iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27(apple.com) |
iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27(apple.com) |
What if I don't want that Siri AI. It should be optional.
Out of the gate, that isn't a good sign.
Me? Snow Leopard.
Don't fall for the security patch fearmongering
This comment is a dud. The whole point of this update was to focus on fixing bugs and improving stability. They literally rewrote the CPU scheduler to improve UI performance. Safari UI and page rendering is no longer shit compared to how it was on iPadOS 26. There’s an insane amount of under the hood changes for this release, something people have been asking for them to do for a while — focus on making things run better instead of adding endless new half baked features.
Updates don’t always have to bring shiny, flashy new features. Holy shit.
If it's a stability release, then great! But that's not what they're saying. Stability is mentioned once regarding search only. Performance has a very small sub-section half way down the page. Where do they mention the CPU scheduler rewrite, or any of the under-the-hood changes you're talking about? You seem to expect people to know about these things from somewhere else.
"Apple framed WWDC 2026 around three pillars: platform improvements, trust and safety, and Apple Intelligence."
and it could have been mentioned in the launch announcement post.
If not, I’m staying at iOS 18.
What I am annoyed about, is that I'm stuck with Watch OS 26, which introduced their new workout app, which is so laggy. One of the few things I use my Apple Watch for, and that UX is a major regression from previous OS versions.
I really wish they released a .x update to Watch OS26 to fix this.
for the last couple months I’ve been able to record videos and watch those videos but am unable to share them, whether on instagram, whatsapp, airdrop or imessage. some limited luck saving the same video to the file system and sharing from there
searching this issue is notoriously difficult, and there is one partially related thread on Apple support forums talking about spacial h264 and spacial h265 video codecs further complicated by being wrappers, with something suggesting the latter is the issue, the final post having a bewildered user asking for clarification that the iphone can create videos that even it cant use
I looked in my camera settings and there are soooo many switches and file formats now, that its impossible to know which edge case has been run into, and there’s no reset button to put the settings back to their most compatible
I hope this OS refresh fixed that
note, this only affects some videos and the common denominator is not obvious. all videos are recent and made in the same timespan. some are sharable some are not
What does "unable" mean?
on whatsapp, tapping the same video thumbnail results in a "preparing media" modal that never ends, until pressing cancel
on airdrop, a similar preparing model appears that never makes any progress and only has a cancel button
on imessage, tapping the same video thumbnail results in a circular progress bar overlay, as if it was downloading it from icloud, except it never finishes and was never in icloud
unable
(while IOS 26.7 did not)
> For example, app launches are up to 30% faster,8 new photos load in your Photos library up to 70% faster,9 and AirDrop transfers are up to 80% faster.10
There appears to be no way to keep it from the Dock without actually killing it or disallowing the "Running in Background" permission for it.
This is the stupidest forced opt-in feature I've ever seen.
Just insane the shit they pulled last year that I'd say straight up defaced years of great designs. Golden Gate has reverted a lot of things though it's still not as good as it used to be in a lot of areas. Step in the right direction anyway.
I think a bunch of the reversions to the accumulated bullshit of the past number of years happening directly following the sudden departure of Alan Dye and his cronies is not a coincidence.
Hopefully that means a few more years of security updates for the last reasonably sized devices they made.
iOS itself has been getting strictly worse every release.
Maybe graphene or something will save us from the android/ios enshittification embrace.
But yes, it can give you information on a topic in a way the old Siri couldn't.
All it takes is to expose application’s UI to the model, and let the model send actions. If a human can do it tapping on the screen, the machine should be able to do the same thing.
They also allow an app to start backing up their data in your iCloud quota without your explicit apoorval or enabling. In fact when you notice, you go ahead and uncheck it, and next time you check it again, you’d see Uber again happily backing up 500MB (or lord knows what) into your iCloud account, a massage and home chores booking company app backing up 650MB data! It’s just pathetic - and that patheticity lies on Apple’s side that they let it happen.
But no, this is a historic release, like every other release, all hail the fruit. I used to think Apple does not care about such issues. But now I suspect they have really been incapable of making these things better for years (in some cases even more than a decade).
I'll probably switch to Android once my phone and watch batteries degrade enough to annoy me
They need to similarly make Gemini hot-swappable to anything on Android and don't want to.
Apple was just first because they're a bigger and more visible target.
The notifications on the lock screen are still completely unreadable. What the fuck is Apple doing?
Can’t even be happy about the bug fixes because my biggest one, Spotlight not getting keyboard focus when you use it, is still present.
And the worse thing about LG is the floating bottom nav bar that keeps shrinking to an icon when you least expect it, moving all elements.
I use Raycast now and it's 1000x better simply because it actually selects the highlighted thing.
Me: - Hey, what's the sunrise time tomorrow?
Siri: - (showing me popup with sunrise info)
Me: - Can you respond with a voice?
Siri: - To whom?
Me: - To me..
Siri: - Here are the contacts I found in your contact list.
Me: - No, I mean can you give me the answer using voice?
Siri: - Here are some results I found on the web...I don't understand why Apple went towards unifying the UI around a failed product (Vision Pro).
Embarrassing.
Should I upgrade to macOS 27?
Glad iOS 27 fixed it.
Guess also don't give money to Google (and other privacy-invading, usually US companies)?
disclaimer: I only use Siri for voice dial (worked on my Ericsson T20!), and it is extremely unreliable, and setting kitchen timers.
I do get the point of it, stuff needs to be interchangeable. BUT. Security and privacy need to be taken into account.
Apple has a track record of picking user privacy even if it makes their services objectively worse. Now EU makes them open up the APIs. Cool, I'm all for it.
Now who makes sure that Joe-Bobs Trusty AI is as secure as Apple Private Compute and won't just store my chat transcripts verbatim on an open S3 folder? EU law doesn't say.
The PR flack will 100% hit Apple though, the fact that the user whose data was leaked used JBTAI is buried in the second to last paragraph under the fold between two ads. Apple will be in the headline with all caps.
Same goes for Google, they don't want their AI to be interchangeable with something, because the lack of analytics will hurt their ad revenue. And maybe some lip service to privacy too.
(And my infinite pet peeve, why is Apple App Store bad and needs to be opened up, but Playstation, Xbox and Nintendo app stores are cool and 3rd party options aren't enforced by law?)
https://applevis.com/blog/ios-27-ipados-27-summary-voiceover...
How is the Android world faring in this regard? My last Android device was an Android One, but that seems to have been cancelled.
edit: holy crap, iOS 27 made an iPhone 11 pro max I just installed it on so much snappier! Absolutely crazy level of improvement.
Also, even now I only receive security fixed on a quarterly schedule.
Still not keen on switching to the walled garden - I like the apps I have, including custom browser engines. I like having F-Droid with open source apps.
Will probably get another Samsung, as they have extended updates to 7 years for newer S models.
Ditched it for an iPhone SE.
Too bad, I did like the XZ2 Compact in that first year I had it.
I have the 5-year-old iPad 9th gen with the iPhone 11's A13 chip.
On iOS 26 it was ridiculously slow. I feel that with recent iOS 26 updates the situation has improved and it became somewhat more usable.
For now I am keeping it on iOS 26 for app QA purposes, but would be curious if iOS 27 is an improvement or a regression.
Although for some reason the AI organise tab option is not showing up on me.
> Rosetta is available for any Mac with Apple silicon using macOS 27 or earlier. Starting with macOS 28, the next major macOS release, Rosetta functionality will be available only for certain older, unmaintained games that rely on Intel-based frameworks.
It's like getting a iOS 26 Service Pack 1 :)
It gave me the verbal answer in miles, but the on-screen pop up showed the answer in kilometres.
Never mind that this is a failure of internationalisation (because I live outside one of the two backwards places that hasn’t yet caught up to metric.)
The inconsistency between verbal and written answers is just… bizarre. I’ve never seen an AI agentic system wired like this!
Overall it took over 1h20m or so for download and install this version in my iPhone. And Settings still displays indexing notification while I have little on the device, and I have disabled searches for every app. So I wonder what it does optimizing and indexing then?
You can’t use CarPlay without Siri enabled, so you can’t use CarPlay without doxxing your friends to Apple. Same goes for the image enhancement stuff.
Privacy, that’s Apple.
I never use CarPlay and have Siri and AI off. iOS 27 update shows as only needing 3.8gb which is surprisingly low.
On my Xcode dev machine, I’ll be biting the bullet soon out of necessity, but my personal machine will stay Sequoia until they course-correct on “style over substance” (and not holding my breath).
Also, I really really really abhor the new UI.
I'd probably make a similar leap to 27 when 28 gets released.
What on earth is happening at Apple?
Meanwhile haven't found an actual new feature yet
the "upgrade to 18.4" took my iphone to 26.whatever and siri got even worst... siri set an alarm for 10:40 (creates one at 12:08)... NO, delete that one, 10 40 (does nothing)... hey siri... (ajum), delete the previous alarm... (done!) now set an alarm at 10:40 (alarm at 4pm....)... eventually you get tired... you go to the alarms app.. and then there is the previous "deleted" alarm and the other one...
Ultra Studio XDR Monitor
I was using Chrome MCP, but this one seems better. The Chrome one was making a lot of messy
It did it, it works… but it’s beyond stupid that this still isn’t just a setting to add a custom query string, even if they bury it in the advanced settings.
They added the ability to vibe code your own custom extensions in this version.
- Wipr (Ad Blocker)
- 1Password (Password Manager)
- Dark Mode HN (HN dark mode hack.)
Not really sure what else I need tbh
[1]https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ublock-origin-lite/id674534269...
From what I recall, I had this in the first beta then it disappeared and never came back.
An example of a decision Safari made that I don’t like: if you open too many tabs you reach a limit, but it doesn’t tell you that and just silently overwrites other tabs you have open.
I use Safari, but whenever I go on a pilgrimage to try a different browser, I also get it on my phone so I can access tabs and bookmarks whenever I am.
I bet with all the transistor count increase, that circuitry is a blip.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/run...
If you're seeing that most people are happy with it then it sounds like you're in the minority.
The version before that, it’d send me to the wrong destination but typing the speech recognizer output verbatim into maps worked.
So, maybe 27 siri is better? (How could it be worse?!?)
Such a high bar for iOS. Unfortunately new Siri is not for me.
The surprising part to me is that it took a full 2 years after the iPhone 16 launch to release the feature - and even then it's still a beta release.
I'm definitely looking forward to trying it out, but right now I'm still in the waitlist to actually enable the feature. I'm mostly just looking for a usable hands free driving experience compared the old Siri which I found to be almost completely useless. Anything beyond that would be a bonus. I have so little faith in Siri though at this point, though, that I am not expecting miracles.
They might be referring to the Apple Intelligence features in particular.
Source: https://www.apple.com/os/ios/ near the bottom of the page.
I imagine they wouldn't shift as much hardware that way though.
Personally, new Siri is the only reason to upgrade from 13 Pro, and it's just not worth the money to bother.
The foundation models run on the device for access to the local graph database and to interact with local actions (intents).
Not everything runs locally, but a local model still needs to run to understand that it needs to recruit help, to package up a subset of data for the external agent, and to perform actions on its behalf as well as return results.
Without the local agent, you are shuttling off all your data to be persisted by an AI cloud provider in case they need it.
I'm aware of the privacy implications. I'm talking about Apple's "private cloud". All of this data is already on iCloud anyway.
>The foundation models run on the device for access to the local graph database and to interact with local actions (intents).
This does not require an on-device model.
> Paused.
> … will resume when device reconnects to Internet.
Yes "Internet"! These buffoons don't even correctly say "WiFi".
And when you lock the screen, the download status message switches to "About X hours remaining" (without actually downloading anything of course) and upon unlock it glitches back to "Paused" state.
It baffles my mind at the amount of hardcoding and flag-based development this company has done. If Fable et al are let loose on these fruity pieces of software, it will lead to a global user safety-based outage.
fm respond 'draw an svg of a pelican riding a bicycle'Seriously though, I thought an on-device local model in the Terminal might help with commands, sort of like intelligent man pages. How cool would that be? I tried it and got detailed instructions for running the (nonexistent) 'brew update-all' command. Okay, I see, RTFM, Apple only built it for simple text transformation, like summarizing text piped in from a script. It's not a frontier model, but couldn't it be more than what it is?
My experiences with the fm command and how to use it [0]
And perhaps make the "System Settings" window scalable horizontally?
No? OK, I'll skip.
I still have no idea how they let it ship. Sure, it's not a productivity killing defect, just a head-scratcher that makes you question the entire software stack.
Is 27 good enough to upgrade from Sequoia? Is your answer the same when I tell you I have an M1 Pro Max?
I've been running it on the macOS 27 beta all summer, and it's night and day. It's usable again.
I’m on a same boat
Should probably do clean install at this point - M1 still good enough and new laptops cost a fortune.
How do I opt out? I'm sure it will take extra gigabytes for the models right?
Linux I guess?
Seriously though, I'm in the same boat. I think the curse of big products is you wind up paying for 100% of the features when you only want 10% of them.
It'll be nice to have an update which isn't just random UI changes.
What is "library migration"?
Anyone who is trying to reduce their AI consumption or see fewer AI features might be interested in this change.
I posted to Tell HN about it a few minutes ago here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49704226), but TL;DR is that the only way to turn this off is to either disable each AI feature independently or apply a '.mobileconfig' profile that does it.
The world has data on air quality. My country, Poland, has air quality information. But Apple is still opposed to showing them. :(
I am still rocking an iPhone 11 Pro Max and even after replacing the battery ~1 year ago, every page load in Safari would take +20 seconds (Chrome was still fast) and opening / closing any app took ~1 second.
iOS 27 has fixed all of it, it feels snappy again!
It seemed to know how to parse the equation and pass it to its calculator tool, as it shows the formatted equation and result at the bottom
Except when it was complete it actually had done 27.
Lots and lots of Reddit posts with the same bug. It’s not just you… Apple botched the meta that shows during the 27 upgrade.
Good news is the upgrade worked fine.
Siri is definitely worth using now, even if it remains still a work-in-progress/needs continued refinement. It can surprise you in good ways, but it isn't consistently good yet.
The keyboard remains unfixed, as is tradition. The same issues they've "fixed" like three or four releases now, seemingly are identically broken, and I'm lost faith they CAN fix it.
The iOS Keyboard and Search on Windows, are like the perpetually broken things that both companies have "fixed" every year for the last ten+ years and yet... It is almost farcical as this point.
Many people have complained before. Honestly I ONLY search for app names in spotlight search or application window, it should be trivial to make it actually work. Maybe i just need to vibecode some alternative search bar :(
sudo mdutil -E /
You can check indexing status with:
mdutil -s /
After that it’s usually fine again until I start pushing the disk limit.
Every sibling comment's issues I've experienced. But a reindex after freeing enough disk space seems to be a semi-stable solution for me. If only I could write a tool to remind me to free disk space before it screws up spotlight. It would be nice if MacOS put the index on its own partition.
Mostly because people still expect to use it to find "Recipe for Egg Salad.docx" without searching the entire Internet or executing some bizarre natural language query.
Breaking interfaces, Linus Torvalds had something to say about it that Apple should heed.
Windows is the same - searching the fs is faster and more accurate than using these 'quick search' tools, which are borderline broken.
I typed "printer" so I can get to my printer settings and the first three are printer icons/emoji. I cant imagine why these would be more important
It is so incredibly bad that for years I have assumed it must be me or my specific laptop. And then the years go by I just accept it.
Anytime Apple is mentioned "comically bad search" should be mentioned. It is the association I have in my mind.
There needs to be more rage at search in Mail.app.
It’s quicker to rollback through them all than it is to use search, but when you get tens or hundreds a day it’s excruciating.
Please Apple, fix email search.
Use EasyFind for no-nonsense file search: https://www.devontechnologies.com/apps/freeware
Check out Raycast / Alfred.
That's a user error, you simply had "This Mac" selected (preselected) instead of narrowing scope to be Applications.
I know that Windows has some equivalent stuff, that the antivirus uses to disallow opening files before they got scanned, so I'd wager that API is functionally required to not miss any changes.
Yet Windows indexing is one of the worst pieces of software in existence and frequently gets out of sync.
I normally don't complain that iOS/MacOS isn't customizable because the defaults are good enough to work for me but that voice to text man its like they completely forgot about it.
The best workaround is a third party app that lets you run Parakeet V3 or Whisper on your phone. There are quite a few.
Some stuff, as you can see, isn’t perfect :-)
I don’t think it is parakeet v2 level, but it’s good enough to not be frustrating
I had the pleasure of typing something on an Android the other day and it was such a breath of fresh air when it actually accepted the keys I was pressing...
Typing is more important than ever. We're a ways off from BCIs and there should be responsible and serious consideration for this problem.
Every single f**n time I begin a sentence with "È" (Italian for "she/he/it is") - which is an extremely deliberate gesture - you have to keep the E tapped until the accents pop up - it will immediately correct it back to an unaccented "E". It's nuts.
There is a metric ton of intent behind my selecting, keeping tapped, waiting for the accents, picking one - it's so obviously NOT accidental, and this utterly cretinous piece of junk changes it .
Web Driver
New Features
- Allow your agent to connect to a Safari browser for development and debugging via the Safari MCP server. (176038457)
Related (From July 1st)
Introducing the Safari MCP server for web developers
https://webkit.org/blog/18136/introducing-the-safari-mcp-ser...
So that's interesting. On the other hand, looks like WebXR support for Safari will never come.
---
¹ https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safari-release-not...
* iOS 27: https://www.apple.com/os/ios/
* iPadOS 27: https://www.apple.com/os/ipados/
* macOS: https://www.apple.com/os/macos/
* watchOS: https://www.apple.com/os/watchos/
* visionOS: https://www.apple.com/os/visionos/
* tvOS 27: no link.
* Overview: https://www.apple.com/os/?version=no-hero
However, the guy who decided to put a useless button on the side of the remote that interrupts whatever you're watching, should get fired immediately. It's almost every day I grab the remote and press it by accident, and have to switch back to what I was watching, and resume playback, because Netflix exits out of the stream.
Sadly, Apple TV is the only Hollywood-approved streaming device that isn't a total trash heap.
"I eat Tide Pods, and I vote"
The other thing that has been terrible for me in 26 is they made some sort of change to the pronunciation in “maps” when it gives directions. It seems like they tried to make it clearer or something but it breaks loads of UK street names in hilarious ways. For example, there is a street near me called “Speldhurst road”. You would normally say this “spelled hirst” or similar. Siri? No. Siri says “Spellduster”. There are many like that. It’s kind of ridiculous.
System Improvements
Discover lots of little ways your Mac is even enjoyable, like faster and smoother experiences across the systems.
/end-rant
Thanks for buying $product, $consumer
^ Intentional.
- Example: “Siri for the lights that are already on in the family room, can you put those lights to 50% brightness?” -> All the lights turn on incorrectly. This is a two step process. Get information from Home and then execute command with that info.
- Example: “Remind me to call back Joe at 5pm.” -> Siri oddly has trouble with this. Asking me what time after I give this command. Is it not hearing full command?
- Example: It seems to ask me to clarify the name of something when that name is readily available in recent personal context. Like recent 5 messages. It should be able to know some of this stuff as I’m most likely operating on recent stuff.
It seems to be hampered in some way. Gemini should be able to handle that tool call really easily.
Other things are great. Like I have my checking account and routing number buried in Notes somewhere. When I’m in safari and ask it to autofill with the routing number from notes. It does it. Amazing.
I’m so bullish on LLMs and my personal context but there are some kinks here that hamper performance so far.
Glad to see that Shared Albums are now full resolution!
Now, please:
1. Allow us to edit the photo order of the Shared Album (instead of the order that the photos were added to it). Currently, my wedding unfolds in the wrong order, and my kid turns 6 months old before being born.
2. Fix identification/clean-up of duplicates.
3. Give us a way to tidy up facial recognition.
4. Allow us to join "best quality possible" collectives, which will replace our poor-quality photos with higher-quality originals from somebody else's library.
So we are all stuck with an 85% very performant, e.g., Photos app, that has 15% extremely annoying and/or lack of features and functionality; because Apple cannot let go of control, but also fails in its responsibility, as is typical of controlling entities.
You can already do this for a long time
Curious if it lets you reclaim space if you turn off Siri.
My only plausible explanation is that no one who works at Apple has kids.
Oddly, Alcatel has (had?) a nice version for their landfill androids a few years ago.
These are basic things of our lives that make us humans : caring about others, remembering what they say, knowing how to recognize a fruit, enjoying colors of the fruits with your eyes, not through your retina display, thinking about the food recipes that we know.
I don't know if this is because I'm european and the gap keeps getting larger across the Atlantic, but what a depressing life those giants are telling us here.
That doesn’t sound like a cultural divide issue.
The video comes off as she doesn't care about her mom, or the recipe, or cooking, and the person doesn't even know what a peach is. The tone in which she says "what did mom mention...", as if she's clearly distracted thinking about something else, probably her busy NY job, and just have AI deal with this annoyance of family as fast as possible... plus she needs AI to read the email and tell her which peaches to get? I dunno, read the email and interpret it yourself, you probably know your mom better than Siri? And call your mom in case of doubt? Maybe I'm too Spanish... but it felt quite dystopian...
I think the appearance is actually worse. They haven't addressed the giant padding areas 26 added to everything, but they added a faux-3D effect to the Liquid Glass. Even if you set the glass to opaque, the faux-3D remains. I don't mind faux-3D (I thought Windows 7 and OS X 10.6 looked fine) but it looks out of place here because the majority of the UI still uses flat design. It looks like if you installed a Windows 7 theme on top of Windows 10, then cancelled the install midway through so it's half applied.
The light theme still has the contrast blown out and hurts my eyes to look at, so I still have to use dark mode even though I preferred light mode on 18 and below.
I only had 2 extensions installed. I disabled uBlock, that didn’t fix it. I just manually rebooted my phone to see if that helps. If it crashes again I’ll be disabling all extensions.
I’m a bit shocked, since “stable” was the one thing I kept hearing about this release.
the semaphore too? i am hating it.
Now I am worried about what the new versions of iOS will bring us, I hope that the "we removed the crap" wasn't just a thing of this year, and that iOS will go back to high software standards. Phone prices are really high for me now, and I would like for my poor little iphone 13 to survive another couple of years.
Performance is for sure better. Not as much as I expected (I expected to notice it everyday), and I can't give you a number, but I remember that I noticed stuff being faster the first couple of days that I installed the beta, but now I got used to it
I bought a MacBook Pro (M5 Pro) in march and was shocked that it did not work properly with my LG 38WN95C-W Monitor (3840x1600@144Hz via USB-C).
This has been fixed with macOS 27. I finally can use the native resolution + HiDPI with my monitor.
Terminal:
system_profiler SPDisplaysDataType
macOS 26:
Displays:
LG HDR WQHD+:
Resolution: 6400 x 2666
UI Looks like: 3200 x 1333 @ 120.00Hz
Displays:
LG HDR WQHD+:
Resolution: 7680 x 3200
UI Looks like: 3840 x 1600 @ 120.00Hz
I had to undo some of my previous configurations (0: disabled, 2: default)
defaults -currentHost write -g AppleFontSmoothing -int 2
Ultrawide display support. Now you can get higher resolutions on ultrawide displays, such as 5K at 120Hz. And your display arrangements stay exactly as you left them, for a seamless experience every time you plug in.
Previous discussion about macOS 26 Problem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47569502
MacOS is fine. For the most part it gets out of my way. However I have a laundry list of small issues that have been there since my first Mac in 2012. I wish there was a Department of Details to fix those little snags in the user experience.
https://www.idownloadblog.com/2026/08/27/build-safari-extens...
For developers, there is a new framework (Core AI), that updates the decade old Core ML framework.
> Core AI allows your app to use the latest model architectures and inference techniques across the CPU, GPU, and Neural Engine.
Sounds like a great way for people to get hacked.
2. The keyboard's AI will also helpfully misinterpret key presses and sub the wrong letter, which doesn't get corrected. For example, common acronyms get corrected to other acronyms I _never_ use. FFS turns into FFA regularly.
command + up/down arrow
Plus, the global key at bottom left fails for keyboard shortcut input when defining new binding for managing windowing rearrangement.
I really wish we could add our own custom prompts for the new Siri. My most common usage of Siri is "Remind me at XX:00 to do XYZ." The most common response from Siri now is, "Sorry, did you say XYZ or XZY?", where XYZ and XZY are two very similar things between which the difference is inconsequential.
Dealing with this "Sorry" response has made reminders take annoying extra steps. Wish I could throw in a "If I'm setting a reminder and you don't quite hear me, just put both things in one reminder and I'll figure it out myself" to the prompt.
Otherwise macOS 27 is mostly okay-ish though, especially compared to 26.
Just tried it this morning after my shower:
- Siri, what's the weather like?
- I don't know where you are
- ... use the the geolocation??
- You need to unlock first
So yeah, still unusable to me even for the most basic shit
I have stopped submitting bugs because of the tedious bug reporting app, only submit really bad ones. Can't they give some helping functions to finding the correct categories based on problem description?
Jeez. I wish they could just roll the keyboard back to iOS 7. That's the last version where it was good.
siri: do you mean livingroom, […] or everywhere?
i rest my case. i can reproduce this every time. siri is the biggest pos software apple ever made (followed closely by the ios keyboard).
or am i the only one experiencing it like this?
Even weather was/is comically bad. Ask it anything specific and it would fall over, repeating the broadest, least helpful version of weather data, even if all that data is clearly available in the ios weather app. Specifics on wind, precipitation hourly, etc.
So no, you can't really ask a homepod for the weather either - Homepod's weather was more like a shitty version of sticking your head outside and looking up at the sky.
[1]: https://github.com/achiya-automation/safari-mcp#vs-apples-of...
This is how to enable: chrome://inspect/#remote-debugging
Thanks for checking. What a mess. I'm so sick of the workarounds that have to make.
I also don't know why this would be considered more confusing for chronology. The year is in the name, whereas it was previously at best, years since version 1, or something more confusing in the case of macOS. I couldn't keep track of all the latest OS versions before, now we will be able to going forward.
They do yearly major releases in September for all their OSes. They are directly tied to the year.
I personally find Ubuntu's versioning to be the easiest to understand because you know when this Ubuntu version was released. It would be very annoying if they called Ubuntu 26.10 Ubuntu 27, though.
That would be hilarious.
But my experience with 26 hasn’t been great. From the top of my head: Random repeated flashing window chrome in the background, notifications that keep on showing while everything is disabled, Finder tooltips from four windows down, tooltips that don’t disappear, Java update interruptions that hijack your flow - just when you where about to hit enter for something else the pop-up shows and bam: you’re installing it. There is nothing right about the update process of Java anyway. Spotlight search has completely stopped working. People I’m mailing with for over a decade are not suggested when drafting a mail. Clicking on the dock icon does not reveal the app. The list goes on and on. It has been a total grueling experience. Worst in all my experiences since System 7.
I’ve shut down the notification system at some point, which alleviated the constant reminders of non-compatibility with the next OS version. Being reminded of that four times a day for months on end is just insulting, even if I used compatible versions. There was no way to shut it off. Notifications are lazily designed and completely uninspired, as they could also adjust the app icons and so on and actually do it right.
I promised myself to update once it came out and then just screen record everything to collect residual garbage to help the Apple team make this stuff work well for everyone.
Sorry to let this all out, but it has been on my mind for a while and I’m happy they say they focussed on quality. Therefore I’m upgrading asap this time.
For anyone jumping versions: remember that Apple messed with the login keychain not being able to be backed up in the most recent Tahoe release [1], which means that issue will be around in Golden Gate.
The Tahoe Dock "App View" / Spotlight just lists my 30 installed apps intermingled with Apple System Apps, which I hardly ever use. Hard coded categories, no way to re-order as far as I can tell.
Seems like the closest thing to LaunchPad is dragging ~/Applications to the Dock.
The other thing I have noticed is scrolling in Firefox is more choppy, and animations are more Janky than Sequoia on this old MacBook Air M1.
iOS 27 is pretty good though.
macOS 27 itself won't run on Intel chips, just Apple Silicon
but it does still have Rosetta (macOS 28 will drop it completely though)
Gotta say, a massive downgrade.
There have certainly been changes like Liquid Glass that were for the worse overall (though the degree of which had been highly overblown). But outside of directional disagreement with a release, I can’t say I’ve ever seen an issue where I’ve regretted pulling the trigger on an update.
cool beans.
One exception maybe is for music producers. For some reason AU/VST/DAW developers don't seem to take part in the beta programs and their software can take a while to get updated. But I've happily been playing with Bitwig (with some Arturia VSTs) over the weekend on Golden Gate without issue.
My impression from audio developers is that the audio infrastructure is very badly documented (like so much of MacOS nowadays) and using it properly requires a combination of luck, WWDC videos, and devrel threads. Also, Apple introduces changes that are genuine improvements in theory, but break undocumented assumptions.
The lack of rigor is a bit surprising given that audio is probably the only mission-critical hard-real-time thing MacOS does. People routinely run an entire live concert on a Mac and an audio glitch is not OK! (Yes, if it’s Taylor Swift budget then there are at least two machines in sync with a big red button to switch over…)
But given what they’re dealing with, I understand why it’s more involved than just “the developers didn’t try the betas”.
- "What is three fifty degrees Fahrenheit in Celsius?" -> "53°F = 11.67°C"
Also disappointing:
- "Add mow the lawn to my chores note." -> "Sorry, I can't help with that."
Me: "Send a message to <wife>".
Gemini: "OK what's the message?"
Me: "Can you bring Tylenol I'm having a headache?"
Gemini: "I'm sorry, I cannot help with that. If you need medical advice..." <-- or something to that extent.
Up to this point, I thought when Gemini would prompt for a message, it would simply accept whatever I said essentially as plain text - and maybe with the new Rambler feature on Pixel phones it may cleanup my message slightly.
But now I can see scenarios where Gemini would possibly need to parse my input. And it should have been obvious since I would often say things like "cancel" and I never questioned it.
No high hopes for how that recipe turns out with Siri in the kitchen then
> The promise of iOS 27 is that it’ll not only unlock new capabilities but also make your existing workflows smoother and quicker.
https://sixcolors.com/post/2026/09/ios-27-review-little-thin...
An update that improves performance on even the oldest supported device is a win.
One thing I hated was a downgrade in Photos app on iOS 26 though, that hasn't improved in 27. Unfortunately it seems I was the only one loving Photos on iOS 18.
I did jump from macOS 18 to macOS 27 beta though and Safari's UI is abhorrent.
Regression to the mean
Apple's incompetence in AI / Assistant etc stuff has to be studied.
Now it just says something like "A message in a different language".
For example, Android and Google Assistant has had excellent support for Polish for more than a decade. Siri still doesn't support Polish at all, even though all of Apple's AI suppliers support Polish perfectly well...
Why should Apple focus on technical excellence when the company and their products are touted for literally gimmicks? In the end this is what brings the money and profits through the door, can't blame a company for providing what the market craves.
They took like 7 years to come out with a foldable iPhone remember - lol!
The “headline features simply must not slip” cadence is ruining the products. The moneymaker, the iPhone, needs the new OS to work (iPhone 18 hardware has never run on iOS 26), so the OS release can’t be delayed for any reason. The other OSes are lashed to this sinking ship, quality-wise, because they all come out together.
Once per year, everyone has to crunch against an impossible deadline, and something has to give. That thing is quality.
Apple search in Photos has always been garbage so I almost always flip over to Google Photos anyway.
I didn't know in advance why Siri can't access my photos (turns out it's because indexing isn't done) - at the beginning I thought there was some sort of other problem. Later I figured out (after going through privacy/permissions stuff) that it's too stupid to know why it can't see my photos.
Amateurish.
I'll answer your question though: because it doesn't show anywhere the progress of the indexing.
As others have said, it helps with the legibility but Liquid Glass is still distracting and illegible. I share the wish that Apple eventually returns to a more sensible, legible UI.
All of that is fine, of course, just as long as you’re aware. I also hate Liquid Glass, but unfortunately don’t think I can avoid it for another year. I just hope that the stuff they rolled back makes it bearable.
(My relatives iPhone updated and its just bad all around. And with increased font size for accessibility, elements don't cover all the text. Feels rushed and not the promised Apple land.)
Waiting 10 years for the next major overhaul seems like a bad plan.
Been running the beta since June -- on the latest beta now and 8 out of ten times to continue the conversation with Siri (most notably in the car with my phone docked) I have to constantly say "Hey Siri."
One thing it's current UX has over chatGPT voice tech as it shows you the text and provides visuals while chatGPT's UI shows no text and or visuals.
Paid but worth every penny.
The only real advantages iOS have left are not being run by an advertising/tracking company (which is reducing as Apple looks for services revenue) and the quality and variety of indie iPhone and iPad apps (yet Apple are happy to make those same devs extremely unhappy).
When I moved from a gs5 to an iPhone 7, I was amazed at how much better the typing experience was. But it has now gotten to a point where I feel like a drunk monkey would type better than I do.
I switch between Android and iPhone every few cycles, and I really do miss my swipe keyboard on Android.
iPhone swipe and tap keyboard always gives me trouble. I hate that it keeps trying to type my contacts’ names.
Also, text selection OSS frequently maddening. Yes, I swiped “is” and it decided I’m a fan of open source software… When I try to select some words or position my cursor, iOS always wants to put the cursor far away from where I held my finger. Doesn’t make a lick of sense.
So while yes, I would say overall it is much more powerful than it used to be, it still sits in the "every few reasons to use it" bucket for me. I'd sooner just reach for Grok/Chat/Claude
edit: keep in mind this is my experience over several months of beta. I haven't installed the public release yet.
iPadOS 27 also isn't looking so hot that I'd believe macOS 27 to be a magic bullet.
It's on the list there alright.
Also enjoying Rectangles WM.
Now that we are living in The Future, I am dumbfounded how e.g. dynamically populated lists change their content reliably to something I did not want, during the phase of interaction where my finger is descending onto the target. Click! Not what I want.
Feels like a lost art which will be "discovered" again in the next 15 years.
Time is an illusion. (Lunchtime especially so.)
Text is blurry on those as a result.
Thankfully, my desktops all run x11, so Apple’s fractional scaling brainrot hasn’t spread to my Linux or BSD’s yet.
What I want is an AI that detects I'm scrolling social media and closes the app. That would save me many hours a week vs trying to save 30 seconds on reserving a table for dinner.
What did you expect on this SV VC funded site? There is a serious selection bias here, and in all SV.
I am sorry but could you explain the meaning of this sentence?
For me yesterday I needed to buy dishwasher rinse aid so when I added it to my shopping list siri put it into the “beverages” category, and when my wife on a different occasion asked me to buy some makeup remover for her siri put that into a “condiments” section.
I have not done anything (on purpose) to make the classification like this by mistraining it or whatever - it’s just been that bad out of the box.
Beverage - another word for drink
Makeup remover - for women
Condiments - something added to food to enhance its flavor
iOS tries to put shopping list items into AI named groups but doesn't seem to understand what objects actually are so it makes mistakes.
mdutil -E -a
That command will erase and rebuild Spotlight index on all volumes.
Since Tahoe, Spotlight has multiple modes. You might have better luck forcing it into folder & files mode. That's command-2. So command-space, spotlight UI appears, keep holding command key, press 2. There's also 1 for applications only, 3 for "actions" and 4 for clipboard history.
Bloody daft.
With the Finder open, go to Settings > Advanced, and change the drop-down at the bottom to "Search the Current Folder". This is something I do on the first run of every new Mac I set up.
"Search this Mac" should be confined to Spotlight OR as a fallback if the local folder doesn't return anything.
It's using a clone of my real Firefox profile, and can "ping" me if it encounters a page that needs my human input, like a login page (as I don't give it access to my password manager) or captcha page. Although sometimes it "bypasses" the captcha page by itself, even though I've instructed it not to...
launchctl disable "gui/$(id -u)/com.apple.notificationcenterui" killall NotificationCenter 2>/dev/null || true
launchctl disable "gui/$(id -u)/com.apple.usernoted" killall usernoted 2>/dev/null || true
To refine my statement on lazy or non-design. Notifications can be valuable, for me i'd like backup notifications and find my messages. Only those, ever. When only those are enabled, MacOS has their own secret settings and is allowed to nag about updates, incompatibility and maybe some other things i don't remember. Part of the problem is the illusion of control, and being spammy about self-importance of new OS versions. Great for some users, insulting to me.
This is made even worse by "focus" which still shows notifications but without the text. Then i'm distracted AND i don't know why.
It’s not an unusual way to save effort when speaking.
https://sixcolors.com/post/2026/09/ios-27-review-little-thin...
LLMs are eating software, maths, and LinkedIn posts; some of the image generators are seeing similar (limited) success.
Other than that, my general impression is that most people think of even the best as garbage.
("Other than". In fairness, most people thought LinkedIn posts were already garbage, it's just that it wasn't made any worse by LLMs).
Wow.
It's on top of the latency inherent to the animations of sliding, wiggling, wobbling, jiggling, etc. that are throughout the interface. ~100ms on top of a ~600ms input-blocking sigmoid probably just looks like a 700ms sigmoid to people.
It seems like Apple could very easily turn the AppleTV into a proper game console, but not with only one person on it. I guess it’s still just a “hobby” for them.
Apple could turn the Mac, iPad or Vision Pro into a proper gaming console, too. It's just not something they are willing to do, no matter how well-positioned they are for it.
Gaming is a license game, not a hardware game.
Apple wants you to buy your games through the App Store, so they can take the 30%, which means competing with Steam. Which means getting licensed games on the App Store.
Apple already fought one such license war over music and won. They're currently doing Apple TV as well.
However, for the gaming industry they're complete strangers. Unlike music (which is mostly made on Mac) and TV/Movies (which are often made on Mac, at least partly), gamedev is very much Windows focused.
Pushing for ports and licenses is an uphill battle, and probably not one Apple wants to take on. They have plenty of other profitable ventures.
so much better framing than typical truck hit :))
love it
I have never been fan of autocorrection tools (especially as I am regularly writing in 4 different languages) regardless of the OS but definitely use autosuggestions to correct potential spelling errors.
But Liquid Glass is still broken at a conceptual level. The only way to fix it is to start all over. Which they basically are, by swapping parts of liquid glass out with every release.
I'd love to know the algorithm they're using for this. Fuzzy search seems like it was a mostly solved problem 20 years ago, and it's definitely worse than it was 10 years ago.
Search 'True', you'll get True Detective and True Blood show up as the top results. That seems to work well.
But then if you add a space making it 'True ', 'Bill Hader' is the top result!
Aah those were the days.
These are too, but those were as well.
And it offers me THREE different chess games I could install!
I don't mind liquid glass and can handle the transparency mostly, but the notifications are just god-awful and difficult to read (white on light glass, using dark mode, who comes up with this stuff?).
But reducing transparency is a much harder setting now (should be "removing transparency"), I don't like it anymore, it also messes with the wallpaper. The previous setting was just right for me. Now the app squares are just black, very bad with dark icons.
I've been running it since 18 (first thing I do is go into accessibility and turn off any animations and screen effects that take GPU cycles)
The old setting was the perfect balance for me. Ah well, iPhone 12 mini is nearly dead, am eyeballing something with GrapheneOS anyway...
> I’ve been happily using the totally frosted look (slider all the way to the right) for a few weeks now. While I didn’t mind Liquid Glass as much as other folks, the frosted setting ensures I can read and see the text, menus and icons properly.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/ive-been-usi...
They are all counting on you not using all of that space in the 2TB plan. So the avg user is subsidizing the usage of some small fraction of power users. They don't want to offer pay-per-use pricing plans because then they would have to increase the price ($/GB/month) to keep their existing margins.
This is one of the very techniques under which the entire Apple Empire has been built. They take the "sweet spot" for $product and intentionally offer options on either side of that sweet spot. They also nerf the lower-end option in other ways (i.e. fewer ports) so to make the upgrade more enticing. This enables them to offer "Prices starting from...." that are dead-end options (like 8GB RAM or 128GB HD's).
Lots of companies do this across various industries. But it works best when the brand name is really strong and/or the competitive landscape is very weak.
I've grown to accept that it's just how they operate.
It's crazy that SwiftKey was terrible too, even though it's the one I use exclusively on Android.
Wait! I do have a specific criticism!
There are certain two-word sequences it will not produce ("kill myself", "white women") and I could do without that little bit of editorial oversight thank you very much.
update: Okay I tried and sure enough, I'm laughing even harder now. The closest I could get it to swipe was "womanhood". Lots of Wohan's though.
Blank women
Chinese women
Indian women
Jewish women
Black men love Chinese women
Black woken live Ellie men
Kill your
Kill mussels
Lmao I never noticed this. I wonder if this is just risk aversion, since they don’t care if I type “white women make me want to kill myself” normally and even autocorrect half the sentence.
AI is also making plenty of holes.
I have not seen a single case of anything that an AI has found that could not have been automatically found without AI.
One thing I've noticed on my own device, that, counter-intuitively, screentime also seems to include time when the screen is off, e.g. playing music through Safari with the screen turned off.
As an example of the fragility of the screentime passwords, the password on a child's device can often be removed by simply turning off the screentime password - it will not always prompt for the current password. Until recently, I actually thought that it was intentional that a password was not required to disable the screentime password on a child device.
I recently had a crazy experience where many restrictions and a screentime password seemed to suddenly get enabled on a child's device. We had just turned on screentime, but without restrictions or a password. It seems as though a bug caused the restrictions to revert to those used a long time ago during an exam period, with very strict time restrictions. It was almost unusable, and no one knew the screentime password. The crazy part is that I tried dozens of passwords - many on the first day, and then one a day for weeks. I was certainly the only one touching the device from that point. One day, when I tried to turn off the screentime password, it just turned off. Unlike every other day for the past few weeks, it did not prompt for a password at all.
Not at all :-) But at least this process doesn’t lead to pain and suffering because either the ScreenTime notification doesn’t arrive on a parent device, or the “Allow” action isn’t picked up by the child’s device. The whole messaging part to get permission to do something is really unreliable, at least in our household.
Considering that Microsoft bought Swype, I have no idea why SwiftKey isn’t absolutely amazing, but it isn’t.
But it was a favorite for a while.
I think it's slightly worded if you swore. No. Slightly worded. No. Slightly worse if you swipe left handed. Yes. At last.
Gaming is also a software support game.
Especially in the last few years, preservation has been a big topic. Gamers want their purchases to keep working in the future, not being broken by an OS update as it often happens with macOS (compared to Windows)
But the vast majority of the games I've purchased on iOS can't be installed anymore. It's not great. In some cases the games still function, but I can't download them on new devices because the developer closed shop and disabled their Apple account.
Of course Apple is doing perfectly fine for mobile gaming, and is giving more than enough tools to developers to implement mobile games perfectly well.
Apple Silicon GPUs are all capable of supporting Vulkan 1.3 and translating DirectX code. Proton 11 supports ARM/FEX natively, which would make Apple Silicon a first-class citizen if you use Asahi drivers. macOS users will be stuck with Game Porting Toolkit and it's lackluster support; iPad/AppleTV/iPhone users have no options whatsoever, presumably to redirect their attention to the App Store that Apple profits from so handsomely.
------------------------
It's also worth pointing out that the developers at Mozilla literally decided to make a brand new programming language (Rust) that eliminated an entire categories of bugs and started working on a new browser (Servo) where its components could be switched into firefox.
Then Mozilla fired the team working on it.
Lesson 1: Better tools and processes eliminate bugs.
Lesson 2: If you don't have the tools, make them.
Lesson 3: Mismanagement leads to security vulnerabilities.
In my memory, that does not seem 100% right. And indeed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_(programming_language)#20... says a single developer who happened to work at Mozilla started it as a personal project.
After a few years Mozilla became interested in it and then sponsored its development, transforming it into the language it is today.
FWIW, Rust is my main language, so I am grateful to the humans that created it, and it is indeed a monumental effort. But vuln finding is a different kind of creative endeavour, and one that is heavily weighted against defenders.
You would choose rust (from a security standpoint) because it massively reduces memory safety issues (which from a Microsoft study was responsible for around 70% of bugs).
Then you look at things like linting, fuzzing, design by contract, proofing, deterministic test runs, etc...
As I said above: use better tools and processes.
LLMs don't fit that criteria.
Edit:
Disabled everything on "Continuity and AirPlay" as well. Guessing it might be the "Handoff" setting. Not sure that the menu pops up any faster though
/shrug
I expect the following from such a system : I set a time limit per app/set of apps,and the phone locks said apps once the limit is reached. In theory, this is what it does, in practice it almost never works : it doesn’t lock, gets broken whenever you upgrade the os, gets broken whenever your child upgrades the os, can be trivially bypassed by a kid, cannot be unlocked when you want it to unlock remotely etc I’ve also seen trivially bad data ( phone usage when it was in my pocket ). It’s worth noting you also need an Idevice to set it remotely - if your significant other has an android device he or she is out of luck.
I was very surprised at how appallingly bad it was - just try it for a few weeks and you’ll immediately notice it’s badly broken but somehow doesn’t fix it.
Contrast this to google’s system which, well, works.
Edit : it’s so mind bogglingly bad that I’m genuinely curious to talk to someone who works at apple about this.
There's also the assistive access or whatever which really locks the phone down but that seems more like for old people.
Alternatively if you wanted to get advanced you could maybe (not sure if it's free) create an Apple business account and try to manage the phone like corporations do. Or you may just be able to generate a configuration profile for free and add to the device. I would expect that process to be a lot more robust generally. You can control pretty much anything. Downside is if you don't have an MDM your stuck with whatever settings are baked into that config profile. Depending what you want to restrict you could pair it with something like NextDNS and lock it down to only safe sites.
Sounds like Android is way better though in this regard. Having to setup a child specific account at the beginning of setup sounds like a pain. If I ever have kids makes me really want to only give them a dumb phone or something like the new (unreleased as of yet) Commodore Callback - has some smartphone features but intentionally no social media
Today's implementation is using more advanced ML techniques ;)
At least I’m macOS I can use Talon instead of the system dictation.
I did it earlier this year. It seems to be much more accurate and confident with which key it thinks I want. I do occasionally miss the sliding but it's worth it overall.
Gboard on Android though is way better
When I use iOS devices, it feels better but I don't use them enough to have used them in anger. Ok, well, yes they have made me angry but for other reasons than the keyboard hence why I'm on Android lol.
To be clear, I only kind of recommend the keyboard. I stopped using mine after a while because of how awkward it was with the Razr unfolded and never actually found it faster or more accurate than the on screen keyboard.
Personally, I use the slyde to type rather than tapping to type and have gboard installed for when slyde doesn't work (I think the Apple algos are not quite as good as Google's).
It is not just a translation layer, as much as a great effort of the open source community to force-port every game in existence to Linux. The effort also includes stuff like ntsync that gives the Linux kernel Windows-y APIs for performance.
I doubt Apple has any interest in any of that. I don't really blame them.
And purely in principle, why are we all going through so much effort to save game devs from writing good OS-independent arch-independent code?
Apple doesn't need to implement ntsync to support Proton or DXVK, either. macOS' synchronization primitives do the job just as well as esync or fsync does.
> why are we all going through so much effort to save game devs from writing good OS-independent arch-independent code?
Because Apple doesn't support OS-independent APIs. They also don't support old runtimes, so users will inevitably have to run the Windows version once the native code breaks.
Valve ported several of their games natively to macOS, and almost every single one of them is broken on modern Macs. Valve didn't change the game tech, it's all runtime breakage.
I don't really know enough about graphics to discuss point (1). From what I understand, Apple GPUs don't really fit the Vulkan model too cleanly, and the Asahi Vulkan drivers are significantly less performant than Metal (how much of that is due to beta/community status vs. architectural bottleneck I have no idea).
But let's say they provide (1).
Providing (2) would simply be a big mistake. It is a huge mistake of Windows, of the C++ programming language and of the x86 ISA (none of which are very good). Linux distros do not provide this either, beyond the core kernel syscalls and glibc. It is certainly a very big ask and not something trivial.
(2) is precisely the reason why nobody can port games to macOS anymore, and largely why ARM is a second-class citizen in PC gaming too. You cannot depreciate things like AVX or 32-bit library execution modes, and then demand native builds get made to 20-year-old games. Apple Silicon's ISA extensions like AMX are not a replacement for x86's SIMD extensions, it's not standardized through Arm or supported in Asahi either. Native Mac games need to incorporate Apple's proprietary and unstable tech like Metal and the Apple Silicon microarchitecture, which makes their games unstable and difficult to support in the long term. Translation is Apple Silicon's only choice for game preservation and mainstream game support.
> Apple GPUs don't really fit the Vulkan model too cleanly
This is a misconception that stems from Metal's preference for tile-based deferred rendering pipelines. Vulkan 1.3 is fully viable on the M1 onward, which is enough to support DirectX 12 translation in Proton. The performance of Asahi's drivers are not any worse than the official Vulkan drivers that Arm provides for TBDR-optimized GPUs like the Mali line.
Games should simply not be written for a particular architecture. The rendering part of the game engine should already be abstracted away from the particular rendering API (there are other significant platforms which do not support Vulkan: PS5 and Xbox, which your game should be capable of targeting). And the math library should have fallbacks to standard C (or standard C++ etc.) and then specialized implementations for AVX, NEON, SVE, etc.
Nothing else needs to be architecture specific.
Now, sure, NEON is slower than AVX-256/512. But backending to NEON or even standard C is certainly going to be faster than running stuff over an x86-to-ARM translation layer.
Sooner or later the Steam Deck 2 will release, probably on an ARM platform (if the Steam Frame compatibility layers go well), and millions upon millions upon millions of dollars of electricity will simply be wasted running x86-to-ARM, Win32-to-Linux and Direct3D-to-Vulkan dynamic compatibility layers when, if the games were well written in the first place, they could simply be trivially recompiled.
> 32-bit library execution modes
If your application assumes pointers are 32-bits, or any particular size, or even any set of particular sizes, it's completely broken.
As for (1), if Asahi Vulkan drivers are really good, that just goes to show why Apple isn't supporting Vulkan. Metal applications seem to be faster, and Apple wants to push devs to make their apps for the faster API.
(1) is just common sense. Go ask your favorite LLM; does hardware-level TBDR optimization degrade basic Vulkan support? No, it doesn't, and we have dozens of mobile GPUs that support Vulkan to prove it. Metal is not "faster" and it's architecture does not preclude high-performance Vulkan drivers in any way. If you don't believe me, ask anyone else.
> millions upon millions upon millions of dollars of electricity will simply be wasted running x86-to-ARM, Win32-to-Linux and Direct3D-to-Vulkan dynamic compatibility layers when
x86-to-ARM doesn't have to be slow. Accelerators like Apple's AMX can leverage autovectorization during translation, which is significantly faster than NEON and potentially more efficient than x86 SIMD.
D3D-to-Vulkan and Win32-to-Linux is almost always more power-efficient for most GPUs/games. Wine is much thinner than a full-fat Windows runtime, and DXVK can translate DirectX code into batched calls with a shader cache even if the game itself doesn't support it. Do you think the Steam Deck runs games better on Windows, somehow?
Obviously an IBM 704 program will run faster on an IBM 704 emulator than on a hardware IBM 704. That's not an argument to keep writing apps for the IBM 704 and "just translate them".
> Your ideal world where programmers support and recompile games 3 decades after release does not exist in reality.
Happens in literally every other programming industry though.
The reason this cannot happen in the games industry is that game developers are not good software developers. They are much more akin to physics-numerical-methods people who can write some magic spaghetti-Fortran that runs really fast and does black magic, but no one can maintain, debug or integrate.
And sometimes, it finds what you want, but before you can select it, it decides that it has found something better, and places that in the place where you wanted to select, causing you to select the wrong thing. And then it thinks that because you selected this, it must be what you want, and starts to push it to the top…
Search is definitely frustrating.
It also has some strange behaviour when it’s not in focus, but hasn’t been closed.
I just leave every application open and command tab to them now.
The amount of misclicks daily because of crappy slow-but-should-be-fast search probably offsets by 10x the amount of time required to hit "enter" for the search to start.
But speaking of quality overall (outside of the search glitch) - I use dual 5k LG monitors with my work MacBook and can get the MacOS Display Manager process to crash if I just enable variable rate refresh and put the computer to sleep, then wake it up. Apparently a known issue for a few years, still not fixed.
It "works" exactly the same on Windows. How is that even possible?
The other issue with Mac search is that it never tells you when it’s done, so you can’t tell if it searched and failed to find something or is still searching.
Maybe they are overthinking it.
Also, search inside the Settings app has been broken for many releases now. I always wonder if anyone inside Apple is actually using macOS or iOS.
Q: For those amongst us who are UI experts, what is it called when dynamic lists populate unpredictably while a finger-tap is in-progress?
a) start query and see initial results
b) start finger-navigation, moving finger over initial results
c) start finger-tap descent
d) underlying list is updated, replacing future finger-tap destination's UI element with another
e) finger-tap meets different element than intended
...I've been seeing this search style in more and more places recently, and I hate it. Let me type my search, then hit enter, then you can go find what I asked for. Don't slow everything down by searching on every character I type.
- Do "normies" perform better with this behavior?
- Or is the goal to disturb the user and make something impractical like in Google, so that people click on ads? Software has turned into a curse. The machines have risen.
Some people don’t like that. I don’t know why you like having to wait but if they showed Chess for CHE you could still find other apps if you kept typing.
Maybe there are also people who like the lottery of results changing the instant you click on the app you want because it adds excitement to their lives.