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Comment by iTokio | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been using it for 2 days now, and the first thing I noticed is that readability took a hit.

My background is a mid tone warm photo, not dark or light, icons got a white foreground that’s very hard to read against their translucent background.

The second thing I noticed, is that when I’m scrolling a webpage, icons now switch color randomly (according to the bg dominant color) and that’s distracting.

The last thing, is that my phone is getting warmer and scrolling has become less fluid, choppy. And that’s on the 16 Pro Max.

What I like the most about this design though, is that it become invisible and let you focus on what you are reading, watching.

Perfect to focus on content, but the user interface has become sometimes unreadable and when you need to interact with it, put the flashlight in a hurry, you are scanning through instead of instantly recognizing stuff. But maybe that’s just new habits to make.

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> The last thing, is that my phone is getting warmer and scrolling has become less fluid, choppy. And that’s on the 16 Pro Max.

Happens with almost every beta, particularly on first install. The later betas typically improve, and even the current ones often get better if there was some new indexing that had to happen.

I’ve been running since the keynote and my phone was initially warm but has calmed down now.

The rise of dynamism in UI design is not only a waste of compute cycles, but also distracting and a trigger for people like me who can be easily distracted.

What I want are UIs built more like E readers or newspapers, with screen updates taken seriously.

Battery seems to be taking a hit (maybe anecdotal). And scrolling is sluggish at times for sure. And also getting warm device (15 pro max). The sluggishness might not be due to the hour/transparency. There seems to be some kind of lazy loading that’s going on with icons. I’m not sure if that’s new.

The transparency is a mess. I can’t believe how far backwards this is. Trying to visually pick out icons is harder. Icons without transparency have this weird edge enhancement effect going on like a bad photoshop filter.

I seem to be having a bunch of new web issues. Popups aren’t handled as well. And there are weird refresh issues when zooming on web pages.

For what it’s worth, any beta I’ve tried out in the past slurped my battery and made my phone act like a hand warmer.

Dev beta 1 of any iOS release always has horrendous battery life and overheats the phone. Wouldn't be early pre-release software otherwise.

I agree with everything you said here. Most of it transfers to macOS as well. Readability took less of a hit, thankfully.

Some of the work appears so shoddy that I wonder if it was done by code mods or something. The Passwords app on macOS looks bizarrely cluttered and cramped, with all kinds of bad artifacts when you resize the window. I know it's a beta, but it's so bad that I really wonder if a human looked at it for more than a minute before they shipped it out.

I don’t think you can judge the final battery implications or whether it runs smoothly from the Developer Preview, they often have significant bugs.

Are there accessibility controls to disable it, e.g. reduce transparency?

I'd probably do that after the first day of using it.

It was mentioned in one of their WWDC videos. IIRC “Reduce Transparency” now would affect the amount of blur. It was similar to the amount of blur in VisionOS.

But this was a few days ago and I can’t remember exactly which video it was mentioned in.

Yes, thankfully there is. You can reduce the transparency in the Accessibility settings.

I’d wish that the computation load / battery drain would also be reduced by reducing the transparency. However, I think that the computation will still take place.

Ooof that's not great. I had a Macbook 12 that really needed reduced transparency + motion to run well...

I guess the M-series chips are up to the task, but still seems like unnecessary computation I can't turn off :(

> focus on content

This has been Alan Dye's modus operandi since he took the helm on software design and the problem is it does not scale to larger devices. On a phone and mostly on an iPad, where you're far more likely to be consuming content anyway, it's not the worst thing to shoot for.

On a Mac it's infuriating. I'm working on anywhere from a 14" to a 27" display, both have a wealth of pixels to work with: why are you hiding controls? You're not making anything simpler, I need those buttons to perform the tasks I'm trying to do. All you've done is make it less intuitive, less discoverable, and added extra clicks.

To be honest it has some problems even on the smaller devices too, mainly in the form of lack of visual affordances. So much functionality you would never discover unless you'd seen someone else do it or triggered it by accident (and even then might not realise what you've done—just yesterday I had to help my mother get out of private browsing in Safari because she'd swiped across to it and didn't know how to get back).

After using it for 2 days I'm liking it, as in really liking it. People complain that controls are harder to find. I say controls were _always_ hard to find. They blended into the content somehow. Now I can find them easier while also _not_ finding them.

I always found controls in previous versions of iOS to be lacking. I hope the negativity doesn't make them backtrack because this is a _huge_ improvement.

iPhone 16 here - my phone was laggy and warm for the first day of having the update. Everything is completely back to normal now, perfect performance even when interacting with liquid glass stuff, exactly as it was on 18.

There's a reason why Win7 dialed transparency down from Vista.

[citation needed]

Vista had a black taskbar with some transparency, 7 made it glass.

If you maximised a window on Vista, the maximised window's border became dark (black/with an accent colour tint) and opaque, the taskbar and sidebar went opaque as well. 7 got rid of that.

> "The last thing, is that my phone is getting warmer and scrolling has become less fluid, choppy. And that’s on the 16 Pro Max."

to understand the motivations, look at the outcomes.

"And that’s on the 16 Pro Max.", haha omg. well, that's the apple experience, never update beyond the OS that came with the device. Painful lesson from being an apple user since 2006

What are you talking about? My iPhone 13 Pro works perfectly on the newest OS. It’s actually hard to justify upgrading. I know lots of people who simply don’t upgrade anymore.

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