Slow Liquid

https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/slow-liquid/

by thomasjb • 10 months ago

71 75 10 months ago

righthand• 10 months ago

Not surprising, Apple is going to make you say “I love glass” whether it works or not or if there’s pushback or not or if it makes your device worse or not.

Time to switch to a Linux phone where the UI doesn’t need to constantly be redeveloped for lifestyle + product manager promotions.

NetMageSCW• 10 months ago

Linux would be the poster child of fractious UI fights and different ways of doing things and changing things just because.

bigyabai• 10 months ago

Yup. Imagine my surprise as a Linux user, seeing paying customers subjected to this level of quality control...

adastra229• 10 months ago

That’s what Android is, right? The Linux phone? Where there is an ongoing battle between Samsung and Google interfaces?

waynecochran• 10 months ago

Remember when Snow Leopard came out? No new user features. It just ran faster. Greatest OS release in history. Why can't Apple just do that again with one of their OS's?

ziofill• 10 months ago

Oh man, that would be well received for sure. A release just about performance and bug fixes. Pure gold.

accrual2• 10 months ago

I would love a year of bugfix-only releases from Apple.

gjsman-1000• 10 months ago

This is generally seen as mythologizing, as Snow Leopard had mountains of bugs at launch.

Everybody just fell in love with 10.6.8.

glhaynes• 10 months ago

It would erase your home folder! https://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyle/snow-leopard-bug-d...

It's no surprise that it had lots of bugs because it rewrote lots of components. But the power of storytelling (and remembering via most-upvoted Reddit comment) has turned it into the perfect release.

adastra229• 10 months ago

You seem to be saying something entirely different and not contradictory?

concinds• 10 months ago

I don't understand this narrative anymore. The yearly macOS changes are objectively minimal. It's a mature platform. This year, a new design and a few power user features (Spotlight, Shortcuts, tidbits like Call Screening/Hold) and framework overhauls (Metal 4), that's it. Heck, new design excepted, I doubt Snow Leopard added fewer features than Tahoe.

Snow Leopard was mainly framework overhauls, but they're still doing those, year after year, only piecewise. People praise Snow Leopard as a golden release, but early on it was very buggy and, for many, slow (I still remember). It only became great after refinement. Now Tahoe seems stable enough (not counting minor UI glitches) that even Ableton/Pro Tools/SPSS/AdobeCC and other frequent troublemakers work fine on release day, an unusual feat. The "downhill" narrative seems to be nothing but baseless nostalgia.

Everybody also forgets that Apple always did yearly macOS releases except for a short gap around the iPhone and iPad introductions. That's not new either.

MattDamonSpace• 10 months ago

Given how many visual glitches persist on last year’s top-of-the-line phone, I’m guessing they’re far behind where they wanted to be and older phone performance got “appropriately” bumped

I’m willing to bet they moved LG up a year to help fill

n3storm• 10 months ago

You are welcome to Linux, 11iquid refugees.

agency• 10 months ago

on an iPhone?

maelito• 10 months ago

The blog post also talks about MacOS at the end.

Insanity4• 10 months ago

Technically that’s what Android is.

defraudbah2• 10 months ago

more like graphene os on android phones

crazygringo• 10 months ago

I will say, wait at least a day before coming to this conclusion.

Maybe the iPhone 13 Mini really will stay choppy, but even my brand-new current gen iPad got super-choppy for the first couple of hours and I was freaked out. Turns out it was just that thing where iOS reindexes everything for Spotlight on a major version upgrade, or god only knows what it's doing in the background.

robin_reala4• 10 months ago

My 13 mini still runs super slowly 4 days after updating. I’m just hoping for a quick patch update from Apple at this point, because 26 is a serious downgrade from 18 at this point.

fkyoureadthedoc2• 10 months ago

How's your battery health?

conradev2• 10 months ago

When you say “running slowly”, do you mean:

- Apps launch slower (time from app launch to interactivity)

- Apps hang more frequently (interface freezes after interaction)

- Apps drop frames (scrolling and animations stutter)

I imagine it’s some combination of the above. Apps and the operating systems that run them get bigger and slower over time.

There really isn’t a “slowness constant” to tweak short of animation speed, and I believe Apple made app launch noticeably faster, animation-wise in iOS 26. Just lots and lots of regressions to fix.

data-ottawa• 10 months ago

I’ve been on the beta for a few weeks, now on full iOS26 on iPhone mini 12.

Performance is generally good, but when there are a lot of effects in Safari’s search view it stutters.

Battery drain was higher for over a week, but now it’s mostly normal. My all day battery use is 60-75% daily (you can check this in the updated battery settings tab), low phone use days are 40-60%.

There are battery use landlines though — this morning playing around with depth effect on wallpapers used 50% of my (95% health) battery in 15 minutes. Camera is very heavy as well.

afavour• 10 months ago

Yep, this always happens.

My phone always runs slowly immediately following an OS update. I assume it's doing a bunch of work in the background, deleting temporary files or whatever. Even downloading and installing app updates I'm now eligible for. Can always tell because the thing gets warm.

Within a few hours it's back to normal. I don't like the Liquid Glass update but it's not impacted performance.

codetiger2• 10 months ago

Running iOS26 on my iPhone 11 Pro as primary phone. I felt animations and scroll are smoother than pervious version. But battery drains real quick.

codetiger2• 10 months ago

Read through the entire thread and look like am the only one happily using iPhone 11 or older

lossolo• 10 months ago

I installed iOS 26 on my iPhone 13 Pro three days ago. It’s still choppy, especially noticeable when looking at the new search window, which has laggy animations. Besides that, the most noticeable issue is just scrolling through pages of apps. On iOS 18 everything was smooth, but here I can see choppiness and lag. And no, my batter is not below 80%.

Xenoamorphous• 10 months ago

Just when I was considering upgrading to iOS 26 in an iPhone 12...

kasperset• 10 months ago

Granted I have the M4 Mac Studio, but it seems to be running just fine in my 3-4 days of use so far. Also the OS seems to be as stable as last version. I wonder if there are any issues besides the visual glitches and slowness? Also over the years I have found MacOS generally stable. I hope they will address the issues over time. On the side note, I actually miss Snow Leopard release and in general miss the "Skeuomorphism" in all the software I use.

Etheryte• 10 months ago

You do realize you're comparing a high-end desktop to a budget phone, right?

vamsiraju• 10 months ago

Toggling Reduced Transparency ON in Accessibility makes it so much better.

robin_reala4• 10 months ago

It makes it much more usable, but it doesn’t make it faster. Or at least it doesn’t bring it up to an acceptable level.

adastra229• 10 months ago

On my phone it made it very snappy, just as fast as the old 18 experience.

Far less polished and imho still a downgrade from a usability perspective, but definitely faster than with the setting off.

tarlinian• 10 months ago

Thank you for the link to Robin Sloan’s blog and temporarily answering my question about whether I should upgrade iOS. I love his books and for some reason never thought to look to see if he wrote anything else online.

thomasjb• 10 months ago

I'd encourage you to get his email newsletter as well! He puts out really interesting and thoughtful content in my experience.

yesfitz• 10 months ago

Counter example: 12 Mini runs fine. Health-wise, it's got 22 GB free, and the battery was replaced in February, 2025.

I really dig the redesign. I've been suffering through flat UIs since at least 2013, so having some volume back is very welcome. I know we probably won't go back to skeuomorphism, but that'd be great. Metaphor in design is important. It's a shortcut to understanding. As it stands, I'll gladly take Liquid Glass's volume and distortion as a indicator of interactability.

But, I am a "harbinger of failure"[1], (12 Mini, right?), so maybe this won't be long-lived either.

1: https://news.mit.edu/2015/harbinger-failure-consumers-unpopu...

qingcharles2• 10 months ago

My very old 8th Gen iPad (32GB) works just fine with 26 too.

teekert• 10 months ago

Hmm I don’t feel like my iPhone 12 mini got any slower? Wonder what op experiences specifically…

InTheArena• 10 months ago

I suspect that OP might be having his photos re-indexed. Running on old hardware, and not seeing this problem.

yohannparis• 10 months ago

Yeah I bet that's it. The first ~24 hours, my iPhone 15 Pro was burning hot and sluggish. Now it's fine.

Insanity4• 10 months ago

I am running iOS26 on my iPhone 13 Pro, and on my m1 iPad Pro. It runs fine on both, but I really regret upgrading on my iPad because the new window management options are terrible. It makes me actively dislike using my iPad now, and it used to be my daily driver.

adastra229• 10 months ago

You can turn those off, no? When I upgraded it asked me which I preferred, the old or the new style, and I kept the old. I presume it’s a setting toggle somewhere.

Insanity4• 10 months ago

No, the original slide over is gone. See https://www.reddit.com/r/ipad/comments/1nk36lz/can_we_get_ap...

accrual2• 10 months ago

Does anyone have experience with iOS 26 on an iPhone 15 Pro yet?

Bullfight2Cond• 10 months ago

smooth

fkyoureadthedoc2• 10 months ago

Smooth, no performance issues for me, been using it since first public beta. I thought the whole liquid look was pretty meh at first, but I'm used to it enough at this point that I don't even think about it.

GuinansEyebrows• 10 months ago

so far, i haven't noticed any performance issues myself. my phone usage is pretty minimal - i don't venture outside of iMessage, feeed, my insulin pump software, a couple of low-requirement games and Orion.

on the other hand, my coworker also has a 15 Pro and he complains that things are slow compared to iOS 18 for him.

adastra229• 10 months ago

I’ve an iPhone 16 Pro and it is definitely a noticeable slowdown for me, if you compare having “Reduce Transparency” on or off (which toggles most of the Liquid Glass effects).

As evidenced by the sibling comments, not everyone seems to be as sensitive to this.

TimTheTinker• 10 months ago

I'm certainly regretting updating my iPhone SE (3rd gen) to iOS 26. It doesn't feel much slower, but the battery life seems to be a lot less than it was last week.

And I had to turn off my accessibility customizations (reduce transparency, etc.) so the interface didn't look completely terrible.

dionian• 10 months ago

yet another person complaining while their phone is indexing

qingcharles2• 10 months ago

"You're holding it wrong"

adastra229• 10 months ago

If you turn on “reduce transparency” in the accessibility settings, the Liquid Glass effects are toned down, and the UI is much snappier.

Unfortunately there are a lot of visual bugs still with this setting, like clipped text boxes. And it removes your wallpaper for inexplicable reasons.

farfolomew• 10 months ago

This is Windows Vista all over again! I remember people complaining their pieces of crap computers couldn't render the fancy desktop transparent windows

_2d304• 10 months ago

Alternatively, you can add my voice to the chorus of people with older phones who at first had a choppy experience and then it became perfectly smooth. Likely due to background indexing/updates. iPhone 14 Pro.

My Mac actually seems to run faster but I may just be imagining that (M3 Max MBP)

lapcat3• 10 months ago

I'm puzzled why this very short 133 word blog post that offers nothing new — literally: "I will add my voice to the chorus" — is getting upvoted so much on HN.

I don't disagree with the blog post, but it's just not interesting, informative, or useful.

rdtsc2• 10 months ago

The blog post that broke the camel's back?

It's often a matter of timing -- just enough after the update was around, time of day, day of the week, no other major or interesting news, etc.

_2d304• 10 months ago

People love to hate on certain companies for certain things: Apple and all things design is one of those company-thing pairs.

Just take a look at the MacOS Tahoe topic (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45252378). A HUGE portion of the comments are clearly from people who both (A) don't use MacOS and/or (B) haven't used Tahoe and they are all intensely negative.

Taking Hacker News as an inverse signal on these things makes sense. For example, HN's iPhone Air hate is making me extremely bullish on its sales prospects.

lapcat3• 10 months ago

The Tahoe submission was new, relevant, and informative. It was posted on the day that Tahoe was released and includes a list of Tahoe features. It wasn't just a terse "me too" post.

I also think that your analysis is reductive. Liquid Glass has some serious usability regressions, so there are very good reasons to criticize it, not just so-called "hate". In any case, there have been plenty of good, informative posts about Liquid Glass and iOS 26 in general; this submission, however, is not one of them.

rdtsc2• 10 months ago

I haven't updated my iphone 14, and seeing posts like these makes me want to wait longer.

Does anyone enjoy or like the changes after the upgrade? Are there any worthy tradeoffs like "ok it's slower but at least I can now do $x or they fixed $y and I don't regret updating it".

tobr• 10 months ago

Just got a brand new iPhone 17 Pro. Even in the setup flow there are tons of little UI glitches going on. Layout jumping around randomly, screens resetting awkwardly, icons not laid out well in their buttons. Not so great first impressions of Liquid Glass, and with absolutely no excuses.

bowsamic• 10 months ago

This is just a short rant, more like a tweet, and should not be here

glimshe• 10 months ago

My Mac Air M1 ran a lot slower until I reduced transparency. The glass change would be fine if the UI was objectively better, but it's an usability downgrade. Things are harder to see/read.

Meanwhile, I still get prompted by the OS whether I want to allow Chrome to access my local network after it asked me that 10 times already.

nofunsir• 10 months ago

Website owner has disallowed Wayback Machine.

NaomiLehman• 10 months ago

damn almost as bad as the IDF /s

tomhow• 10 months ago

It's not clear what you were intending to achieve with this, but please don't post off-topic inflammatory comments here. HN is for curious conversation, not whatever this is. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45303687 and marked it off topic.

Slow Liquid

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