> I've been trying to stay away from Liquid Glass until it's actually usable.

This sounds overly dramatic. You may not like the design but its 100% usable.

AndrewStephens 7 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I find some parts of Liquid Glass to be an improvement over the previous flat style that lasted far too long. A lot of it seems really well thought out.

On mobile that is.

On larger screens with desktops and overlapping windows it looks kind of bad. Not unusable, just annoying. I am hoping this will change as more apps update their design.

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epistasis 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's about 60% as usable. Weird and distracting jiggling makes it hard to target where the button will be.

Also the placement of buttons and functionality is completely scattered around the UIs, which severely reduces usability. What do all the mystery meat buttons do now? One has to relearn all the UX. There's a ton of improvement needed, it's about first-draft level quality.

Dark mode UI elements are almost invisible too, frequently.

It has a "my first redesign project" feel everywhere. On macOS I upgraded right away and it was a huge downgrade on performance. On iPhone I waited until 26.2, and merely had to suffer far lower usability.

	▲	hyperbovine 7 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		What does % usable even mean?

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Zagitta an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Tell that to my keyboard that doesn't show up half the time and the other half covers random parts of the app

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dewey 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Indeed, based on all the “look at that, you can’t even read xyz” screenshots around release time I thought it will be really bad. Upgraded and…it’s fine. After a week you don’t notice anything and the old OS will look dated. Just like every design change and any product that causes a lot of noise in the first week.

On the Mac it’s much rougher than on iOS.

	▲	celsoazevedo an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Performance of iOS 26 on some iPhones isn't great. Sure, a lot of people complain because they don't like change, but we shouldn't ignore the performance issues and poor legibility on some elements. Those are valid complaints.
	▲	sdtransier an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Agreed that there are more rough edges on Mac, but even then, I've been using Tahoe for months now and it's been fine. I hear podcasters saying that they're just skipping the entire Tahoe cycle and waiting until this fall's OS and I just don't get it.

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JoeBOFH 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I am a newer iPhone user (2 years now) and I am of the same opinion as you. I see so many people crying foul, that their phone is now unusable, but I’m just hear going “eh it’s uglier” and continuing. Curious what OP thinks is fundamentally broken.

Now I have heard about issues on MacOS and things but not really anything around the phone.

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celsoazevedo an hour ago | parent [-]

Something I've heard from someone that owns an iPhone 16 Pro is that animations are (were?) laggy sometimes. I was also looking at some pictures on an iPhone the other day (unsure about the model, maybe 14?) and it felt like it was dropping some frames while switching apps.

So while it may not be fundamentally broken, it's the type of stuff that would annoy me a lot if I used an iPhone. I never expect to go from smooth experience to a low-end Android phone experience after a software update.

MacOS... I've avoided upgrading my M4 Max MBP so far after upgrading the M1 Air we have at home. It's just not as smooth as before, even with reduced transparency.

	▲	n8cpdx an hour ago \| parent [-]
		iPhone 16 Pro and Apple TV and Apple Watch have all become noticeably slower/laggier with choppy animation under 26. Totally unacceptable.

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zadikian an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm fine with the design, just want my phone to stop freezing up and glitching out.

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icedchai 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's usable. It is also noticeably slower on my iPhone 13, even after turning on "reduce transparency."

	▲	piskov 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Reduce motion, that will help