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Comment by tengwar2 | Hacker News Reader

15.7.8 is out today as well, with these security fixes: https://support.apple.com/en-us/128071.

For context, there have been issues with MacOS 26 which have led many people to defer upgrading until MacOS 27 is available, and MacOS 15 is the previous version.

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> For context, there have been issues with MacOS 26 which have led many people to defer upgrading

For me the issue is liquid glass. Which I doubt is getting fixed any time soon

Also a liquid glass hater, but for what it's worth, 27 is supposed to make it a little bit better. I would prefer to go back to what I had before I had to upgrade into this horrible UI, but this is better than nothing.

https://www.cultofmac.com/news/liquid-glass-changes-ios-27-m...

> this is better than nothing.

Having installed the beta, I think that's the best you can say about it.

As long as the UI improves and I can ignore all the AI stuff they're starting to push through, that's fine with me, though like many longtime macOS users, I'm not holding my breath for a bug-free experience.

> though like many longtime macOS users

For those of us older than just 10 years of using macOS, the older Apple OSes have instilled within us the desire to never install the X.0 release and wait until at least the X.1 release. The bug-free experience is a myth

> wait until at least the X.1 release

I think that applies to almost all software, not just Apple OSes. After all, Confucius said: "The only thing worse than old software is new software."

> AI stuff they're starting to push through

iOS 26 anecdote:

A couple of weeks ago, I had a Baltimore Oriole (a cool-looking bird, not a baseball player) in my yard. They aren't rare, per se, but they are uncommon.

Took my iPhone out to snap a picture, and pressed the camera button. I hadn't used it, since upgrading to 26.

It takes the picture. It's there. I can see it, but it won't let me save it. Instead, it wants to tell me about the cool new voice-activated AI retouch feature. There was no way to save.

I probably could have figured it out, but I was so furious, I just nuked the picture.

for real? it did, like every subsequent photo taken on the device after pressing the shutter “button”. You must be a bot, just another living shill. another confident user error in the field

It was a first-time onboarding thing. After that first time, it didn’t happen again.

Fairly typical kind of workflow, that most apps do, these days. It’s just that the timing couldn’t have been worse.

> You must be a bot, just another living shill. another confident user error in the field

I have no idea what that means.

Holding down the camera button does open the AI search for me instead of the Camera app. This can be disabled, if I remember correctly.

It was a one-time thing. I have that button set for the app. I have the long-press set for manual tweaking. I assume that this was trying to get me to use AI, instead.

I hear it’s slower? Can you comment on that?

I haven't noticed or heard that it's slower.

Nice, thanks for that.

The 27 betas? No, they are generally faster than 26.

Definitely not slow.

Also on the beta. Agreed. Definite visual and UX improvement over 26, fixing the most egregious issues with 26 implementation of Liquid Glass, but maybe not quite as good as 25 overall.

> not quite as good as 25 overall

Nothing will ever be as good as 25.

Because macOS 25 does not exist. ;-)

Ahhh, my mistake. macOS 15 not to be confused with macOS 10.15

You can almost turn it off on the 27 beta, and 27 seems to perform a lot better too.

You can already turn off most glass effects in 26 via "System Settings => Accessibility => Display => Reduce Transparency".

I had that turned off years ago (for reasons I don't remember), and was wondering what all the fuzz was about when 26 came out because I didn't see much of a difference ;)

IMHO the actual important visual changes in the 27 beta is that rolls back the bizarre oversized corner radius in Finder windows, and they also got rid of the 'every menu item must have an icon' idea.

27 seems superior to 26 in almost every way, although I'm still on a fairly old beta.

It's the first thing I turn off on a new iPhone or iPad. Started around ten years ago in the release which had animated app icons. Induced nausea.

Yep. That’s why it’s in accessibility - some people can’t handle it. Other useful options are reduce motion, reduce transparency…

I think that is just iOS no? Or does that work on MacOS too

It works on macOS too, I don't own any iOS devices.

I've been running the 27 beta and it fixes so much of the ugliness I hated in Tahoe. Lots of places had toolbars restored, solid areas that indicate where the window can be grabbed. The shitty icon spam in menus is back to sanity. And window corner radii are consistent and less bulbous.

macOS 17 is decisively faster on my MacBook Air M1 16 GB than macOS 26/27 is on my MacBook Pro M2 Max 32 GB. And I don’t mean just the animations themselves but lag/sluggishness/responsiveness in general.

There is no macOS 17.

Gosh I thought I had edited it to macOS 15, now it’s too late

Slower than 15 though

Same. It's not the worst thing in the world, at least with Reduce Transparency enabled in the Accessibility settings, but I still don't feel any inclination to upgrade. My personal Mac Studio is macOS 15 and my work MacBook is on macOS 26, and I don't think there's a single thing that I find to be better on the work laptop than on my personal machine.

I might update to macOS 26 in September to be ready to update to macOS 27. Being two versions behind doesn't seem reasonable and I'd rather be on the "Tahoe but less shitty" version than Tahoe itself.

macOS 27 does polish Liquid Glass and makes it look passable on macOS IMHO. It was very bad on 26. Comically bad.

That's the sad thing: Apple decided to leave all Intel macs on broken macOS 26. Very bad on Apple's part.

Fortunately, those can run Linux. I recently installed Arch on an Intel T2. The only issue is that it does not have a TPM module, so the LUKS password needs to be manually entered at boot.

What's the alternative to typing in a LUKS password?

You can use TPM with secure boot to store the password. TPM checks that the firmware is the same and that the OS is signed by trusted (by _you_) keys, and if everything matches it makes the key available for reading by the OS.

So what stops other people turning on your computer?

I believe this is the definitive resource on the state of Linux on Intel MacBook Pros: https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux

I recently made the move away from an out-of-support macOS 12 Monterey to Debian Stable (13 trixie), after some failed attempts to upgrade macOS using OpenCore Legacy Patcher.

While Linux support will always remain far from perfect with that series of MBP, it was still much better than I expected compared to my last look many years ago. I happen to get better use out of my particular setup now compared to macOS; as it's basically a glorified streaming device that I interact with through wayvnc/vncviewer out of arm's reach across a table. This also allows me to mostly avoid using the semi-busted Butterfly keyboard.

In addition to having something with security updates again, I'll now never need to think about Apple dropping Intel support. I'd also like to note that nix-darwin support on Intel macOS is ending very soon too - but not Linux + nix as a package manager (nixpkgs) since that combination is separate to macOS + nix-darwin.

I hate the round corners. It's already too much on 15, but way worse on 26. It looks like "Baby's first OS", designed by Fisher-Price.

They reverted this in 27

https://www.macrumors.com/2026/06/09/macos-golden-gate-liqui...

Love to see this, now if only they could revert the whole shimmering oil slick disaster that is "glass" on iOS (unlike macOS, even if I "reduce transparency", the oil slick effect still appears in many places, in addition to all the spacing issues).

You can disable it in the accessibility preferences.

I bought a MBP mainly for the hardware, otherwise I'd have stuck with Linux. OS-wise, the jump from Monterey (which I'd last used) to Sequoia was smooth and still feels that way. I prefer not to notice the OS at all, something that I feel would be hard to do on Tahoe due to all that liquid glass and dumb transparency and animations.

Seriously, who the heck even asked for those?

I found if you turn off transparency effects and turn on high contrast in the accessibility settings, it's actually a pretty nice looking UI. Still has some dumb quirks like inconsistent corner radiuses and text appearing under UI elements (because they're assumed to be transparent, but aren't). But all software is trash in 2026 so be thankful it isn't even worse, I guess.

Been doing that for years now already (performance boost). You can also do high contrast mode per app (if were talking about iOS). Must have for iMessage I think personally as it makes hard to read Green Bubbles a nice dark green that is very pleasant.

27 is a lot better. You can make the UI opaque again (they provide a transparency slider)

Same thing happens almost every release. I've stopped updating my Mac machine until I see something in the release notes I literally have to have in order to continue doing macOS/iOS builds, otherwise I'm staying on the version I've validated to work, and I know the existing bugs with.

A better strategy would probably be to stick with the previous *major* release, but, do install its ("minor") security updates...

> do install its ("minor") security updates

Yeah, I thought so too, but surprise surprise; some months ago one of the "minor" updates "broke" ("upgraded") something that made my CI/CD setup stop working, that's when I dropped the idea that Apple even do "minor" updates anymore.

As we used to say in the Windows world, wait for service pack 3.

That doesn't work any longer given patch tuesdays, at work wait that IT validates them and pushes the updates via managed WSU, at home, it is worthwhile wanting if something hits the news on WindowsCentral, Verge or what have you.

It doesn't work with Windows anymore, since Microsoft no longer allows the user to control their own computer.

However, Software Update on Apple devices still allows you to turn off automatic update installation the way Windows used to.

It does when using Professional and Workstation, there are still a few knobs available.

For quite some time that I don't use home edition.

I also would not bet on Apple staying that way.

"You can delay this update for a little while" simply isn't the same thing as "you still have full control over updates".

It's right up there with Microsoft's "you are not allowed to turn telemetry all the way off", or all the efforts to require the use of an online Microsoft account to access your own computer.

You mean the efforts to follow Apple and Google footsteps and stores?

Ever heard of Local Group Policy Editor?

WindowsRT and Windows S were already attempts to lock down Windows to only allow apps from an app store.

Secure Boot initially didn't allow the install of operating systems other than Windows.

Microsoft is the company continually attempting to lock down their general purpose computers, not Apple.

...and no. Microsoft backing down aftet consumers revolt doesn't mean their attempts don't count.

Right, because Apple anyway never allowed anyone else, other than when they were almost bankrupt, went into a marketing action to pretend otherwise, now back to their former self as well with a nice bank account.

The question now is, is 27 sufficient enough of an improvement over 15 to upgrade and tolerate Liquid Glass?

>have led many people to defer upgrading until MacOS 27 is available

Then there's me, crying in MacBook Pro 2019 stuck on MacOS 15 because 27 won't be available for my machine.

26.0 had a very annoying video jitter issue, but that was the first things that I noticed to be fixed in the next 26 release. Other than that, it worked just fine.

The bug that led to network connection issues after 49 days of uninterrupted uptime was a bit of a showstopper for me.

Are there no versions between MacOS 15 and 26???

They changed the numbering scheme, so... no, there aren't. Version numbers are now year-based, but previously they were not.

Last year they unified all their OS version numbers to just match upcoming year.

macOS went from 15 to 26

iOS went from 18 to 26

watchOS went from 11 to 26

and so on

No, 26 is the successor of 15. They changed the numbering to year-based.

Did they un-hardcode the corner radius? I mean were they able to? I mean not that that anyone at this point needs convincing how utterly disgusting incompetent they’re at software.

They reduced the radius back to older, smaller size and now all apps use a single radius, vs the weird 3 different radii in Tahoe. Looks better.

I was shocked to find out the inconsistent corner radii in Tahoe was an intentional design decision. I figured it's so obviously bad that it was just sloppy work. But one of the WWDC session videos bafflingly clarified that it depends on whether the app has a toolbar or not.

https://youtu.be/VqTn9NgiE1s?t=439

I can't imagine how the people who signed off on that were put in charge of design at Apple.

I am fairly convinced this was all designed only in graphic tools, and looked nice in static mockups, like those fake desktops with overlapping small windows widely spaced, etc. The design folks probably all had giant studio displays with plenty of room, etc.

Then the reality of "what about toolbars", "what about dark mode", "what about laptop screens", etc were all afterthoughts and resulted in bolt-on fixes like that.

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