all I really wanted.
I just updated my M1 MBA, it feels basically the same as 26 performance wise (that being said, I didn't notice a performance difference between 18 and 26 either).
I think the appearance is actually worse. They haven't addressed the giant padding areas 26 added to everything, but they added a faux-3D effect to the Liquid Glass. Even if you set the glass to opaque, the faux-3D remains. I don't mind faux-3D (I thought Windows 7 and OS X 10.6 looked fine) but it looks out of place here because the majority of the UI still uses flat design. It looks like if you installed a Windows 7 theme on top of Windows 10, then cancelled the install midway through so it's half applied.
The light theme still has the contrast blown out and hurts my eyes to look at, so I still have to use dark mode even though I preferred light mode on 18 and below.
I’ve been having a different experience with Safari. It’s crashed my phone a half dozen times so far. Surprisingly, when it comes back to the lock screen afterward, it doesn’t make me enter my passcode.
I only had 2 extensions installed. I disabled uBlock, that didn’t fix it. I just manually rebooted my phone to see if that helps. If it crashes again I’ll be disabling all extensions.
I’m a bit shocked, since “stable” was the one thing I kept hearing about this release.
Unfortunately the slider does not fix Liquid Glass. Notifications are still unreadable even when you go full opaque. You need to also toggle Reduce Transparency to actually get the UI to be opaque enough to be readable.
Jeez, it's an accessibility feature and they just turned it off!
I don't mind liquid glass and can handle the transparency mostly, but the notifications are just god-awful and difficult to read (white on light glass, using dark mode, who comes up with this stuff?).
But reducing transparency is a much harder setting now (should be "removing transparency"), I don't like it anymore, it also messes with the wallpaper. The previous setting was just right for me. Now the app squares are just black, very bad with dark icons.
Yes it changed, first it reduced the transparency in many places, most notably in notifications, and made the glass dark. Now it makes the glass just a black plastic, but also in the launcher, where dark icons don't pop out anymore.
The old setting was the perfect balance for me. Ah well, iPhone 12 mini is nearly dead, am eyeballing something with GrapheneOS anyway...
> I’ve been happily using the totally frosted look (slider all the way to the right) for a few weeks now. While I didn’t mind Liquid Glass as much as other folks, the frosted setting ensures I can read and see the text, menus and icons properly.
Just anecdotally, increasing the blur seems to have an associated performance cost, especially in Springboard ("the home screen".) It's probably only ~100ms for each interaction, so it probably won't impact latency-insensitive users.
As others have said, it helps with the legibility but Liquid Glass is still distracting and illegible. I share the wish that Apple eventually returns to a more sensible, legible UI.
I want to stress this isn't something I measured. There are just these noticeable lags before the sigmoidal animation starts when, e.g. opening a folder.
It's on top of the latency inherent to the animations of sliding, wiggling, wobbling, jiggling, etc. that are throughout the interface. ~100ms on top of a ~600ms input-blocking sigmoid probably just looks like a 700ms sigmoid to people.
You’ll probably be waiting around a decade, then (about the amount of time Apple has between these refreshes), and won’t be able to upgrade your Mac hardware (because they never support OSs older than what they ship with). For people developing for Apple platforms, there are even more restrictions.
All of that is fine, of course, just as long as you’re aware. I also hate Liquid Glass, but unfortunately don’t think I can avoid it for another year. I just hope that the stuff they rolled back makes it bearable.
Still daily driving the 6s after almost 11 glorious years, and I can't imagine software ever being painfully slow on M series hardware. But if you need, well, are forced, to be on latest MacOS, then you are out of luck and you have my sympathy.
(My relatives iPhone updated and its just bad all around. And with increased font size for accessibility, elements don't cover all the text. Feels rushed and not the promised Apple land.)
I agree, despite being quite the Liquid Glass hater at first. It has grown on me, and they have ironed out the worst kinks. I still don't love it, but it's great that we're getting a bit of three-dimensionality back, after all the ambiguity that comes with the flat design trend of the decade or so before Liquid Glass.
It's fine on iOS, it's painful on macOS. The "squircle jail" is one of the worst design crimes Apple has shipped in a long time and another step back for Mac iconography.
The panic was, frankly, underblown at first. The first iterations of Liquid Glass were truly awful. It’s now okay, after a lot of tweaking and a LOT less “glass”. Now we have more frost.
But Liquid Glass is still broken at a conceptual level. The only way to fix it is to start all over. Which they basically are, by swapping parts of liquid glass out with every release.
The thing that I disliked the most about Tahoe is that they made light mode extremely bright, so it was a lot more uncomfortable to look at than Sequoia. I had to switch the computer to dark mode as a workaround. Did they fix this in Golden Gate or is light mode still too bright?
Usually I wait until december to install the new iOS on my phone, since most of the time I don't care about the upgrades. This time I installed iOS 27 beta on my phone since the public beta was out, and I had 0 new bugs compared to iOS 26, but it hasn't been the big relief that I hoped for.
Now I am worried about what the new versions of iOS will bring us, I hope that the "we removed the crap" wasn't just a thing of this year, and that iOS will go back to high software standards. Phone prices are really high for me now, and I would like for my poor little iphone 13 to survive another couple of years.
So what's your experience in terms of speed and battery life with iOS 27 on the iPhone 13 so far? I have a 13 mini, and I still haven't gotten over the (perceived) shorter battery life with iOS 26.
Upgrading the battery on my iPhone 12 Pro has been a fucking revelation. I just don't run out of battery any more. I'm sure Apple was telling me it was only 20% degraded or something too, but I would strongly, strongly recommend this if thinking about battery life is currently an issue for you.
That could be a factor for sure, but this iOS upgrade basically broke mu iPhone as switching between apps got noticeably slower and sometimes the UI gets stuck for a second or two especially when switching between the camera and other apps. I'm so sorry I gave in and installed it.
I would say bettery is about the same of iOS 26, but mine is quite cooked (78% battery health) and I have to replace it.
Performance is for sure better. Not as much as I expected (I expected to notice it everyday), and I can't give you a number, but I remember that I noticed stuff being faster the first couple of days that I installed the beta, but now I got used to it
I reviewed the battery test results for iOS versions 26 (26.2, 26.3, 26.4, 26.6) and 27.
The comparison covered the iPhone 14 series and newer models.
The batteries in each model retain their charge 10–15% less effectively on iOS 27.
I concur with gekoxyz - I've been using the iOS and macOS 27 developer betas since about beta 3 on my personal devices, and had actually forgotten to a large extent that I was running beta software. It's been excellent - a marked difference to the 26 releases.
No, not exaggerating at all, but I'm not a power user of the phone. I just do really simple stuff, and I didn't find new bugs, just old ones. But obviously that's my experience... The most noticeable stuff was the app launch speed.
Interesting. Bugs on mine were from using core apps, IIRC. I wonder if bugs manifest on some iPhone hardware versions? Or maybe even which iOS version the phone was upgrade from?
Oh! How's the text rendering now? In macOS 26 I had to return a new ultrawide because macOS hates non-retina displays and text was blurry af. Worth trying now?
Apple lists ultrawide display support as a feature:
Ultrawide display support. Now you can get higher resolutions on ultrawide displays, such as 5K at 120Hz. And your display arrangements stay exactly as you left them, for a seamless experience every time you plug in.
I got a MacBook a few weeks ago, first Apple computer I have ever owned. I was so surprised when I plugged my 4K monitor into it, there didn't seem to be a way to run it at native resolution and all the text was aliased.
That's all I want! A not-completely-useless Siri, and performance/quality of life improvements.
MacOS is fine. For the most part it gets out of my way. However I have a laundry list of small issues that have been there since my first Mac in 2012. I wish there was a Department of Details to fix those little snags in the user experience.
Having updated from macOS 15 to 27, I think this is one of my favorite macOS releases in a while. macOS 27 is what I think each update should be: one, maybe two, major new features, and a ton of little tweaks and improvements everywhere. Not a bunch of new features that end up never getting touched for a decade, slowly getting worse over time. Hopefully the positive reception (at least, that I’ve seen) encourages Apple to do more future updates like this.
My only problem with iOS 27 (and I mean that literally. It's been a great release so far.) is that the light/dark mode switching when connected to my car is insane. There's no dead band built into it so, for example, driving down a tree lined road, Carplay is constantly switching back and forth in rapid--RAPID--succession. My other phone, still on 26, doesn't do that.
How does CarPlay still not have a brightness control? I leave my CarPlay perpetually in dark mode because light mode is searing in all but directly sunlight.
In my experience in a Subaru, a Toyota, and a Volvo, it seems to be connected to the car's light sensor (so it triggers at the same time as the automatic headlights). A third-party head unit I've tried was just always light.
Finally some more DPI options for those of us with non-Apple high-resolution monitors. Still, the upgrades only go up to 5K. Crazy to me that Windows support for ultrawide screens is so much better than Mac, especially when it's not a particularly new category!
I do NOT understand the bullishness on Siri. I've been running the dev builds for month. The thing I hear the most often is, "I'm sorry. Something went wrong."
On 26, for me, the baseline is (1) press the siri button on carplay maps (2) speak destination (3) it shows a screen with a map and blue dot showing my destination, and siri says “Sorry, I do not know where you are.”
The version before that, it’d send me to the wrong destination but typing the speech recognizer output verbatim into maps worked.
So, maybe 27 siri is better? (How could it be worse?!?)
There are users, there are rabid fans, and then there are blissful corporation groupies. Apple has a company that severely lacks the first kind – because if it did, it would have either fixed its act or gone into the ground.
The iPhone 16 was the big "Built for Apple Intelligence" release, where they added hardware to support AI. So not too surprising to me that iPhone models before the 16/15 Pro wouldn't be able to support the new AI Siri.
The surprising part to me is that it took a full 2 years after the iPhone 16 launch to release the feature - and even then it's still a beta release.
I'm definitely looking forward to trying it out, but right now I'm still in the waitlist to actually enable the feature. I'm mostly just looking for a usable hands free driving experience compared the old Siri which I found to be almost completely useless. Anything beyond that would be a bonus. I have so little faith in Siri though at this point, though, that I am not expecting miracles.
If I will be able to voice-dial my contact by its name again (used to work few years ago), instead Siri calling some random internet search hit who has the same surname, it is already a win...
In moments like this I kind of assume that I should do 26.7 first because probably they test incremental transitions more thoroughly? I wish I had more faith in software updates.
Things are or were labeled wrong... I clicked a button for "upgrade to iOS 27" but then follow up dialogue is talking about upgrading to 26.7. When supposedly I'm already running 26.7. It's very weird.
Yep. You could choose "26.7" or "upgrade to iOS27" but after tapping "upgrade to iOS 27", the next option was JUST 26.7 I think it did both upgrades in series though, I don't think I had to manually select 27 again later.
There was a bug in my update UI. I selected iOS 27, told it to install, and then it said it was downloading and installing 26.7 the whole time. When it rebooted it did come back up on 27 though.
Same. Siri has been so bad for so long, and this announcement gave me a brief glimmer of hope that it would finally get better. However, every phone in my family is a 15 or older, and there is no support for our newer HomePod either. Boooooo Apple, booooo.
I have a 16 Pro, who’s sales pitch was “built for Apple Intelligence”, or something to that effect. I can’t customize the Siri voice. I’m a bit shocked that they would have all the features on the 16 to avoid a class action based on their sales pitch of that phone. Tweaking the voice didn’t seem like it would be all that demanding.
The foundation models run on the device for access to the local graph database and to interact with local actions (intents).
Not everything runs locally, but a local model still needs to run to understand that it needs to recruit help, to package up a subset of data for the external agent, and to perform actions on its behalf as well as return results.
Without the local agent, you are shuttling off all your data to be persisted by an AI cloud provider in case they need it.
Updated a bit ago to give Siri AI a go for some basic stuff I've been wanting it to do with personal context. It had some false positives in there, but it's notably better now, pretty fast, and handled context well. It allows you to see where it got the context from, which is great considering that doesn't sound like a very Apple thing to do.
I am very sad that there is no iPadOS for A12X iPads. That tablet is the first one to be clearly desktop-class, and would still be usable with Linux as a desktop. iPadOS 26 sadly has too many issues, and it would have deserved an upgrade to 27.
They block iOS 27 upgrade over 5G (irrespective of data mode and battery setting/state). Then they show something like this as a warning:
> Paused.
> … will resume when device reconnects to Internet.
Yes "Internet"! These buffoons don't even correctly say "WiFi".
And when you lock the screen, the download status message switches to "About X hours remaining" (without actually downloading anything of course) and upon unlock it glitches back to "Paused" state.
It baffles my mind at the amount of hardcoding and flag-based development this company has done. If Fable et al are let loose on these fruity pieces of software, it will lead to a global user safety-based outage.
I tried to use the built-in foundation models to draw pelicans riding bicycles, but what I got out was SVG of roadkill. That is realistic in a different sense.
fm respond 'draw an svg of a pelican riding a bicycle'
Roadkill means it's working as intended. Apple's docs say not to write code with it.
Seriously though, I thought an on-device local model in the Terminal might help with commands, sort of like intelligent man pages. How cool would that be? I tried it and got detailed instructions for running the (nonexistent) 'brew update-all' command. Okay, I see, RTFM, Apple only built it for simple text transformation, like summarizing text piped in from a script. It's not a frontier model, but couldn't it be more than what it is?
My experiences with the fm command and how to use it [0]
Can I have my square corners back, please? And while you're at it, add sorting by alphabet in the WiFi networks list. Maybe even a filter field (I know, too advanced, but hey...)
And perhaps make the "System Settings" window scalable horizontally?
I still have no idea how they let it ship. Sure, it's not a productivity killing defect, just a head-scratcher that makes you question the entire software stack.
Still on iPadOS 18.7.8 on a 9th generation iPad out of fear for performance degradation of ProCreate using an Apple Pencil on iPadOS 26. Considering the size of this update, I fear iPadOS 27 might equally wreck my workflow.
What happened is that the accessibility setting “reduce transparency” which indeed used to reduce transparency and made glass backgrounds darker, now makes them fully black. So dark icons don’t come out of the background anymore. What we got back is a slider that does not make the glass darker, just more opaque. But notifications are still white on light glass. So it really got worse for me.
Yes. I have a M1 8GB MacBook Air that I use as a lightweight travel machine, and macOS 26 utterly trashed the performance on it. Things I used to do fine (work on small Xcode projects) were completely unusable, to the point where I had to downgrade it to Sequoia.
I've been running it on the macOS 27 beta all summer, and it's night and day. It's usable again.
I think its good especially if you are on an M1 generation.
This is one of those releases with loads of fixes and speedups and not a whole lot of anything else
macOS 15 should be getting security updates until at least the end of next year. I've been using it for ~2 years and I'll happily spend another year using it.
Correct me if I'm wrong but it's my understanding that macOS 15 security updates are only made available for devices for which 15 is the last compatible macOS version.
That's not how it's worked in the past. They did security updates until three versions later released regardless of the hardware. What you may be thinking of is that there was some weirdness around Intel vs M series chips and how those got updates.
Parent is thinking iOS/iPadOS, not macOS. Older devices that are not capable of running iOS 26 are still receiving security updates for iOS 18, but any device supported by iOS 26 is not. It's a real hard push by Apple to get people to swallow Liquid Glass by withholding security updates.
Seriously though, I'm in the same boat. I think the curse of big products is you wind up paying for 100% of the features when you only want 10% of them.
I believe it's a Gemini derived model that they are running on isolated hardware. So it's not the same servers as Gemini and thus will have potentially different performance.
Apple themselves says it's a combination of on device and hosted Gemini models. But it seems Apple is hosting Gemini models themselves with far better privacy than the regular Gemini product.
(i(Pad)?|mac)OS 27 no longer allows Apple Intelligence to be disabled from one place like you could in iOS 26.
Anyone who is trying to reduce their AI consumption or see fewer AI features might be interested in this change.
I posted to Tell HN about it a few minutes ago here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49704226), but TL;DR is that the only way to turn this off is to either disable each AI feature independently or apply a '.mobileconfig' profile that does it.
I liked the monolith. If I didn't want any AI on my device, I liked having the ability to switch that off and be done with it like Firefox offers (and what Apple offered in the last major release).
On that same note I'm still upset Apple acquired Dark Sky. Apple's own weather app got _a little_ better after that, but they've never gotten close to the the accuracy and reliability that Dark Sky had for everything local climate/weather related.
I am still rocking an iPhone 11 Pro Max and even after replacing the battery ~1 year ago, every page load in Safari would take +20 seconds (Chrome was still fast) and opening / closing any app took ~1 second.
iOS 27 has fixed all of it, it feels snappy again!
And somehow they managed to break Dock magnification (it stays magnified after you expand a folder in grid view and launch something from expanded folder until you hover over the dock again). Does no one use this at Apple.
Last year, the "you need to upgrade to the recent iOS major version to use your brand new Apple Watch" caught me off-guard. This year, I am back to the usual routine of waiting AT LEAST 6 months until upgrading iOS.
Well, my Galaxy S22 (from well: 2022), which still works great will no longer receive _any_ updates after February 27, so I'll have to get new one, or potentially suffer open security holes in the future.
Also, even now I only receive security fixed on a quarterly schedule.
Still not keen on switching to the walled garden - I like the apps I have, including custom browser engines. I like having F-Droid with open source apps.
Will probably get another Samsung, as they have extended updates to 7 years for newer S models.
Still better than my Sony Xperia XZ2 Compact, which I bought in May 2019 (I guess it was my bad to buy it a full year after release) and which received its last ever update in August 2020.
Ditched it for an iPhone SE.
Too bad, I did like the XZ2 Compact in that first year I had it.
I had edited my comment at the same moment you added yours. It made an 11 Pro Max I installed it behave almost like a brand new phone as far as snappiness. This blew my mind a bit, given what happened with iOS 26. Mind you, I only have 10 minutes of testing so far.
I had Safari build me an extension that lets me press control+space on any page to bring up a spotlight-type search box and to search in Kagi.
It did it, it works… but it’s beyond stupid that this still isn’t just a setting to add a custom query string, even if they bury it in the advanced settings.
I wish they would improve the extension support in Safari. I'm on Safari full time but I always dread the moment I have to install an extension. If the extension even exists (Firefox / Chrome is easy, so developers always do that and they don't have to pay Apple a fee) download some app, then click some button to open Safari settings, then enable the extension there, then give it permissions in the Safari menu bar. Horrible UX.
That gives you the extension, but the workflow within macOS for users is still very user hostile. Problem with extensions might be that the training data isn't that great as there's not that many open source Safari extensions.
I use 1Password, RSS Button (To highlight if the page has a feed, so I can subscribe with my own Miniflux instance), 1Blocker (Ad blocking), Tampermonkey for loading userscripts on some websites, Readdeck extension to easily send something to my "read later" pile. It's not a lot of them, but every time I want to test a new one I dread it.
Browsers on iOS may be using the same rendering engine under the hood but they make different decisions for UI or how certain features work. They can be useful if you don’t like the decisions Apple made with Safari.
An example of a decision Safari made that I don’t like: if you open too many tabs you reach a limit, but it doesn’t tell you that and just silently overwrites other tabs you have open.
I use Safari, but whenever I go on a pilgrimage to try a different browser, I also get it on my phone so I can access tabs and bookmarks whenever I am.
> Rosetta is available for any Mac with Apple silicon using macOS 27 or earlier. Starting with macOS 28, the next major macOS release, Rosetta functionality will be available only for certain older, unmaintained games that rely on Intel-based frameworks.
i wonder if M7 will not have elements in it that help with x86 to ARM on the fly translation that M1 had now that macOS 27 and beyond is ARM only with no Rosetta
I bet it will, because cross-platform virtualization and containerization is a boon for Apple. Also, Rosetta will stay for older programs (esp. games) and some Intel specific frameworks per Apple's docs.
I bet with all the transistor count increase, that circuitry is a blip.
I tested its general knowledge by asking some simple questions like “how far away is the moon”?
It gave me the verbal answer in miles, but the on-screen pop up showed the answer in kilometres.
Never mind that this is a failure of internationalisation (because I live outside one of the two backwards places that hasn’t yet caught up to metric.)
The inconsistency between verbal and written answers is just… bizarre. I’ve never seen an AI agentic system wired like this!
Anyone got saving files from the web on the phone replaced with iCloud Drive?
Overall it took over 1h20m or so for download and install this version in my iPhone. And Settings still displays indexing notification while I have little on the device, and I have disabled searches for every app. So I wonder what it does optimizing and indexing then?
Reminder: you can’t use any Apple gen AI without enabling Siri, and enabling Siri will upload your entire address book unencrypted to Apple each time you use it.
You can’t use CarPlay without Siri enabled, so you can’t use CarPlay without doxxing your friends to Apple. Same goes for the image enhancement stuff.
The majority of the people in your address book probably store their contacts in iCloud but do not have Advanced Data Protection enabled, so their entire address books are held by Apple unencrypted. I wouldn't be surprised if most of my friends allow social media apps to read all their contacts, also.
My MacBook has an external 1440p monitor (@1x) which has been adequate for Sequoia, but macOS 26 and 27 look awful for bold text, like the list of users in Messages looks really bad. The AppleFontSmoothing fixes seem to make you pick between "bold text looks ok" or "everything else looks ok" - and macOS 27 doesn't fix it.
A suggestion: try to use BetterDisplay’s HiDPI in reverse, rendering your 1440p monitor as 2880p (macOS Retina), then downsampling it to the native 1440p. There's an entry about it on their GitHub Wiki, look for "HiDPI, LoDPI"
My biggest complaint is the regressions on font size both on macOS and iOS. Some of the copy which was of comfortably readable size is now microscopic (for example, the organization and job title on a contact card in the Contacts app). Similarly, on macOS, when the sidebar icons are set to small, the labels also become terribly tiny.
I definitely wanted to skip Tahoe by any means and was reluctant about this new version. I recently installed it because the wm I was using (omniwm) wasn't compatible with Tahoe anymore so I had to choose. I have to say it has been completely usable to me after reducing the liquid glass thing as much as the system allows.
Same. In addition to UX regression, we’re two major revs in, there’s nothing that’s a compelling enough value-add to be worth the trade-off, let alone the risk of unexpected side effects on any OS upgrade.
On my Xcode dev machine, I’ll be biting the bullet soon out of necessity, but my personal machine will stay Sequoia until they course-correct on “style over substance” (and not holding my breath).
I am currently on Sonoma and I was considering to upgrade to get the things that I missed in these years. I think and hope that macOS 27 will be faster wrt Sonoma...
For the first time in years I will upgrade early. Apple Support required me to update to iOS 26 back in November or else they refused to troubleshoot an iCloud issue. The issue remains to this day and I regularly regret upgrading. But it seems many things about the interface has improved. Hoping for the best now.
They seems to have vibe coded mission control and broader window management (including window menu bars) without any actual testing. It is still as comically bad as when regressions were introduced in Dev Beta 1.
Can we please have a 1 release focus on fixing bugs? not more ai but fixing bugs, 1 release where you can disable AI... 1 release to make it faster again, 1 release to polish... not to push the next "game changing UI design..."
the "upgrade to 18.4" took my iphone to 26.whatever and siri got even worst...
siri set an alarm for 10:40 (creates one at 12:08)... NO, delete that one, 10 40 (does nothing)... hey siri... (ajum), delete the previous alarm... (done!) now set an alarm at 10:40 (alarm at 4pm....)... eventually you get tired... you go to the alarms app.. and then there is the previous "deleted" alarm and the other one...
My Finder now opens every folder scrolled to about 2/3 of the way down instead of all the way on the bottom or top. I end up scrollign 20-30 pages long each time I want to do anything. Yay macOS27!
The change to how iOS lets you select cards in Apple Pay is worth the upgrade alone. Now you just swipe to select the card you want instead of having to tap through multiple buttons/modals.
Better more refined windows, faster more responsive, cleaner look, wallpaper window however still presents a narrow requestor window why can't you open the window to fill the screen when choosing background pictures?
Darn. My iPhone 12 still works great but doesn’t get most of this. I’ve been waiting for an AI interface that doesn’t suck and I think Apple stands a chance at nailing it, given that’s what they’ve historically been good at.
Can this AI integration now mean that Siri can finally just read the wikipedia page of a topic when I am driving? Or can I finally have Siri add a stop at Mcdonalds on google maps during a road trip?
Isn’t the whole hope is that Google (and other app vendors) doesn’t even get a say at what’s possible through Siri.
All it takes is to expose application’s UI to the model, and let the model send actions. If a human can do it tapping on the screen, the machine should be able to do the same thing.
My iPad 2021 10.2" was flawless but some weeks ago it was updated to iOS26 by mistake and it became so slow on basic stuff (like showing the keyboard). Made me terrified of doing any upgrades
Some stuff that is very niche but useful to me such as kerberized NFS has been broken forever. I don't remember if NFSv4 with krb5p ever worked to begin with.
STT is definitely better on my iPhone 15 pro which doesn’t get the large model. It’s usable now but not up to the real deal like parakeet with a LM cleaning up the output after.
Pretty sure their decade old iCloud Tabs bug, that leaves phantom tabs from other devices stuck, isn’t fixed.
They also allow an app to start backing up their data in your iCloud quota without your explicit apoorval or enabling. In fact when you notice, you go ahead and uncheck it, and next time you check it again, you’d see Uber again happily backing up 500MB (or lord knows what) into your iCloud account, a massage and home chores booking company app backing up 650MB data! It’s just pathetic - and that patheticity lies on Apple’s side that they let it happen.
But no, this is a historic release, like every other release, all hail the fruit. I used to think Apple does not care about such issues. But now I suspect they have really been incapable of making these things better for years (in some cases even more than a decade).
As a European, and Apple household: no new iPhone Duo, Watch or iPhone 18 Pro Max purchases in this house until Apple desists with its malicious campaign to break the DMA. I'll get by fine with other AI products in the meantime.
My basic point is that the EU DMA is a good idea, but it's still stupid - and I live here.
I do get the point of it, stuff needs to be interchangeable. BUT. Security and privacy need to be taken into account.
Apple has a track record of picking user privacy even if it makes their services objectively worse. Now EU makes them open up the APIs. Cool, I'm all for it.
Now who makes sure that Joe-Bobs Trusty AI is as secure as Apple Private Compute and won't just store my chat transcripts verbatim on an open S3 folder? EU law doesn't say.
The PR flack will 100% hit Apple though, the fact that the user whose data was leaked used JBTAI is buried in the second to last paragraph under the fold between two ads. Apple will be in the headline with all caps.
Same goes for Google, they don't want their AI to be interchangeable with something, because the lack of analytics will hurt their ad revenue. And maybe some lip service to privacy too.
(And my infinite pet peeve, why is Apple App Store bad and needs to be opened up, but Playstation, Xbox and Nintendo app stores are cool and 3rd party options aren't enforced by law?)
27 got the slider so I though: finally I can turn it off even more. Turns out the max value of the slider is what toggling “less Liquid Glass please” was already doing in 26.
But at the same time they modified it and now it somehow looks eee worse? I don’t know whst they did but it’s just looking less readable, at least in dark mode.
And the worse thing about LG is the floating bottom nav bar that keeps shrinking to an icon when you least expect it, moving all elements.
MacOS 26 forced me to give up spotlight for Raycast. It would do this thing where new delayed results would steal highlight focus so hitting the enter button to select something from the list became a lottery. Would you select the thing you see or would something else replace it in the time you press the button.
I use Raycast now and it's 1000x better simply because it actually selects the highlighted thing.
I guess they didn’t know the Vision Pro would fail when they made the switch. Now, they’ve made the second ugliest iOS ever. So, they are on a recovering trend, but of course they’ve got pretty far to go.
I installed iOS 27 yesterday and first thing went to try new Siri. My settings for Siri responses was set to 'Auto' and it wasn't responding with a voice. So the first chat with a new Siri went like this (tried first example):
Me: - Hey, what's the sunrise time tomorrow?
Siri: - (showing me popup with sunrise info)
Me: - Can you respond with a voice?
Siri: - To whom?
Me: - To me..
Siri: - Here are the contacts I found in your contact list.
Me: - No, I mean can you give me the answer using voice?
Siri: - Here are some results I found on the web...
I'm not annoyed that my OG Apple Watch Ultra doesn't get the latest OS. I get it - tech moves at a fast pace.
What I am annoyed about, is that I'm stuck with Watch OS 26, which introduced their new workout app, which is so laggy. One of the few things I use my Apple Watch for, and that UX is a major regression from previous OS versions.
I really wish they released a .x update to Watch OS26 to fix this.
I’m adding representation to an issue that I hope is fixed:
for the last couple months I’ve been able to record videos and watch those videos but am unable to share them, whether on instagram, whatsapp, airdrop or imessage. some limited luck saving the same video to the file system and sharing from there
searching this issue is notoriously difficult, and there is one partially related thread on Apple support forums talking about spacial h264 and spacial h265 video codecs further complicated by being wrappers, with something suggesting the latter is the issue, the final post having a bewildered user asking for clarification that the iphone can create videos that even it cant use
I looked in my camera settings and there are soooo many switches and file formats now, that its impossible to know which edge case has been run into, and there’s no reset button to put the settings back to their most compatible
I hope this OS refresh fixed that
note, this only affects some videos and the common denominator is not obvious. all videos are recent and made in the same timespan. some are sharable some are not
on instagram, tapping the thumbnail has no user feedback and is never selected
on whatsapp, tapping the same video thumbnail results in a "preparing media" modal that never ends, until pressing cancel
on airdrop, a similar preparing model appears that never makes any progress and only has a cancel button
on imessage, tapping the same video thumbnail results in a circular progress bar overlay, as if it was downloading it from icloud, except it never finishes and was never in icloud
Makes sense - definitely an "unable" - I was just curious where the delay was coming, but that iMessage example really sounds like a system issue I agree.
does anyone have wifi disconnect all the time on the iPhone/iOS 27? been happening since Dev Betas and seems to still happen all the time for me at home.
IOS claimed to have improved app startup over the previous version
> For example, app launches are up to 30% faster,8 new photos load in your Photos library up to 70% faster,9 and AirDrop transfers are up to 80% faster.10
I've just installed macOS 27 on my personal laptop and I'm losing my mind. My OrbStack app is now permanently stuck in Dock showing as "Running in Background"
There appears to be no way to keep it from the Dock without actually killing it or disallowing the "Running in Background" permission for it.
This is the stupidest forced opt-in feature I've ever seen.
My favorite part of macOS 27 is they finally made corner rounding consistent across windows. It had been getting worse for years until last year when Tahoe bizarrely added a bunch of SUPER rounded windows in native system apps. Which I figured were so ugly and inconsistent that it must have been an oversight. Only to find in their documentation that they actually intended for corner radii to be inconsistent across different applications, and only ones with certain toolbars would be extra rounded?
Just insane the shit they pulled last year that I'd say straight up defaced years of great designs. Golden Gate has reverted a lot of things though it's still not as good as it used to be in a lot of areas. Step in the right direction anyway.
I think a bunch of the reversions to the accumulated bullshit of the past number of years happening directly following the sudden departure of Alan Dye and his cronies is not a coincidence.
I’m really disappointed that Apple removed the one-toggle option to turn off Apple Intelligence / Siri AI features in the last beta. Writing tools magically reappearing after I had it off is not a great experience.
I tried Siri AI a few times and it keeps disappointing me, it will suggest something like "Would you like me to open <APP> for you and <DO THE THING> next?", then I go and prompt "Yes." and it replies with "Sorry, I don't understand."
Semi-related but I'm ignorant: when did Apple change to use a universal version number? Is it just for the public, like how Windows 11 is actually NT 10.0? I can't believe I missed the HN discussion on this one.
It’s the same every fing year. People (developers) don’t test the beta, but just complains when the .0 is released in the fall with ”how could anyone have anticipated this?”
So if you don't want to use Apple's AI, this brings... faster app launching on iOS? I guess I'll use the Liquid Glass controls, but otherwise this is a dud.
This comment is a dud. The whole point of this update was to focus on fixing bugs and improving stability. They literally rewrote the CPU scheduler to improve UI performance. Safari UI and page rendering is no longer shit compared to how it was on iPadOS 26. There’s an insane amount of under the hood changes for this release, something people have been asking for them to do for a while — focus on making things run better instead of adding endless new half baked features.
Updates don’t always have to bring shiny, flashy new features. Holy shit.
The linked page is 90% AI and not much about stability. If "the whole point of this update was to focus on fixing bugs and improving stability" they don't say so, so excuse me for not knowing that.
If it's a stability release, then great! But that's not what they're saying. Stability is mentioned once regarding search only. Performance has a very small sub-section half way down the page. Where do they mention the CPU scheduler rewrite, or any of the under-the-hood changes you're talking about? You seem to expect people to know about these things from somewhere else.
Compare it to 18 before the UI fail and you might have a non-dud of a response. And no, it wasn't the whole point, just read the announcement to see how much space is devoted to other points
I've been using it for several months since the developer beta came out; overall I'm extremely positive on it. One of their better releases that seemingly focused more on quality and refinements than new-features.
Siri is definitely worth using now, even if it remains still a work-in-progress/needs continued refinement. It can surprise you in good ways, but it isn't consistently good yet.
The keyboard remains unfixed, as is tradition. The same issues they've "fixed" like three or four releases now, seemingly are identically broken, and I'm lost faith they CAN fix it.
The iOS Keyboard and Search on Windows, are like the perpetually broken things that both companies have "fixed" every year for the last ten+ years and yet... It is almost farcical as this point.
Apple's search is so comically bad. For example, I can click on my applications, and I have an app called Chess. I can often type letters C-H-E-S-S and have it not show the Chess app. This is inside the applications folder!
Many people have complained before. Honestly I ONLY search for app names in spotlight search or application window, it should be trivial to make it actually work. Maybe i just need to vibecode some alternative search bar :(
It’s so much worse than that. This happens to me on a daily basis with both MacOS and iOS. Say I’m searching for Chess, I’ll get to the C-H and it’ll show the Chess app, but enter that next -E and it’s totally gone. It feels like the system is designed like “Well, I showed them Chess when they entered CH, but they kept typing, so they must not actually want Chess.” This ends up breaking for me like 95% of the time, and the only way around it is to search like “C”…wait for results…”H”…wait for results…etc. It’s maddening.
This, and then, if you notice, and backspace to remove the 'e', it doesn't put chess back into the search results, since it figures that everything that matches 'che' also matches 'ch', and so doesn't update it. Sometimes, if you add the 'e' again, it _will_ find chess, sometimes you need to type the 's', or even the final 's' before it gives you chess back again.
And sometimes, it finds what you want, but before you can select it, it decides that it has found something better, and places that in the place where you wanted to select, causing you to select the wrong thing. And then it thinks that because you selected this, it must be what you want, and starts to push it to the top…
Search is definitely frustrating.
Weird, the same stupid crap happens with Windows. I’ve had to learn the exact N character search to find the things I use often; any more or less and the result with that name is buried. It’s like Microsoft and Apple are just pip installing same broken search package.
On Windows I use PowerToys' Alt+Space command bar which does a much better job. In fact, it's the only search I use on Windows.
I switched to Everything for search a while ago and haven’t looked back. For the start menu I replace it with Open Shell, which seems to find apps much more reliably.
Good info, I’ll check it out. Thanks!
Always turn off searching the internet as much as possible on both. Helps a ton. I think I set both windows and iOS to only search local applications and settings
I don't find this to be the case at all.
Firefox's "awesome bar" behaves the same way. I guess it's either inherent to the problem somehow, or else everyone is sharing a library (unlikely), or else everyone just makes the same mistakes.
It's worse than this! You Type C-H-E then you go to press enter, and it changes the results as you're pressing it, opening the wrong thing! I've turned off all the search targets, except for applications and folders.
Absolutely. The mac spotlight search / bar was one of my favourite features, maybe 10 years ago? But now it’s useless.
It also has some strange behaviour when it’s not in focus, but hasn’t been closed.
I just leave every application open and command tab to them now.
I found people suggesting Raycast to replace Spotlight search and that's been far better and more consistent for me since I switched.
Changing the results just when you are going to action on them is a fundamental UX sin.
Yes. "UI Speed" should be a configurable thing, so that if the UI changes as you're choosing an item, it acts instead on _what was there_ at a brief moment in the past, e.g. 20-50ms ago.
I'm hit by this problem often. I wonder why UI updates which could well be incremental instead just replace the whole results from under your fingers!
Don't worry, airdrop does it too! I've accidentally sent airdrop requests to strangers from their profile picture moving under my finger as I'm approaching to touch someone else's. The single most idiotic design I've ever seen in UI. I don't use airdrop for anything sensitive anymore, obviously.
I have the same problem when i touch a result and it changes the result line at the exact moment.
This one drives me particularly crazy.
[dead]
I really wish apps stopped doing that "search on type" thing in search boxes. You either need to have only a couple miliseconds of response time, or you need to confirm that you want the search process to start. Or maybe at least have some feedback showing "more content is loading, watch out, don't click".
The amount of misclicks daily because of crappy slow-but-should-be-fast search probably offsets by 10x the amount of time required to hit "enter" for the search to start.
For me search has been that way since the first MacOS 26.0 upgrade and apparently never fixed.
But speaking of quality overall (outside of the search glitch) - I use dual 5k LG monitors with my work MacBook and can get the MacOS Display Manager process to crash if I just enable variable rate refresh and put the computer to sleep, then wake it up. Apparently a known issue for a few years, still not fixed.
> I’ll get to the C-H and it’ll show the Chess app, but enter that next -E and it’s totally gone
It "works" exactly the same on Windows. How is that even possible?
It's probably asynchronous reranking doing something weird. My guess is that the underlying ranking algorithms in these desktop search bars are very ropey, and they can't debug or diagnose because privacy reasons means the developers don't get to see what results were generated for different query/index combos. Also search is probably just not staffed most of the time.
So many platforms with search have a variation of this problem now.
The other issue with Mac search is that it never tells you when it’s done, so you can’t tell if it searched and failed to find something or is still searching.
I find this theory pretty compelling: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49703471
Maybe they are overthinking it.
Either same guy got promoted over and over again or someone thought we must copy this genius search bar as is
'calc' used to bring up calculator, but now it becomes some widget to calculate distance inside the spotlight box. The worst thing is you can't even backspace out of it.
I'd take the widget! For me typing "calc" finds the "com.apple.calculator" folder. If I continue to "calcu" etc, it suggests "com.apple.ncplugin.calculator" instead. Brilliant intelligence right there.
For me the big one is whenever I type "sys" to get system settings, it pops up for a half second and then for some reason the top result is like "reset some system setting" and then I invariably get flashbanged because it turns off dark mode and there's no confirmation dialogue lmao. Maddening.
Typing “sound” and end up with some obscure sound setting as top option and the general “sound” control panel nowhere to be found. Every time.
I've deactivated every single type of data in Spotlight except Applications. It goes out of its way to still suggest files like C system files or header files, like "system_library.c". It didn't wait for AI to turn against us.
I was trying to see what happens here. It does give the Sound settings panel as the first hit. But when I then press Return, it opens System Settings, but does not actually go to the Sound settings, but General.
Also, search inside the Settings app has been broken for many releases now. I always wonder if anyone inside Apple is actually using macOS or iOS.
I had this problem on Spotlight, I solved it once and never happened to me again, there is a setting to reindex all the files, which solves the issue. On iOS however I still have this problem.
The best part is when you click on or press enter when you see "chess", but this is just as "cheese.com" is appearing so you open that instead.
I wish all this shit would just stop trying to search as I’m fucking typing. It’s like that person we all know that can’t hold their tongue for five fucking seconds and let you finish a sentence before the blurt something out.
This seems like a general UI bug.
Q: For those amongst us who are UI experts, what is it called when dynamic lists populate unpredictably while a finger-tap is in-progress?
a) start query and see initial results
b) start finger-navigation, moving finger over initial results
c) start finger-tap descent
d) underlying list is updated, replacing future finger-tap destination's UI element with another
e) finger-tap meets different element than intended
It’s called layout shift.
Than You! Been looking for this. Cheers
I feel attacked, but it’s probably the same reason, we both think we know the answer before you finished.
Ah, but hitting enter now takes you to the top result! Therefore it has to search as you type, so there's something to activate as soon as you hit enter! /s
...I've been seeing this search style in more and more places recently, and I hate it. Let me type my search, then hit enter, then you can go find what I asked for. Don't slow everything down by searching on every character I type.
It’s called incremental search and it’s useful, but only when there’s some debouncing involved and the search results is presented at once or the items are sorted by the order they are found.
I can't search for Apples own Notes app. I've tried the name in my local language, I've tried the original english name of the app. Nothing. It will show me OneNote which isn't even installed anymore, but not the Notes app. Very strange.
Don't they perform user testing?
- Do "normies" perform better with this behavior?
- Or is the goal to disturb the user and make something impractical like in Google, so that people click on ads? Software has turned into a curse. The machines have risen.
I always assumed that was intentional to save you arriving through options. I find that behaviour quite useful as I can hit anything beginning with CHE just by typing more letters.
I don’t get it. How is it useful that typing CHE you won’t see Chess even though it was visible before you got to type the E?
Because you watch as you type. You may not find it useful, I very much do for apps with colliding names.
>> the only way around it is to search like “C”…wait for results…”H”…wait for results…
Some people don’t like that. I don’t know why you like having to wait but if they showed Chess for CHE you could still find other apps if you kept typing.
Maybe there are also people who like the lottery of results changing the instant you click on the app you want because it adds excitement to their lives.
FWIW, I find if I’m pushing the disk limit, Spotlight search becomes unusable. So I free up ~100GB (easy to do with iOS/Android dev artifacts, emulators, etc.) and then force a Spotlight re-index from the command line:
sudo mdutil -E /
You can check indexing status with:
mdutil -s /
After that it’s usually fine again until I start pushing the disk limit.
Every sibling comment's issues I've experienced. But a reindex after freeing enough disk space seems to be a semi-stable solution for me. If only I could write a tool to remind me to free disk space before it screws up spotlight. It would be nice if MacOS put the index on its own partition.
Exactly this. Spotlight remains the best local search but it falls apart with disk space limits.
Spotlight worked best in OS X 10.4. It was near instantaneous on what is now considered ancient hardware. It's been steadily downhill from there.
Mostly because people still expect to use it to find "Recipe for Egg Salad.docx" without searching the entire Internet or executing some bizarre natural language query.
A common one I hit is "blu" showing bluetooth settings, but "blue" does not. Very frustrating to see the thing you are hoping for popup, but then go away as you type more if its name.
Windows does this, too. So I really wonder how come two companies implemented the same borked behavior.
Android keyboard does that too. When I start typing my email address, for example, the keyboard app suggests the correct email after a few characters, but if I keep typing it disappears from the suggestions.
I have to send a daily email that always has the subject starting with "Work Diary". If I type "W", it doesn't come up. If I type "Wo" it comes up as the 3rd auto-complete suggestion. If I type any more characters, I have to type the entire two words. This is on Android, but I have a feeling it's no better on iOS.
I'd love to know the algorithm they're using for this. Fuzzy search seems like it was a mostly solved problem 20 years ago, and it's definitely worse than it was 10 years ago.
It would be interesting to learn what over engineered solution to fuzzy string matching is being used here to exhibit this behavior, so we never make the same mistake.
I bet it's some obscure MIT/BSD-licensed fuzzy matching library that both macOS and Windows uses.
that space is probably sold to the same ad network by both OSs
Not just operating systems. Try the following on the IMDB app or website.
Search 'True', you'll get True Detective and True Blood show up as the top results. That seems to work well.
But then if you add a space making it 'True ', 'Bill Hader' is the top result!
To be fair "Bill Hader" should be the top result no matter what you type.
People still use IMDB after they introduced mandatory account registration to even see user reviews?
Seems like someone got updated KPIs and decided to try the most ham-fisted enshittification move to raise registrations. Oh, it is now possible again to see about five top reviews per item. Seems like loss of traffic was rough.
Just tried this on iOS 27 and both blu and blue showed me bluetooth settings. I saw someone in a different thread of this discussion mention resetting dictionaries helping with autocorrect, I wonder if there is something that would apply to this situation which helps.
Just do a fresh install every two weeks.
Aah those were the days.
These are too, but those were as well.
KDE gets it right, too.
And it offers me THREE different chess games I could install!
At some point I got the damn Chess app every time I wanted to switch to Chrome. You know, typing cmd-space, ch and enter. I've learned I can't remove Chess from my computer. After numerous incantations of various spells and reboots and updates I think it started working normally again.
Breaking interfaces, Linus Torvalds had something to say about it that Apple should heed.
I struggle daily with Finder's search. It cannot find files in my Downloads folder even if I type the exact name. Do I need to rebuild some index or some other setting?
It couldn't hurt. I don't have problems like that.
mdutil -E -a
That command will erase and rebuild Spotlight index on all volumes.
Since Tahoe, Spotlight has multiple modes. You might have better luck forcing it into folder & files mode. That's command-2. So command-space, spotlight UI appears, keep holding command key, press 2. There's also 1 for applications only, 3 for "actions" and 4 for clipboard history.
Thank you so much! I rebuilt the index and it's much better. And good to know about command-2 option; that's helpful. Thank you again!
The annoying thing with Finder is when you're in a folder, you start to search, and then it defaults to "This Mac" and not the god damn folder you're in.
Bloody daft.
That's because you have that set in your Finder Settings.
With the Finder open, go to Settings > Advanced, and change the drop-down at the bottom to "Search the Current Folder". This is something I do on the first run of every new Mac I set up.
No, that's because it's a default value, so the complain is 100% spot on. Bad defaults should be treated as a bug.
"Search this Mac" should be confined to Spotlight OR as a fallback if the local folder doesn't return anything.
I made this change. Thank you very much!
On my incredibly midrange PC that has a midrange SSD in it, the Linux `find` and `grep` commands usually can find stuff much quicker than any 'accelerated' and 'cached' desktop search, even though the only caching they usually get is when the files are in the page cache because I have interacted with them. Even when that's not the case, it's faster AND more accurate that GNOME search or whatever search is in Windows Explorer.
Windows is the same - searching the fs is faster and more accurate than using these 'quick search' tools, which are borderline broken.
Same example: I search Spotlight for “Voice Memos,” a built-in Apple app. Nothing. Ask Siri? It’s horrible.
Search feels like it used to be much better in finding a balance between showing app vs files vs web - feels really broken somehow and I wonder if there’s any setting I can change.
By default finder search searches all files rather than the current folder. You have to go to finder preferences to change it.
I thought i was going to greener pastures when I switched from Windows to Ubuntu but Ubuntu native search is pretty bad too.
I typed "printer" so I can get to my printer settings and the first three are printer icons/emoji. I cant imagine why these would be more important
I joked about vibe coding the solution to this but I did have Claude tell me how to fix it and apparently there is a config to change search sources.
The good part is you have the source so you can just fork it, fix the code to prioritize results properly, compile and install it to fix Ubuntu, then see if you can get your patch upstreamed. /s
Just vibe code it my man! /s
Windows 10 start menu is the same way. How is it these things are so bad??
For me it's gotten way better in iOS/macOS 27. It's also way faster. They claim to have rewritten the spotlight index to handle the new Siri integration.
The new Siri UX needs improvement and to match the UX of talking to chatGPT. At least in settings have an option to keep the Siri window always on top (just have a prominent X out to go to the screen below) and always listening ready to continue your conversation like the experience is with chatGPT.
Been running the beta since June -- on the latest beta now and 8 out of ten times to continue the conversation with Siri (most notably in the car with my phone docked) I have to constantly say "Hey Siri."
One thing it's current UX has over chatGPT voice tech as it shows you the text and provides visuals while chatGPT's UI shows no text and or visuals.
I did just that. Took me half a day. I haven't used Spotlight since. I did try alternative launchers, but they are all bloated. I just need an app launcher and simple arithmetic - that's all it does.
https://github.com/askielboe/lightning-launcher
Check out TinyStart. It’s 5€, and the best 5€ I’ve spent in ages. It’s super fast, and handles basic math. Even lets you put the results on the pasteboard!
https://tinystart.app/
It works fine for me but my wife has this exact problem. It’s absolutely mystifying how something so basic could get so messed up.
Spotlight works for me across files and apps on Mac, iOS, visionOS, pretty well - it has failed occasionally but usually it's because my disk is full. I haven't really found anything better (Alfred is good but is just a wrapper around Spotlight)
This should be the top comment!!!
It is so incredibly bad that for years I have assumed it must be me or my specific laptop. And then the years go by I just accept it.
Anytime Apple is mentioned "comically bad search" should be mentioned. It is the association I have in my mind.
> Apple's search is so comically bad.
There needs to be more rage at search in Mail.app.
It’s quicker to rollback through them all than it is to use search, but when you get tens or hundreds a day it’s excruciating.
Please Apple, fix email search.
I quit Apple Mail (due to its poor handling of Gmail accounts) and started using Mimestream years ago. Truly excellent mail client. Actively and thoughtfully developed.
Paid but worth every penny.
They did fix it (macOS 27, my experience). I have like 600,000 mail messages - there was a period where Mail search was awful but these days it's fast and accurate. It really comes down to whether you need to rebuild your index.
I’ll have it not show Xcode. It’s apples main developer ide. Most of the time it works. Then it gets into some weird loop. Only shows the Xcode website. Very helpful.
I use Raycast and it’s much better than spotlight imo
Raycast2 has its own index and it's way more reliable and fast. I don't understand how Apple does not care about many of the core services of their OS. Searching in Mail is a coinflip
This is why I use Alfred instead of spotlight.
https://www.alfredapp.com/
Alfred afaik uses the spotlight index too, so if that's the problem you're out of luck.
The number one thing I want to use it for is opening folders eg Downloads. It has such a hard time ever recommending the right thing.
Ever since they re-did Spotlight I've had issues. When I type something and press Return it should activate. I shouldn't have to wait for it to populate the results and then press Return a second time. Moreover they've broken the ability for me to use Cmd to locate files quickly. I have to awkwardly Cmd-double-click the result with my cursor because trying to Cmd-Return triggers Ask Siri!
The first thing I do on any mac is replace the default search, usually with alfred.
Same. But Alfred is not immune to these frustrations.
True, but it's way better in my experience.
What makes it amazingly worse is that all of this USED to work SO much better!
Use EasyFind for no-nonsense file search: https://www.devontechnologies.com/apps/freeware
Turn off all the web search and other domains that the index uses. Apple took a really brain dead decision to include web search in the results, and they are the worst. It is completely useless, and even though the recall has expanded, the precision is abysmal.
Use Raycast, and never look back
I got so annoyed at this recently I turned off spotlight entirely and replaced it with 3rd party software. I couldn’t be happier with my choice.
Check out Raycast / Alfred.
Yeah, Alfred is one of the first things I install on a new MacOS install.
Also enjoying Rectangles WM.
Alfred is wonderful for launching applications and custom actions, but it’s actually worse than Spotlight search for searching for files and folders. It finds a lot of results but inexplicably it likes to rank partial matches ahead of exact matches.
Why vibecode - obsidian
alfred and quicksilver etc. all work surprisingly well.
i still use alfred. wish it was there for ios
Cmd+space, cmd+1 to search apps only
[dead]
You mean, like this?
https://imgur.com/a/pmtihO1
That's a user error, you simply had "This Mac" selected (preselected) instead of narrowing scope to be Applications.
It’s really sad, because they mostly aped search from BeOS and had best in class search for a decade or so. Now indexing frequently breaks or works when an external disk is not attached, but won’t find local files after it’s connected.
It is sad, and as one of the several former BeOS employees who went to Apple to add our experience to OSX, I can say that most of us have moved on. This isn't to say that others can't do what we did; they certainly should be able to. The OSX team back then was much smaller and we all had a maniacal attention to detail. One reason is that we were micromanaged by Steve J. and did lengthy weekly reviews with him and he was direct and brutal. He wasn't always right, but he did have the final say. This is all gone and even though Steve Lemay (now head of UX) was there during this time, he was also present during the overall rot of the user experience.
Hi Pavel. I remember your work on Eddie and Tracker and Queries. Do you still follow the development of Haiku (even if infrequently)?
/meta let me just say how cool it is to cool it is to make a comment on HN and have responses from folks who worked on legendary teams. Thanks for your work on BeOS.
Are you the man who helped work on the new Apple file system / spotlight after working on BeOS' filesystem? If so, thanks!
Dominic Giampaolo may be who you’re thinking of. He’s shown up on HN before, IIRC.
Cool.
Now that we are living in The Future, I am dumbfounded how e.g. dynamically populated lists change their content reliably to something I did not want, during the phase of interaction where my finger is descending onto the target. Click! Not what I want.
Feels like a lost art which will be "discovered" again in the next 15 years.
Why do filesystem indices get stale? The OS can track what files get accessed, isn't inotify watertight?
I know that Windows has some equivalent stuff, that the antivirus uses to disallow opening files before they got scanned, so I'd wager that API is functionally required to not miss any changes.
Yet Windows indexing is one of the worst pieces of software in existence and frequently gets out of sync.
Even with inotify failing, if the system is plugged in and idle, it could quickly do a scan for files with update date > last known indexed time and index those. Like once per day maybe. Wouldn't take much load or memory, IMHO.
Any improvements to voice to text? I use iPhone 13 Mini and so keyboard has always been hard to type on. But voice to text..man..it is an absolutly miserable experience that I wish I could swap out for any other competitor.
I normally don't complain that iOS/MacOS isn't customizable because the defaults are good enough to work for me but that voice to text man its like they completely forgot about it.
There is also a new, larger voice to text model available... but not for an old iPhone like the 13 mini. Only like the iPhone 17 Pro and above.
The best workaround is a third party app that lets you run Parakeet V3 or Whisper on your phone. There are quite a few.
Dictus is one that I’ve been playing around with.
This is GREAT! It’s not possible to enable local-only dictation on iOS with the OS alone. :(
It’s by far the best speech to text I’ve ever used so I’m a fan
Can you clarify, you like third party? Or you like the larger Apple model
Hear hear. The insistence upon prioritizing names in my extensive contacts list as well as certain geographic names leads to so many unnecessary manual edits.
I use it constantly and it mostly works well for me since as long as I can remember. My biggest gripe with it is all the random ass commas it puts.
try this: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ghostspeech-agentic-keyboard/i....
i’ve been using the beta for a few months now, and the speech to text is significantly better. Put in parentheses using apple speech to text
Some stuff, as you can see, isn’t perfect :-)
I don’t think it is parakeet v2 level, but it’s good enough to not be frustrating
Have you tried wispr flow?
How is the keyboard broken? Maybe I'm so used to whatever it is that I'm blind to it.
They have some nasty "dynamic tap zones" algorithm that dynamically resizes the hitbox for keys based on what it predicts you will type in order to reduce miss-taps. Anecdotally, it has just steadily been getting worse with every update. I swear I can be pressing the center of a key and it will select the next one over and immediately autocorrect to a completely different word than what I typed.
I had the pleasure of typing something on an Android the other day and it was such a breath of fresh air when it actually accepted the keys I was pressing...
In addition to this, there is a delay in the suggested word such that when you see the options above the keyboard, decide you see the word you want, stop typing and move to select it, it changes right as you land your finger.
That drives me crazy. What's crazier happens when the suggested word is the one you are going to type. You hit the next letter in the word, recognize that it has already been suggested, yet right after you hit the letter, it decides to suggest another word.
OMG you're giving me PTSD just reading about it. It happens every single time!!!
I'm terribly sorry, but I had to post that to make sure it's not just ME!
This happens everywhere. On menu items to. You would think they would invalidate a click id the item changes in the last 0.1 seconds. But no.
What's hilarious is that typing was nearly perfect on my 3gs (with "iPhone OS 3"--back before it was even "iOS").
That's because it used to be a simple Markov model back then.
Today's implementation is using more advanced ML techniques ;)
Compliments of product managers, engineers, etc making millions and millions of dollars to produce a much worse end user experience, if it wasn’t painful enough
Sounds like a third-party keyboard opportunity: “Just like the standard Apple keyboard but not ML”.
Yes, it was a solved problem. Then they had to figure out how to utilize the ML features of their chips... and fucked it all up.
It's been getting noticeably worse with every update. iOS 26 was a significant step down from whatever version was before that.
Oh wonderful. That’s what’s happening to me. I’m an author and Apple‘s dictionary appears to be missing about half the more uncommon words in the English language. It’ll never recognize “prescient” in dictation for example. Some words it marks in red because it thinks it’s a spelling error. I know it’s not because I’ve used it, read it, and it’s in online dictionaries.
At least I’m macOS I can use Talon instead of the system dictation.
Thank you for putting a name to this phenomenon. I hadn't gone through my yearly attempt to figure out why iOS was terrible for text entry. I figured since I only have an iPad and not an iPhone, and infrequently type in it, that it just hadn't learned my habits or words. It's incredible that they've developed these kinds of algorithms that have made every facet of text entry from speech to text to spell checking to typing itself such a miserable experience.
Try turning off slide to type. It's under Settings > General > Keyboard.
I did it earlier this year. It seems to be much more accurate and confident with which key it thinks I want. I do occasionally miss the sliding but it's worth it overall.
This explains so much... Never knew, just constantly gets frustrated because even if my thumbs are big, no way I press wrong that often...
I had a second gen iPod Touch and from what I can remember the keyboard experience was vastly superior than the iPhone now
Yeah, I’m not a dedicated iPhone user and my personal phones are androids so my iOS experience has been iPod Touch 2G -> employer owned iPhone 8 -> employer owned iPhone XR -> iPad Air M3. Each of those big gaps have seen the UI shift and the keyboard decline.
If you turn off swipe or whatever the hell they call it the keyboard is a lot better.
Gboard on Android though is way better
Interesting. Because I have a much harder time typing on my Pixel. In fact, I hate it. I wish I had a blackberry.
When I use iOS devices, it feels better but I don't use them enough to have used them in anger. Ok, well, yes they have made me angry but for other reasons than the keyboard hence why I'm on Android lol.
I used a Clicks keyboard with a folded Moto Razr for a while and it was Blackberry-esque. The keyboard is a little narrow compared to the Blackberries of yore, though. I'm somewhat hopeful about the Clicks Communicator which is wider, but sadly still only a four row keyboard.
http://clicks.tech/
To be clear, I only kind of recommend the keyboard. I stopped using mine after a while because of how awkward it was with the Razr unfolded and never actually found it faster or more accurate than the on screen keyboard.
Ah, so that’s why that happens? I was gaslighting myself.
someone posted high speed videos a few months ago where the keyboard will popup the key you thought you pressed (therefore did press, as far as the UI is concerned) but iOS will insert a different character anyway.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45662685
Some of those videos are misleading. They sometimes slide a finger off one key onto another: taps need to not move.
Personally, I use the slyde to type rather than tapping to type and have gboard installed for when slyde doesn't work (I think the Apple algos are not quite as good as Google's).
Yep; this has been the case since the very first iPhone, it can't be disabled, and there is no feedback it happens other than the typos. It is very crazy making and mind boggling.
Except on the first iPhone it actually seemed to work.
Same. Glad to know I'm not alone
JFC I hate this so much. Why can't they simply add a setting to disable this.
The best way to put it is it really wants to type what it wants to type, and if you deviate from that it will often end up just ignoring it. Whether it's the dynamic tap zones as mentioned elsewhere, or just auto correcting backwards and changing words you've already typed. Also when you go back and change a word it will also often insert additional spaces around the changed word. Or worse still if you mistype a word like say banana then backspan to ban and retype ana, it will display banana... Until you hit space and it turns it into "ban ana".
Try an android keyboard and go back to an iphone. Having switched back and forth between both systems it’s quite remarkable how bad the iphone keyboard is. In practice , typing on an iphone means constant typos, bad autofix, and bad suggestions.
Completely agree. I switched from Android to iOS... 6 years ago now? and the keyboard immediately felt off. I thought it was just something related to needing to adjust, but I reused my old Android (Pixel 3a) for the first time a few days ago (cuz I'm working on an Android app and wanted to try it on an actual phone) and the keyboard just works. No typo, no ass completions, I can actually type fast as I feel it and the text ends up mostly (99%) correct on the first try. On iOS I sometimes really struggle writing exactly what I want (the worst offending situation is iOS "correcting" a word when I hit send, so what's sent is literally not what I typed)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45662685
As someone who has had an iPhone since the 3GS (I'm so old), but tries Android out every now and then - I can wholeheartedly agree.
The only real advantages iOS have left are not being run by an advertising/tracking company (which is reducing as Apple looks for services revenue) and the quality and variety of indie iPhone and iPad apps (yet Apple are happy to make those same devs extremely unhappy).
I would actually go one step further and claim that typing has not come back to the speed and accuracy of Blackberry and Nokia phones with physical keyboard. It's taking so long that we may actually destroy humanity with AI before we have fast and accurate keyboards again.
I used to have galaxy S phones with some aftermarket keyboard whose name I forget. It was quite popular at the time, and was fairly happy with it.
When I moved from a gs5 to an iPhone 7, I was amazed at how much better the typing experience was. But it has now gotten to a point where I feel like a drunk monkey would type better than I do.
Yay, I found my people…
I switch between Android and iPhone every few cycles, and I really do miss my swipe keyboard on Android.
iPhone swipe and tap keyboard always gives me trouble. I hate that it keeps trying to type my contacts’ names.
Also, text selection OSS frequently maddening. Yes, I swiped “is” and it decided I’m a fan of open source software… When I try to select some words or position my cursor, iOS always wants to put the cursor far away from where I held my finger. Doesn’t make a lick of sense.
I personally use the swiping keyboard on ios and it seems to detect the wrong word with an almost malicious frequency. It also randomly Capitalizes things.
Unfortunately for us swipers, disabling slide to type on an iPhone makes typing significantly more accurate. I can only guess as to why, but after seeing anecdotal reports over the last year or so from people raving about how much better typing was with swiping disabled I finally got fed up enough to give it a shot myself. It is much, much better, to the point where I'd never re-enable slide to type until Apple finally fixes this.
Sometimes I swipe the same word 5 times in a row and it gets it wrong every time, despite me being slower and more precise each time. I give up and type it by hand. Note: this is NOT the censorship issue, that's separate (where it will not allow you to swipe certain words or phrases AT ALL, no matter how hard you try. Like if you type "kill" it won't let you swipe "him" or "her" after it, though some other words work. There are many instances of this)
For some reason, the one word that it just will not let me swipe is “and”. Which is, you know, somewhat common. I get all kinds of random things instead.
Yes! It will give me Andy, ABE! abs, and's, anything but friggen "and"!
And’s! Fucking and’s! Every goddamned time, regardless of the fact that I have never once intentionally typed and’s (until now, which probably means that it’ll now either appear constantly or never again).
This drives me crazy. Sometimes I'll just put the phone down and move to a proper keyboard to type what I want. It definitely makes me use my phone less, maybe that's a good thing overall.
I can't do "is". I get "OSS" instead. I'm not even that into open source.
I get “is” more often than “and”, though nowhere near what I got with Swype on Android ten years ago.
Considering that Microsoft bought Swype, I have no idea why SwiftKey isn’t absolutely amazing, but it isn’t.
and -> Abe for me for some reason.
you most likely have an Abe in your contacts, I don’t have an Abe but have a similar issue with a last name from mine. the behavior sort of makes sense if I squint and crane my neck around a bit but I have no idea how the weightings are so bad.
"ABs"
That is common. The one that I haven’t seen lately is “Abbas”, like the Palestinian politician. Except, I don’t ever write about Middle Eastern politics. At all.
But it was a favorite for a while.
I also use it all the time and I hate it very much. It almost never works right on the first try.
It's intriguing. Danny! Infuriating.
I think it's slightly worded if you swore. No. Slightly worded. No. Slightly worse if you swipe left handed. Yes. At last.
Each time you type the wrong letter there’s a big chance you didn’t miss but the keyboard typed the wrong key anyway.
Have to wonder how often you hit the wrong letter and the keyboard corrects it to what you actually wanted though.
Would have been totally gaslit by my iPad on this only I have an android phone to compare my typing accuracy on.
I know the autocorrect is broken -- I consistently hit a bottom row character like "n" instead of spacebar, and it's simply unable to comprehend that you might have hit a letter instead of space. It comes up with all kinds of insane, implausible suggestions for the autocorrect, but never the obvious one that's 1 character from what i typed.
Oooh that's what's happening! I sometimes end up with garbage like "so ' I'll" instead of, say, "someone" and I wondered how it happened.
Yes! The way it tries to be smart about what you actually wanted to press but has certain areas that are exceptions to that rule — like space bar — drives me crazy.
It's unclear to me if they're alleging that it's recently broken. I switched to iPhone at my wife's insistence 3-4 years ago and I have pined for Swype the entire time. It's so bad and I was spoiled by Android.
You can install a different keyboard if you want. I used 3rd party swiping keyboards but ended up using the system one for the last few years because it doesn't bother me.
I tried SwiftKey but decided it was worse
I switched to iPhone for 2-3 months but the keyboard was so back I switched back to Android. If Apple can't get a keyboard (any keyboard!) to work in a decade, I'm going to an OS that works.
It's crazy that SwiftKey was terrible too, even though it's the one I use exclusively on Android.
What do you find lacking in iOS’s swipe keyboard implementation?
I can't comment knowledgeably. I just regularly have to try over and over again to get it to produce the word I want, and my memory is that this happened rarely on Android.
Wait! I do have a specific criticism!
There are certain two-word sequences it will not produce ("kill myself", "white women") and I could do without that little bit of editorial oversight thank you very much.
And expletives. If I want to say fuck, that's my business, I don't need my phone refusing to allow it. If not for how embedded I am right now in the ecosystem, this keyboard & vocabulary behavior they force on me might be enough to make me switch.
Swipe keyboard has given up and let’s me type fuck now
Yep, there's a whole set of censored phrases. Kill won't let you type a lot of things after it, including "him" and "her" (well, I haven't tested on iOS 27 yet). I haven't tried the white woman one though, that is cracking me up.
update: Okay I tried and sure enough, I'm laughing even harder now. The closest I could get it to swipe was "womanhood". Lots of Wohan's though.
Who’re women
Blank women
Chinese women
Indian women
Jewish women
Black men love Chinese women
Black woken live Ellie men
Kill your
Kill mussels
Lmao I never noticed this. I wonder if this is just risk aversion, since they don’t care if I type “white women make me want to kill myself” normally and even autocorrect half the sentence.
Can confirm that you can’t swipe type “white women” on iOS 27 lmao
I may be mistaken but I'm pretty sure it's been the case since at least 2022 when I switched from Android
Poor word choices. Backwards "corrections" that are incorrect.
I am so very glad to see all of my complaints with ios text entry so thoroughly articulated in this thread. My first thought with the iphone duo is "how many people are going to develop a repetitive stress injury with these awful text entry interfaces and giant heavy devices?"
Typing is more important than ever. We're a ways off from BCIs and there should be responsible and serious consideration for this problem.
I have an English/Italian bilingual keyboard set up as my default.
Every single f**n time I begin a sentence with "È" (Italian for "she/he/it is") - which is an extremely deliberate gesture - you have to keep the E tapped until the accents pop up - it will immediately correct it back to an unaccented "E". It's nuts.
There is a metric ton of intent behind my selecting, keeping tapped, waiting for the accents, picking one - it's so obviously NOT accidental, and this utterly cretinous piece of junk changes it .
Can't "autocorrect" be replaced to "autosuggest" instead like on android devices?
I have never been fan of autocorrection tools (especially as I am regularly writing in 4 different languages) regardless of the OS but definitely use autosuggestions to correct potential spelling errors.
It can. I don’t understand how anyone willingly keeps autocorrect enabled on iOS. The autosuggestions are nevertheless still bad.
The iPhone keyboard "intelligent" tap target size is independent of autocorrect, however, and you can't turn it off or adjust it's behavior.
Yes, the keyboard is pretty bad in various ways. I’m still surprised how many comments in this thread (and similar threads in the past) are mentioning the autocorrection, implying that they haven’t turned it off.
Largely because the auto correction is needed to undo the damage caused by the tap target shenanigans.
I have French / English and every time I start my sentence with "The" (obviously the start of an English sentence), it autocorrects as "Thé" (tea). There's veeeery few situations in French where a sentence can start with "Thé".
"O can" instead of "I can" on the iPhone is the one which has been driving me bonkers for at least a couple of years now.
Typing German and Swiss German is entirely broken while English is fine on the Swiss German keyboard layout. It very often registers the wrong key even though a slow motion video shows very clearly that the finger hits the correct key initially.
try using swipe-type on an android and you'll see. the funny thing is it's been this way since the iphone 1 because iphone 1 didn't have swipe-type while very early android did (via "swype").
I really need the spacebar to expand slightly more on the right so my thumb doesn't miss it while typing. Wish it were customizable.
This is the “dynamic key area” in action
This! So many times have I hit one of the keys in the row above space. I think this might actually be caused by them resizing the hitbox because I am not that fat-fingered.
1. Auto-correct inserts the wrong words into my sentences despite correct spelling and grammar. Think, "what a ducking joke". This has suddenly gotten better recently when it comes to typos, though.
2. The keyboard's AI will also helpfully misinterpret key presses and sub the wrong letter, which doesn't get corrected. For example, common acronyms get corrected to other acronyms I _never_ use. FFS turns into FFA regularly.
https://youtu.be/hksVvXONrIo - [It's Not Just You - The iOS Keyboard is Broken]
While we're complaining about the iOS keyboard, I just want a number row.
macOS has the prior keycombo for 'home' and 'end' occupied for other uses.
I don't know how to read to the bottom of a webpage and jump immediately to the top of page.Plus, the global key at bottom left fails for keyboard shortcut input when defining new binding for managing windowing rearrangement.
Your specific usecase has a native solve. Tap the status bar on any scrollable content view to scroll immediately to the top of the page. This has been around since, I believe, iPhone OS 1.
Tap? With your fingers?
Command + up/down is pg up/pg dn. Command + left/right is home/end.
Command+up arrow and down arrow behave exactly as you say on my computer: like home and end do on PC/Linux. Command left and right for how it also behaves on Linux/PC if you're in a text field. They always have? I use that combo all the time and only have issues in Safari tabs that overload the arrow keys with bullshit.
(adjacent to keyboard) It has no way to select all text. That makes the whole platform a toy.
It used to be there but a few releases ago the option disappeared.
In my experience new Siri has been better only marginally. Still tons of I didn’t understand the query responses
Marginally better? What kind of queries are you giving it? It's obviously not as capable as GPT, etc, but it's leaps and bounds better than the old Siri. There's no question about that.
I don’t recall exact queries. What I do remember is giving a demo of the developer beta to friends thinking it’s gotten much closer to ChatGPT and it embarrassing me. And being much slower, requiring a gesture at the top of the screen to dismiss etc just made me deactivate Apple Intelligence. It’s embarrassing in 2026 for Apple.
Meh, I don't think it's so clear cut. It's so much worse than the AI that all of us are used to using, that's it's not worth using as AI. And it's now much slower at the few tasks it used to be good at (phone calls, timers, etc..)
So while yes, I would say overall it is much more powerful than it used to be, it still sits in the "every few reasons to use it" bucket for me. I'd sooner just reach for Grok/Chat/Claude
edit: keep in mind this is my experience over several months of beta. I haven't installed the public release yet.
In my experience the new Siri is marginally worse for everything that I used to use Siri for. It's much slower to respond. It asks for obnoxious classifications. It doesn't know that when I say "call Mike" I mean the Mike I call every day vs the other Mike in my contact I have never called in my life. It defaults back to Apple products for everything, old Siri knew I liked Spotify but now if I ask it to play a song it will complain about my Apple Music subscription. I could go on.
Absolutely the same experience here. Pretty much worse in every way.
My experience with the new Siri is objectively worse. I am on an Iphone 17 Pro Max and all searches are very slow, accessing utilities has slowed down quite a bit, lagginess when settings timers. Failure to make new notes or reminders. Stuff just not working. I've been using the OS since the RC. I give it a flat 0/10
> Siri is definitely worth using now, even if it remains still a work-in-progress/needs continued refinement. It can surprise you in good ways, but it isn't consistently good yet.
I really wish we could add our own custom prompts for the new Siri. My most common usage of Siri is "Remind me at XX:00 to do XYZ." The most common response from Siri now is, "Sorry, did you say XYZ or XZY?", where XYZ and XZY are two very similar things between which the difference is inconsequential.
Dealing with this "Sorry" response has made reminders take annoying extra steps. Wish I could throw in a "If I'm setting a reminder and you don't quite hear me, just put both things in one reminder and I'll figure it out myself" to the prompt.
I had issues with the Siri Beta. I would ask it to open the garage door, and often it just... failed.
Un-enrolling from the beta fixed it.
— Open the garage door, Siri.
— I'm sorry, OptionOfT. I'm afraid I can't do that.
One pretty bad regression is that the Spotify client now from time to time has pretty bad audio glitches on my M1 Pro Mac (of course this may end up as a typical fingerpointing issue, e.g. whether the bug is in macOS or in Chromium - but it definitely regressed from macOS 26 to 27).
Otherwise macOS 27 is mostly okay-ish though, especially compared to 26.
I see the same happening on iOS, but on Plexamp. I wonder if this is a shared subsystem or some weird JS bug.
I too feel the keyboard is broken but I haven't identified exactly what is broken about it.
its when you type it wrong two times, and then slowly type it. Then it works.
> Siri is definitely worth using now
Just tried it this morning after my shower:
- Siri, what's the weather like?
- I don't know where you are
- ... use the the geolocation??
- You need to unlock first
So yeah, still unusable to me even for the most basic shit
The first part of this one is more hilarious when you ask "Find me the nearest Starbucks" while CarPlay is actively providing you navigation: "I'm sorry, I don't know your location".
This sounds like some kind of conflict with your privacy settings
"""One of their better releases that seemingly focused more on quality and refinements than new-features.""" - Compared to a lot of others, this one have introduced more bugs than I have ever experienced in more than 10 years.
I have stopped submitting bugs because of the tedious bug reporting app, only submit really bad ones. Can't they give some helping functions to finding the correct categories based on problem description?
Compared to ios 26?
Yes
one day we'll find out they have only one QA person on the team which develops keyboard among other things, and they have comically alien fingers.
doubtful, I am sure they fired QA long ago
> The keyboard remains unfixed, as is tradition.
Jeez. I wish they could just roll the keyboard back to iOS 7. That's the last version where it was good.
Search on Mac has been very broken for a while, whatever they use to get the text results from files just can’t handle code, one node_modules folder and that list will just be hundreds of JavaScript files no matter what you type.
What is the issue with the iOS keyboard? The support for third party keyboards is garbage but the default keyboard is reliable for me. Search is horrible on iOS and Mac though
Would you say that it's ready for prime-time on a developer machine?
If the iOS keyboard is broken in terms of auto correct suggestions, try resetting its dictionary. I found it was much improved after that.
The keyboard on iOS is so frustrating.
me: siri, turn off the lights everywhere.
siri: do you mean livingroom, […] or everywhere?
i rest my case. i can reproduce this every time. siri is the biggest pos software apple ever made (followed closely by the ios keyboard).
Every other morning I get out of the shower to my wife cussing out siri because it can't handle the simple task of snoozing an alarm...
Is Gemini-backed siri active ?
in the mean time Android has full gemini from a button click :(
Siri: "Sorry I don't understand"
Sure I feel that the Apple bundled apps are better, the design is better, but frankly Golden Gate broke more third-party apps than Tahoe did, including some third-party apps where I had an old perpetual license and had not updated for many years.
What's better about it in your usage?
How’s messages? Oh still 2008?
re keyboard: i don't get how the keyboard on the iphone can be so broken. meanwhile the small keyboard on the ipad works like a charm.
or am i the only one experiencing it like this?
I was starting to think I was getting old and senile with how hard typing has become on the iPhone. It's a misery. I have to type so insanely slow to have any chance of getting the right keys now. I don't have this issue on other virtual keyboards, iPad etc.
Turn off Swipe or Slide or whatever they call it now in the keyboard settings
Wait what was so bad about siri before? I've been using it for years on homepod, asking it for weather and setting timers.
I realise this is a joke, but I have to pile on.
Even weather was/is comically bad. Ask it anything specific and it would fall over, repeating the broadest, least helpful version of weather data, even if all that data is clearly available in the ios weather app. Specifics on wind, precipitation hourly, etc.
So no, you can't really ask a homepod for the weather either - Homepod's weather was more like a shitty version of sticking your head outside and looking up at the sky.
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Was just looking over the Safari 27 release notes¹, which is part of macOS 27, and noticed this:
Web Driver
New Features
- Allow your agent to connect to a Safari browser for development and debugging via the Safari MCP server. (176038457)
Related (From July 1st)
Introducing the Safari MCP server for web developers
https://webkit.org/blog/18136/introducing-the-safari-mcp-ser...
So that's interesting. On the other hand, looks like WebXR support for Safari will never come.
---
¹ https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safari-release-not...
I've been using the Safari MCP in a "grocery agent" tool I built. It takes the weekly menu my wife puts together, turns it into a shopping list, and then uses Safari to add things to the shopping cart on Walmart's website. It's pretty solid, I like it more than the Chrome dev protocol I had been using before Safari.
How are you getting around bot detection shutting you out? I tried exactly this but for stop and shop.
I've actually never had it trip any bot detection, captchas, or anything like that, and haven't built anything into it for evading detection. If I had to guess, it's because I make sure to manually sign in to my Walmart account before it begins adding things to the cart.
This is the case for me too. If I try to automate sign in, it trips bot detection. But if I manually sign in then let the agent rip, I'm fine.
Not on macOS but have my own browser extension basically doing the same with Firefox, for use with agents.
It's using a clone of my real Firefox profile, and can "ping" me if it encounters a page that needs my human input, like a login page (as I don't give it access to my password manager) or captcha page. Although sometimes it "bypasses" the captcha page by itself, even though I've instructed it not to...
i ended up having to hot swap in an abliterated model just to solve the captchas and then move on.
Unfortunately, not well suited for stealth use cases for personal automation. Here's a comparison to an mcp tool that allows driving your live safari via osascript:
[1]: https://github.com/achiya-automation/safari-mcp#vs-apples-of...
75+ comments, HN thread
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48769639
Given that Safari needs the most debugging and automation tooling for Safari was hardest to come by, this is a welcome change. I wonder if it works with pages on a connected iPhone though? Anyone tried it? Because debugging on iOS Safari is the most maddening. (No, responsive design mode doesn't cut it, iOS Safari has its own special bugs that don't manifest in desktop Safari merely emulating a phone viewport.)
This MCP server for Safari is pretty neat. I think I'm going to start automatting some tasks for our corporate websites.
It's really powerful. I have been using it in Chrome for a while.
This is how to enable: chrome://inspect/#remote-debugging
True WebXR for the Apple ecosystem will never come. At least that’s what I’m assuming given their behavior so far
> On the other hand, looks like WebXR support for Safari will never come.
Thanks for checking. What a mess. I'm so sick of the workarounds that have to make.
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At the bottom of the press release they have links to individual OS pages:
* iOS 27: https://www.apple.com/os/ios/
* iPadOS 27: https://www.apple.com/os/ipados/
* macOS: https://www.apple.com/os/macos/
* watchOS: https://www.apple.com/os/watchos/
* visionOS: https://www.apple.com/os/visionos/
* tvOS 27: no link.
* Overview: https://www.apple.com/os/?version=no-hero
No disrespect to you for posting this, but those iOS/iPadOS/MacOS are almost identical launch pages. Feels like a waste of time even having them be separate.
Poor tvOS :(
I was at WWDC for the Vision Pro launch and asked someone a technical question about tvOS. He said, 'ah, [Jim] could answer that, but he isn't here today'. When I asked if anyone else from tvOS was here the reply was, '[Jim] is the only person on tvOS' and I am pretty sure he was serious.
I’ve heard this kind of thing about Apple fairly regularly (the iTunes Remote app comes to mind). While there are issues to large teams, I feel like there is a middle ground that doesn’t result in a single point of failure. What happens when Jim wins the lottery?
It seems like Apple could very easily turn the AppleTV into a proper game console, but not with only one person on it. I guess it’s still just a “hobby” for them.
> It seems like Apple could very easily turn the AppleTV into a proper game console
Apple could turn the Mac, iPad or Vision Pro into a proper gaming console, too. It's just not something they are willing to do, no matter how well-positioned they are for it.
I think this is honestly correct strategy.
Gaming is a license game, not a hardware game.
Apple wants you to buy your games through the App Store, so they can take the 30%, which means competing with Steam. Which means getting licensed games on the App Store.
Apple already fought one such license war over music and won. They're currently doing Apple TV as well.
However, for the gaming industry they're complete strangers. Unlike music (which is mostly made on Mac) and TV/Movies (which are often made on Mac, at least partly), gamedev is very much Windows focused.
Pushing for ports and licenses is an uphill battle, and probably not one Apple wants to take on. They have plenty of other profitable ventures.
> Gaming is a license game, not a hardware game.
Gaming is also a software support game.
Especially in the last few years, preservation has been a big topic. Gamers want their purchases to keep working in the future, not being broken by an OS update as it often happens with macOS (compared to Windows)
A lot of game industry operates on a "release and move on" model; nobody has time to keep updating an old game hardly anyone buys instead of working on a new thing. On PC and console this is fine because your games keep working more or less indefinitely.
But the vast majority of the games I've purchased on iOS can't be installed anymore. It's not great. In some cases the games still function, but I can't download them on new devices because the developer closed shop and disabled their Apple account.
I think you’re responding to “gaming” and thinking of AAA titles which are flashy and splashy but are a smaller market than mobile games. I guess gp might have been thinking of mobile or casual where Apple does have a significant stake and interest but no appreciable focus.
I'm thinking of gaming as in Steam, including indies, AA and AAA.
Of course Apple is doing perfectly fine for mobile gaming, and is giving more than enough tools to developers to implement mobile games perfectly well.
I am talking about PC gaming, and more specifically modern DXVK/Wine support. There's no need for ports, as the Steam Deck showed.
Apple Silicon GPUs are all capable of supporting Vulkan 1.3 and translating DirectX code. Proton 11 supports ARM/FEX natively, which would make Apple Silicon a first-class citizen if you use Asahi drivers. macOS users will be stuck with Game Porting Toolkit and it's lackluster support; iPad/AppleTV/iPhone users have no options whatsoever, presumably to redirect their attention to the App Store that Apple profits from so handsomely.
This is entirely a misleading point. DXVK, Wine and Proton are full of patches that exist to support individual games.
It is not just a translation layer, as much as a great effort of the open source community to force-port every game in existence to Linux. The effort also includes stuff like ntsync that gives the Linux kernel Windows-y APIs for performance.
I doubt Apple has any interest in any of that. I don't really blame them.
And purely in principle, why are we all going through so much effort to save game devs from writing good OS-independent arch-independent code?
That is the point. Valve is maintaining the patches; Apple has to do nothing besides support compliant Vulkan 1.2+ drivers (which their community already does).
Apple doesn't need to implement ntsync to support Proton or DXVK, either. macOS' synchronization primitives do the job just as well as esync or fsync does.
> why are we all going through so much effort to save game devs from writing good OS-independent arch-independent code?
Because Apple doesn't support OS-independent APIs. They also don't support old runtimes, so users will inevitably have to run the Windows version once the native code breaks.
Valve ported several of their games natively to macOS, and almost every single one of them is broken on modern Macs. Valve didn't change the game tech, it's all runtime breakage.
From what I understand you're saying that Apple should provide 2 things: (1) Vulkan drivers and (2) backwards compatibility forever.
I don't really know enough about graphics to discuss point (1). From what I understand, Apple GPUs don't really fit the Vulkan model too cleanly, and the Asahi Vulkan drivers are significantly less performant than Metal (how much of that is due to beta/community status vs. architectural bottleneck I have no idea).
But let's say they provide (1).
Providing (2) would simply be a big mistake. It is a huge mistake of Windows, of the C++ programming language and of the x86 ISA (none of which are very good). Linux distros do not provide this either, beyond the core kernel syscalls and glibc. It is certainly a very big ask and not something trivial.
I'm only asking for (1); Apple can keep breaking APIs forever as long as they support the libraries that enable Proton.
(2) is precisely the reason why nobody can port games to macOS anymore, and largely why ARM is a second-class citizen in PC gaming too. You cannot depreciate things like AVX or 32-bit library execution modes, and then demand native builds get made to 20-year-old games. Apple Silicon's ISA extensions like AMX are not a replacement for x86's SIMD extensions, it's not standardized through Arm or supported in Asahi either. Native Mac games need to incorporate Apple's proprietary and unstable tech like Metal and the Apple Silicon microarchitecture, which makes their games unstable and difficult to support in the long term. Translation is Apple Silicon's only choice for game preservation and mainstream game support.
> Apple GPUs don't really fit the Vulkan model too cleanly
This is a misconception that stems from Metal's preference for tile-based deferred rendering pipelines. Vulkan 1.3 is fully viable on the M1 onward, which is enough to support DirectX 12 translation in Proton. The performance of Asahi's drivers are not any worse than the official Vulkan drivers that Arm provides for TBDR-optimized GPUs like the Mali line.
Everything you said about (2) is wrong imo.
Games should simply not be written for a particular architecture. The rendering part of the game engine should already be abstracted away from the particular rendering API (there are other significant platforms which do not support Vulkan: PS5 and Xbox, which your game should be capable of targeting). And the math library should have fallbacks to standard C (or standard C++ etc.) and then specialized implementations for AVX, NEON, SVE, etc.
Nothing else needs to be architecture specific.
Now, sure, NEON is slower than AVX-256/512. But backending to NEON or even standard C is certainly going to be faster than running stuff over an x86-to-ARM translation layer.
Sooner or later the Steam Deck 2 will release, probably on an ARM platform (if the Steam Frame compatibility layers go well), and millions upon millions upon millions of dollars of electricity will simply be wasted running x86-to-ARM, Win32-to-Linux and Direct3D-to-Vulkan dynamic compatibility layers when, if the games were well written in the first place, they could simply be trivially recompiled.
> 32-bit library execution modes
If your application assumes pointers are 32-bits, or any particular size, or even any set of particular sizes, it's completely broken.
As for (1), if Asahi Vulkan drivers are really good, that just goes to show why Apple isn't supporting Vulkan. Metal applications seem to be faster, and Apple wants to push devs to make their apps for the faster API.
You're welcome to disagree with me about (2), I don't care what macOS picks in this regard. It's not going to help games get ported to macOS or Apple Silicon any faster. There are hundreds of thousands of video games that will never be updated again, macOS will never support these games without translation. Your ideal world where programmers support and recompile games 3 decades after release does not exist in reality. This is why efforts like WoW64 and FEX exist in the first place; you will never recompile the majority of Windows games. Ever.
(1) is just common sense. Go ask your favorite LLM; does hardware-level TBDR optimization degrade basic Vulkan support? No, it doesn't, and we have dozens of mobile GPUs that support Vulkan to prove it. Metal is not "faster" and it's architecture does not preclude high-performance Vulkan drivers in any way. If you don't believe me, ask anyone else.
> millions upon millions upon millions of dollars of electricity will simply be wasted running x86-to-ARM, Win32-to-Linux and Direct3D-to-Vulkan dynamic compatibility layers when
x86-to-ARM doesn't have to be slow. Accelerators like Apple's AMX can leverage autovectorization during translation, which is significantly faster than NEON and potentially more efficient than x86 SIMD.
D3D-to-Vulkan and Win32-to-Linux is almost always more power-efficient for most GPUs/games. Wine is much thinner than a full-fat Windows runtime, and DXVK can translate DirectX code into batched calls with a shader cache even if the game itself doesn't support it. Do you think the Steam Deck runs games better on Windows, somehow?
Why are you deltaing to windows? You should be deltaing to native.
Obviously an IBM 704 program will run faster on an IBM 704 emulator than on a hardware IBM 704. That's not an argument to keep writing apps for the IBM 704 and "just translate them".
> Your ideal world where programmers support and recompile games 3 decades after release does not exist in reality.
Happens in literally every other programming industry though.
The reason this cannot happen in the games industry is that game developers are not good software developers. They are much more akin to physics-numerical-methods people who can write some magic spaghetti-Fortran that runs really fast and does black magic, but no one can maintain, debug or integrate.
For casual kids gaming, Apple TV and Apple Arcade is a fantastic combo. It's been plenty enough to keep my kid occupied, using hardware I already owned.
They already have several such deals, such as Resident Evil.
> What happens when Jim wins the lottery?
so much better framing than typical truck hit :))
love it
It streams videos. It works. I'd rather they don't mess with it.
However, the guy who decided to put a useless button on the side of the remote that interrupts whatever you're watching, should get fired immediately. It's almost every day I grab the remote and press it by accident, and have to switch back to what I was watching, and resume playback, because Netflix exits out of the stream.
Sadly, Apple TV is the only Hollywood-approved streaming device that isn't a total trash heap.
I love Siri's suggestions for categories in my shopping list. At the moment it puts "Dishwasher Rinse Aid" in the "Beverages" category.
Eat Up Martha
Tide pod challenge
Well, the kids were eating Tide Pods not too long ago, seems like Siri's not that inaccurate after all.
That was almost 10 years ago. Seems like it was just yesterday.
> That was almost 10 years ago. Seems like it was just yesterday.
Time is an illusion. (Lunchtime especially so.)
From what I recall, the only people actually eating Tide pods were elderly folks with dementia. The kids were joking about it a lot, though.
My favorite bumper sticker from when the Millennials were in college was a riff on the old "I {$cause}, and I vote" from the 80's:
"I eat Tide Pods, and I vote"
Most Millenials were 30+ when the Tide Pod trend happened. It was solidly a Gen Z thing.
Surely that meme was after millennials had already graduated
Siri is for entertainment purposes only. As in, it's so bad, it'll make you laugh.
I always assumed there would be some rinse aid residue on your cups and glasses.
Is this a joke? My iPhone is still running 26 and I just did that exact test and it went into "Household items".
No. Dishwasher rinse aid in beverages happened yesterday but I’ve also had makeup remover in condiments and various other fun ones. I have an iPhone 16 so it’s not like the hardware is terribly underpowered either. It may be dependent on regional settings or something but Siri shopping classification has been hilariously terrible for me. If I make a shopping list of 10 items there is always at least one that is wildly misclassified - I leave it on because it makes me laugh.
The other thing that has been terrible for me in 26 is they made some sort of change to the pronunciation in “maps” when it gives directions. It seems like they tried to make it clearer or something but it breaks loads of UK street names in hilarious ways. For example, there is a street near me called “Speldhurst road”. You would normally say this “spelled hirst” or similar. Siri? No. Siri says “Spellduster”. There are many like that. It’s kind of ridiculous.
> Dishwasher rinse aid in beverages happened yesterday but I’ve also had makeup remover in condiments
I am sorry but could you explain the meaning of this sentence?
There is a setting in the “Reminders” app where Siri will automatically categorize your reminders into certain categories. If you have a shopping list and you add chickpeas and red beans for example it might put them into a category of “pulses and grains”. I think the idea is you probably buy all the things in a particular category from the same kind of store (or the same section of a supermarket or whatever).
For me yesterday I needed to buy dishwasher rinse aid so when I added it to my shopping list siri put it into the “beverages” category, and when my wife on a different occasion asked me to buy some makeup remover for her siri put that into a “condiments” section.
I have not done anything (on purpose) to make the classification like this by mistraining it or whatever - it’s just been that bad out of the box.
Dishwasher rinse aid - the tablets you put into the machine containing chemicals
Beverage - another word for drink
Makeup remover - for women
Condiments - something added to food to enhance its flavor
iOS tries to put shopping list items into AI named groups but doesn't seem to understand what objects actually are so it makes mistakes.
From the macOS 27 release notes in the System Settings app:
Doesn't anybody proofread copy anymore?/end-rant
It's not just tolerable, it's even enjoyable!
Enjoy and consume $product faster
Thanks for buying $product, $consumer
LIKE FASTER!
Seems like this is a draft / filler that was supposed to be updated. At least it’s not AI.
We can have these micro easter eggs clearly indicating that flawed humans were involved, or we can have perfectly proofread Opusplaining. Enjoy the former while you can!
Probably intended, because usually Mac is not very enjoyable
proof of not ai
"Artisanal" english.
Or it could be new, improved AI that's appearing not to be AI by sounding more human...
Or Siri AI is just not that good.
Have the really good copywriters left the profession already?
The download on my iPhone said it’s iOS 26.7, but it definitely installed 27 (:
I can't even
^ Intentional.
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This is going to sound like a really weird and irrelevant nitpick, but I dislike how they changed the version numbers to be year+1. I like that they all unified and have a relationship to the current year, but we're not buying cars. We're getting operating systems and not being confused about chronology is pretty important for bug tracking or other minutiae. Plus, the Mac lineup use(d) the year of release. Why move away from it? Is it really necessary to market and sell an operating system like it's a car or the latest Microsoft Office suite?
They’re telling you the year where the new OS will be stable enough that it’s a good idea to upgrade (joke’s on them, I still haven’t “upgraded” to Tahoe…)
Oh boy don’t! I’m also waiting for Golden Gate .1 release instead
Give me 10.6.9 with nothing changed except support for current machines.
TBH Tahoe feels like an especially buggy .0 still. I'm updating as soon as my laptop shows it as available in the hopes that it'll feel closer to a .1 than what Tahoe is.
From a psychological standpoint, maybe customers thinking 26 is old on their brand new device in 3 months isn't exactly good. People might start expecting 27 in 3 months when actually 27 is going to be around for most of the year.
Kind of like a vechical's model year.
It's not year+1, it's the year that most overlaps with that OS being the latest. 27 will be the latest OS for ~9 months of 2027 and only ~3 of 2026.
I also don't know why this would be considered more confusing for chronology. The year is in the name, whereas it was previously at best, years since version 1, or something more confusing in the case of macOS. I couldn't keep track of all the latest OS versions before, now we will be able to going forward.
They do yearly major releases in September for all their OSes. They are directly tied to the year.
Also Apple's fiscal year starts at the end of September. (Not exactly on Oct 1, because their fiscal calendar is weird.)
Do you hate *Ubuntu YY.MM style versions with their major LTS every even year in April and minor every October? Like April 2026 is 26.04
But Ubuntu sticks to the year and month the OS was released. I think OP was complaining about MacOS using year+1 as the version, even though the OS is being released in the current year.
I personally find Ubuntu's versioning to be the easiest to understand because you know when this Ubuntu version was released. It would be very annoying if they called Ubuntu 26.10 Ubuntu 27, though.
As someone who has been doing iOS programming for ~16 years I'm glad they did something. Nothing better than running Xcode 16, on macOS 15, to do iOS 18 work. Unless, of course, you also have watchOS 11 work too.
I think it’s because Apples fiscal year does start in October, so iOS 27 is basically released when Apple does start their fiscal year 2027.
You really think the marketing team based their version number on... the fiscal year?
That would be hilarious.
Yeah, I think it's far more likely that they don't want people buying devices with what looks like last year's operating system.
This feels like the kind of thing where the mismatching version numbers bugged some influential people internally. But I suppose a practical application could be recommending matching versions if customers run into issues since they are trying to integrate devices more.
Just breathe, relax, and stop worrying about useless things in life.
It will be the OS for 3 months of 2026 and 9 months of 2027.
they should release the new OS on the 1st of January
I think they had to rush out this version early to replace all the bullshit they did with liquid glass at lunch.
Reminder to wait a couple of months before upgrading macOS! Every single time issues are found after a new macOS version, give it a little bit of time before jumping right away on your work machine :)
Normally I’d agree.
But my experience with 26 hasn’t been great. From the top of my head: Random repeated flashing window chrome in the background, notifications that keep on showing while everything is disabled, Finder tooltips from four windows down, tooltips that don’t disappear, Java update interruptions that hijack your flow - just when you where about to hit enter for something else the pop-up shows and bam: you’re installing it. There is nothing right about the update process of Java anyway. Spotlight search has completely stopped working. People I’m mailing with for over a decade are not suggested when drafting a mail. Clicking on the dock icon does not reveal the app. The list goes on and on. It has been a total grueling experience. Worst in all my experiences since System 7.
I’ve shut down the notification system at some point, which alleviated the constant reminders of non-compatibility with the next OS version. Being reminded of that four times a day for months on end is just insulting, even if I used compatible versions. There was no way to shut it off. Notifications are lazily designed and completely uninspired, as they could also adjust the app icons and so on and actually do it right.
I promised myself to update once it came out and then just screen record everything to collect residual garbage to help the Apple team make this stuff work well for everyone.
Sorry to let this all out, but it has been on my mind for a while and I’m happy they say they focussed on quality. Therefore I’m upgrading asap this time.
How do you shut down the notification system?
Without any warranty, you need to get rid of NotificationCenter and usernoted. The first gets rid of the gui, the second of the entire infrastructure.
launchctl disable "gui/$(id -u)/com.apple.notificationcenterui" killall NotificationCenter 2>/dev/null || true
launchctl disable "gui/$(id -u)/com.apple.usernoted" killall usernoted 2>/dev/null || true
To refine my statement on lazy or non-design. Notifications can be valuable, for me i'd like backup notifications and find my messages. Only those, ever. When only those are enabled, MacOS has their own secret settings and is allowed to nag about updates, incompatibility and maybe some other things i don't remember. Part of the problem is the illusion of control, and being spammy about self-importance of new OS versions. Great for some users, insulting to me.
This is made even worse by "focus" which still shows notifications but without the text. Then i'm distracted AND i don't know why.
Dont you have to disable SIP to get rid of all those buildins?
I'm still on Sequoia (which took me ages to jump to from Ventura). :)
For anyone jumping versions: remember that Apple messed with the login keychain not being able to be backed up in the most recent Tahoe release [1], which means that issue will be around in Golden Gate.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49651046
Me too. I was just thinking recently about updating from Sequoia, now I've got to take a while and reconsider everything.
I was on Sequoia as well, and just updated ... first thing I noticed is LaunchPad is gone.
The Tahoe Dock "App View" / Spotlight just lists my 30 installed apps intermingled with Apple System Apps, which I hardly ever use. Hard coded categories, no way to re-order as far as I can tell.
Seems like the closest thing to LaunchPad is dragging ~/Applications to the Dock.
The other thing I have noticed is scrolling in Firefox is more choppy, and animations are more Janky than Sequoia on this old MacBook Air M1.
I'm staying on Sequoia for at least one more year.
iOS 27 is pretty good though.
I feel pretty good about the 27 series in a way I haven't in the past (I've been running iOS 27 and it's working well), except for one thing, they remove x86 support (no more Rosetta), so just keep that in mind in case that might disrupt anything for you.
People have already replied in part, but to clarify:
macOS 27 itself won't run on Intel chips, just Apple Silicon
but it does still have Rosetta (macOS 28 will drop it completely though)
you’re right, thanks for clarifying!
Rosetta is still present in 27.
I keep getting so many warnings about this though - maybe I'm misreading it? is 27 the LAST version with Rosetta maybe?
Yes, 27 is the final Rosetta version. The warnings are worded in a way that makes sense if you already know that but are easy to misunderstand if you don’t. I think they initially didn’t want to commit to the next version being called macOS 28. The final 27 release has started explicitly saying it’s going away in 28 which makes it a lot more straightforward.
I thought they weren't removing Rosetta until macOS 28. https://support.apple.com/en-us/102527
I normally suggest the same, but 26 has been universally bad. This is the "point release" or "Snow Leopard" edition of 26.
Sequoia is still supported and very solid right now. I'll probably skip Tahoe and update around 27.5.
So far, I haven’t read many complains about GG. Only the huge amount of space that the AI takes on the disk
As it stands Sequoia is the last good version of the OS.
I just updated my Mac Studio from Sequoia to Tahoe.
Gotta say, a massive downgrade.
why did you do that to yourself when an alleged fix is coming in a few months?
Figured it might be slightly less painful to update one major version at a time.
iPadOS 27 also isn't looking so hot that I'd believe macOS 27 to be a magic bullet.
Don't worry I am still on Sonoma :)
I'm still on Sequoia and I have zero intention of updating to this AI-saturated slop.
There are over 200 security patches in the newest versions of macOS. AI is helping patch previously unrealized holes.
> AI is helping patch previously unrealized holes.
AI is also making plenty of holes.
I have not seen a single case of anything that an AI has found that could not have been automatically found without AI.
Mozilla had 400 Firefox CVEs found by Mythos; if those were so easy to find, why didn’t humans do it before?
Humans did do it before.
------------------------
It's also worth pointing out that the developers at Mozilla literally decided to make a brand new programming language (Rust) that eliminated an entire categories of bugs and started working on a new browser (Servo) where its components could be switched into firefox.
Then Mozilla fired the team working on it.
Lesson 1: Better tools and processes eliminate bugs.
Lesson 2: If you don't have the tools, make them.
Lesson 3: Mismanagement leads to security vulnerabilities.
> It's also worth pointing out that the developers at Mozilla literally decided to make a brand new programming language (Rust)
In my memory, that does not seem 100% right. And indeed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_(programming_language)#20... says a single developer who happened to work at Mozilla started it as a personal project.
After a few years Mozilla became interested in it and then sponsored its development, transforming it into the language it is today.
Good point about the whole new language as a tool for eliminating many thousands(?) as a whole category
Yes, and even after introducing and using Rust, there were still vulns in the remaining code.
FWIW, Rust is my main language, so I am grateful to the humans that created it, and it is indeed a monumental effort. But vuln finding is a different kind of creative endeavour, and one that is heavily weighted against defenders.
Yes, which is why you don't stop at rust.
You would choose rust (from a security standpoint) because it massively reduces memory safety issues (which from a Microsoft study was responsible for around 70% of bugs).
Then you look at things like linting, fuzzing, design by contract, proofing, deterministic test runs, etc...
As I said above: use better tools and processes.
LLMs don't fit that criteria.
Yes, I should have been clear - I don't mind AI working on patches or vuln-hunting; my issue with MacOS 27 is the amount of AI included in the OS that is not opt-in. I use Claude Code everyday - but it doesn't run locally on my main production machines.
If Apple wanted to make the OS more secure, they would make the OS more modular, allowing users to reduce the surface risk by not installing bloated components
You have the same long list for Sequoia 15.8, so how is that better? Besides, newer OSes are also more likely to have uniquely knew bugs from both AI slop and in general all the shiny new broken features
i'm sure most of those patches will keep coming to Sequoia over the coming years
They've already come?15.8 has a long list of vulns fixed
I’ve been running it for a couple months, I’d say we’re pretty much out of danger.
This seems to be the consensus viewpoint but outside of a few highly specific and known-in-advance incompatibilities on work laptops, I have been essentially a day-one adopter since Leopard and I cannot recall any issues that rose above a minor annoyance.
There have certainly been changes like Liquid Glass that were for the worse overall (though the degree of which had been highly overblown). But outside of directional disagreement with a release, I can’t say I’ve ever seen an issue where I’ve regretted pulling the trigger on an update.
yes. I have been waiting 12 months already because Tahoe didn't convince many people, and I dread the moment I upgrade my mpb m3. Maybe I should just keep the factory OS
I finally upgraded to Tahoe a couple weeks ago after putting it off for ages. As soon as it came up, my external monitor (connected by DVI to a caldigit dock) started being flaky af. I have to reconnect 2-3 times to get it to properly detect.
cool beans.
I don't understand this viewpoint. So, the release version is 27.0 build 26A428. That build is static, how can it get more stable than it is right now? Lets say 27.1 comes out in 2 weeks - do you update to 27.0 instead of 27.1? When is it snappy enough?
There have been far more buggy iOS releases than stable ones. A few years in particular were absolute disasters until December or January. It is very sound graybeard advice to wait until the .1 release. Apple has not earned the trust to upgrade on day 1.
I don’t understand what you mean by snappy. Apple is notorious for releasing buggy macOS major versions. You wait 6 months, then upgrade without having to be their tester. Snappiness has nothing to do with that, any macOS version on apple silicon is snappy
Taking this at face value they say wait for the incremental updates. I think some big rollouts have had fringe issues and they are saying to minimize the probability you get a random bug it's better to wait for a 27.x or 27.0.x before upgrading, and to upgrade to that one, not 27.0
In theory that makes sense, in practice I've never had any issues with updating on day one and it's often necessary if you want to develop for iOS / macOS anyway unless you have a dedicated developer machine.
I used to always do this but I hate liquid glass with such passion that I even upgraded to an iOS beta just to get any improvements to it. Worst UI update in the history of the company.
I have updated macOS and iOS around day one of release since 2008 and have yet to experience meaningful issues, AMA.
There is not much point in asking if you're so imperceptive
Maybe it's time to upgrade from Sequoia? But a few more months can't hurt :)
yep last time it completely broke Internet but fortunately there was a workaround available via cellular
You don't have to! I always update the day of. So far, no regrets!
Good advice.
You do you. I backup and install once the RC goes live. Have done for years. Only problem I recall was a few years ago Homebrew got in a tizzy for a day.
One exception maybe is for music producers. For some reason AU/VST/DAW developers don't seem to take part in the beta programs and their software can take a while to get updated. But I've happily been playing with Bitwig (with some Arturia VSTs) over the weekend on Golden Gate without issue.
I keep the studio computer OS a full version behind.
My impression from audio developers is that the audio infrastructure is very badly documented (like so much of MacOS nowadays) and using it properly requires a combination of luck, WWDC videos, and devrel threads. Also, Apple introduces changes that are genuine improvements in theory, but break undocumented assumptions.
The lack of rigor is a bit surprising given that audio is probably the only mission-critical hard-real-time thing MacOS does. People routinely run an entire live concert on a Mac and an audio glitch is not OK! (Yes, if it’s Taylor Swift budget then there are at least two machines in sync with a big red button to switch over…)
But given what they’re dealing with, I understand why it’s more involved than just “the developers didn’t try the betas”.
I think it’s because apple has no competition with regards to audio, there is close to no pressure to document and QA things properly
Did they fix the thing where you have to wait like 2 seconds for the context menu to open up when you want to paste something? Does anyone else notice that you tap on the screen and it takes literally 3 full seconds for the little pop-up where you can press the paste button to appear,
Probably continuity network slowness. Universal Clipboard is probably seeing if your other device just added something to the clipboard.
Oh my! That solved it! Thank you so much!
How is it solved? You can't disable the clipboard sync, only disable handoff altogether.
i think that was sarcastic or should have been sarcastic :D
100% not sarcastic. I disabled all continuity options and the annoying delay to bring up the context menu is gone. My phone is my only apple product. I don't need it.
Where is that setting ? Can only find continuity related to AirPlay
Edit:
Disabled everything on "Continuity and AirPlay" as well. Guessing it might be the "Handoff" setting. Not sure that the menu pops up any faster though
Yeah, it was "handoff". It was always taking a long second or two before it would open. Now it is instant
/shrug
So after disabling this I realised since I only have an iPhone (and no Mac or other Apple devices) I should disable anything and everything in the settings that syncs stuff between devices. There was also one about the Focus options (like Do Not Disturb) and some other ones. I figure this can only simplify everything and speed up the phone if it never has to check for any (non existent) device to sync settings against. Still have all my local phone settings backing up to iCloud
Why didn’t you ask an llm if it was bothering you? It would have solved this easily as well
/shrug
This is my first iphone since the original. I thought that is just how it was.
The question is if Apple fixed that and I don't think they have.
You think that's ridiculous, try sharing a video on WhatsApp that's longer than a minute. See how "easy" that process is, especially if you walk away from your phone while it's "processing" or "preparing" the video.
Everything in 26 takes longer with all the bs easing that got drizzled over the interface.
Ive switched to “reduced motion” in accessibility settings and it’s gone
The problem with this is that iirc, this also signals to web pages that you do not like a lot of motion, which IS a nice UX enhancer for some pages, but might supress animations from (auto)playing where it's not what you want because the animations are the reasons you're visiting that page.
I’ve spent a lot of time testing the new Siri. Overall I like it and believe this will become a very powerful tool but definitely think it needs work.
- Example: “Siri for the lights that are already on in the family room, can you put those lights to 50% brightness?” -> All the lights turn on incorrectly. This is a two step process. Get information from Home and then execute command with that info.
- Example: “Remind me to call back Joe at 5pm.” -> Siri oddly has trouble with this. Asking me what time after I give this command. Is it not hearing full command?
- Example: It seems to ask me to clarify the name of something when that name is readily available in recent personal context. Like recent 5 messages. It should be able to know some of this stuff as I’m most likely operating on recent stuff.
It seems to be hampered in some way. Gemini should be able to handle that tool call really easily.
Other things are great. Like I have my checking account and routing number buried in Notes somewhere. When I’m in safari and ask it to autofill with the routing number from notes. It does it. Amazing.
I’m so bullish on LLMs and my personal context but there are some kinks here that hamper performance so far.
One of the few things I use Siri for is converting units and still in iOS 27 we have:
- "What is three fifty degrees Fahrenheit in Celsius?" -> "53°F = 11.67°C"
Also disappointing:
- "Add mow the lawn to my chores note." -> "Sorry, I can't help with that."
I've had the latter with Gemini in Android Auto. In fact, my scenario was even worse.
Me: "Send a message to <wife>".
Gemini: "OK what's the message?"
Me: "Can you bring Tylenol I'm having a headache?"
Gemini: "I'm sorry, I cannot help with that. If you need medical advice..." <-- or something to that extent.
Up to this point, I thought when Gemini would prompt for a message, it would simply accept whatever I said essentially as plain text - and maybe with the new Rambler feature on Pixel phones it may cleanup my message slightly.
But now I can see scenarios where Gemini would possibly need to parse my input. And it should have been obvious since I would often say things like "cancel" and I never questioned it.
It’s really pathetic. I would think even the lowest quality LLMs could figure out tool use like this. It has to figure out the tool and most of the time, it’s stated in the command. Like remind me or put this in notes, so why can’t it do this more easily. I’m just having trouble figuring out why. I’m curious if they still have tons of rules in the background in a way that is muddying the pure LLM experience.
I don't use voice often (I'm also not quite sure what you're asking with 'three fifty', but if I just type '50F' into the new Siri it immediately shows '10C'. Hopefully the voice recognition continues to improve.
Three fifty = 350?
It’s not an unusual way to save effort when speaking.
Ah, doh! I just tested it and it worked. Siri clearly can answer the question, now it seems more like a speech to text issue. I wonder if everything is using the new models or if stt is still using the old ones?
“Then preheat the oven to three fifty, and give that spoon a lick …”
No high hopes for how that recipe turns out with Siri in the kitchen then
So, is it better (faster, stronger, etc) than iOS 18? Everyone says iOS 26 was not good at all and iOS 27 is much better, but it seems like it's fairly simple to make something that's better than iOS 26. A more interesting question is whether it's better than iOS 18? Does anyone have any experience switching from iOS 18 to, say, some beta of iOS 27?
It's "better" if you like eye candy, animations are more drawn out and deliberate. Otherwise they're functionally identical (and has ever been since iPhone X).
For me 26 absolutely chews through battery compared to 18 (I have the last gen iPhone SE). Hopefully 27 doesn't make that worse, but i'm holding off on upgrading. Really took me by surprise.
Definitely made it worse for me. I'm on 15 pro, and when I have anything intensive open (ranging from youtube video ~ games), the phone starts burning through my hand and the battery in it. I would've kept 18 forever, except the camera on the old one died out and replacement came with 26 :(
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You can always read a review:
> The promise of iOS 27 is that it’ll not only unlock new capabilities but also make your existing workflows smoother and quicker.
https://sixcolors.com/post/2026/09/ios-27-review-little-thin...
An update that improves performance on even the oldest supported device is a win.
That's a nice overview, but it seems to compare iOS 27 to iOS 26. Isn't iOS 26 known to be terrible, though? I'd like a comparison to a "known-good" iOS version. Basically I skipped iOS 26 (so I have zero experience with it) and am now wondering whether iOS 27 is any good
That's dramatically overstating it. iOS 26 was just... alright. It wasn't great. It also wasn't the devil incarnate in a phone. iOS 27 has been legimately good since the early public betas.
> The good news is there are some places where things are just better across the board. In general, iOS 27 feels peppy. I know, we always talk about snappiness, but given the time Apple has spent on improving performance and removing bugs with this release, it’s reassuring to see that it’s borne out by my experience. Apps launch quickly, photos sync faster via iCloud, AirDrop transfers are especially rapid, browsing my NAS via the Files app was downright speedy compared to earlier versions.
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I skipped macOS 26 (except on my work laptop, where it’s crap), but I don’t think iOS 26 is significantly worse overall than iOS 18.
Why would I read reviews for "the promise"? So after reading the review, how much has performance improved over 18?
"Better" is subjective. I've been using iOS 27 beta and other than a few bugs it hasn't been that bad. I only had some minor downgrades in Safari UI, but those are minor and personal.
One thing I hated was a downgrade in Photos app on iOS 26 though, that hasn't improved in 27. Unfortunately it seems I was the only one loving Photos on iOS 18.
I did jump from macOS 18 to macOS 27 beta though and Safari's UI is abhorrent.
Did you see 26? Is it even worse than on 26? It is so bad it got me off from binge browsing... so Nice work Apple I guess.
”it seems like it's fairly simple to make something that's better than iOS 26”
Regression to the mean
It improves performance on the oldest iOS device that is supported.
Compared to iOS 18? Or just compared to 26? how so?
> The good news is there are some places where things are just better across the board. In general, iOS 27 feels peppy. I know, we always talk about snappiness, but given the time Apple has spent on improving performance and removing bugs with this release, it’s reassuring to see that it’s borne out by my experience. Apps launch quickly, photos sync faster via iCloud, AirDrop transfers are especially rapid, browsing my NAS via the Files app was downright speedy compared to earlier versions.
https://sixcolors.com/post/2026/09/ios-27-review-little-thin...
I didn't see a single reference to iOS 18 in that article. So while I understand it would be faster than 26, those of us wondering about the comparison to iOS 18 are still in the dark.
most likely they compare it to 26. It is an easy fix then, because they messed it up already compared to 18.
Siri AI feels like a beta version (I think it officially is?). It’s unaware indexing isn’t done yet so it just tells me “I can’t find any photos of Italy” although there’s many thousands. Then it tells me how to let it access my photos using nonexistent iOS settings, even though permissions aren’t the problem. Amateurish.
It is still not multi language. I mean I can talk to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, fucking Grok in any language I want and it will understand / respond in given language. Apple being Apple, I have to choose a language in Siri menu and it has to be the phone language for some reason.. Otherwise it downgrades to old Siri.
Apple's incompetence in AI / Assistant etc stuff has to be studied.
What is amazing to me is that when driving, Siri used to read out messages sent to me in other languages in the original language.
Now it just says something like "A message in a different language".
I think Apple's top-down approach is showing here. Google is more bottom-up, which has its flaws, but it's more suited for cases like this one. I seems that unless one of Apple's higher-ups notices a problem nobody is going to do anything.
For example, Android and Google Assistant has had excellent support for Polish for more than a decade. Siri still doesn't support Polish at all, even though all of Apple's AI suppliers support Polish perfectly well...
> Apple's incompetence in AI / Assistant etc stuff has to be studied.
Why should Apple focus on technical excellence when the company and their products are touted for literally gimmicks? In the end this is what brings the money and profits through the door, can't blame a company for providing what the market craves.
The market craves good AI experiences... But that doesn't mean Apple is capable of delivering it at this stage.
Does the market crave good AI experiences?
LLMs are eating software, maths, and LinkedIn posts; some of the image generators are seeing similar (limited) success.
Other than that, my general impression is that most people think of even the best as garbage.
("Other than". In fairness, most people thought LinkedIn posts were already garbage, it's just that it wasn't made any worse by LLMs).
This post is a testament that mobile AI experience on Android is much better and yet iphones are not really losing market share to that.
I just don't think they have it in them to be a leader in a new, experimental tech like this.
They took like 7 years to come out with a foldable iPhone remember - lol!
Apple’s scatterbrained OS-bundled software is just embarrassing at this point. Half-baked release after half-baked release. I’m convinced that modern Apple simply can’t ship good software any longer.
The “headline features simply must not slip” cadence is ruining the products. The moneymaker, the iPhone, needs the new OS to work (iPhone 18 hardware has never run on iOS 26), so the OS release can’t be delayed for any reason. The other OSes are lashed to this sinking ship, quality-wise, because they all come out together.
Once per year, everyone has to crunch against an impossible deadline, and something has to give. That thing is quality.
Its crazy to insist on releasing all new operating systems for these devices at the same time. I didn't realize they were doing that. If one team is behind they would still have to ship it anyway
This is precisely what it is, which is why 27.0.1 will come out so rapidly, and will fix the immediate jank, and then 27.1 the next month (tbh it is probably already massively underway right now and 27.0.1 is likely in testing).
I agree. I worked at a company where we transitioned to big releases aligned with a yearly event and it was a disaster. It became all about marketing and bodges.
Yes, I've been encountering this for weeks (because that's how long it has taken indexing to run...) and my workaround has been to switch to GooglePhotos since I backup everything to it.
Apple search in Photos has always been garbage so I almost always flip over to Google Photos anyway.
It blows my mind that a trillion-dollar company with the ability to attract the world’s top talent has struggled for years to make a chatbot.
My phone kept saying it couldn't find anything, until I realised I turned off Spotlight Suggestions for photos, contacts, mail etc. Once I turned them on, Siri could access it.
Why don't you therefore just wait until indexing is done?
Why Apple doesn't say "I'm sorry but your photos aren't accessible because they are being sorted and indexed at the moment"?
I didn't know in advance why Siri can't access my photos (turns out it's because indexing isn't done) - at the beginning I thought there was some sort of other problem. Later I figured out (after going through privacy/permissions stuff) that it's too stupid to know why it can't see my photos.
Amateurish.
Ah yes, the pleasures of paying $1000+ dollars for a phone whose developers can't even bother to add an `if (!indexingDone)`.
I'll answer your question though: because it doesn't show anywhere the progress of the indexing.
https://www.bugsappleloves.com/
It's on the list there alright.
At this point Gemini has been fully integrated in android for like 2 years, why is Apple so behind?
Siri is a really bad product, holy shit.
26GB for an update is pretty steep considering their base macs are still on 256GB SSDs.
How can I not remove 35GB of "Apple Intelligence" download? I hope there is a way to do this both on macOS and on the iPhone too
On macOS you can delete them manually (though it requires booting into recovery mode and temporarily disabling System Integrity Protection).
https://github.com/tejyash/delete-apple-intelligence-macos
Apple Intelligence and Siri were separate toggles before, but no more.
Curious if it lets you reclaim space if you turn off Siri.
I turned it off on my iPhone and no... you don't reclaim the space
CNET says that the OS auto-reclaims the space when needed: https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/how-to-turn-...
They don't have incentives to reclaim space imediately since disks that appear to be full sell more iCloud subscriptions.
Don't get me started as well on how the iCloud plans jump from 200gb to 2TB with absolutely nothing in between. Apple really knows how to extort their customers!
That's not just an Apple thing though. Google does the same thing. Dropbox only offers 2TB plan. OneDrive is just as expensive but offers 1TB.
They are all counting on you not using all of that space in the 2TB plan. So the avg user is subsidizing the usage of some small fraction of power users. They don't want to offer pay-per-use pricing plans because then they would have to increase the price ($/GB/month) to keep their existing margins.
I'm stuck in this dilema too.
This is one of the very techniques under which the entire Apple Empire has been built. They take the "sweet spot" for $product and intentionally offer options on either side of that sweet spot. They also nerf the lower-end option in other ways (i.e. fewer ports) so to make the upgrade more enticing. This enables them to offer "Prices starting from...." that are dead-end options (like 8GB RAM or 128GB HD's).
Lots of companies do this across various industries. But it works best when the brand name is really strong and/or the competitive landscape is very weak.
I've grown to accept that it's just how they operate.
Apple should not be allowed to have a monopoly on iCloud. They ought to be forced to have an open spec such that competitors could offer alternative cloud storage services.
PHOTOS
Glad to see that Shared Albums are now full resolution!
Now, please:
1. Allow us to edit the photo order of the Shared Album (instead of the order that the photos were added to it). Currently, my wedding unfolds in the wrong order, and my kid turns 6 months old before being born.
2. Fix identification/clean-up of duplicates.
3. Give us a way to tidy up facial recognition.
4. Allow us to join "best quality possible" collectives, which will replace our poor-quality photos with higher-quality originals from somebody else's library.
It’s a study in the rather tricky double edged sword of the Apple walled garden; on one hand they have control that allows providing extremely satisfying interactions and performance, on the other hand, because it’s been a soulless line-go-up corporation, it has very low pressure incentives to take anything beyond the 85% level.
So we are all stuck with an 85% very performant, e.g., Photos app, that has 15% extremely annoying and/or lack of features and functionality; because Apple cannot let go of control, but also fails in its responsibility, as is typical of controlling entities.
> 1. Allow us to edit the photo order of the Shared Album (instead of the order that the photos were added to it). Currently, my wedding unfolds in the wrong order, and my kid turns 6 months old before being born.
You can already do this for a long time
I don’t want a new screen time experience , I just want it to work. Much to my surprise, it’s extraordinarily brittle, to such an extent that it’s virtually useless.
As a parent of kids with iThings, the parental controls/screen time experience is incredibly bad. I have no idea why they are not interested in having it work.
100% agree. We had to turn it off because it was too frustrating for everyone involve. Now we’re at “trust, but verify” where “verify” is looking at Screen Time stats at the end of each week.
My only plausible explanation is that no one who works at Apple has kids.
That’s a good idea . So you’re telling me that I can trust the on device numbers enough?
I've never been quite clear that the numbers are completely trustworthy, but at least the counting is more solid than the restrictions and the passwords.
One thing I've noticed on my own device, that, counter-intuitively, screentime also seems to include time when the screen is off, e.g. playing music through Safari with the screen turned off.
As an example of the fragility of the screentime passwords, the password on a child's device can often be removed by simply turning off the screentime password - it will not always prompt for the current password. Until recently, I actually thought that it was intentional that a password was not required to disable the screentime password on a child device.
I recently had a crazy experience where many restrictions and a screentime password seemed to suddenly get enabled on a child's device. We had just turned on screentime, but without restrictions or a password. It seems as though a bug caused the restrictions to revert to those used a long time ago during an exam period, with very strict time restrictions. It was almost unusable, and no one knew the screentime password. The crazy part is that I tried dozens of passwords - many on the first day, and then one a day for weeks. I was certainly the only one touching the device from that point. One day, when I tried to turn off the screentime password, it just turned off. Unlike every other day for the past few weeks, it did not prompt for a password at all.
Thanks this mirrors my experience. I’ll try your trust and verify approach then.
> So you’re telling me that I can trust the on device numbers enough?
Not at all :-) But at least this process doesn’t lead to pain and suffering because either the ScreenTime notification doesn’t arrive on a parent device, or the “Allow” action isn’t picked up by the child’s device. The whole messaging part to get permission to do something is really unreliable, at least in our household.
I wouldn't trust them. I have seen screen time over 24H at least twice.
Isn't it being revamped a big feature of iOS 27 ?
Yes and that’s my point. I don’t care about any ui or features change - I want the very basic functionality to work and it currently doesn’t.
What doesn't work ?
Fair question.
I expect the following from such a system : I set a time limit per app/set of apps,and the phone locks said apps once the limit is reached. In theory, this is what it does, in practice it almost never works : it doesn’t lock, gets broken whenever you upgrade the os, gets broken whenever your child upgrades the os, can be trivially bypassed by a kid, cannot be unlocked when you want it to unlock remotely etc I’ve also seen trivially bad data ( phone usage when it was in my pocket ). It’s worth noting you also need an Idevice to set it remotely - if your significant other has an android device he or she is out of luck.
I was very surprised at how appallingly bad it was - just try it for a few weeks and you’ll immediately notice it’s badly broken but somehow doesn’t fix it.
Contrast this to google’s system which, well, works.
Edit : it’s so mind bogglingly bad that I’m genuinely curious to talk to someone who works at apple about this.
So I don't have kids but in the keynote I remember them making a big deal about totally revamping it in 27. I know they definitely added a way to officially lock it (with a passcode) so your kids won't be able to theoretically just deactivate screen time. I think before you technically could do sorta the same thing (you can restrict almost any app to require FaceID or passcode to unlock).
There's also the assistive access or whatever which really locks the phone down but that seems more like for old people.
Alternatively if you wanted to get advanced you could maybe (not sure if it's free) create an Apple business account and try to manage the phone like corporations do. Or you may just be able to generate a configuration profile for free and add to the device. I would expect that process to be a lot more robust generally. You can control pretty much anything. Downside is if you don't have an MDM your stuck with whatever settings are baked into that config profile. Depending what you want to restrict you could pair it with something like NextDNS and lock it down to only safe sites.
Sounds like Android is way better though in this regard. Having to setup a child specific account at the beginning of setup sounds like a pain. If I ever have kids makes me really want to only give them a dumb phone or something like the new (unreleased as of yet) Commodore Callback - has some smartphone features but intentionally no social media
The main problem here is that even if they revamp it, it likely still won’t work since the most basic features don’t work as advertised . It’s like buying a car and it won’t start every other day and will only move backwards.
Wow those supposed improvements sound great. Though what good are features if they don’t work reliably?
The state of parental controls on apple devices is absolutely appalling.
The more time kids spend on the device, the more revenue Apple generates. They don’t have any incentive for it to really work.
Android’s is also maliciously bad.
Oddly, Alcatel has (had?) a nice version for their landfill androids a few years ago.
My least favorite part is how the parental controls are locked into iMessage. There's no way to manage parental controls from anything other than another iDevice. I suppose this is a sales strategy for them - parent must buy an iDevice as well.
How depressing this first demo video about mum, grandma and the fruits.
These are basic things of our lives that make us humans : caring about others, remembering what they say, knowing how to recognize a fruit, enjoying colors of the fruits with your eyes, not through your retina display, thinking about the food recipes that we know.
I don't know if this is because I'm european and the gap keeps getting larger across the Atlantic, but what a depressing life those giants are telling us here.
I got the same feeling from the scene about the new Apple Watch features in the media event on Wednesday. Having a device listen to your conversations for you, so that you can avoid the hassle of having to ask someone to repeat themselves when you zone out, seems a little depressing to me. It makes Apple seem a little out of touch as well. (Are AI note taking "pins" and hardware devices really something people want? Why emulate them?)
In business it is very useful, especially when you have to do lots of context switches.
Yeah and maybe you can replay your own requests to Siri if it doesn't catch it the first time?
Yeah, few hours/days after the meeting about a minor detail... In a business settings meetings are routinely recorded and transcribed because everybody is just lazy.
You’re mad that Siri was asked to find a recipe in an email and add its items to a grocery list?
That doesn’t sound like a cultural divide issue.
I went to see the video expecting to agree with you, but actually I agree with the parent poster.
The video comes off as she doesn't care about her mom, or the recipe, or cooking, and the person doesn't even know what a peach is. The tone in which she says "what did mom mention...", as if she's clearly distracted thinking about something else, probably her busy NY job, and just have AI deal with this annoyance of family as fast as possible... plus she needs AI to read the email and tell her which peaches to get? I dunno, read the email and interpret it yourself, you probably know your mom better than Siri? And call your mom in case of doubt? Maybe I'm too Spanish... but it felt quite dystopian...
All of these AI demos have the same vibe "You'll save so much time now AI can reword your mum's text messages". I don't know what these SV guys are doing, but writing shopping lists, talking to my friends, or booking a haircut doesn't take me very much time at all.
What I want is an AI that detects I'm scrolling social media and closes the app. That would save me many hours a week vs trying to save 30 seconds on reserving a table for dinner.
Who wants to spend time with family, cooking, taking care of self, when there are the shareholders, who need bigger yachts? Seriously, you guys are so out of touch... Why care for any of these, when we are loosing the AI race, and maybe it won't be "our" (employer's, or even favorite product manufacturer's) AI obliterating human race, but a competitors? /s
What did you expect on this SV VC funded site? There is a serious selection bias here, and in all SV.
This is actually how it works in silicon variety. Tech workers are expected to give 100% to the company, families and other matter like a kid are seen as “disturbance”.
This reminds me so much of the movie Her, where the main character’s job is to write heartfelt letters to people’s friends, family, even lovers, that they can’t be bothered to write themselves.
I would typically never install a .0 release, but as an 18 holdout who begrudgingly had to finally "upgrade" to 26, I have to say 27 really is an improvement. The egregious bugs are gone. Safari is usable again. You can pretty much disable liquid glass. It feels faster. This is all I really wanted.
I just updated my M1 MBA, it feels basically the same as 26 performance wise (that being said, I didn't notice a performance difference between 18 and 26 either).
I think the appearance is actually worse. They haven't addressed the giant padding areas 26 added to everything, but they added a faux-3D effect to the Liquid Glass. Even if you set the glass to opaque, the faux-3D remains. I don't mind faux-3D (I thought Windows 7 and OS X 10.6 looked fine) but it looks out of place here because the majority of the UI still uses flat design. It looks like if you installed a Windows 7 theme on top of Windows 10, then cancelled the install midway through so it's half applied.
The light theme still has the contrast blown out and hurts my eyes to look at, so I still have to use dark mode even though I preferred light mode on 18 and below.
I’ve been having a different experience with Safari. It’s crashed my phone a half dozen times so far. Surprisingly, when it comes back to the lock screen afterward, it doesn’t make me enter my passcode.
I only had 2 extensions installed. I disabled uBlock, that didn’t fix it. I just manually rebooted my phone to see if that helps. If it crashes again I’ll be disabling all extensions.
I’m a bit shocked, since “stable” was the one thing I kept hearing about this release.
> You can pretty much disable liquid glass.
the semaphore too? i am hating it.
Not updating from Sequoia until the Liquid Glass era is over.
They literally give you a new slider to increase or reduce the Liquid Glass effect to align with your personal preferences.
Unfortunately the slider does not fix Liquid Glass. Notifications are still unreadable even when you go full opaque. You need to also toggle Reduce Transparency to actually get the UI to be opaque enough to be readable.
Jeez, it's an accessibility feature and they just turned it off!
I don't mind liquid glass and can handle the transparency mostly, but the notifications are just god-awful and difficult to read (white on light glass, using dark mode, who comes up with this stuff?).
But reducing transparency is a much harder setting now (should be "removing transparency"), I don't like it anymore, it also messes with the wallpaper. The previous setting was just right for me. Now the app squares are just black, very bad with dark icons.
Your saying the "reduce transparency" setting changed between 26 and 27?
I've been running it since 18 (first thing I do is go into accessibility and turn off any animations and screen effects that take GPU cycles)
Yes it changed, first it reduced the transparency in many places, most notably in notifications, and made the glass dark. Now it makes the glass just a black plastic, but also in the launcher, where dark icons don't pop out anymore.
The old setting was the perfect balance for me. Ah well, iPhone 12 mini is nearly dead, am eyeballing something with GrapheneOS anyway...
That's certainly not what the reviews say:
> I’ve been happily using the totally frosted look (slider all the way to the right) for a few weeks now. While I didn’t mind Liquid Glass as much as other folks, the frosted setting ensures I can read and see the text, menus and icons properly.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/ive-been-usi...
That's certainty not what the reviews say, the complaint was about notifications, your quote doesn't mention them
Just anecdotally, increasing the blur seems to have an associated performance cost, especially in Springboard ("the home screen".) It's probably only ~100ms for each interaction, so it probably won't impact latency-insensitive users.
As others have said, it helps with the legibility but Liquid Glass is still distracting and illegible. I share the wish that Apple eventually returns to a more sensible, legible UI.
> only ~100ms for each interaction
Wow.
I want to stress this isn't something I measured. There are just these noticeable lags before the sigmoidal animation starts when, e.g. opening a folder.
It's on top of the latency inherent to the animations of sliding, wiggling, wobbling, jiggling, etc. that are throughout the interface. ~100ms on top of a ~600ms input-blocking sigmoid probably just looks like a 700ms sigmoid to people.
Transparency is obviously not the only change they added with this liquid glass thing.
And fixed the dumb sidebar design
You’ll probably be waiting around a decade, then (about the amount of time Apple has between these refreshes), and won’t be able to upgrade your Mac hardware (because they never support OSs older than what they ship with). For people developing for Apple platforms, there are even more restrictions.
All of that is fine, of course, just as long as you’re aware. I also hate Liquid Glass, but unfortunately don’t think I can avoid it for another year. I just hope that the stuff they rolled back makes it bearable.
Still daily driving the 6s after almost 11 glorious years, and I can't imagine software ever being painfully slow on M series hardware. But if you need, well, are forced, to be on latest MacOS, then you are out of luck and you have my sympathy.
(My relatives iPhone updated and its just bad all around. And with increased font size for accessibility, elements don't cover all the text. Feels rushed and not the promised Apple land.)
The 6s was great, I had mine until it literally came apart.
It's really not that bad.
I agree, despite being quite the Liquid Glass hater at first. It has grown on me, and they have ironed out the worst kinks. I still don't love it, but it's great that we're getting a bit of three-dimensionality back, after all the ambiguity that comes with the flat design trend of the decade or so before Liquid Glass.
It's fine on iOS, it's painful on macOS. The "squircle jail" is one of the worst design crimes Apple has shipped in a long time and another step back for Mac iconography.
but it's bad enough to be worth not upgrading.
The panic is overblown.
The panic was, frankly, underblown at first. The first iterations of Liquid Glass were truly awful. It’s now okay, after a lot of tweaking and a LOT less “glass”. Now we have more frost.
But Liquid Glass is still broken at a conceptual level. The only way to fix it is to start all over. Which they basically are, by swapping parts of liquid glass out with every release.
Indeed, such a basic and obvious design fail yet all those "I can't read text, but it's grown on me"
The thing that I disliked the most about Tahoe is that they made light mode extremely bright, so it was a lot more uncomfortable to look at than Sequoia. I had to switch the computer to dark mode as a workaround. Did they fix this in Golden Gate or is light mode still too bright?
There's a fix on the keyboard, it's got a little sun icon, next to the escape key.
I just upgraded last week. For the most part, I really don't care. It was not a noticeable change.
...relative to what, Windows 11?
I find Win 11 UI better than Liquid Glass, if not by much
Its advantage is diminishing, as for some reason MS thinks it is a good idea to copy every bad design pattern from Mac...
Same
It looks significantly better on the Mac with this release.
Waiting 10 years for the next major overhaul seems like a bad plan.
I hate liquid glass with passion. Having said that, it's much more bearable in 27.
Usually I wait until december to install the new iOS on my phone, since most of the time I don't care about the upgrades. This time I installed iOS 27 beta on my phone since the public beta was out, and I had 0 new bugs compared to iOS 26, but it hasn't been the big relief that I hoped for.
Now I am worried about what the new versions of iOS will bring us, I hope that the "we removed the crap" wasn't just a thing of this year, and that iOS will go back to high software standards. Phone prices are really high for me now, and I would like for my poor little iphone 13 to survive another couple of years.
So what's your experience in terms of speed and battery life with iOS 27 on the iPhone 13 so far? I have a 13 mini, and I still haven't gotten over the (perceived) shorter battery life with iOS 26.
Upgrading the battery on my iPhone 12 Pro has been a fucking revelation. I just don't run out of battery any more. I'm sure Apple was telling me it was only 20% degraded or something too, but I would strongly, strongly recommend this if thinking about battery life is currently an issue for you.
That could be a factor for sure, but this iOS upgrade basically broke mu iPhone as switching between apps got noticeably slower and sometimes the UI gets stuck for a second or two especially when switching between the camera and other apps. I'm so sorry I gave in and installed it.
I think it's different for mini owners. I upgraded my battery in march of this year and its already at 89%, I blame ios26 frankly.
Oof! Mine is still the original one, and it’s incidentally also at 89% after maybe 3.5 years of being my daily driver.
I would say bettery is about the same of iOS 26, but mine is quite cooked (78% battery health) and I have to replace it.
Performance is for sure better. Not as much as I expected (I expected to notice it everyday), and I can't give you a number, but I remember that I noticed stuff being faster the first couple of days that I installed the beta, but now I got used to it
I run iOS 18 and have no problems with my battery, it is at 73%. iPhone 14 Pro. Don't think I'm going to install 27 either.
I reviewed the battery test results for iOS versions 26 (26.2, 26.3, 26.4, 26.6) and 27. The comparison covered the iPhone 14 series and newer models. The batteries in each model retain their charge 10–15% less effectively on iOS 27.
Thanks kind stranger, genuinely appreciate the info. I had my suspicions.
Are you exaggerating? I tried the latest beta about a month ago and experienced multiple bugs within half an hour. Had to downgrade back to 26.
I concur with gekoxyz - I've been using the iOS and macOS 27 developer betas since about beta 3 on my personal devices, and had actually forgotten to a large extent that I was running beta software. It's been excellent - a marked difference to the 26 releases.
No, not exaggerating at all, but I'm not a power user of the phone. I just do really simple stuff, and I didn't find new bugs, just old ones. But obviously that's my experience... The most noticeable stuff was the app launch speed.
Interesting. Bugs on mine were from using core apps, IIRC. I wonder if bugs manifest on some iPhone hardware versions? Or maybe even which iOS version the phone was upgrade from?
My favourite feature about this release is that support for ultra wide monitors dramatically improved.
I bought a MacBook Pro (M5 Pro) in march and was shocked that it did not work properly with my LG 38WN95C-W Monitor (3840x1600@144Hz via USB-C).
This has been fixed with macOS 27. I finally can use the native resolution + HiDPI with my monitor.
Oh! How's the text rendering now? In macOS 26 I had to return a new ultrawide because macOS hates non-retina displays and text was blurry af. Worth trying now?
Yes, it fully works for me!
Terminal:
Output:macOS 26:
macOS 27: 144 Hz works as well.I had to undo some of my previous configurations (0: disabled, 2: default)
Apple lists ultrawide display support as a feature: Copied from: https://www.apple.com/os/macos/Previous discussion about macOS 26 Problem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47569502
Thank you very much!
I got a MacBook a few weeks ago, first Apple computer I have ever owned. I was so surprised when I plugged my 4K monitor into it, there didn't seem to be a way to run it at native resolution and all the text was aliased.
macOS has no problem running 4k displays for like forever. We're talking about ultrawide non-retina screens, and these had various problems.
They hide native resolution on a lot of displays.
Text is blurry on those as a result.
Thankfully, my desktops all run x11, so Apple’s fractional scaling brainrot hasn’t spread to my Linux or BSD’s yet.
That's all I want! A not-completely-useless Siri, and performance/quality of life improvements.
MacOS is fine. For the most part it gets out of my way. However I have a laundry list of small issues that have been there since my first Mac in 2012. I wish there was a Department of Details to fix those little snags in the user experience.
I just want a Siri that doesn't trigger when my partner says "Siri set a timer for 20 minutes" on a completely different floor of the house.
The solution is obviously to switch partner.
You're obviously holding your partner the wrong way.
I'm looking forward to trying out Safaris new ability to vibe code extensions that will modify websites to remove annoyances.
https://www.idownloadblog.com/2026/08/27/build-safari-extens...
For developers, there is a new framework (Core AI), that updates the decade old Core ML framework.
> Core AI allows your app to use the latest model architectures and inference techniques across the CPU, GPU, and Neural Engine.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coreai
> I'm looking forward to trying out Safaris new ability to vibe code extensions that will modify websites to remove annoyances.
Sounds like a great way for people to get hacked.
Having updated from macOS 15 to 27, I think this is one of my favorite macOS releases in a while. macOS 27 is what I think each update should be: one, maybe two, major new features, and a ton of little tweaks and improvements everywhere. Not a bunch of new features that end up never getting touched for a decade, slowly getting worse over time. Hopefully the positive reception (at least, that I’ve seen) encourages Apple to do more future updates like this.
My only problem with iOS 27 (and I mean that literally. It's been a great release so far.) is that the light/dark mode switching when connected to my car is insane. There's no dead band built into it so, for example, driving down a tree lined road, Carplay is constantly switching back and forth in rapid--RAPID--succession. My other phone, still on 26, doesn't do that.
How does CarPlay still not have a brightness control? I leave my CarPlay perpetually in dark mode because light mode is searing in all but directly sunlight.
That would be controlled by the car itself? Surely must be a brightness slider for the infotainment system somewhere?
Not in Hyundai. The brightness controls have no impact when CarPlay starts up.
That should be controlled by the car, so just get a better car with a working light sensor? :)
Is it using the light sensor?
In my experience in a Subaru, a Toyota, and a Volvo, it seems to be connected to the car's light sensor (so it triggers at the same time as the automatic headlights). A third-party head unit I've tried was just always light.
Finally some more DPI options for those of us with non-Apple high-resolution monitors. Still, the upgrades only go up to 5K. Crazy to me that Windows support for ultrawide screens is so much better than Mac, especially when it's not a particularly new category!
I do NOT understand the bullishness on Siri. I've been running the dev builds for month. The thing I hear the most often is, "I'm sorry. Something went wrong."
I've been using it since the second dev beta and it's been working great.
If you're seeing that most people are happy with it then it sounds like you're in the minority.
Real question: have you asked it to do basic arithmetic? Does it work for you?
I tried "what is 7 plus 13 to the power of 25" and it correctly returned the answer (confirmed with a calculator)
It seemed to know how to parse the equation and pass it to its calculator tool, as it shows the formatted equation and result at the bottom
On 26, for me, the baseline is (1) press the siri button on carplay maps (2) speak destination (3) it shows a screen with a map and blue dot showing my destination, and siri says “Sorry, I do not know where you are.”
The version before that, it’d send me to the wrong destination but typing the speech recognizer output verbatim into maps worked.
So, maybe 27 siri is better? (How could it be worse?!?)
There are users, there are rabid fans, and then there are blissful corporation groupies. Apple has a company that severely lacks the first kind – because if it did, it would have either fixed its act or gone into the ground.
Like the “Users” of Windows and Android who really managed to fix Microsoft and Google offerings…
> available on iPhone Duo, iPhone Air, iPhone 16 models or later, iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max
Such a high bar for iOS. Unfortunately new Siri is not for me.
The iPhone 16 was the big "Built for Apple Intelligence" release, where they added hardware to support AI. So not too surprising to me that iPhone models before the 16/15 Pro wouldn't be able to support the new AI Siri.
The surprising part to me is that it took a full 2 years after the iPhone 16 launch to release the feature - and even then it's still a beta release.
I'm definitely looking forward to trying it out, but right now I'm still in the waitlist to actually enable the feature. I'm mostly just looking for a usable hands free driving experience compared the old Siri which I found to be almost completely useless. Anything beyond that would be a bonus. I have so little faith in Siri though at this point, though, that I am not expecting miracles.
That’s not correct. It reaches back to the 12.
They might be referring to the Apple Intelligence features in particular.
Even further back. iOS 27 supports iPhone 11 (released 7 years ago, btw).
Source: https://www.apple.com/os/ios/ near the bottom of the page.
If I will be able to voice-dial my contact by its name again (used to work few years ago), instead Siri calling some random internet search hit who has the same surname, it is already a win...
This was already known when Apple Intelligence was first announced years ago so nothing surprising there.
Anyone else accidentally upgrade to 26.7 first?
In moments like this I kind of assume that I should do 26.7 first because probably they test incremental transitions more thoroughly? I wish I had more faith in software updates.
I did that too! The update servers are hammered as is tradition.
Things are or were labeled wrong... I clicked a button for "upgrade to iOS 27" but then follow up dialogue is talking about upgrading to 26.7. When supposedly I'm already running 26.7. It's very weird.
It did both. I didn’t get offered 26.7 until noon. I did it. Then it offered 27. I did it. But instead it showed that it was updating to… 26.7.
Except when it was complete it actually had done 27.
Lots and lots of Reddit posts with the same bug. It’s not just you… Apple botched the meta that shows during the 27 upgrade.
Good news is the upgrade worked fine.
Yep. You could choose "26.7" or "upgrade to iOS27" but after tapping "upgrade to iOS 27", the next option was JUST 26.7 I think it did both upgrades in series though, I don't think I had to manually select 27 again later.
same, I saw the exact same weird transition from 27 -> 26.7... def seems like a bug
There was a bug in my update UI. I selected iOS 27, told it to install, and then it said it was downloading and installing 26.7 the whole time. When it rebooted it did come back up on 27 though.
I wish they allowed iCloud subscribers with older hardware to use cloud-only Siri AI.
I imagine they wouldn't shift as much hardware that way though.
Same. Siri has been so bad for so long, and this announcement gave me a brief glimmer of hope that it would finally get better. However, every phone in my family is a 15 or older, and there is no support for our newer HomePod either. Boooooo Apple, booooo.
Yeah, the 15 owners got hosed badly by it, especially since they were marketing it as the "AI iPhone" when it launched.
Personally, new Siri is the only reason to upgrade from 13 Pro, and it's just not worth the money to bother.
I have a 16 Pro, who’s sales pitch was “built for Apple Intelligence”, or something to that effect. I can’t customize the Siri voice. I’m a bit shocked that they would have all the features on the 16 to avoid a class action based on their sales pitch of that phone. Tweaking the voice didn’t seem like it would be all that demanding.
That isn't really how it works, unfortunately.
The foundation models run on the device for access to the local graph database and to interact with local actions (intents).
Not everything runs locally, but a local model still needs to run to understand that it needs to recruit help, to package up a subset of data for the external agent, and to perform actions on its behalf as well as return results.
Without the local agent, you are shuttling off all your data to be persisted by an AI cloud provider in case they need it.
>Without the local agent, you are shuttling off all your data to be persisted by an AI cloud provider in case they need it.
I'm aware of the privacy implications. I'm talking about Apple's "private cloud". All of this data is already on iCloud anyway.
>The foundation models run on the device for access to the local graph database and to interact with local actions (intents).
This does not require an on-device model.
Even for iCloud subscribers with newer hardware, as the cloud version should be faster. You’d have the choice between privacy and better performance.
Updated a bit ago to give Siri AI a go for some basic stuff I've been wanting it to do with personal context. It had some false positives in there, but it's notably better now, pretty fast, and handled context well. It allows you to see where it got the context from, which is great considering that doesn't sound like a very Apple thing to do.
Nice. Can't wait for all my binaries to suddenly stop building.
That’s what the beta released at wwdc is for! To test software before the release, to get build breaks before the general public and fix them then.
I am very sad that there is no iPadOS for A12X iPads. That tablet is the first one to be clearly desktop-class, and would still be usable with Linux as a desktop. iPadOS 26 sadly has too many issues, and it would have deserved an upgrade to 27.
cries in A1980
They block iOS 27 upgrade over 5G (irrespective of data mode and battery setting/state). Then they show something like this as a warning:
> Paused.
> … will resume when device reconnects to Internet.
Yes "Internet"! These buffoons don't even correctly say "WiFi".
And when you lock the screen, the download status message switches to "About X hours remaining" (without actually downloading anything of course) and upon unlock it glitches back to "Paused" state.
It baffles my mind at the amount of hardcoding and flag-based development this company has done. If Fable et al are let loose on these fruity pieces of software, it will lead to a global user safety-based outage.
Wasn't that the fix they last minute deployed in 26.6.2 or something ?
Are they no longer publishing the complete feature list PDFs for each OS? E.g. https://www.apple.com/os/pdf/All_New_Features_iOS_26_Sept_20...
These are usually published a little later.
Woo! WiFi icon changes into Ethernet when it is connected and prioritized. Nice. Long overdue.
I tried to use the built-in foundation models to draw pelicans riding bicycles, but what I got out was SVG of roadkill. That is realistic in a different sense.
Roadkill means it's working as intended. Apple's docs say not to write code with it.
Seriously though, I thought an on-device local model in the Terminal might help with commands, sort of like intelligent man pages. How cool would that be? I tried it and got detailed instructions for running the (nonexistent) 'brew update-all' command. Okay, I see, RTFM, Apple only built it for simple text transformation, like summarizing text piped in from a script. It's not a frontier model, but couldn't it be more than what it is?
My experiences with the fm command and how to use it [0]
[0] https://mac.install.guide/terminal/fm-command
Can I have my square corners back, please? And while you're at it, add sorting by alphabet in the WiFi networks list. Maybe even a filter field (I know, too advanced, but hey...)
And perhaps make the "System Settings" window scalable horizontally?
No? OK, I'll skip.
you can add square corners with a terminal command afaik https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/want-the-bigger-window-...
Did they remove the rounded corners mess?
Not entirely but its ALOT better then it was.
:fingers-crossed:
I still have no idea how they let it ship. Sure, it's not a productivity killing defect, just a head-scratcher that makes you question the entire software stack.
I would think so, I’m pretty sure they mentioned this in the keynote.
All I really want is a spellchecker as good as GNU Aspell and a way to turn off all AI features I don’t use to get battery life back.
Still on iPadOS 18.7.8 on a 9th generation iPad out of fear for performance degradation of ProCreate using an Apple Pencil on iPadOS 26. Considering the size of this update, I fear iPadOS 27 might equally wreck my workflow.
I’d certainly wait until 27.2 or so.
Hmm, got the liquid glass slider, put it all the way to the right, but still lost a lot of contrast in my notifications...
Yeah, I did the same but found the experience worse. Currently I've set it at 75% where it is tolerable.
What happened is that the accessibility setting “reduce transparency” which indeed used to reduce transparency and made glass backgrounds darker, now makes them fully black. So dark icons don’t come out of the background anymore. What we got back is a slider that does not make the glass darker, just more opaque. But notifications are still white on light glass. So it really got worse for me.
I usually use beta OSs, but I completely skipped MacOS 26 and 27, mostly because I heard terrible things about 26.
Is 27 good enough to upgrade from Sequoia? Is your answer the same when I tell you I have an M1 Pro Max?
Yes. I have a M1 8GB MacBook Air that I use as a lightweight travel machine, and macOS 26 utterly trashed the performance on it. Things I used to do fine (work on small Xcode projects) were completely unusable, to the point where I had to downgrade it to Sequoia.
I've been running it on the macOS 27 beta all summer, and it's night and day. It's usable again.
Thanks, appreciate the feedback!
I think its good especially if you are on an M1 generation. This is one of those releases with loads of fixes and speedups and not a whole lot of anything else
Generally you wanna wait for 27.2
I’m on a same boat
Should probably do clean install at this point - M1 still good enough and new laptops cost a fortune.
I would upgrade if only because you would otherwise stop receiving security patches at this point.
macOS 15 should be getting security updates until at least the end of next year. I've been using it for ~2 years and I'll happily spend another year using it.
Correct me if I'm wrong but it's my understanding that macOS 15 security updates are only made available for devices for which 15 is the last compatible macOS version.
That's not how it's worked in the past. They did security updates until three versions later released regardless of the hardware. What you may be thinking of is that there was some weirdness around Intel vs M series chips and how those got updates.
Parent is thinking iOS/iPadOS, not macOS. Older devices that are not capable of running iOS 26 are still receiving security updates for iOS 18, but any device supported by iOS 26 is not. It's a real hard push by Apple to get people to swallow Liquid Glass by withholding security updates.
You are wrong. Everyone gets it
I use my Mac exclusively in Terminal and IDE, so I won't benefit from Siri or any Apple-provided AI.
How do I opt out? I'm sure it will take extra gigabytes for the models right?
> How do I opt out?
Linux I guess?
Seriously though, I'm in the same boat. I think the curse of big products is you wind up paying for 100% of the features when you only want 10% of them.
Wonder what crucial API they'll deprecate this time, forcing another round of urgent refactoring for my old app. It's an annual tradition.
Are they still using Gemini? Curious to see how fast all these AI features will feel.
I believe it's a Gemini derived model that they are running on isolated hardware. So it's not the same servers as Gemini and thus will have potentially different performance.
They've never used Gemini, and they are not using Gemini here. Gemini and Siri AI are both based on Google technology though.
Apple themselves says it's a combination of on device and hosted Gemini models. But it seems Apple is hosting Gemini models themselves with far better privacy than the regular Gemini product.
Any chance Podcasts now takes less than 30 seconds to load the Latest Episodes list? I'd rather an outdated list than none at all.
Yes, very fast for me now after library migration
That's good to hear.
It'll be nice to have an update which isn't just random UI changes.
What is "library migration"?
just the loading screen after updating
(i(Pad)?|mac)OS 27 no longer allows Apple Intelligence to be disabled from one place like you could in iOS 26.
Anyone who is trying to reduce their AI consumption or see fewer AI features might be interested in this change.
I posted to Tell HN about it a few minutes ago here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49704226), but TL;DR is that the only way to turn this off is to either disable each AI feature independently or apply a '.mobileconfig' profile that does it.
that seems mostly sensible? you are still able to do it, but the features probably should not be treated as a monolith
I liked the monolith. If I didn't want any AI on my device, I liked having the ability to switch that off and be done with it like Firefox offers (and what Apple offered in the last major release).
Okay it turns out that you can disable these features. It's just more cumbersome than before. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49704226#49718040
I'd normally suggest waiting till a .1 release, but 26 was such a disaster that I might forego this advice.
Apple still has issues with AirQuality data. I've been reporting it for several years, and it still hasn't been resolved.
The world has data on air quality. My country, Poland, has air quality information. But Apple is still opposed to showing them. :(
On that same note I'm still upset Apple acquired Dark Sky. Apple's own weather app got _a little_ better after that, but they've never gotten close to the the accuracy and reliability that Dark Sky had for everything local climate/weather related.
iOS 26 made my phone unusable!
I am still rocking an iPhone 11 Pro Max and even after replacing the battery ~1 year ago, every page load in Safari would take +20 seconds (Chrome was still fast) and opening / closing any app took ~1 second.
iOS 27 has fixed all of it, it feels snappy again!
Safari does in fact feel snappier.
I was surprised to see that macOS is 28GB. Is that all the local models that come with it?
And somehow they managed to break Dock magnification (it stays magnified after you expand a folder in grid view and launch something from expanded folder until you hover over the dock again). Does no one use this at Apple.
Last year, the "you need to upgrade to the recent iOS major version to use your brand new Apple Watch" caught me off-guard. This year, I am back to the usual routine of waiting AT LEAST 6 months until upgrading iOS.
https://applevis.com/blog/ios-27-ipados-27-summary-voiceover...
Kudos to Apple for still having their latest iOS run on hardware as old as iPhone 11, which was released 7 years ago.
How is the Android world faring in this regard? My last Android device was an Android One, but that seems to have been cancelled.
edit: holy crap, iOS 27 made an iPhone 11 pro max I just installed it on so much snappier! Absolutely crazy level of improvement.
Well, my Galaxy S22 (from well: 2022), which still works great will no longer receive _any_ updates after February 27, so I'll have to get new one, or potentially suffer open security holes in the future.
Also, even now I only receive security fixed on a quarterly schedule.
Still not keen on switching to the walled garden - I like the apps I have, including custom browser engines. I like having F-Droid with open source apps.
Will probably get another Samsung, as they have extended updates to 7 years for newer S models.
Still better than my Sony Xperia XZ2 Compact, which I bought in May 2019 (I guess it was my bad to buy it a full year after release) and which received its last ever update in August 2020.
Ditched it for an iPhone SE.
Too bad, I did like the XZ2 Compact in that first year I had it.
How does it fare on iOS 27?
I have the 5-year-old iPad 9th gen with the iPhone 11's A13 chip.
On iOS 26 it was ridiculously slow. I feel that with recent iOS 26 updates the situation has improved and it became somewhat more usable.
For now I am keeping it on iOS 26 for app QA purposes, but would be curious if iOS 27 is an improvement or a regression.
I had edited my comment at the same moment you added yours. It made an 11 Pro Max I installed it behave almost like a brand new phone as far as snappiness. This blew my mind a bit, given what happened with iOS 26. Mind you, I only have 10 minutes of testing so far.
People who are still on Chrome as main browser should seriously try Safari 27. Compatibility greatly improved, super speedy.
Although for some reason the AI organise tab option is not showing up on me.
Still waiting for them to allow me to use any search provider I want (e.g. Kagi).
I had Safari build me an extension that lets me press control+space on any page to bring up a spotlight-type search box and to search in Kagi.
It did it, it works… but it’s beyond stupid that this still isn’t just a setting to add a custom query string, even if they bury it in the advanced settings.
Orion is pretty solid
I wish they would improve the extension support in Safari. I'm on Safari full time but I always dread the moment I have to install an extension. If the extension even exists (Firefox / Chrome is easy, so developers always do that and they don't have to pay Apple a fee) download some app, then click some button to open Safari settings, then enable the extension there, then give it permissions in the Safari menu bar. Horrible UX.
Feels like the perfect thing to vibe-code based on existing FF/Chrome extensions? Decent agent should make pretty light work of it.
That gives you the extension, but the workflow within macOS for users is still very user hostile. Problem with extensions might be that the training data isn't that great as there's not that many open source Safari extensions.
> I wish they would improve the extension support in Safari.
They added the ability to vibe code your own custom extensions in this version.
I honestly think vibe coding your own extensions would be safer than using 3rd party ones which are malware more often than not.
On Safari I use
- Wipr (Ad Blocker)
- 1Password (Password Manager)
- Dark Mode HN (HN dark mode hack.)
Not really sure what else I need tbh
I use 1Password, RSS Button (To highlight if the page has a feed, so I can subscribe with my own Miniflux instance), 1Blocker (Ad blocking), Tampermonkey for loading userscripts on some websites, Readdeck extension to easily send something to my "read later" pile. It's not a lot of them, but every time I want to test a new one I dread it.
WBlock is great too if you’re looking for something that’s free and/or more customizable. It’s the uBO of Safari basically
Just a heads up, you can have dark mode on every website on iOS Safari with Dark Reader: https://darkreader.org/
I use Dark Reader on Chrome, Edge, and Firefox, but I've found Noir to be better on Safari.
Does uBlock Origin (or something equivalent) work in Safari?
There’s an official Safari version [1], but it’s more like a toy compared to Firefox.
[1]https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ublock-origin-lite/id674534269...
The standard answer is Wipr but nothing is as good as uBlock Origin imo. It's passable enough that I daily drive Safari now.
wBlock and AdGuard
AdGuard as well.
>> Although for some reason the AI organise tab option is not showing up on me.
From what I recall, I had this in the first beta then it disappeared and never came back.
Do tech savvy people actually use chrome on iOS? Why?
Browsers on iOS may be using the same rendering engine under the hood but they make different decisions for UI or how certain features work. They can be useful if you don’t like the decisions Apple made with Safari.
An example of a decision Safari made that I don’t like: if you open too many tabs you reach a limit, but it doesn’t tell you that and just silently overwrites other tabs you have open.
My assumption would be for account syncing.
I use Safari, but whenever I go on a pilgrimage to try a different browser, I also get it on my phone so I can access tabs and bookmarks whenever I am.
For syncing from desktop chrome probably
When I switched to macOS in '22 I went to Safari from Firefox and I don't think I've run into a single compatibility issue.
if the "back" functionality is still laggy and not instant I won't change from firefox to safari.
I take it this is the one that tosses out Rosetta 2 on macOS?
Nope, that's macOS 28.
> Rosetta is available for any Mac with Apple silicon using macOS 27 or earlier. Starting with macOS 28, the next major macOS release, Rosetta functionality will be available only for certain older, unmaintained games that rely on Intel-based frameworks.
Sauce: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102527
i wonder if M7 will not have elements in it that help with x86 to ARM on the fly translation that M1 had now that macOS 27 and beyond is ARM only with no Rosetta
I bet it will, because cross-platform virtualization and containerization is a boon for Apple. Also, Rosetta will stay for older programs (esp. games) and some Intel specific frameworks per Apple's docs.
I bet with all the transistor count increase, that circuitry is a blip.
Apple can’t wait to ditch rosetta2, and dump all the development work on fex for supporting old legacy x86 software.
oh right, forgot about virtualization. Apple probably still need those customers that spend half of their day in Parallels Desktop
Also, being able to run x86 Linux binaries is important for developers:
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/run...
The warning dialog I received the other day while running macOS 27 Beta said that it will be removed in macOS 28.
I tested its general knowledge by asking some simple questions like “how far away is the moon”?
It gave me the verbal answer in miles, but the on-screen pop up showed the answer in kilometres.
Never mind that this is a failure of internationalisation (because I live outside one of the two backwards places that hasn’t yet caught up to metric.)
The inconsistency between verbal and written answers is just… bizarre. I’ve never seen an AI agentic system wired like this!
I'm very happy Siri AI is not available here so there is practically nothing big and flashy changing.
It's like getting a iOS 26 Service Pack 1 :)
I miss the old John Siracusa reviews on Ars. Was always a vibe to read thru those while taking snapshots and pulling the latest update image.
Anyone got saving files from the web on the phone replaced with iCloud Drive?
Overall it took over 1h20m or so for download and install this version in my iPhone. And Settings still displays indexing notification while I have little on the device, and I have disabled searches for every app. So I wonder what it does optimizing and indexing then?
Reminder: you can’t use any Apple gen AI without enabling Siri, and enabling Siri will upload your entire address book unencrypted to Apple each time you use it.
You can’t use CarPlay without Siri enabled, so you can’t use CarPlay without doxxing your friends to Apple. Same goes for the image enhancement stuff.
Privacy, that’s Apple.
The majority of the people in your address book probably store their contacts in iCloud but do not have Advanced Data Protection enabled, so their entire address books are held by Apple unencrypted. I wouldn't be surprised if most of my friends allow social media apps to read all their contacts, also.
Is that true with 26 as well ?
I never use CarPlay and have Siri and AI off. iOS 27 update shows as only needing 3.8gb which is surprisingly low.
My MacBook has an external 1440p monitor (@1x) which has been adequate for Sequoia, but macOS 26 and 27 look awful for bold text, like the list of users in Messages looks really bad. The AppleFontSmoothing fixes seem to make you pick between "bold text looks ok" or "everything else looks ok" - and macOS 27 doesn't fix it.
A suggestion: try to use BetterDisplay’s HiDPI in reverse, rendering your 1440p monitor as 2880p (macOS Retina), then downsampling it to the native 1440p. There's an entry about it on their GitHub Wiki, look for "HiDPI, LoDPI"
My biggest complaint is the regressions on font size both on macOS and iOS. Some of the copy which was of comfortably readable size is now microscopic (for example, the organization and job title on a contact card in the Contacts app). Similarly, on macOS, when the sidebar icons are set to small, the labels also become terribly tiny.
I'll stay w/ Sequoia as long as I can.
I definitely wanted to skip Tahoe by any means and was reluctant about this new version. I recently installed it because the wm I was using (omniwm) wasn't compatible with Tahoe anymore so I had to choose. I have to say it has been completely usable to me after reducing the liquid glass thing as much as the system allows.
Same. In addition to UX regression, we’re two major revs in, there’s nothing that’s a compelling enough value-add to be worth the trade-off, let alone the risk of unexpected side effects on any OS upgrade.
On my Xcode dev machine, I’ll be biting the bullet soon out of necessity, but my personal machine will stay Sequoia until they course-correct on “style over substance” (and not holding my breath).
I am currently on Sonoma and I was considering to upgrade to get the things that I missed in these years. I think and hope that macOS 27 will be faster wrt Sonoma...
Sequoia it's quite fast and stable.
Also, I really really really abhor the new UI.
I jumped from Ventura to Sequoia when 26 was first released, and I can safely say it's been around the same.
I'd probably make a similar leap to 27 when 28 gets released.
For the first time in years I will upgrade early. Apple Support required me to update to iOS 26 back in November or else they refused to troubleshoot an iCloud issue. The issue remains to this day and I regularly regret upgrading. But it seems many things about the interface has improved. Hoping for the best now.
I'm using it now; it's pretty good. My phone feels a bit faster. That's always a good thing.
Can't wait for this trend of making absolutely everything rounded to go away. It looks so ugly.
They seems to have vibe coded mission control and broader window management (including window menu bars) without any actual testing. It is still as comically bad as when regressions were introduced in Dev Beta 1.
What on earth is happening at Apple?
Can we please have a 1 release focus on fixing bugs? not more ai but fixing bugs, 1 release where you can disable AI... 1 release to make it faster again, 1 release to polish... not to push the next "game changing UI design..."
the "upgrade to 18.4" took my iphone to 26.whatever and siri got even worst... siri set an alarm for 10:40 (creates one at 12:08)... NO, delete that one, 10 40 (does nothing)... hey siri... (ajum), delete the previous alarm... (done!) now set an alarm at 10:40 (alarm at 4pm....)... eventually you get tired... you go to the alarms app.. and then there is the previous "deleted" alarm and the other one...
My Finder now opens every folder scrolled to about 2/3 of the way down instead of all the way on the bottom or top. I end up scrollign 20-30 pages long each time I want to do anything. Yay macOS27!
Meanwhile haven't found an actual new feature yet
I still haven’t upgraded from v18 to v26, having heard so many bad things about it.
The change to how iOS lets you select cards in Apple Pay is worth the upgrade alone. Now you just swipe to select the card you want instead of having to tap through multiple buttons/modals.
Better more refined windows, faster more responsive, cleaner look, wallpaper window however still presents a narrow requestor window why can't you open the window to fill the screen when choosing background pictures?
Ultra Studio XDR Monitor
Darn. My iPhone 12 still works great but doesn’t get most of this. I’ve been waiting for an AI interface that doesn’t suck and I think Apple stands a chance at nailing it, given that’s what they’ve historically been good at.
> Allow your agent to connect to a Safari browser for development and debugging via the Safari MCP server.
I was using Chrome MCP, but this one seems better. The Chrome one was making a lot of messy
Rapid AirDrop... I prefer stable and always working AirDrop first
Can this AI integration now mean that Siri can finally just read the wikipedia page of a topic when I am driving? Or can I finally have Siri add a stop at Mcdonalds on google maps during a road trip?
Adding a stop at McDonalds on Google Maps won't necessarily work unless Google provides the hooks to accomplish that.
But yes, it can give you information on a topic in a way the old Siri couldn't.
Isn’t the whole hope is that Google (and other app vendors) doesn’t even get a say at what’s possible through Siri.
All it takes is to expose application’s UI to the model, and let the model send actions. If a human can do it tapping on the screen, the machine should be able to do the same thing.
My iPad 2021 10.2" was flawless but some weeks ago it was updated to iOS26 by mistake and it became so slow on basic stuff (like showing the keyboard). Made me terrified of doing any upgrades
Some stuff that is very niche but useful to me such as kerberized NFS has been broken forever. I don't remember if NFSv4 with krb5p ever worked to begin with.
STT is definitely better on my iPhone 15 pro which doesn’t get the large model. It’s usable now but not up to the real deal like parakeet with a LM cleaning up the output after.
Pretty sure their decade old iCloud Tabs bug, that leaves phantom tabs from other devices stuck, isn’t fixed.
They also allow an app to start backing up their data in your iCloud quota without your explicit apoorval or enabling. In fact when you notice, you go ahead and uncheck it, and next time you check it again, you’d see Uber again happily backing up 500MB (or lord knows what) into your iCloud account, a massage and home chores booking company app backing up 650MB data! It’s just pathetic - and that patheticity lies on Apple’s side that they let it happen.
But no, this is a historic release, like every other release, all hail the fruit. I used to think Apple does not care about such issues. But now I suspect they have really been incapable of making these things better for years (in some cases even more than a decade).
New Siri is not available in the EU. And no plans to change that.
I'll probably switch to Android once my phone and watch batteries degrade enough to annoy me
As a European, and Apple household: no new iPhone Duo, Watch or iPhone 18 Pro Max purchases in this house until Apple desists with its malicious campaign to break the DMA. I'll get by fine with other AI products in the meantime.
You do know that Google is fighting the same DMA rules as Apple?
They need to similarly make Gemini hot-swappable to anything on Android and don't want to.
Apple was just first because they're a bigger and more visible target.
> whataboutism
Guess also don't give money to Google (and other privacy-invading, usually US companies)?
disclaimer: I only use Siri for voice dial (worked on my Ericsson T20!), and it is extremely unreliable, and setting kitchen timers.
My basic point is that the EU DMA is a good idea, but it's still stupid - and I live here.
I do get the point of it, stuff needs to be interchangeable. BUT. Security and privacy need to be taken into account.
Apple has a track record of picking user privacy even if it makes their services objectively worse. Now EU makes them open up the APIs. Cool, I'm all for it.
Now who makes sure that Joe-Bobs Trusty AI is as secure as Apple Private Compute and won't just store my chat transcripts verbatim on an open S3 folder? EU law doesn't say.
The PR flack will 100% hit Apple though, the fact that the user whose data was leaked used JBTAI is buried in the second to last paragraph under the fold between two ads. Apple will be in the headline with all caps.
Same goes for Google, they don't want their AI to be interchangeable with something, because the lack of analytics will hurt their ad revenue. And maybe some lip service to privacy too.
(And my infinite pet peeve, why is Apple App Store bad and needs to be opened up, but Playstation, Xbox and Nintendo app stores are cool and 3rd party options aren't enforced by law?)
There's approximately zero chance Google would go along with the changes that Apple would have had to make to support EU's DMA.
Updated my iPad to iPadOS 27 and disabled Reduce Transparency because I figured that they’ve fixed Liquid Glass.
The notifications on the lock screen are still completely unreadable. What the fuck is Apple doing?
Can’t even be happy about the bug fixes because my biggest one, Spotlight not getting keyboard focus when you use it, is still present.
27 got the slider so I though: finally I can turn it off even more. Turns out the max value of the slider is what toggling “less Liquid Glass please” was already doing in 26. But at the same time they modified it and now it somehow looks eee worse? I don’t know whst they did but it’s just looking less readable, at least in dark mode.
And the worse thing about LG is the floating bottom nav bar that keeps shrinking to an icon when you least expect it, moving all elements.
MacOS 26 forced me to give up spotlight for Raycast. It would do this thing where new delayed results would steal highlight focus so hitting the enter button to select something from the list became a lottery. Would you select the thing you see or would something else replace it in the time you press the button.
I use Raycast now and it's 1000x better simply because it actually selects the highlighted thing.
so, finally ipad 8th gen support is over. any idea if performance improvements would be released to 8th gen as feature update?
Can I disable AI?
If you're in Europe, you can't even enable it!
but does it still take up the 35GB?
Can't stand the UI. I've turned off transparency. I've zoomed in a bit. I heavily use the swipe down search on the Home Screen and it's obnoxious now.
I don't understand why Apple went towards unifying the UI around a failed product (Vision Pro).
I guess they didn’t know the Vision Pro would fail when they made the switch. Now, they’ve made the second ugliest iOS ever. So, they are on a recovering trend, but of course they’ve got pretty far to go.
Hope they finally fix that SwiftUI bug from iOS 18 by version 27 instead of adding another dozen widgets.
Looking forward to see how Siri AI works and develops. Do you guys think it will be powerful enough?
I installed iOS 27 yesterday and first thing went to try new Siri. My settings for Siri responses was set to 'Auto' and it wasn't responding with a voice. So the first chat with a new Siri went like this (tried first example):
At last, the feature Windows has had since XP: separate volume for different audio sources (alarms and ring tones).
Embarrassing.
I wonder if Apple have fixed the issue where the user want the Siri to use a different language than the UI language.
I only just spotted that the AirPods Pro 3 can do heart rate monitoring. That's some amazing miniaturization.
I must say iOS really went good. I am on 12 pro max. The phone really feels more snappy
I hope they fix safari rendering, which is extremely bad at websites like notion.
I hope websites like notion fix their code, which is extremely bad on anything but Chrome.
Was hoping for advanced iMessage filtering and enhancements to the Passwords app. Bummer.
What are Apple's rules on vibe coding? Do they use AI to write software?
It actually feels smoother on my iphone, and changing liquid glass effect is huge!
I Do not like the new battery icon on MacOS. I think they made it the same as iOS.
I held off installing macOS 26 due to all the negative press.
Should I upgrade to macOS 27?
I recently did the update to macOS 26 after waiting on it for almost a year, it's ok-ish now, I'd update to 27 right away.
probably not.
Any way to make Safari’s tabs look and behave like they did on Sequoia?
Is battery life of the new iOS version comparable to pre iOS 26?
If not, I’m staying at iOS 18.
Coming alongside them, Swift 6.4 is now also officially available.
I'm not annoyed that my OG Apple Watch Ultra doesn't get the latest OS. I get it - tech moves at a fast pace.
What I am annoyed about, is that I'm stuck with Watch OS 26, which introduced their new workout app, which is so laggy. One of the few things I use my Apple Watch for, and that UX is a major regression from previous OS versions.
I really wish they released a .x update to Watch OS26 to fix this.
Watch is too cheap to care about. It’s a disposable thing that you’re expected to toss away every year, it’s obvious.
I’m adding representation to an issue that I hope is fixed:
for the last couple months I’ve been able to record videos and watch those videos but am unable to share them, whether on instagram, whatsapp, airdrop or imessage. some limited luck saving the same video to the file system and sharing from there
searching this issue is notoriously difficult, and there is one partially related thread on Apple support forums talking about spacial h264 and spacial h265 video codecs further complicated by being wrappers, with something suggesting the latter is the issue, the final post having a bewildered user asking for clarification that the iphone can create videos that even it cant use
I looked in my camera settings and there are soooo many switches and file formats now, that its impossible to know which edge case has been run into, and there’s no reset button to put the settings back to their most compatible
I hope this OS refresh fixed that
note, this only affects some videos and the common denominator is not obvious. all videos are recent and made in the same timespan. some are sharable some are not
> unable to share them
What does "unable" mean?
on instagram, tapping the thumbnail has no user feedback and is never selected
on whatsapp, tapping the same video thumbnail results in a "preparing media" modal that never ends, until pressing cancel
on airdrop, a similar preparing model appears that never makes any progress and only has a cancel button
on imessage, tapping the same video thumbnail results in a circular progress bar overlay, as if it was downloading it from icloud, except it never finishes and was never in icloud
unable
Makes sense - definitely an "unable" - I was just curious where the delay was coming, but that iMessage example really sounds like a system issue I agree.
Glad iOS 27 fixed it.
Update: IOS 27 fixed it
(while IOS 26.7 did not)
does anyone have wifi disconnect all the time on the iPhone/iOS 27? been happening since Dev Betas and seems to still happen all the time for me at home.
But— are they faster?
IOS claimed to have improved app startup over the previous version
> For example, app launches are up to 30% faster,8 new photos load in your Photos library up to 70% faster,9 and AirDrop transfers are up to 80% faster.10
if you buy M5’s they are, much faster
Only good thing about iOS is it has fluid animation
I've just installed macOS 27 on my personal laptop and I'm losing my mind. My OrbStack app is now permanently stuck in Dock showing as "Running in Background"
There appears to be no way to keep it from the Dock without actually killing it or disallowing the "Running in Background" permission for it.
This is the stupidest forced opt-in feature I've ever seen.
Did they fix the slow workspace switching animation?
How is Siri AI looking? Good as they say it is?
My favorite part of macOS 27 is they finally made corner rounding consistent across windows. It had been getting worse for years until last year when Tahoe bizarrely added a bunch of SUPER rounded windows in native system apps. Which I figured were so ugly and inconsistent that it must have been an oversight. Only to find in their documentation that they actually intended for corner radii to be inconsistent across different applications, and only ones with certain toolbars would be extra rounded?
Just insane the shit they pulled last year that I'd say straight up defaced years of great designs. Golden Gate has reverted a lot of things though it's still not as good as it used to be in a lot of areas. Step in the right direction anyway.
They fixed it because they were publicly shamed.
Isn't that just called listening to feedback?
I think a bunch of the reversions to the accumulated bullshit of the past number of years happening directly following the sudden departure of Alan Dye and his cronies is not a coincidence.
Can I disable apple intelligence on macOS?
It’s opt-in. It’s disabled by default.
Should developers upgrade yet, or wait?
I’m really disappointed that Apple removed the one-toggle option to turn off Apple Intelligence / Siri AI features in the last beta. Writing tools magically reappearing after I had it off is not a great experience.
You find a way to turn it off ? I completely disabled Siri immediately but a lot that stuff still shows up
Upgraded just now. Went pretty smooth!
macOS 27 ade my M2 MBA feel like new. Tahoe just felt a lot less responsive most of the time.
I heard they just made animations a bit faster:)
Finally Apple has a screen time that allows different configurations for different time segments. What took them so long? /j
siri is kinda useless nowadays imo
Siri has always been, is, and will always be, useless. That’s consistency for you!
Why not series 8 apple why not?
WatchOS, too. Not tvOS, though.
Can the new AI browse the web?
I use Raycast; very op
Still compatible with SE 2+ and 11+.
Hopefully that means a few more years of security updates for the last reasonably sized devices they made.
iOS itself has been getting strictly worse every release.
Maybe graphene or something will save us from the android/ios enshittification embrace.
Looks like it's time to update to macOS 26. Should be stable now.
upgraded everything day one, so far so good.
I tried Siri AI a few times and it keeps disappointing me, it will suggest something like "Would you like me to open <APP> for you and <DO THE THING> next?", then I go and prompt "Yes." and it replies with "Sorry, I don't understand."
Semi-related but I'm ignorant: when did Apple change to use a universal version number? Is it just for the public, like how Windows 11 is actually NT 10.0? I can't believe I missed the HN discussion on this one.
Last year. They started basing it off the release year with 26. Though it comes a little early, kind of like the model year of a car.
Why these updates are getting so much way heavier with each release? like Xcode 10 GB and this update near 30 GB, are you kidding me?
What if I don't want that Siri AI. It should be optional.
Is it just me or is clicking “iOS 27” on iPhone showing upgrade screen for 26.7?
same. and at the bottom it says "Also Available : iOS 27" with a button which leads right back to iOS 26.7.
Same here. Will upgrade and hopefully 27 will show up!
If it does then do much for focus on quality in this release…
Same, but I clicked it, awaited the update, and I'm on iOS 27 proper now-- so just a visual bug.
> just a visual bug.
Out of the gate, that isn't a good sign.
Same here. It’s over 5 GB, therefore is not 26.7. Upgrading, let’s see.
Yes, it does 26.7 -> 27 sequentially, IIRC.
Having exact same experience as of 2:11p EDT.
Cries in MacBook Pro 2019 stuck on macOS 26
Disappointed on upgrade I still have to opt in and wait to get added to the Siri beta.
Can we turn liquid glass fully off?
Yawn, when was the last time you felt excitement for a macOS release?
Me? Snow Leopard.
if you were disappointed by iOS dictation, give it another shot after this update. It has improved a lot. I've been using it a lot more than before
Whatever you do just stop doing OS updates after 2 years of owning any device these guys make if you don't want to be forced into an upgrade cycle
Don't fall for the security patch fearmongering
welcome to 2024, Siri
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Why the fuck is this trending? Beta was out months ago
It’s the same every fing year. People (developers) don’t test the beta, but just complains when the .0 is released in the fall with ”how could anyone have anticipated this?”
Not everyone on the Mac is a Mac developer, nor can they afford the bugs in beta software when they are trying to get work done.
So if you don't want to use Apple's AI, this brings... faster app launching on iOS? I guess I'll use the Liquid Glass controls, but otherwise this is a dud.
> Otherwise this is a dud
This comment is a dud. The whole point of this update was to focus on fixing bugs and improving stability. They literally rewrote the CPU scheduler to improve UI performance. Safari UI and page rendering is no longer shit compared to how it was on iPadOS 26. There’s an insane amount of under the hood changes for this release, something people have been asking for them to do for a while — focus on making things run better instead of adding endless new half baked features.
Updates don’t always have to bring shiny, flashy new features. Holy shit.
The linked page is 90% AI and not much about stability. If "the whole point of this update was to focus on fixing bugs and improving stability" they don't say so, so excuse me for not knowing that.
If it's a stability release, then great! But that's not what they're saying. Stability is mentioned once regarding search only. Performance has a very small sub-section half way down the page. Where do they mention the CPU scheduler rewrite, or any of the under-the-hood changes you're talking about? You seem to expect people to know about these things from somewhere else.
They discussed it in the Keynote https://www.newegg.com/insider/ios-27-performance-boost-ever...
I mean, this is nice:
"Apple framed WWDC 2026 around three pillars: platform improvements, trust and safety, and Apple Intelligence."
and it could have been mentioned in the launch announcement post.
Compare it to 18 before the UI fail and you might have a non-dud of a response. And no, it wasn't the whole point, just read the announcement to see how much space is devoted to other points
Snow Leopard was one of the most celebrated Mac OS X updates for a reason.