Apple very rarely admits mistakes. The fact they're rolling back some of the extremeness in Liquid Glass and actively mentioned in the keynote that they very seriously took the user feedback shows just how bad it was, at least initially.
That and the guy who announced it last year fled to Facebook of all places.
>Goes to show that a year of anybody with any sort of clout complaining about the thousand little cuts of Liquid Glass on macOS will get a company to respond.
Worth remembering too that this isn't merely about "complaints", Apple has significant metrics on the rates at which users are upgrading to a new OS, or not. You can opt-out of sharing that data, but a lot of people (even technical people) may choose to check the box to share with Apple. Anecdotally, I myself and a LOT of other people have stuck with macOS 15 or earlier, but Apple should have a lot of hard data on it and adoption curves vs the past.
A real reaction does certainly suggest that this wasn't just a tempest in a teacup, but that they really weren't seeing the adoption on Macs they expected.
Given the other emphasis placed on performance improvements (likely in service to helping to mask the slowness of LLM Siri) I’m really hoping this is a modern Snow Leopard release. I’m looking forward to the Apple nerds digging and offering a compelling narrative about why I should care about updating.
And to add on to that, if this is a bug-fix bonanza release, hopefully we’ll also see a lot of positive movement during the beta period to keep shipping fixes. We’re getting a freaking EQ on AirPods!!!!111!!1! It seems Apple is finally taking some things to heart about listening to their users and I’m 10000% here for it.
I did not upgrade my laptop because it would come with the latest OS- I am not alone.
As far as I know, the best data the rest of us have is Google Trends. And based on that, it really does look like Liquid Glass elicited the largest negative reaction that Apple has ever had to an OS release.
"How to Switch to Android" hit 3x its all time peak, "iPhone revert update", hit 4x its all-time peak, "iPhone slow" hit 8x its all time peak, "iPhone bad now" hit 5x its all time peak, "iPhone fix battery" hit 3x its all-time peak (and 14x its five-year peak)
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=how%20to...
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=iphone%2...
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=i...
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=iphone%2...
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=iphone%2...
I mostly looked at this for iOS, but searches like "macOS slow", "mac slow", "fix mac battery", "fix mac", etc. all show similar hockey-stick jumps as Liquid Glass rolled out.
If this means a sudden highest-ever 10x shift in customer dissatisfaction - 1000% - then that has to have been significant.
The worst part, intentionally or not they left macOS 26 as the last release for all the Intel user.
DHH's dotfiles repo is not a viable replacement for macOS, I promise you. Linux is fun, but macOS is already enough of a *nix for most developers, and it works well without much tinkering.
I cannot believe that Apple is that insidious to have planned a milquetoast release to be the last one for Intel, but I totally believe that Apple is insidious enough to see how they can benefit from it.
That they're literally marketing macOS 27 as we've listened to your complaints about 26 completely deflates anyone's interest in running macOS 26 on Intel. Their Intel users are being marketed hard to switch to Apple Silicon.
How? Aren’t all update requests made to, and all updates downloaded from their servers?
Also, doesn’t the system that pushes emergency updates (https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/deployment/dep93ff7ea7...) have to know what OS you are running?
It’s a big problem, because running an old iOS is very bad for security. There’s still new vulnerabilities popping up in iOS, especially in the image and video decoders, that are fixed in newer point releases of iOS 26. I’m not sure if Apple is back porting all the fixes. I would definitely be a little afraid, because iMessage previews are a common attack vector and are zero-click. I don’t think anyone really turns off automatic previews; they’re very convenient.
I still would have liked a more genuine walk back (they sold it as "iterations and adjustments" as if the rewinded stuff were new ideas) but overall reassuring.
You will see that during this era Mac OS X was relegated to stepchild status and received far fewer support.
All this glory is just Steve Jobs selling it to us as a good thing! In the end it worked out, but it was more incidental and a collateral of the iPhone than the public memory likes to admit.
Probably the best reversion was getting rid of the butterfly keyboard and bringing back ports after Jony Ive was gone.
With a large enough trackpad, you could even move to a 1:1 type of movement, or add that functionality to a layer for the best of both worlds (like gyro enhanced aiming in games).
I’ve worked with some designers who did what you described with their huge tablets. Use the stylus to turn it into a giant touchpad. Works pretty good.
And before you mention it, yes the charging cable. In reality, plugging it in for literally 1 minute will get you enough battery to last hours. 5 minutes will get you an entire day. Normal people plug it in and go get a coffee or pee and then it’s fine until they log off for the day. Could it better? Of course, but it’s not so large an issue that they are losing customers on it, so it is what it is.
You’re not the target market for an Apple mouse and that’s okay.
It's also the terrible ergonomics.
It's the epitome of putting form before function. It's a desk ornament that leads to frequent injuries with use. See: https://www.google.com/search?q=magic+mouse+injury
Unfortunately I had to learn this when I got my first mac.
You don't have to go very deep into the ecosystem to encounter things that... well, things bottom out at shallow.
Looking back... glossy displays. flat keyboards without curvature to center your fingers on the keys. more and more hurdles to using macos as a technical person. prematurely missing USB-A. memory/storage that's not expandable. Dongles everywhere as a checkbox item/workaround.
and of course, anything that superficially seems to be a mouse.
It is neither a good trackpad replacement nor a good mouse design.
Any non-anecdotal data on that assertion?
A good lesson in not messing with a good thing. If they had just put an electric motor in a classic Ferrari body, it could have been a nice moment for the energy transition.
I almost left apple entirely over those stupid switches lol.
They did it with Aqua when MacOS launched and again with the iPhone's original skeuomorphic UI and yet again with the flat redesign of iOS.
Whenever I use my personal Mac or iPad, still on the old OS, I wonder what they were thinking - I would guess it was rushed to hit the annual release, as it does have potential in parts.
That said, it looks from the few screenshots in this like you’re able to pare it back to something much closer to how it used to look, which is great and I’m glad they’re taking feedback on board.
I cannot help but think: they are such cowards, so afraid of anything that stands out after years of flat design. Like, you can almost feel like there is someone trying to sneak it in, only for it to get squeegeed at the last minute. The buttons could look like classic Aqua ( if they are allowed a background color that is), if it got slammed with a belt sander. Everything has to be too subtle, too toned down, too pale, and too faint, only noticable blown up to 4x on an OLED screen. It's like all they are allowed is "mimiminalizm", just remove, remove, remove, tone down, remove, slavishly, without thought. I'm supposed to cheer they added color back to in-focus window sidebars? First: good lord, what were they thinking? Of course they rolled such an utterly stupid decision back. Second: what color? Some single accent color applied to some whisper thin monochrome squiggles they call icons?
Its still more of the same. In the Installer app, there are windows where the dividing line between toolbar and content is like a 1px 30% grey line on same old bland 20% grey background, and that's with the new "Draw Borders" Accessibility setting turned on.
They can dress it up. Fix the worst issues. I'm thankful for it. Hell, I might not skip this one. But the problem still remains: Liquid Glass was a *bad, flawed* design from the start, whose central principle is contradictory (we'll get out of the way of your content by floating directly in front of your content all the time, in the way). There is no salvaging it.
Given all other truly useful things you could implement as well as bug fixes, why did you think that investing time and money on Liquid Glass would deliver useful value to users?
I wonder how much time and money they wasted on something that nobody wanted, cared for, needed or solved any real problem?
Excep every time they do a big redesign like this. This happened when they moved away from skeuomorphism in iOS7(?) and then backpedalled hard in the following revision because of negative user feedback. Similar thing happened when they presented the reinvented Safari (I do't think that one even survived through betas). And it is happening now.
When they toned down the horrific excesses of skeumorphism (like leather textures) on macOS but still retained some skeumorphic design (e.g., buttons that look like buttons) people were pretty ok with it too. I remember some complaints that the lickable aqua buttons were gone but that wasn't really a serious complaint, just more of a "I kind of liked those gaudy buttons, sad they're gone" type of sentiment.
Classic case of the reality distortion field here.
Uninstalling Copilot and the local AI models is whats new on current insider builds.
Your links only apply to Home editions.
You can also use an autoattend.xml file on the install ISO to set up a local account (https://schneegans.de/windows/unattend-generator/) amongst other things like removing all the windows store apps, etc.
I believe they used the word edition because they plan on offering W365 cloud VMs with this config pre applied.
Also Jobs: fires the antenna designer
We could be holding it wrong, and Jobs be correct to point out that many rival phones at the time literally had manuals dictating how to hold their phones to avoid reception issues.
The antenna designer could have done a better job, preventing the situation, thereby not dragging Jobs into a PR storm.
Jobs could have handled the situation and communication _significantly_ better.