I think parts of Liquid Glass on macOS looks pretty bad. But I don't care that much about how things look, so it doesn't offend me.
What does offend me are all the bugs, as you say. It's still utterly broken all these months after the public release. Spotlight is a mess; I've seen it take DAYS before it has made an app in '/Applications' findable through search (even as the app shows up in Spotlight's long scrollable list of apps), and the animation where it comes in as a result of the four finger gesture has so many bugs I won't go through them all here. The most annoying is that it can end up in a state where Spotlight is not on screen, but you need to do the "make Spotlight go away" gesture before the "make Spotlight appear" gesture works again. It also often loads icons slowly; sometimes loading them in one by one over time, sometimes all at once after thinking for a second. It's arguably better from a UX design perspective than Launchpad was, but Launchpad was so much more polished and better performing.
There's also just constant minor graphical glitches. Things which pop in, things which load in with the wrong background color, that sort of stuff. The Settings app sometimes loads in stuff gradually and parts of the app jump around for a second before it settles, like a bad web app. It feels janky.
Mac OS X used to feel like a solid operating system. It has been going downhill for a while, but macOS 26 is the biggest leap in a long time.
> I think parts of Liquid Glass on macOS looks pretty bad. But I don't care that much about how things look, so it doesn't offend me.
I don't care overmuch about the purely cosmetic side of it, but Liquid Glass looks absolutely terrible from an ergonomics point of view. It's just plainly, objectively bad UX.
Tip: in accessibility , enable High Contrast and disable transparency. Optionally disable animations. Decent experience imo. I can now see what areas are clickable.
Nb I see tons of rendering bugs across a bunch of apps and I suspect it’s because I disabled as much animation and transparency as I could. Things like the keyboard opening slightly off the screen to the right then jumping into place, some apps going black when certain overlays are open, stuff like that.
I did basically that on my iPhone. My laptop was needing a cleanup, so I just wiped it and re-installed Sequoia. the Mac Studio never got the upgrade at all. If at some point I find there's something in Tahoe that I particularly need, I'll revisit upgrading.
Doing a fresh install of Sequoia was the best move for me, too. I had an unnecessary amount of third party apps installed for no reason. I don't even use Ice for the menu bar anymore, I realized the icons that I had hidden I didn't need in the first place so I completely disabled them, in whichever apps it's possible.
> But I don't care that much about how things look, so it doesn't offend me.
So I'm guessing you use some default Mac editor (Xcode?)? You don't change your color scheme, you don't change your font, etc?
Aside: Software devs are very weird, they spend all this time crafting their dev setup and but when it comes to their OS they just give up and whatever Tim Cook feeds them their in. Makes no sense. Anyway, off to Linux land. See ya'll!
I spend a lot of my time in Neovim in a terminal. I have spent a lot of time on the setup, but everything (including the theme and colors) is optimised for legibility, not aesthetics. Most of the rest of my time is spent in Firefox (well, Waterfox these days) with the default dark theme.
This is true whether I'm on my laptop running macOS or my desktop running Fedora.
Incidentally, if I was using some native-ish editor like Xcode and a native-ish browser like Safari, I would probably care way more since I'd be interacting with Liquid Glass more as a primary UI. Now it only really touches the stuff surrounding what I care about, while my terminal, editor and browser are all blissfully non-native.
My IDE provides 98% of the pixels on my screen and provides 90% of the overall experience. That’s why it gets all the attention. If the OS is able to show my IDE on one screen and a web browser and UNIXy terminal on the other, it’s working.
So you don't use the built-in Terminal? What about Finder, Safari, Mail, Spotlight, System Settings, etc? If someone doesn't care about how they look, they should use all the built-in stuff right?
> It also often loads icons slowly; sometimes loading them in one by one over time, sometimes all at once after thinking for a second.
This is frequent, if not constant, on iOS for me. I never witnessed it before the 26 update.
How can it take an entire second or more to display an icon in list in the settings application? It was literally a solved problem for every iOS version I've ever used.
This year I've had to perform many hard resets on my MacBook, iPhone and even Apple Watch because they've locked up. And they're all relatively new devices. Apple needs to get its shit together. I already expect to move away from their mobile ecosystem when it comes time to upgrade.
It's Apple itself that needs a hard reset. Maybe if we all at the same time collectively hold our power buttons down for sixty seconds, Apple Park will reboot.
I recently upgraded (downgraded?) from an iPhone 15PM to a smaller iPhone 17P, and I have found myself wondering if I got a glitchy piece of hardware or if it's just iOS 26 bugs. I hardly had any problems with the previous phone, but on the 17 it's pretty routine that I have to close apps (including native Apple ones) which have become non-responsive. Frustrating, for sure.
Nope, that's iOS (I'm on a 16 Pro). I routinely have apps I can switch into but are entirely dead. They're not chewing CPU cycles, the phone is "cold". But very much so.
the one I've noticed being the worst for lock ups is the camera / photos app, which is frankly very surprising given how central the photography usecase appears to be to iPhone sales and therefore Apple's bottom line.
I'm talking, I pull up the camera and try to take literally 4-5 shots quickly and by the 6th there's what feels like seconds of lag between the button press and the photo being taken.
It feels like I'm using an ancient camera phone, or a more modern phone but in extreme heat when the CPU is just throttling everything. But instead, this is a 2 year old iPhone at room temperature.
Interesting, likewise, the Camera app. And other camera apps, I use Halide too.
And Photos. Will it sync? Yes. When? Who the fuck knows? Doesn't matter whether you're on Ethernet or Wifi, gigabit internet. You can quit Photos on both devices, you can then keep Photos open foreground... so what? Photos will sync when it wants to, not what when you want it to.
you're right! The photo syncing is comically bad, again given the alleged importance of photos in the Apple marketing material. That said I've rarely used it in the past and so wasn't sure if it was a newly degraded experience or had always been that poor.
What does offend me are all the bugs, as you say. It's still utterly broken all these months after the public release. Spotlight is a mess; I've seen it take DAYS before it has made an app in '/Applications' findable through search (even as the app shows up in Spotlight's long scrollable list of apps), and the animation where it comes in as a result of the four finger gesture has so many bugs I won't go through them all here. The most annoying is that it can end up in a state where Spotlight is not on screen, but you need to do the "make Spotlight go away" gesture before the "make Spotlight appear" gesture works again. It also often loads icons slowly; sometimes loading them in one by one over time, sometimes all at once after thinking for a second. It's arguably better from a UX design perspective than Launchpad was, but Launchpad was so much more polished and better performing.
There's also just constant minor graphical glitches. Things which pop in, things which load in with the wrong background color, that sort of stuff. The Settings app sometimes loads in stuff gradually and parts of the app jump around for a second before it settles, like a bad web app. It feels janky.
Mac OS X used to feel like a solid operating system. It has been going downhill for a while, but macOS 26 is the biggest leap in a long time.