Slow Liquid
robinsloan.com
robinsloan.com
Maybe the iPhone 13 Mini really will stay choppy, but even my brand-new current gen iPad got super-choppy for the first couple of hours and I was freaked out. Turns out it was just that thing where iOS reindexes everything for Spotlight on a major version upgrade, or god only knows what it's doing in the background.
- Apps launch slower (time from app launch to interactivity)
- Apps hang more frequently (interface freezes after interaction)
- Apps drop frames (scrolling and animations stutter)
I imagine it’s some combination of the above. Apps and the operating systems that run them get bigger and slower over time.
There really isn’t a “slowness constant” to tweak short of animation speed, and I believe Apple made app launch noticeably faster, animation-wise in iOS 26. Just lots and lots of regressions to fix.
but I agree, the hangs in the latest operating systems are brutal. Feels a little half-baked. macOS Tahoe is much worse than Sequoia on this by far. I’m hoping that the later releases (26.1, etc) make the situation better.
Performance is generally good, but when there are a lot of effects in Safari’s search view it stutters.
Battery drain was higher for over a week, but now it’s mostly normal. My all day battery use is 60-75% daily (you can check this in the updated battery settings tab), low phone use days are 40-60%.
There are battery use landlines though — this morning playing around with depth effect on wallpapers used 50% of my (95% health) battery in 15 minutes. Camera is very heavy as well.
My phone always runs slowly immediately following an OS update. I assume it's doing a bunch of work in the background, deleting temporary files or whatever. Even downloading and installing app updates I'm now eligible for. Can always tell because the thing gets warm.
Within a few hours it's back to normal. I don't like the Liquid Glass update but it's not impacted performance.
I really dig the redesign. I've been suffering through flat UIs since at least 2013, so having some volume back is very welcome. I know we probably won't go back to skeuomorphism, but that'd be great. Metaphor in design is important. It's a shortcut to understanding. As it stands, I'll gladly take Liquid Glass's volume and distortion as a indicator of interactability.
But, I am a "harbinger of failure"[1], (12 Mini, right?), so maybe this won't be long-lived either.
1: https://news.mit.edu/2015/harbinger-failure-consumers-unpopu...
I don't disagree with the blog post, but it's just not interesting, informative, or useful.
It's often a matter of timing -- just enough after the update was around, time of day, day of the week, no other major or interesting news, etc.
Just take a look at the MacOS Tahoe topic (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45252378). A HUGE portion of the comments are clearly from people who both (A) don't use MacOS and/or (B) haven't used Tahoe and they are all intensely negative.
Taking Hacker News as an inverse signal on these things makes sense. For example, HN's iPhone Air hate is making me extremely bullish on its sales prospects.
I also think that your analysis is reductive. Liquid Glass has some serious usability regressions, so there are very good reasons to criticize it, not just so-called "hate". In any case, there have been plenty of good, informative posts about Liquid Glass and iOS 26 in general; this submission, however, is not one of them.
Hacker News truly has a large number of topics for which the reactions and responses are reflexively negative and large in magnitude (there are similar positive reactions as well!). This isn't "reductive" analysis and you didn't understand what I said if your point is "your analysis is reductive because liquid glass has some serious usability regressions". You can even look in my own post history to see that I agree with that just fine.
Still, look through the discussion! Much of it is clearly reflexive negativity and based on zero user experience.
It's entirely expected and unsurprising that Apple's announcement of a major macOS release would receive a ton of upvotes, regardless of how people feel about the release. That's why I think your analogy is irrelevant.
A low quality submission should not receive many upvotes, and as a consequence, it should not receive many comments of any kind, positive or negative, because it won't appear on the front page of HN for people to notice and comment on it.
I think the idea that one behavior being used as evidence for another behavior is problematic is ridiculous.
Unfortunately there are a lot of visual bugs still with this setting, like clipped text boxes. And it removes your wallpaper for inexplicable reasons.
Far less polished and imho still a downgrade from a usability perspective, but definitely faster than with the setting off.
Meanwhile, I still get prompted by the OS whether I want to allow Chrome to access my local network after it asked me that 10 times already.
Does anyone enjoy or like the changes after the upgrade? Are there any worthy tradeoffs like "ok it's slower but at least I can now do $x or they fixed $y and I don't regret updating it".
My Mac actually seems to run faster but I may just be imagining that (M3 Max MBP)
I’m willing to bet they moved LG up a year to help fill
Time to switch to a Linux phone where the UI doesn’t need to constantly be redeveloped for lifestyle + product manager promotions.
on the other hand, my coworker also has a 15 Pro and he complains that things are slow compared to iOS 18 for him.
As evidenced by the sibling comments, not everyone seems to be as sensitive to this.
Everybody just fell in love with 10.6.8.
It's no surprise that it had lots of bugs because it rewrote lots of components. But the power of storytelling (and remembering via most-upvoted Reddit comment) has turned it into the perfect release.
Snow Leopard was mainly framework overhauls, but they're still doing those, year after year, only piecewise. People praise Snow Leopard as a golden release, but early on it was very buggy and, for many, slow (I still remember). It only became great after refinement. Now Tahoe seems stable enough (not counting minor UI glitches) that even Ableton/Pro Tools/SPSS/AdobeCC and other frequent troublemakers work fine on release day, an unusual feat. The "downhill" narrative seems to be nothing but baseless nostalgia.
Everybody also forgets that Apple always did yearly macOS releases except for a short gap around the iPhone and iPad introductions. That's not new either.
And I had to turn off my accessibility customizations (reduce transparency, etc.) so the interface didn't look completely terrible.
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45303687 and marked it off topic.