iOS 26 – Life on the Wicked Stage: Act 3

My Year In The Apple Fruit Basket 2025

Not a good fruit crop yield for Apple

2025 was an odd year toiling in Apple’s orchard.

Shutterstock 1478322374.

Getting this out of the way upfront, it was a year that Apple’s corporate behavior, personalized by Tim Cook, made me think seriously about looking to fill my computing needs and habits elsewhere. That’s an ongoing discussion I’m having with myself. As it rattles around my brain, I don’t see an alternative that is any better or any worse from a corporate posture point of view. Apple has plenty of company.

From a technology point of view I also don’t see any better alternative beyond reliving my past hobbyist days with Linux that I’m far too old to contemplate. I used to be that geek. I’m not anymore. Aside from communal political knee bending, every tech company’s plunge into the Artificial Intelligence swamp has mucked up everything, everywhere all at once, in one way or another.

I have to touch Windows now and again and every time I do I feel like I need to take a purgative and wash my hands. I feel much the same about Google’s products. Life as a geek was already becoming increasingly more distasteful in the days when it was just the algorithms that enshittified everything, but adding Artificial Intelligence into the mix has created a slop that even hogs are beginning to turn away from. I know that’s all here to stay and I’m honestly sad that it is.

Hardware

This was the first year that I didn’t upgrade much Apple hardware. I don’t think it was a conscious choice correlating with Apple’s corporate behavior, but I won’t rule out my subconscious working against my small contribution to Apple’s bottom line. Let’s put it this way, I didn’t feel the usual gadget lust tugs and twinges over anything Apple announced this year.

I did upgrade to an iPhone 17 Pro and didn’t even think twice about taking a serious look at the iPhone Air. Apparently I wasn’t the only one. There’s nothing really remarkable to say about the 17 Pro. It’s as good and solid as it’s predecessor and if that’s incremental, than incremental is more than enough for me. I think that’s also true for most users.

I did pick up a pair of AirPods Pro 3 and wrote a quick review that you can read here. The battery life on the AirPods Pro 2 was approaching end of life, so it was time, and I use AirPods a lot.

I also upgraded to the Apple Watch Series 11 from the Series 10. It’s not that the Series 11 does anything more remarkable from a technology perspective. It doesn’t. But I’m in sort of a trap of upgrading every year due to the technology I use to monitor my diabetes.

I use the Dexcom G7 sensor that pairs with both my iPhone and Apple Watch to show me and my doctor how I’m doing with my blood sugar readings. I’ve come to rely on the constant monitoring on the Apple Watch app more than I do on the iPhone. But the two devices and their apps are married. On the Apple Watch that constant monitoring takes a heavy toll on Battery Life and Battery Health. Since I’ve been using that technology Battery Health can degrade at or below 70% in a year. That’s enough for me to upgrade every year.

That is an excellent example of one of the pitfalls of Apple’s development pace that drops new operating systems annually, but trickles out fixes over the course of a year. Dexcom developers take quite a bit of time to catch up with new hardware and software. They have to. They are a medical device company. That lag is certainly more acute with a device that monitors medical conditions, but this year’s round of operating system changes have been challenging for developers in all software categories leading us all into a perpetual year of beta software.

Summing up what I feel about Apple’s 2025 hardware releases I’ll leave it this way. Apple continues to make good improvements with each hardware iteration. Quite frankly, I’d be content to see Apple continue iterating the way it has since the dawn of the M-series chip change, but the many voices continually calling for something newer and bolder seem like they’ll have their day in the next few hardware cycles.

The current crop of Apple hardware has matured into the best I’ve seen on the market. Here’s hoping all that’s rumored continues that trend. That said, I don’t really see the appeal of a vastly more expensive folding iPhone beyond it being a regressive retro move and small enough to make it easier to stuff in a pocket. I guess the next big retro innovation will be to bring back mechanical keyboards. But, hey the Commodore 64 also made a come back this year. I’m guessing a folding iPhone will be enough to excite the faithful. For a few months.

Software

Software provided the real color on Apple’s fruit plate this year with what they shipped and what they still haven’t. The Apple Intelligence slices are browning around the edges, leaving an unappetizing anticipation for what may or may not be unveiled. I say “may not” because in Apple’s announcement last spring delaying the rollout of how Apple Intelligence integrates with the “new Siri” there was an important word that most seem to have overlooked. Here’s the statement:

“Siri helps our users find what they need and get things done quickly, and in just the past six months, we’ve made Siri more conversational, introduced new features like type to Siri and product knowledge, and added an integration with ChatGPT. We’ve also been working on a more personalized Siri, giving it more awareness of your personal context, as well as the ability to take action for you within and across your apps. It’s going to take us longer than we thought to deliver on these features and we anticipate rolling them out in the coming year.”

The key word in that statement is “anticipate.” Most conventional assumption makers believe whatever Apple is working on will roll out sometime in the first half of 2026. But that word “anticipate” is a great hedge that only a PR professional or lawyer could love. I don’t doubt the pressure is on to release something. I wouldn’t bet a dime on it happening before WWDC 2026.

As for what Apple Intelligence is currently, it’s still nothing to write home about. Notification summaries remain a comedy gold mine. I think I’ve touched the Writing Tools a few times, but fall back on other proofreading habits and tools. Whatever Siri is or is not doing, it’s gotten worse and even less predictable than it was before. Every time an accidental touch of the camera button light’s up the border of the screen it’s more a reminder of what’s not there than what it was promised to do. Whatever Apple is planning, the current iteration feels like it’s been largely abandoned like a rotting piece of fruit.

Liquid Glass was the feature that did ship. Countless words have proliferated around the Internet about the design change. I’ve written a few myself. My take at year end is that Liquid Glass is neither here nor there.

Legibility issues and design disasters need lots of work and attention, most of which won’t come while the number 26 is still affixed to the operating systems. Devices still work, even though I’m seeing more and more haphazard weirdness as app developers try to play catch up while Apple itself is still trying to chase down its own problems.

Given the leadership turmoil within Apple who knows what Liquid Glass may or may not become in the future. But then who knows what it was actually intended to be in the first place, beyond a distraction from the Apple Intelligence miss. It certainly wasn’t designed to fulfill anything Apple’s marketers thought it might. If there’s harmony in trying to unify things across platforms, someone needs a basic course in music theory.

While I don’t hate Liquid Glass my continuing impression is that it still feels childish in a bubbly sort of way that doesn’t jive with the sophistication that the advanced hardware platforms seem to beg for. That was my first impression when Liquid Glass rolled out, and it was solidified after spending a large junk of time with my grandkids and other relatives’ kids watching them play children’s games on their non-Apple tablets over the holidays.

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It may look cool to some, but it feels like undercarriage lighting on a car to me.

There Were Some Good Things

The most important operating system change that Apple made was iPadOS 26, finally instituting, and then continuing to iterate on, a much better windowing system for iPads.

And, the best new feature on any of the Apple devices I use the most is the Wrist Flick to dismiss a notification on my Apple Watch. It’s simple, it’s effective, it makes sense on all levels. It should have existed earlier. And it should be what Apple aspires to with everything it creates.

Spotlight was given an overhaul offering new features like a clipboard manager. I’m still experimenting with it, but can see how it might replace Raycast in the future if Apple continues iterating on it. It’s a good addition that still needs work.

I think Apple is on to something with the changes it made for the Phone app to try and help alleviate spam calls. I hope they continue to improve this, because as good an effort as it is, I and others still find it confusing.

Perhaps the best thing about the OS 26 releases beyond that is that all of my devices are working as I anticipate if I look past (not through) Liquid Glass and avoid Apple Intelligence.

Summing Up

In the end, I think 2025 will be considered a lost year for Apple. I maintain that Apple’s ability to take the long view strategically hindered more than it helped. And I think that some of the executive level changes reflect that. But the fact that it takes a long time to see any new substantial change in an already crowded and confused orchard didn’t argue well for the year to be a success. The political posturing alongside the product missteps has led to my personal disgruntlement and I know it has for many others as well.

One of the many Apple mantras that we’ve become accustomed to is that Apple designs its products for 90% of its users. That may indeed still be true. As much as I feel comfortable with steady iteration in hardware and software, it feels to me increasingly that Apple is reaching more and more for innovations that excite the remaining 10%. I get that. And to a degree it’s commendable. But in my experience with the users I support, the majority of those in that 90% probably never even attempt to use many of these new innovations. It’s not a case of reach exceeding grasp in my opinion. Rather, it’s reaching in the wrong direction.

Apple has already made some noise that the next OS versions will be more fixing and futzing rather than feature rich. How could it not be? By the same token, how could it be if, I as feel is increasingly likely, it will be the first time we see what the new Siri and Apple Intelligence will really offer.

I also think Apple and the other tech companies need to pay attention to the warning signs that are starting to bubble up about Artificial Intelligence. I think most of the growing distaste of AI comes not from what these tech companies are offering on computing platforms, but from the day to day encounters people are experiencing in their daily lives as more and more non-tech companies roll out versions of AI support. The way I’m hearing and feeling it, jokes and complaints about AI at holiday gatherings this year are starting to compete in numbers with ones about government and politics.

I don’t think that’s an accomplishment that augurs well.

(First image from Johann Lensless on Shutterstock)

You can also find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.

Apple’s Changes To The Phone App Are Helpful and Confusing

Apple tries to improve the Phone experience

When the iPhone was first announced Steve Jobs uttered the now famous words about three products that would be combined into one:

Well, today we’re introducing three revolutionary products of this class. The first one is a widescreen iPod with touch controls. The second is a revolutionary mobile phone. And the third is a breakthrough Internet communications device.

The app for that “revolutionary mobile phone” has undergone few changes through the years since 2007, but nothing really to call home about. It can be argued that of those original three products, the phone has become perhaps the least important as users relied more and more on other methods of communication. This year with iOS 26, the Phone app got some significant changes. Some of which, at the moment, are proving quite helpful even if a bit confusing.

Let’s talk about the confusion first.

Apple introduced a new Unified View in the Phone app that consolidates Favorites, Recents, and Voicemails all under a single Calls tab. It sounds good to try and combine these features into one hub as a concept, but I find it confusing and some of the folks I support do as well. Apple also knew it could be confusing, providing users with a way to switch back to the prior Classic View with the familiar separate tabs for Favorites, Recents and Voicemail. Those folks I support are choosing to stick with the Classic View rather than learning something new. I’m swinging back and forth.

New Shareshot.

Like anything else new this Unified View breaks muscle memory. That sort of change isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but coming after years of users trained on the same interface, it’s about as confusing as flipping the mouthpiece and the earpiece on an old landline phone would be.

If you choose the Unified View and designate enough contacts as Favorites, it’s also a damn ugly interface to look at. Your Favorites are arrayed at the top with recent calls below.. If you tap on Show All, (the catch all bucket if you have more than seven Favorites) you’re taken back to the same list view from the older UI of the Classic View. (The Unified View is on the left and the Classic View is on the right in the image below.)

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I’m also confused at times about the differences between what’s a Missed Call and What’s an Unknown Caller as notifications sometimes, not all the time, appear in both places. Sometimes a call record will show up in three places if it’s also identified as a Spam call.

New and Newish Features

Hold Assist Detection sounds like a winner of a feature. In some cases it is. In some not. It makes me think that the designers of this feature have never used the Phone app to call a pharmacy or a doctor’s office where the person answering the phone is so busy that when they answer they speak so fast that you can’t understand what they’re saying. In my experiences attempting to use this feature in cases like those, the person on the other end just hangs up and I have to make the call again. I’ve yet to have a successful attempt at using this feature as designed other than testing it with friends.

New Shareshot.

As an intriguing side note, the same thing happened with a call to Apple Support.

Screen Unknown Callers is another new feature that works well in some cases yet not in others. It has certainly reduced the number of unwanted calls I’ve received since turning it on. The call screening happens before your phone rings, which apparently is enough to bring an end to a number of those calls. Sometimes those calls appear in the Missed Calls list, sometimes not. What I don’t understand is that some of these calls also show up as Priority Notifications while others do not.

There are three options for screening unknown callers. The first is Never, which means you aren’t screening and all calls come through. The second is Ask Reason for Calling, which queries the caller. The third is Silence which silences any unsaved numbers and sends them to voicemail, placing the log of the call in the Recents List.

I’ve been using the Ask Reason for Calling option and, as I said, it has cut down on the number of unknown calls I receive in a day. My wife and I received our current phone numbers when we lived in another state and area code, so we essentially reject any calls with that area code as unwanted. I do wonder if this will become a whack-a-mole game with spam callers in the future as they look for ways to get around this feature.

Call Filtering silences missed calls and voicemail from unknown numbers. Those calls end up in the Unknown Callers List. Sometimes in other lists.

Spam Calls, as identified by your carrier, are silenced, sent to voicemail and moved to the Spam List. Yet, sometimes are flagged as Priority notifications.

Live Voice Mail has been around since iOS 17 and is supposed to show you a live transcription of a voice mail so you can pick up if the call is important. I tried this a couple of times during the iOS 17 era but never used it regularly to gauge how well it worked. I’ve tried it a few times in iOS 26 and have not been able to see the live transcription until after the caller ended things on their end. So I’m guessing Apple has some work to do there.

The good news about all of this is that Apple in the last couple of years is working to make your iPhone less of a nuisance when it comes to dealing with unwanted calls.

The not-so-good news comes in two buckets. The new user interface will require quite an adjustment. Kudos to Apple for providing an option to switch back easily. The other bucket is that phone makers have to rely on carriers for reducing Spam. Spam lists are the province of the carriers. That push and pull is reflected somewhat in the design of the Phone app interface when it comes to blocking unwanted calls.

In order to Block or Block and Report a phone number as Spam there are two options. If you swipe left on the record of an unknown phone call a small orange icon with a white hand appears that reveals the blocking actions.

New Shareshot.

You can also open up a Contact card by hitting the Info button on the right of a Contact card, scroll all the way down to the bottom of the card and choose to Block the number from there.

Either method described above is more cumbersome than it needs to be in my opinion and it would be much simpler if Apple could design an incoming call screen that had a prominent Block button on it.

These new features Apple has added to the Phone app in my opinion demand better curation of contacts by a user to work effectively. At least in my case they do. Numbers you may use once in a while need to be in your contacts in order for these new phone features to identify them appropriately. By the same token, numbers you never want to hear from again need to be blocked or blocked and reported as spam.

All methods of communication eventually devolve into this kind of tedium and you’d think by now there would be money enough to find better technological methods to relieve us of it.

My other concern is one that I have about how Apple handles its apps in general. With a few exceptions, (Notes and Reminders) Apple tends to release new features for an app and then let them go years without continuing to improve them. I hope that’s not the case with these new features in the Phone app. Apple made a good, certainly overdue, next step with these changes. They can’t just leave us all on hold until they take the next one. We could all use a little more sanity and perhaps a bit more revolution from the “revolutionary mobile phone.”

Who knows? Maybe one day Apple will even turn its attention to the long neglected Contacts app.

More Thoughts and Issues With macOS 26 Tahoe

Unfinished Tahoe is not a friend to developers or users

I wrote a bit earlier about some of my early thoughts on the new OS 26 releases and here’s a few more to share about macOS 26 Tahoe. I continually beat a drum about the fact that we’re all on Apple’s beta bus, whether we opt in to receiving betas or not. I don’t opt in. Several of these thoughts keep that percussive refrain rumbling along through the issues below.

MacOS 26 Tahoe purple.

Memory Leaks

Since the release of macOS Tahoe 26.0.1 I’ve seen strange memory leaks increasing for what I think are odd reasons. For example, a process known as IconServicesAgent increases the longer I go between rebooting sessions. According to documentation I’ve found online, one of the causes of this can be an overly large or corrupted icon cache, or specific icon causing the problem. A solution is to clear the icon cache, which I’ve done, but the problem reoccurs.

I don’t have the expertise or the patience to tray and track down which icon(s) may be the issue, so hopefully this gets fixed in an upcoming release.

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My hunch is this has to do with icons being a lower priority for developers who still have a lot of other work to do on their apps. I base that on the number of non Apple app icons I see that haven’t been updated for Liquid Glass.

Notifications Memory Leak

There’s another memory leak that I see less frequently and seems a bit more random. You can see in the image above the amount of memory NotifcationsCenter is consuming. Apparently this “occurs when a program holds onto references to objects, like activities or other resources, even after they are no longer needed, and uses the notification system as a way to do so.” It’s tough to pin down whether these memory leaks are the fault of developers hindered by Apple’s choices, or just a system bug. Either way it’s far from optimal.

Again, I don’t have the expertise to sort this out, so I’m hoping for a fix in an update down the road.

Notification Summaries

Prior to macOS 26 Tahoe I had long ago turned off Apple Intelligence’s Notification Summaries on macOS Sequoia. I turned them back on with this new release to see if things improved. They did not. In my experience they are just as bad and just as useless as they were previously. So I’ve turned them off again.

Liquid Glass, Corners, and Such

I find the general acceptance that Apple made Liquid Glass less of a priority than it did on other device platforms amusing because it’s not only true, it’s true in the way a red wine stain shows up on a white shirt or blouse. That said, the somewhat half-way approach we do have, while not a deal breaker, is becoming increasingly more visually annoying.

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The lack of contrast for Sidebars always jerks my attention away when I have a sidebar open because for someone who once had real vision issues due to cataracts, it triggers a flashback to when I first started noticing those since corrected eye issues. The screen shot above makes it look like there is greater contrast than what I see in actual practice.

I’m also just not buying the entire concept of bringing “more focus to content.” Again, it’s more distracting than focusing. The more I see it the more distracting it becomes, which I’m guessing is antithetical to what Apple’s designers were hoping. This is true on iPhones and iPads as well.

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Widgets

This is one instance when the drum beat of bad beta behavior sounds loudest. Again, I do not run betas on any of my devices. Yet, each time that Apple releases a beta for the next version of macOS 26 all of the widgets I use on a secondary screen will disappear the morning before the release. I can set my clock by it. I’ll go to the trouble of restoring them. Within the next day or so duplicates of those widgets will appear, but strangely now revealed under Notifications.

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At first I deleted the duplicates but after this week’s beta release I noticed that they eventually disappeared on their own. It’s odd behavior to say the least.

Control Center

Speaking of Control Center, Apple is obviously hoping to move a lot of what functionality available in Menu Bar icons into the Mac Control Center. Apple has provided an API for developers to make that possible so that user can access those functions from the Control Center instead of the Menu Bar. I have very few apps that have taken advantage of this so far, again speaking to the slow pace of adoption by developers with other priorities.

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Even so, the two I have placed in the Control Center are sometimes present and sometimes not. To my surprise they appeared this morning. Not surprisingly they do not appear this afternoon, merely showing a place holder.

Control Center Notifications

Apple moved Notifications for things like Bluetooth and WiFi connections, volume sliders, and other functions so they animate out of the Control Center. That means they pop out in the upper right hand corner of the screen. That said, I find when they do animate they either distract me from what I’m doing, since I’m typically looking at the center of the screen, or my muscle memory of looking for them in different locations causes me to miss them entirely.

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The beta drumbeat pounds on

It’s been obvious since the release of macOS 26 Tahoe that Apple has a lot of work still to do. Some of that obviously was by design due to time and resources. Fine, but not fine. You can’t expect high performance out of a F1 race car unless your pit crew can nail the basics. As it currently stands Apple has its shiny new car well polished for pictures and demos, but is obviously still behind with its own engineering, throwing more delays at developers in the pit, in turn leaving users wondering about the turns ahead.

I frankly don’t see these gaps closing until sometime next spring at this point. Just in time for Apple to begin shifting resources to whatever comes next. I find that sloppy, unsettling, and like a lot of things Apple-like, not very Apple-like these days.

Stop Snoozing and Wake Up: Apple Changes Alarm Shutoff Screen

If you snooze, you lose

It was a real wake up call for me when news broke recently that in the next major update to iOS 26 Apple will be changing the wake up screen for alarms. The change means that instead of having two buttons, one above the other to either Snooze the alarm or Stop the alarm, users will now have to Slide a button to turn off the alarm.

This shouldn’t have been that much of a surprise for me as prior to iOS 26, the snooze button was a big orange one and the “button” to turn off the alarm was below it and much smaller. I can’t tell you the number of times I, and my wife, accidentally hit the snooze button instead of turning off the alarm.

To my tastes, Apple fixed that in the initial release of iOS 26 by making the buttons of similar size, even if the Snooze button still grabbed all the glory and color.

Here’s the thing. Of course how you wake it up is a very personal preference. Personally, I’m not a snoozer. When it’s time to wake I want to wake up and get moving. But apparently the majority of the world prefers snoozing, as do the folks making decisions in Cupertino. When you think about it explains quite a bit about so much when it comes to meeting the challenges of each day, whether in the real world or in tech.

What’s that old saying, if you snooze, you lose? I think that’s it.

I can only imagine how many iPhones are going to be knocked off of bedside tables as semi-awake users attempt to slide the button to silence an alarm. If I was responsible for the design, I’d have made it more challenging to hit a snooze button than to hit the wake up button.

But that’s just me.

iPhone and OS 26 Reviews Off The Beaten Track

Looking for some new voices.

New iPhones have been released, are being delivered, and I assume being used. Some of the usual sources have already reviewed the devices and the new operating systems and I’m guessing you’ve seen many of those.

Insider explains who the iPhone 17 Air is for.

I’m enjoying reading reviews that are sort of off of the beaten track, assuming the Internet has one of those, and thought I’d link to a few of them.

First up Jason McFadden of Jason Journals talks about his experiences and impressions after installing OS 26 on several older devices. Good read.

Next up is Sebastian de With’s look at the iPhone 17 Pro cameras. Sebastian is one of the developers of the team Lux that developed the Halide camera app for the iPhone.

Olivia Lipski writing for Good HouseKeeping says I’m a Tech Reporter and a Mom. Here’s My Honest Review of the iPhone Air.

And finally Rakhim Davlekali has written a review of macOS in reverse starting with the now current Tahoe and going backwards through time. Benjamin Button Reviews macOS is worth a read for a few laughs.

I still think it’s early for any real judgements to be made about the new devices and new operating systems. But the links above are worth a look.

You can also find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.

OS 26 First Impressions

Early thoughts on OS 26 versions

Bubbles. My grandkids love bubbles. It’s a kid’s delight. Apparently bubbles also delight some Apple designers. My first impression of the look of iOS 26 on the iPhone was bubbles.

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I watched the OS 26 round of operating system betas over the summer as things evolved and have now installed the first release on all my devices. I’ve seen and heard the reactions so I was reasonably prepared for what would happen once the updates occurred. These are some first impressions after taking a look.

Liquid Glass

I’m not putting down bubbles. Bubbles are fun, whimsical, and joyful. But my overwhelming impression on the iPhone 16 Pro with iOS 26 installed was that the Liquid Glass design language, (that supposedly isn’t a design language,) felt very bubbly and child-like. To my eye I associate it more with bubbles than I do glass, liquid or not.

I also thinks Liquid Glass looks and feels better on the iPad Pro than it does on the iPhone. There’s more space for the chunkier, bubblier UI elements to float around. By and large things look cleaner on the iPad.

On the Mac, Apple didn’t go quite as far with Liquid Glass as they did with the iPhone and iPad regarding transparency and bubbly things, but there is still a more cartoonish feel to macOS 26 than the previous version. I think most of that is due to the rounded corners, rounded buttons and tab bars. I will say in this early going, I miss what I felt was a cleaner design in Sequoia on the Mac than what I see in this early going with Tahoe.

Bubbles are also messy things. Messier than glass in solid form certainly. Perhaps applying liquid properties to this glass like interface provides a license to keep things messier. That’s certainly true in some cases on the iPhone. For example, in the Phone app the reflective (or is it refractive) qualities around the buttons make it feel like light is leaking through a misapplied sticker than I think was the intent.

New Shareshot.

On both the iPad and the iPhone you’ll have to be careful what you choose for a wallpaper, because that same light leaking through means photos that have many colors or light contrasts within them appear more distracting than pleasing. (I like to use my own photography for wallpapers).

New Shareshot.

The issues of legibility have been discussed quite a bit over the summer, and I don’t think Apple has a complete solution for that yet when it comes to complex backgrounds, other than seemingly to force users to make simpler choices with wallpaper backgrounds. In early use, I think what we see on iPhone and iPad completely renders useless the statement of letting your content shine through. It might bleed through, but if it shines it does so in a distracting manner.

Here’s an example of one of my Home Screens that I think makes things look more bubbly than Liquid Glassy, especially in the upper two rows of folder icons.

New Shareshot.

Alan Dye, the VP of Human Interface Design, the Apple guy who spearheaded this UI change, is quoted as saying that Liquid Glass is “the foundation for new experiences in the future.” All well and good when you have a fuller view of the future as one assumes he would. But for those looking at their devices today, that means as much or as little as any tech promise or vision that have been dropped on us these last few years.

Liquid Design, in my very early looks is not to my taste. It may be to yours. the good news is that everything still appears to be functional. But to me, it’s a child-like appliqué on sophisticated devices that seem to beg for something more mature. I’m sure Liquid Glass will evolve, but until it does, I don’t think these bubbles will be popping soon.

Other Changes

I haven’t explored many of the new features of any of these new operating systems, only attempting to get things up and running. Most things appear to be running well.

A few changes I like include:

I prefer this iteration of the Photos app in iOS

I like the big multi-tasking changes for iPad and look forward to working with them more, although count me as one who will miss Slide Over. It was handy in my work in rehearsals.

I like the new Trash Can icon on the Mac. That’s the kind of whimsy I can support.

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I love the wrist flick gesture on the Apple Watch.

Things I’m not a fan of:

On the Mac I miss the Shortcuts item in the menu bar. Yes, you can add one, but instead of getting a straight drop down of clickable Shortcuts, it now opens a new window that requires not only the selection of the Shortcut you want to execute, but another separate action to run the Shortcut. Adding clicks isn’t much of a shortcut to me. I see where Apple is going with this, trying to move things out of the Menu Bar into the Control Center. That’s going to require developers to make that move successful.

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I’m not a fan of some of Apple’s redesigned icons.

I tried out the Tinting feature for icons. I could see myself using this, if the feature didn’t tint widgets. What’s the point of a tinted Photos widget?

New Shareshot.

Some things I’m on the fence about:

I’ve previously used independent apps Bartender and Ice to control the large number of Menu Bar icons I like to have available. Both are currently in beta so I’m testing out Apple’s feature to hide the Menu Bar until things change on those fronts. Simply put, that means the Menu Bar disappears until I hover over or click on it, revealing the icons. In using this feature when windows are at the top of the screen, Menu Commands sometimes disappear requiring some window rearrangement. This doesn’t happen consistently, so I’m guessing it’s a bug. I’m not sold on this in the early going but I’m giving it a try.

I’ve been using Raycast as an application and Shortcut launcher, along with some of its other features. I’m giving Apple’s new Spotlight features a try including the long overdue Clipboard Manager. This will require some muscle memory retraining, and it might mean leaving Raycast behind. It would be easier to do so if that Clipboard Manager copied across devices.

It’s early going. For me, as well as these new operating systems. I’ll discover more as I go along. I’m hoping the evolutionary pace for this software from Apple and most certainly developers will come close to matching mine in the days to come. I’m guessing it’s going to be sometime in 2026 before we can really evaluate what’s what in these OS 25 releases.