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I hope they release a version of these fixes on iOS 18 in a form installable on an iPhone 14; I've been trying to stay away from Liquid Glass until it's actuall

by pikhq 8mo ago

I hope they release a version of these fixes on iOS 18 in a form installable on an iPhone 14; I've been trying to stay away from Liquid Glass until it's actually usable. I really don't want to be forced to upgrade, since Apple seems to have replaced UX testing with "just ship it," as has become standard in the industry.

BitwiseFool 8mo ago
Liquid Glass looks pretty from a distance, but my biggest gripe with the design language is just how difficult so many things become to read or interact with. Given that the whole raison d'être of liquid glass is transparent effects, the options to limit that or otherwise increase contrast simply do not go far enough. I also balk at how much extra computing power is needed to generate effects I find no value in and would prefer to disable. My hope was that Apple would be forced to course correct in subsequent releases but that doesn't seem to be happening.
- tailnode 8mo ago
  They almost certainly will course-correct in the next release now that the culprit responsible for Liquid Glass is no longer at the company. But they won't chuck it out wholesale; it will be a gradual evolution back to sanity.
  - dylan604 8mo ago
    They reacted pretty quickly to the butterfly keyboard fiasco. By the time users received the shipping products of the first gen, the second gen were already in the pipeline so there was a slightly modified with only a dust cover being added. There was no third gen. Hopefully iOS 26.x releases will continue to correct Liquid Glass, but I'm guessing iOS 27 is well down the path with it still integrated. Maybe iOS 28 will see sanity return???
    - procaryote 8mo ago
      Second gen butterfly keyboard broke a lot too. And then there was the no-esc touch bar, and the removal of inverted-T arrow keys... It took a few years of no good mac laptops before they backpedalled enough to get back to where they started
      - zer0zzz 8mo ago
        I’m pretty sure butterfly keyboard was made worse when it came to the hotter rubbing higher power Mac’s. I rarely saw folks with the original 12” low power model having issues. It was not an entirely bad concept for the device it was conceived for, but Apple has a habit of unifying their technologies to all their products and sometimes, like with Liquid Glass, that seriously doesn’t work.
    - nottorp 8mo ago
      Yes, some suckers bought the second gen with the dust cover. Because they said the keys are more protected from dust. It started to break in 3 months, had unusable keys in 6... Stop defending that idiocy.
    - pjmlp 8mo ago
      Quickly, as measured in a few years.
- derefr 8mo ago
  > I also balk at how much extra computing power is needed to generate effects I find no value in and would prefer to disable. I mean, "computing power" in a literal sense maybe, but does that matter if it doesn't translate to either "workload contention" or "electrical power"? I think the Liquid Glass effects, similar to smooth scrolling, are mostly just running as pixel shaders on a spare tile of one of the SoC's GPU's Streaming Processors — a tile that likely likely would have been idle-but-burning-power-anyway, given that GPU power management occurs on the level of entire SPs. It's the same reason that ProMotion "smooth viewport scrolling" doesn't really cost anything.
  - loloquwowndueo 8mo ago
    Workload contention. My iPhone 17 visibly struggles to render components with evident lagging - this is user-noticeable, if it were all done by an otherwise spare core I wouldn’t notice these things.
    - procaryote 8mo ago
      And even if they reserved a core, that would be a waste of a perfectly good core
    - derefr 8mo ago
      AFAICT, the steady-state Liquid Glass effects (think: the address bar in Safari, staying static itself while you scroll the page under it) cost nothing. That's what I meant above. Animating the Liquid Glass widgets (i.e. changing their position or shape), on the other hand, does seem to cost a lot / produce lag. I get the impression that this is down to the UI toolkit not being optimized for whatever Liquid Glass is doing in terms of recalculating constraints during animations. (When the GPU overruns its time budget while computing shaders for the compositor, the visual effect is of [double-buffered] texture buffers dropping/repeating frames, not slowdown. Actual "lag" in a GPU-composited UI is either from CPU work, or from one-shot CUDA-type GPU "prerender jobs".) I get the sense that Apple rushed out some shitty code that has some of these components re-evaluating a bunch of their placement and sizing constraints on every non-static animation frame (rather than just giving the Liquid Glass shaders the ability to do declarative tweens.) Or maybe the shaders already do declarative tweens, but Apple are doing tons of redundant on-CPU per-frame recalculations, to re-do any constraint-based layout for everything around the component during the animation, that might be impacted by the component's current tweened state. I dunno. Either way, it's definitely silly, and could be re-engineered to work a lot better. But it's also not really "Liquid Glass's fault" (i.e. something inherent to the visual design); it's just (AFAICT) bad implementation engineering, rushed to give Apple something to talk about besides its failure to launch Apple Intelligence.
- rdtsc 8mo ago
  > I also balk at how much extra computing power is needed to generate effects I find no value in and would prefer to disable Sounds like you need to spend some money for a new Apple device! /s
- Reason077 8mo ago
  > “My hope was that Apple would be forced to course correct in subsequent releases but that doesn't seem to be happening.” I’m optimistic that they will eventually course correct on Liquid Glass, but we’ll have to wait until iOS/macOS 27, or perhaps longer. There are parallels to Apple’s butterfly keyboard fiasco on the hardware side. Sleek looking on the surface but an objective step backwards in usability. Unfortunately it took Apple several years to reverse course on that one.
  - kergonath 8mo ago
    > There are parallels to Apple’s butterfly keyboard fiasco on the hardware side. There are also parallels with the original pinstripes-and-transparency-everywhere aqua UI. I am also optimistic that it will be toned down over time but retaining the responsiveness.
    - bee_rider 8mo ago
      What was the Windows Vista thing, right? It was pretty bad but nobody bought a windows laptop because they thought it’d look nice.
    - Towaway69 8mo ago
      Whatever happened to the magic bar? The SD card slot on macbooks … not to mention the HDMI slot. Here’s hoping that the glass effect goes the same way as the Dodo.
- ibejoeb 8mo ago
  The Windows ME/Fisher Price look. I can get past the drag handle problem. It's like every window is now the damn ios simulator.
- bs7280 8mo ago
  My biggest frustrations with it aren't even related to the look of things, its the all around disregard for user experience. The new screenshot UX on iOS is an insanely bad downgrade.
  - SchemaLoad 8mo ago
    I think it makes sense. They refocused it on sharing or extracting information from screenshots. Which is what people want more than saving them to the camera roll. Being able to copy text or translate the text in a screenshot is super useful.
  - jimsmart 8mo ago
    Just go to Settings > General > Screen Capture, and turn off Full-Screen Previews - which fully restores the previous behaviour. Personally I prefer the new behaviour. But eitherways: it’s just an option.
bombcar 8mo ago
[flagged]
layer8 8mo ago
They won't, it already didn't happen for 18.7.4 and 18.7.3 (only via beta channel for the latter), and the present fixes are being released as 18.7.5 for the iPhone XS/XR. Still I think that staying on iOS 18 is the lesser evil.
Cider9986 8mo ago
I recommend installing liquid glass on iOS. It actually has been looking good on there since 26.2. Macs have been godawful with liquid glass.
sillywalk 8mo ago
Doesn't look like it. It looks like it's only iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, iPhone XR https://support.apple.com/en-us/126347 https://support.apple.com/en-us/126347
aydyn 8mo ago
[flagged]
- dewey 8mo ago
  Indeed, based on all the “look at that, you can’t even read xyz” screenshots around release time I thought it will be really bad. Upgraded and…it’s fine. After a week you don’t notice anything and the old OS will look dated. Just like every design change and any product that causes a lot of noise in the first week. On the Mac it’s much rougher than on iOS.
  - sdtransier 8mo ago
    Agreed that there are more rough edges on Mac, but even then, I've been using Tahoe for months now and it's been fine. I hear podcasters saying that they're just skipping the entire Tahoe cycle and waiting until this fall's OS and I just don't get it.
    - kcplate 8mo ago
      It’s been perfectly fine for me too. I don’t understand the folks tossing it so much hate…I have to think for them it’s more about subjective style complaint than objective complaints. Operationally my Mac experience hasn’t changed. Within an hour of using it, I honestly stopped noticing the differences.
  - celsoazevedo 8mo ago
    Performance of iOS 26 on some iPhones isn't great. Sure, a lot of people complain because they don't like change, but we shouldn't ignore the performance issues and poor legibility on some elements. Those are valid complaints.
- JoeBOFH 8mo ago
  I am a newer iPhone user (2 years now) and I am of the same opinion as you. I see so many people crying foul, that their phone is now unusable, but I’m just hear going “eh it’s uglier” and continuing. Curious what OP thinks is fundamentally broken. Now I have heard about issues on MacOS and things but not really anything around the phone.
RASBR89 8mo ago
Updated my 13 mini. Performance is fine / maybe better.. but battery. Tanked. How true is the ‘it takes days for reindexing’ statement?
- lynndotpy 8mo ago
  Re-indexing does occur after an update, but iOS 26 consumes more battery life than iOS 18 anyways. Just in one example video ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eCUkYJ8A98 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eCUkYJ8A98 ) they see the phone get hotter and the battery drops 13x faster during non-static sequences like checking notifications, etc. Just anecdotally, my iPhone 16 Pro seems to last half as long. Before iOS 16, I got from 80% to 20% without a problem. Now, I charge to 100% and I still need to recharge throughout the day. Apple simply fucked up our phones.
  - thisislife2 8mo ago
    Planned Obsolescence. Increased battery consumption = reduced battery life + user hostile repairability = new purchases. I've seen so many iDiots purchase a new iPhone when their battery conks out because the cost of repairs and original battery "doesn't justify it".
- pvab3 8mo ago
  ios 26 has made my 13 mini consistently laggier and hotter
  - icedchai 8mo ago
    Same. I would’ve stayed on 18.x if they provided updates.
markoa 8mo ago
iOS Liquid Glass needs its own Snow Leopard.
stuartd 8mo ago
Is that not 18.7.5 as released yesterday or am I missing something? https://support.apple.com/en-us/126347 https://support.apple.com/en-us/126347
- TheDong 8mo ago
  > Available for: iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, iPhone XR, iPad 7th generation They are explicitly choosing to only release security updates for 18.x to devices which are not eligible for liquid glass. iPhone 14 was deemed capable of running liquid glass, even though it has worse battery life and performs sluggishly. In the past, Apple has usually let you hold back on an older version and shipped security updates for all devices, not just ones that are incapable of running the new OS, but not this time.
  - MYEUHD 8mo ago
    > In the past, Apple has usually let you hold back on an older version and shipped security updates for all devices, not just ones that are incapable of running the new OS, but not this time. No they haven't been, for the past several years: https://www.macrumors.com/2025/12/19/ios-18-forced-ios-26-upgrade/ https://www.macrumors.com/2025/12/19/ios-18-forced-ios-26-up...
- lynndotpy 8mo ago
  Apple used to make minor and patch releases available, but they've stopped doing that so as to increase Liquid Glass adoption. For that reason, iOS 18.7.5 is only available for the iPhone XS / XR series released. Very consumer-hostile behavior from Apple :(
  - urbandw311er 8mo ago
    Massively hostile. They have effectively forced me to choose between a less secure phone or one with a terrible UX. FWIW I’m sticking with the less secure one that doesn’t look like Windows Vista.
- itchingsphynx 8mo ago
47282847 8mo ago
I immediately enabled “reduce transparency” and “strong contrast” in the accessibility settings and didn’t really notice much difference to 18 then. Not a big deal at all.
- bee_rider 8mo ago
  Reduced transparency is somewhat ugly (the giant bars on the top and bottom of the screen in the web browser for example. But it isn’t obviously awful like the giant transparency thing.
  - 47282847 8mo ago
    I use Orion Browser and don’t know what you are referring to.
    - bee_rider 8mo ago
      Oh, interesting. Safari just turns the areas that would be transparent solid, instead.

by pikhq 8mo ago

BitwiseFool 8mo ago

Liquid Glass looks pretty from a distance, but my biggest gripe with the design language is just how difficult so many things become to read or interact with. Given that the whole raison d'être of liquid glass is transparent effects, the options to limit that or otherwise increase contrast simply do not go far enough. I also balk at how much extra computing power is needed to generate effects I find no value in and would prefer to disable. My hope was that Apple would be forced to course correct in subsequent releases but that doesn't seem to be happening.

tailnode 8mo ago
They almost certainly will course-correct in the next release now that the culprit responsible for Liquid Glass is no longer at the company. But they won't chuck it out wholesale; it will be a gradual evolution back to sanity.
- dylan604 8mo ago
  They reacted pretty quickly to the butterfly keyboard fiasco. By the time users received the shipping products of the first gen, the second gen were already in the pipeline so there was a slightly modified with only a dust cover being added. There was no third gen. Hopefully iOS 26.x releases will continue to correct Liquid Glass, but I'm guessing iOS 27 is well down the path with it still integrated. Maybe iOS 28 will see sanity return???
  - procaryote 8mo ago
    Second gen butterfly keyboard broke a lot too. And then there was the no-esc touch bar, and the removal of inverted-T arrow keys... It took a few years of no good mac laptops before they backpedalled enough to get back to where they started
    - zer0zzz 8mo ago
      I’m pretty sure butterfly keyboard was made worse when it came to the hotter rubbing higher power Mac’s. I rarely saw folks with the original 12” low power model having issues. It was not an entirely bad concept for the device it was conceived for, but Apple has a habit of unifying their technologies to all their products and sometimes, like with Liquid Glass, that seriously doesn’t work.
  - nottorp 8mo ago
    Yes, some suckers bought the second gen with the dust cover. Because they said the keys are more protected from dust. It started to break in 3 months, had unusable keys in 6... Stop defending that idiocy.
  - pjmlp 8mo ago
    Quickly, as measured in a few years.
derefr 8mo ago
> I also balk at how much extra computing power is needed to generate effects I find no value in and would prefer to disable. I mean, "computing power" in a literal sense maybe, but does that matter if it doesn't translate to either "workload contention" or "electrical power"? I think the Liquid Glass effects, similar to smooth scrolling, are mostly just running as pixel shaders on a spare tile of one of the SoC's GPU's Streaming Processors — a tile that likely likely would have been idle-but-burning-power-anyway, given that GPU power management occurs on the level of entire SPs. It's the same reason that ProMotion "smooth viewport scrolling" doesn't really cost anything.
- loloquwowndueo 8mo ago
  Workload contention. My iPhone 17 visibly struggles to render components with evident lagging - this is user-noticeable, if it were all done by an otherwise spare core I wouldn’t notice these things.
  - procaryote 8mo ago
    And even if they reserved a core, that would be a waste of a perfectly good core
  - derefr 8mo ago
    AFAICT, the steady-state Liquid Glass effects (think: the address bar in Safari, staying static itself while you scroll the page under it) cost nothing. That's what I meant above. Animating the Liquid Glass widgets (i.e. changing their position or shape), on the other hand, does seem to cost a lot / produce lag. I get the impression that this is down to the UI toolkit not being optimized for whatever Liquid Glass is doing in terms of recalculating constraints during animations. (When the GPU overruns its time budget while computing shaders for the compositor, the visual effect is of [double-buffered] texture buffers dropping/repeating frames, not slowdown. Actual "lag" in a GPU-composited UI is either from CPU work, or from one-shot CUDA-type GPU "prerender jobs".) I get the sense that Apple rushed out some shitty code that has some of these components re-evaluating a bunch of their placement and sizing constraints on every non-static animation frame (rather than just giving the Liquid Glass shaders the ability to do declarative tweens.) Or maybe the shaders already do declarative tweens, but Apple are doing tons of redundant on-CPU per-frame recalculations, to re-do any constraint-based layout for everything around the component during the animation, that might be impacted by the component's current tweened state. I dunno. Either way, it's definitely silly, and could be re-engineered to work a lot better. But it's also not really "Liquid Glass's fault" (i.e. something inherent to the visual design); it's just (AFAICT) bad implementation engineering, rushed to give Apple something to talk about besides its failure to launch Apple Intelligence.
rdtsc 8mo ago
> I also balk at how much extra computing power is needed to generate effects I find no value in and would prefer to disable Sounds like you need to spend some money for a new Apple device! /s
Reason077 8mo ago
> “My hope was that Apple would be forced to course correct in subsequent releases but that doesn't seem to be happening.” I’m optimistic that they will eventually course correct on Liquid Glass, but we’ll have to wait until iOS/macOS 27, or perhaps longer. There are parallels to Apple’s butterfly keyboard fiasco on the hardware side. Sleek looking on the surface but an objective step backwards in usability. Unfortunately it took Apple several years to reverse course on that one.
- kergonath 8mo ago
  > There are parallels to Apple’s butterfly keyboard fiasco on the hardware side. There are also parallels with the original pinstripes-and-transparency-everywhere aqua UI. I am also optimistic that it will be toned down over time but retaining the responsiveness.
  - bee_rider 8mo ago
    What was the Windows Vista thing, right? It was pretty bad but nobody bought a windows laptop because they thought it’d look nice.
  - Towaway69 8mo ago
    Whatever happened to the magic bar? The SD card slot on macbooks … not to mention the HDMI slot. Here’s hoping that the glass effect goes the same way as the Dodo.
ibejoeb 8mo ago
The Windows ME/Fisher Price look. I can get past the drag handle problem. It's like every window is now the damn ios simulator.
bs7280 8mo ago
My biggest frustrations with it aren't even related to the look of things, its the all around disregard for user experience. The new screenshot UX on iOS is an insanely bad downgrade.
- SchemaLoad 8mo ago
  I think it makes sense. They refocused it on sharing or extracting information from screenshots. Which is what people want more than saving them to the camera roll. Being able to copy text or translate the text in a screenshot is super useful.
- jimsmart 8mo ago
  Just go to Settings > General > Screen Capture, and turn off Full-Screen Previews - which fully restores the previous behaviour. Personally I prefer the new behaviour. But eitherways: it’s just an option.

bombcar 8mo ago

[flagged]

layer8 8mo ago

They won't, it already didn't happen for 18.7.4 and 18.7.3 (only via beta channel for the latter), and the present fixes are being released as 18.7.5 for the iPhone XS/XR. Still I think that staying on iOS 18 is the lesser evil.

Cider9986 8mo ago

I recommend installing liquid glass on iOS. It actually has been looking good on there since 26.2. Macs have been godawful with liquid glass.

sillywalk 8mo ago

Doesn't look like it. It looks like it's only iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, iPhone XR https://support.apple.com/en-us/126347 https://support.apple.com/en-us/126347

aydyn 8mo ago

[flagged]

dewey 8mo ago
Indeed, based on all the “look at that, you can’t even read xyz” screenshots around release time I thought it will be really bad. Upgraded and…it’s fine. After a week you don’t notice anything and the old OS will look dated. Just like every design change and any product that causes a lot of noise in the first week. On the Mac it’s much rougher than on iOS.
- sdtransier 8mo ago
  Agreed that there are more rough edges on Mac, but even then, I've been using Tahoe for months now and it's been fine. I hear podcasters saying that they're just skipping the entire Tahoe cycle and waiting until this fall's OS and I just don't get it.
  - kcplate 8mo ago
    It’s been perfectly fine for me too. I don’t understand the folks tossing it so much hate…I have to think for them it’s more about subjective style complaint than objective complaints. Operationally my Mac experience hasn’t changed. Within an hour of using it, I honestly stopped noticing the differences.
- celsoazevedo 8mo ago
  Performance of iOS 26 on some iPhones isn't great. Sure, a lot of people complain because they don't like change, but we shouldn't ignore the performance issues and poor legibility on some elements. Those are valid complaints.
JoeBOFH 8mo ago
I am a newer iPhone user (2 years now) and I am of the same opinion as you. I see so many people crying foul, that their phone is now unusable, but I’m just hear going “eh it’s uglier” and continuing. Curious what OP thinks is fundamentally broken. Now I have heard about issues on MacOS and things but not really anything around the phone.

RASBR89 8mo ago

Updated my 13 mini. Performance is fine / maybe better.. but battery. Tanked. How true is the ‘it takes days for reindexing’ statement?

lynndotpy 8mo ago
Re-indexing does occur after an update, but iOS 26 consumes more battery life than iOS 18 anyways. Just in one example video ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eCUkYJ8A98 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eCUkYJ8A98 ) they see the phone get hotter and the battery drops 13x faster during non-static sequences like checking notifications, etc. Just anecdotally, my iPhone 16 Pro seems to last half as long. Before iOS 16, I got from 80% to 20% without a problem. Now, I charge to 100% and I still need to recharge throughout the day. Apple simply fucked up our phones.
- thisislife2 8mo ago
  Planned Obsolescence. Increased battery consumption = reduced battery life + user hostile repairability = new purchases. I've seen so many iDiots purchase a new iPhone when their battery conks out because the cost of repairs and original battery "doesn't justify it".
pvab3 8mo ago
ios 26 has made my 13 mini consistently laggier and hotter
- icedchai 8mo ago
  Same. I would’ve stayed on 18.x if they provided updates.

markoa 8mo ago

iOS Liquid Glass needs its own Snow Leopard.

stuartd 8mo ago

Is that not 18.7.5 as released yesterday or am I missing something? https://support.apple.com/en-us/126347 https://support.apple.com/en-us/126347

TheDong 8mo ago
> Available for: iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, iPhone XR, iPad 7th generation They are explicitly choosing to only release security updates for 18.x to devices which are not eligible for liquid glass. iPhone 14 was deemed capable of running liquid glass, even though it has worse battery life and performs sluggishly. In the past, Apple has usually let you hold back on an older version and shipped security updates for all devices, not just ones that are incapable of running the new OS, but not this time.
- MYEUHD 8mo ago
  > In the past, Apple has usually let you hold back on an older version and shipped security updates for all devices, not just ones that are incapable of running the new OS, but not this time. No they haven't been, for the past several years: https://www.macrumors.com/2025/12/19/ios-18-forced-ios-26-upgrade/ https://www.macrumors.com/2025/12/19/ios-18-forced-ios-26-up...
lynndotpy 8mo ago
Apple used to make minor and patch releases available, but they've stopped doing that so as to increase Liquid Glass adoption. For that reason, iOS 18.7.5 is only available for the iPhone XS / XR series released. Very consumer-hostile behavior from Apple :(
- urbandw311er 8mo ago
  Massively hostile. They have effectively forced me to choose between a less secure phone or one with a terrible UX. FWIW I’m sticking with the less secure one that doesn’t look like Windows Vista.
itchingsphynx 8mo ago

47282847 8mo ago

I immediately enabled “reduce transparency” and “strong contrast” in the accessibility settings and didn’t really notice much difference to 18 then. Not a big deal at all.

bee_rider 8mo ago
Reduced transparency is somewhat ugly (the giant bars on the top and bottom of the screen in the web browser for example. But it isn’t obviously awful like the giant transparency thing.
- 47282847 8mo ago
  I use Orion Browser and don’t know what you are referring to.
  - bee_rider 8mo ago
    Oh, interesting. Safari just turns the areas that would be transparent solid, instead.