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Comment by torben-friis | Hacker News Reader

iOS/macos 26 have me feeling isolated in a way I’ve never experienced in tech.

Aesthetics aside (which I personally don’t like, but I can accept as subjective) I see extreme issues and regressions literally everywhere, from not being able to read the notifications in a half pulled curtain to memory leaks in half the native apps.

Yet no one is raising their voice in the tech world. No bloggers, no YouTubers, nothing that feels proportionate to the screwup I’m seeing. People was far more vocal about the lack of the new Siri.

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If you head over to digital artistry-related subreddits / other forums, they are almost uniformly very strongly against this due to the major UX regressions in iPadOS for their typical use cases (i.e. touch-based multitasking having been ruined)

But yes agreed, it is mind-boggling to me how broadly well-received this has been

Yeah some niches are complaining, but mainstream content seems to be positive to neutral. I understand that people like MKBHD can't badmouth such a big player without risking loss of access, but not even clickbait content creators seem to be aware that the king has no clothes.

It's crazy that they removed split view and slide over from the iPad. The new window management is still extremely fiddly. It takes now 7 steps to open another app next to the current one, and a few more steps to get them all full screen again.

I used split view quite often, but I never use the new window management. I just store away my iPad more often now and use my PC instead.

The new windowing system is actually rather decent when used with a keyboard + all window tiling / maximising / app switching keyboard shortcuts memorised. Although the lack of Slide Over is still inexplicable and sucks.

The issue is that most people don't use iPads with keyboards. The windowing system in this case is then an absolute nightmare compared to what came before, as touch-based users were clearly a distant second thought when designing it.

For any HNers who don't have access to iPads running iPadOS 26 / 18, and aren't sure if this is just the "people on the internet hating new things" reflex (it really isn't), here's a side-by-side comparison that clearly illustrates andix's point[1]

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/iPadOS/comments/1mq8sgd/old_split_v...

It looks so easy on the video. If I try to drag a full screen window it only works in 20% of the cases. In the other cases either one of those things happen: menu bar opens, widgets opens, control center opens, lock screen opens, or I tap some controls in the app.

I don't think it's "an issue" that I use an iPad without mouse and keyboard most of the time. Last time I checked the iPad was designed as a touch device.

I completely agree and I just put in the bit about the keyboard shortcuts to pre-empt comments from the minority of iPad users who never remove the iPad from their Magic Keyboard saying they quite like the update.

Although regarding your final sentence - I don't think Apple even knows what the iPad is supposed to be any more. It seems execs completely lack any kind of product vision. And given both the tackiness of Liquid Glass and the various insulting ad campaigns that have trickled out over the past few years - they also clearly lack taste. In other words, Apple is Just Another Tech Company now.

> I see extreme issues and regressions literally everywhere

I would claim this is mostly unrelated to 26, and more related to .0. All the tech people that I know, who have experience with Apple OS releases, wait until .1 release to upgrade, for this reason. .0 are always a shit-show, since my first Apple device over 10 years ago. I see .0 as a public beta, and that's what I expect whenever I do decide to install them. I suspect there's some truth to this, where they don't have time to fix everything found in the actual beta.

.0 releases tend to have certain bugs, but not to this degree.

I've actually been part of public betas for many years, and this is the only one where I've felt launch day approach with growing concern, as it was clear nothing was remotely close to shippable.

There wasn't even a clear direction, as most of the fixes have just been reducing glass around the UI, and it's very telling that the only way they've found so far to make the new design language work is to roll it back as much as they can without losing face.

When friends ask in person I can just pull the phone and find bugs. Not ones that I previously know, new ones each time just by paying a bit of attention.

Are you talking about bugs to mean broken functionality or design you dislike? I’m not sure I noticed broken functionality anywhere

Aesthetic glitches are everywhere, though it’s hard to tell when behavior is intended. Can you read the context of my texts? https://ibb.co/mVbVpYCD

The most glaring non aesthetic ones are memory leaks affecting native macOS apps, missed alarms and a very frequent one for iOS where unlocking the phone leads to an empty screen.

I also have one in safari where what seems like a misplaced dark fade covers the top third of the screen. The safari url bar tends to show empty or reappear wrongly as well.

Oh I know that UI, it’s when you slide the notification center from the top. That’s a conscious action with an animation so yes the context of modality is understandable there.

Also the memory leak issue isn’t due to Liquid Glass and it’s not something you’ll find just by grabbing someone’s phone and running an app.

I keep reading about all the memory leaks and have been staying far away. Lots of people reporting slowdowns and crashes and not being able to launch new apps. That just shows really bad QA across not just one app or the OS but across the whole process. Probably the hurry to get out a new OS version every year instead of every couple

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