I haven’t yet seen macOS 26 but iOS 26 is ugly and the least usable phone OS I’ve ever used - controls (theirs placement) and blurry areas waste too much space, animations are distracting and “reduce motion” option just reduces them with flickering which even worse. I was a happy iPhone users for 5+ years and was considering to buy a MacBook (as a replacement for an old Thinkpad) but iOS 26 is such abomination that I will wait and if the next version will not remove Liquid Glass I’ll buy an Android phone and a Linux-compatible notebook.
I like the new iOS design, despite having low expectations after seeing nothing but hate online leading up to the release.
It’s non intrusive and neat to look at. There are some decisions that are annoying, like a hidden button that takes an extra click now, but it’s also something I spend such a small amount of time interacting with that spending any time fretting over it seems like a wasteful overreaction.
That said, I empathize with your frustration, and I have plenty of things that trigger me into passionate “overreaction”, so I totally get it… and things like “more battery consumption” are objectively bad.
Hopefully my experience will be similar with macOS once I try it out though.
Aesthetics may be subjective (liquid glass looks bad to me but I don't like flat design either) but what objective is that new design leaves much less space than old one. Here is HN site on IOS 18 and IOS 26 (both iPhone SE): https://www.citrin.ru/tmp/403/safari-ios18-26-side-by-side.p...
Also in IOS 26 fonts are bigger for some reason (Large Text is Off on both), it can be reduced (using Large Text slider) but interval between lines and UI block is still bigger than in 18.
Settings waste even more space because of less dense design, and the same spacing problem is in most (all) applications.
> macOS 26.0 is continuing to appear more often with 28.61% as of end of September 2025. In our dataset, it had a spike to almost 40% in the middle of September, but came back a bit after that.
Compare to macOS 15 which exactly one year ago had 50% of the market share.
Obviously, it is just a subset. But the drop from 40 to 30% is pretty significant even for that subset. (Based on https://telemetrydeck.com/platforms/swift/ - 6,280 apps use it, but that includes macOS and iOS apps)
PS. I am a macOS indie app developer, but I personally do not use TelemetryDeck and I am not in any way related to them. Just found this data being really interesting, so decided to share.
I haven’t yet seen macOS 26 but iOS 26 is ugly and the least usable phone OS I’ve ever used - controls (theirs placement) and blurry areas waste too much space, animations are distracting and “reduce motion” option just reduces them with flickering which even worse. I was a happy iPhone users for 5+ years and was considering to buy a MacBook (as a replacement for an old Thinkpad) but iOS 26 is such abomination that I will wait and if the next version will not remove Liquid Glass I’ll buy an Android phone and a Linux-compatible notebook.
I like the new iOS design, despite having low expectations after seeing nothing but hate online leading up to the release.
It’s non intrusive and neat to look at. There are some decisions that are annoying, like a hidden button that takes an extra click now, but it’s also something I spend such a small amount of time interacting with that spending any time fretting over it seems like a wasteful overreaction.
That said, I empathize with your frustration, and I have plenty of things that trigger me into passionate “overreaction”, so I totally get it… and things like “more battery consumption” are objectively bad.
Hopefully my experience will be similar with macOS once I try it out though.
Aesthetics may be subjective (liquid glass looks bad to me but I don't like flat design either) but what objective is that new design leaves much less space than old one. Here is HN site on IOS 18 and IOS 26 (both iPhone SE): https://www.citrin.ru/tmp/403/safari-ios18-26-side-by-side.p...
Also in IOS 26 fonts are bigger for some reason (Large Text is Off on both), it can be reduced (using Large Text slider) but interval between lines and UI block is still bigger than in 18.
Settings waste even more space because of less dense design, and the same spacing problem is in most (all) applications.
> macOS 26.0 is continuing to appear more often with 28.61% as of end of September 2025. In our dataset, it had a spike to almost 40% in the middle of September, but came back a bit after that.
Compare to macOS 15 which exactly one year ago had 50% of the market share.
Obviously, it is just a subset. But the drop from 40 to 30% is pretty significant even for that subset. (Based on https://telemetrydeck.com/platforms/swift/ - 6,280 apps use it, but that includes macOS and iOS apps)
PS. I am a macOS indie app developer, but I personally do not use TelemetryDeck and I am not in any way related to them. Just found this data being really interesting, so decided to share.