For those as confused as me, I'm on macOS 15.6.1, and it seems for the next version they aligned everything and I do indeed see an update for "macOS Tahoe 26.2". However, I also see a Sequoia 15.7.3 update dated at the same time and together in the same upgrade blog post (and for Sonoma 14.8.3, kudos), so for those that doesn't seem to want to do the jump now into Liquid Glass, that seems available:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/100100
Note: I had to click the [i], then unselect the "macOS Tahoe 26.2" and select the "macOS Sequoia 15.7.3" manually to avoid a full upgrade.
These techniques used to be exclusive to spyware distributors.
You have to think about UX for 99%, not just for HNers who might know what a 15.7.3 is.
Not if we aren’t talking about security updates. In this case the previous version of iOS also has the same security updates so ‘updating’ to a new version is completely up to the user, with no difference in security posture either way. Tricking users into updating for what are in the tech company’s opinion ‘new features’ is by definition a dark pattern.
Weird hill for you to die on given that dark patterns have been specifically legislated for in many jurisdictions and have a clear definition.
Nothing stops Apple from advertising both at the same level.
This suggests someone forgot to update the "ⓘ" text. Not a dark pattern.
It seems clear to me that they use OS updates as a way to eventually slow your device down so the lag becomes so annoying that you want to purchase a new device.
(Edit: And the really obnoxious part is that they force you to receive upgrade prompts every single day and you can't disable it.)
Enable iOS 18 Developer Beta and the nag screens go away.
Running iOS 17.6.1 on my iPhone 13 mini right now. I've got a backup iPhone 13 mini new in the box with the factory OS still installed (just in case).
I'm hoping my devices can hold out longer than Apple can remain irrational.
You really shouldn't. There are dozens of RCE exploits, some of which were found in the wild, that you're missing out patches for.
It sounds like 26.2 might be approaching usable status on the mini but I'd want a battery replacement too.
I gave up yesterday, and disabled lockdown mode (and upgraded to 26.2). Seems fine now, but liquid glass is still a usability nightmare.
This is a wild take for a company known for the long lives of its devices.
You can do this to any product. (As can you undo it by wiping and reinstalling an old image.)
iOS, sure. After a certain point, you need to be fine with simple functionality (but, I’ll add, more than adequate for most users, which means someone else could find use and value for what you treat as junk).
But macOS? What software? Everything I’m thinking of is graphics adjacent and significantly benefits from faster hardware. For almost everything else, a browser suffices.
Apple was slowing down phones for a while, however, the general public entirely misunderstood why: At a certain point, the battery could not maintain the voltages required to keep the phone operating properly at all (if you understand silicon, you will understand why...CPU needs 1.5v, battery can provide 1.4v...and boom!), so Apple did the most graceful thing they could and they down clocked the phones rather than letting them abruptly turn off. That led to millions of people in a certain era of iPhone being able to use their phones...just more slowly...vs not being able to use them the second voltage > supply voltage...which basically means any remotely demanding app. They were (rightfully) sued because they made the change without informing the user first. They didn't have to touch the phones, period. They tried to allow the phones to be used/data recovered from gracefully.
Don't misunderstand me, I am not willing to defend the practices of any business at all, especially Apple (I've worked from, and walked away from, some despicable companies in my time as an engineer), however Apple went above and beyond to let folks continue to use their devices. If you think otherwise, I've a box full of android and non Android phones and tablets that the likes of Google, Samsung, LG, HTC, etc. all quickly abandoned.
For comparison, the Google Pixel 3a (among others) was released the same year and saw it's last major OS update in 2022. iPhone 11? Still receives updates to this day. No, they aren't slowing the phone down. Trust me, my non technical spouse would have complained super loudly by now. More importantly, I, as her tech support person would've. She is on 26.2 right now.
There is a time and place to bash Apple, however hardware/software support definitely isn't the place. If you think that the current OS/update you have installed is purposefully and intentionally slowing your phone in order to push you to update, please feel free to publish your testing and results...and make sure you isolate every other variable like filling up internal storage, running 50,000 apps at once, expecting any application made within the past 6-7 years to peform at top speed, etc.
Also make sure you aren't falling for things such as confirmation bias or worse: you simply parrot what others say because your decade old phone, much like your decade old PC,feels slower now than it did a decade ago, when apps and games were simpler, and didn't embed entire browser engines in order to display content.
Cheers, btw, and I mean no disrespect to anyone. Merry Christmas/Happy Holidays.
I use 26.x on an "original" 8GB M1 MacBook Air and it's as fine as it ever was.
(I also have a MBP, various Mac Mini's and other desktops, so it's not that I'm just used to everything being slow).
Maybe that's ancient history now, but from what it sounds like, they still have users that distrust their releases. When you say "I don't know where this is coming from" then a few lines later describe the known practice and the reason, well there you are. I guess it's a brand trust thing, and it sticks.
This sounds like an exaggeration of what happens after an upgrade: iOS has to re-index your entire phone for Spotlight, etc. Same thing for Photos if there have been changes.
Depending on which phone and the amount of storage, your phone can feel kind of sluggish for a while until the background indexing is done.
If you update before you go to sleep, your device will be fine in the morning.
Simply select "iOS 18 Developer Beta" under beta updates (might need a developer account) and it will allow you to install it. The update currently offered is the production release.
Remember that Apple is also pushing that update out to serve their iPhones that cannot get iOS 26. Even if I was to maximize my cynicism, I don't think they presently use security point releases in the manner you are describing.
This partly relies on the "just update bro" attitude of sufficient fanbois to achieve upgrade momentum. Otherwise, let's be honest, no one would update, ever, our phones are too personal to be changing constantly.
This "bug" has been there for 2-3 days now. If it was a bug with their software delivery system, I assume it would have been fixed by now, it's affecting many people (with plenty of message board complaints to prove it).
Do they?
For instance, look at the release history for iOS 12 and 13:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_12#Version_history
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_13#Release_history
After 13 was released (September 19, 2019) there were no more updates for iOS 12, at least for the devices that support iOS 13.
The liquidglass experience was bad, but reduce motion was unusable.
Now I don't see any iOS 18 updates at all, only the iOS 26 prompts. What a dick move, Apple. Especially if this is a) a security update, and b) iOS 26 is known to run poorly on older phones like mine.
Thanks for the workaround!
Then they have more or less monthly security updates, and bundle some into minor releases to not force too many updates which require rebooting.
You're not going to add text message spam filtering to your phone because they changed the border radius or blur or whatever?
I wouldn’t say so. The “Increase Contrast” and “Show Borders” accessibility options make liquid glass just bearable to me, but the new UI design is still ungracefully buggy and unnecessarily hard(er) to use. (See e.g. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/liquid-glass/ for a detailed discussion.)
Sure, life goes on. However, considering the price tag of an iPhone/iPad, I understand how iOS 26 is off-putting to so many people – despite all the other new features.
What new features?
Personally I will skip IOS 26 and stay on IOS 18 and maybe upgrade to IOS 27 when it comes out next year (if by then all the bad UI decisions have been reversed).
I had a play around with a friend's phone who was updated to IOS 26 and honestly It just doesnt work for me in it's current state.
The thing is, Liquid Glass is already using a shader to render the refraction effect on top of the other UI layers. But - at least from my own developer experiments - it doesn't actually use anything graphical to determine what background color it needs to contrast against[1]. Instead, it looks through the view hierarchy for a view on the same edge as the toolbar the widget is in, and then grabs some undocumented[0] property from that view to determine its background. This fails if there's a split. Build, say, a toolbar layout and put two views inside of it, split 50% vertically with one having a black background and the other white. Put items in your toolbar on both left and right sides. They will either be all black or all white, only contrasting with half the screen.
[0] Or, at least, I have yet to find out what this property is.
[1] Hell, for icons and text they could XOR the alpha mask with the underlying pixels, or a blurred version thereof, to make text that will always contrast.
Plus there’s the pile of outright visual bugs and glitches. Like my keyboard opening with one size, then after a moment resizing itself a few pixels narrower because it initially rendered a little too big and off center to the right, like a badly-designed webpage. Every single time I open it. Including to write and edit this comment.
I also notice that I had to turn a bunch of accessibility features on so I wouldn’t constantly see animations with tons of dropped frames making me feel like I’m playing a bad port of a 3D PlayStation 2 game on a Gameboy Advance.
- If I scroll a web page, and then decide to close it, I have to wait 'til the browser finishes scrolling the page before it'll open the menu with the close button
- every single time I watch a video my eye is drawn to the fucking stupid glass-y diffraction patterns and away from the content I was watching, or the play/pause icon I was interacting with
- every single time I use the home screen on iOS, or CMD+tab in macOS, my eye is drawn to the glass-y highlights around the icons, distracting me from whatever I was trying to do and causing me to think about the OS (and how much I hate the new look)
- I keep noticing the stupidly wide rounded corners on apps
- I keep noticing how the glassy icons and controls and stuff don't consistently change color with dark/light mode. They sometimes change if the content behind them is light/dark (which you'd think is a contrast improvement but it wouldn't be necessary if they had boxed out the toolbars like before). Often half the buttons have changed to contrast with the background and half haven't. This makes all the icons harder to read because I have to interpret the whole set to work out why it's suddenly slightly confusing
- I keep noticing how the toolbar icons have this insane shadows making them appear about 5meters closer to my face than the rest of the scree, which pulls my attention away from whatever I was looking at
- I keep noticing how some icons have those annoying highlighted edges and some don't and wondering why that is, and if they'll all come in sync...
- ... and the glassy-highlighted icons look like shit because the highlights are all the same (same color, same angle, same spread around the edges of the icons), which wouldn't happen if they were actual physical things under natural illumination
- since iOS 26.2, the increase contrast and reduce transparency modes have got worse: they seriously mess with the colors, in many case the light/dark relationship is inverted from what would be most useful (I can't think of examples now - it was so annoying I actually switched back to glassy to allow my eye a sense of comfort when using the thing, and now I try to put up with the "eye candy" distractions instead). I used to have "increase contrast" turned on with the last several major iOS versions. The new scheme has made it slightly harder to use the phone.
And I'm not even getting to how everything is harder to read, harder to see. It's _dreadful_ and they should fire everyone from the C-level who signed it off downwards.
At this point I'm not contorting myself into skipping an update; I'm looking at exiting the entire Apple ecosystem. I don't want Liquid Glass to be my computing experience for the next numerous years.
Apple use to put function first, then form followed, then polished till it was a natural experience.
Do I understand correctly that they just switched to calver, but called the 2025 release "version 26" for marketing reasons (like year numbers for car models)?
There is a bug in Electron caused by the use of a private API that slows down macOS 26 significantly. It’s fixed in Electron but not all Electron apps have updated to the new version yet. Apparently it’s fixed in macOS 26.2
metmac•15h ago
I wanted to like it too, but some of the new UI modals of iOS 26 are just awful.
dchest•15h ago
bflesch•15h ago
SoftTalker•15h ago
temp0826•13h ago
philamonster•13h ago
Settings > Accessibility > Motion > Reduce motion and Settings > Accessibility > Display and text size > Reduce transparency make it usable-ish. There is hundreds of ms lag at times inexplicably w/touch and upwards of a second plus when connected to CarPlay. But I can't blame iOS 26. I have to reboot this thing sometimes weekly, sometimes less frequent than that since iOS 18. I can no longer justify spending hundreds of dollars on things that don't meet my standard of "works" even if it's 2025.
burnt-resistor•14h ago
Security updates are typically available for the most current 2 OS versions, and 18 is still officially supported, perhaps until 2026 or 2027. 18.7.3 exists with similar security updates as 26.2. It may not show up on iPhone as an update option without being on the beta 18 channel because they're trying to force people onto 26 using dark patterns, but it shows up on iPadOS without any additional magic.
hexbin010•14h ago
bflesch•13h ago
gruez•12h ago
hexbin010•11h ago
gruez•11h ago
>Liquid Glass is now mandatory if you care about security.
and
>It is not available. [...] the download is not showing up on the phone.
metmac•8h ago
layer8•9h ago
__turbobrew__•13h ago
metmac•8h ago
1over137•15h ago
schmuckonwheels•14h ago
Ars Technica, a clickbait aggregator whom should have been banned from this site long ago, is hardly a reliable source.
akyuu•13h ago
https://www.intego.com/mac-security-blog/apples-poor-patchin...
p_ing•12h ago
> Note: Because of dependency on architecture and system changes to any current version of Apple operating systems (for example, macOS 26, iOS 26, and so on), not all known security issues are addressed in previous versions (for example, macOS 15, iOS 18, and so on).
doodlebugging•14h ago
After reading that article where it is apparent that Apple has intentionally used terms that sound similar to obscure what the customer is actually gaining when they upgrade versus update and they intentionally omit the part about older devices not getting all the security updates that are pushed in the updates. I now have some clarity.
I can focus on moving to Linux and in time will be ditching the iPhone. Should've done this years ago.
konart•15h ago
the_other•15h ago
pdpi•14h ago
Etheryte•14h ago
chuckadams•14h ago
firefax•13h ago
Long live frutiger aero