Apple to focus on 'quality and underlying performance' with iOS 27 next year

“Snow Leopard”, the original OSX release that focused under the hood, returns. I’m glad to hear it.

Good.

Mac OS has become a richly productive bug farm, lately.

I wonder if they'll ever get around to actually reading their bug reports, though...

I hope they invest some time in macOS, gosh it's become a right mess over the last 3-5 major releases - Tahoe is the worst of the bunch.

1) The "0 New Features" Mac OS X 10.6.0 came 22 months after 10.5.0, not 12 months

2) 10.6.0 included significant under-the-hood improvements but also brought some truly nasty new bugs and was significantly buggier than 10.5.8, released a few weeks prior

3) 10.6 received 23 months of subsequent minor bug fix updates, up to 10.6.8 v1.1

We'd need two Snow Leopards in a row just to match Snow Leopard purely in development time, but now there's a lot more preexisting technical debt built up after well over a decade of annual major releases.

Fix that freaking keyboard FFS. Seriously. How is it that almost 20 years later it's still one of the worst parts of the iOS experience.

Also, ditch liquid glass on MacOS. That sh t is so Windows 7. It wasn't cool then and it isn't cool now. What the hell are you guys doing? Copying Microsoft now?

They need to fix Mac OS first. It’s one of the worst OS I have ever used - apps keep crashing, random UI/UX glitches and bad decisions overall.

I’ll probably ditch Mac if this degradation continues.

Would like to switch to Linux but hardware/laptop options are horrible compared to MacBook M series machines.

> Apple won’t quite launch ‘zero new features’ like they claimed with OS X Snow Leopard back in 2009, however. According to Gurman, Apple still plans to release a number of new AI features with iOS 27, so the company doesn’t continue to fall behind in the AI race.

Goddamit.

The number one priority must surely be fixing the keyboard, besides the horrible UX?

Millions are having problems for years so it's not just me, honestly thought i was "getting old" but no incredible amount of threads and now this on YT with 1 mil views:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hksVvXONrIo

I don’t usually complain about UX issues because I’m not bothered by small things. I can’t recall having a problem with ios before ios26, when the screenshot tool stopped showing the screenshot after you took one. Instead it would automatically save it to the gallery, which is not what I wanted.

The workaround for this bug was to lock and unlock the screen. Not the worst thing, but it indicated a shocking lack of give-a-fuck in Cupertino. This is one of the most basic flows, which they shipped in a broken state.

Maybe it's just me, but if I was leading development of iOS, then a "Quality and Underlying Performance" focus would be the bedrock of anything that was modified or added to iOS.

How is it not? :-/

Why wait? Fix things now.

I brought a Pro Max last year, after owning a perfectly fine 13 mini for years, and just my luck the latest iOS seems to make everything worse.

Face detection. Navigating photos. Unresponsive Apps. Confusing as f*ck UI.

No idea why I spent so much money on a Pro phone, should of stuck with the 13 mini and refused to upgrade the OS.

Holy shit so I will have to put up with iOS 26’s abysmal performance for almost a year? Nooo… this thing visibly and painfully struggles to keep up even on a brand-new iPhone 17. I was hoping for iOS 26 point releases fixing most of the garbage… sigh

Start by kicking out Cook, MASSIVELY toning down Liquid Glass, fixing the Mac to look more Mac like, and stop shoving ads in my face.

my 83 year old mother was able to use (almost) all the features of iOS when she first got an iPhone, in 2012. It genuinely changed her life and meant she could participate in a world I dont think she ever expected to be comfortable in. She tried and failed to use a PC for years. Local library lessons, family time (and patience) etc, but she always needed support. the iPhone as different, it was simple to use with familiar user interactions with every app. Roll forwards to 2025, gradually bit by unnecessary bit bells, whistles and complexity has bled in from every angle. Last week I did a FaceTime call with her to help her log in to an app on her phone. She can do it fine on her iPad that hasn't been updated. this was like going back to her PC days - too complicated and giving her features she didn't ask for, or need.

what was it Steve Jobs said?

"If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or a better computer — so what? When you have a monopoly market share, the company is not any more successful. So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people. And they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision-making forums. And the companies forget what it means to make great products. Sort of the product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies who have no conception of a good product versus a bad product."

This is amazing. Once a company that built its reputation on quality and performance wants to focus on that. iOS became a parody of itself. 26 feels like a cheap knockoff of an iOS. Hundreds of people get paid to enshitify experience for millions of users. That’s incredible. And then they simply say that yeah you know it’s time to work on quality and performance. Isn’t it what always had to be there in the first place? Ridiculous.

Apple hardware is great, but the software has become complete garbage.

On my Apple Watch I have regularly occurring hiccups where the whole UI freezes, especially when I go into training mode to pick an exercise. On my iPhone, after the liquid glass update, I get a noticeable slowdown and stuttering FPS when moving from the widgets screen to the first page and in other parts of UI. I'm afraid to upgrade my MacBook to the new OS, so I don't.

Why do they even need to release a major version every year? Whats the point?

For the hardware, i get it, but the OS doesnt really drive sales, and if you have the pressure of releasing new amazing features every year then maintenance and bugs get left behind, and you end up in the situation that we have now…

How did it get to this point? Don’t the old folks at Apple use iPhones?

I'm an outsider to the big tech companies so I don't know how it looks on the inside, but I have thoughts and maybe it will spur some discussion.

I've heard it said that there is manager culture, push to ship new features to pad resumes, etc. So you have these teams building new projects/products and some of it is a miss. There's an escalation path from outside and inside that allows for radars to be filed for major issues. I remember tracking one when I got the original iPhone SE they had a bug in the bluetooth stack that made handsfree calls sound all full of static for the first release or two after launch. We all know bluetooth is a pain and they handled fixing this well. I assume logically with most projects you expect to field lots of bugs early on at launch and then you take resources off once it's been live for a bit and the problem reports slow down. Then it's just debt or not important and how does it ever get handled?

With Apple, there are little ongoing bugs I would like to file, I have submitted on-device feedbacks before but it feels like sending into a black hole. Here is a simple bug, very easy to describe: Accessibility > Audio & Visual > Flash for Alerts (enable it). It flashes the camera light when you get a notification so you can visually see alerts while the phone is silent and not in a pocket. This works on its own, but if you are using the camera light as flashlight and people begin to message you, it will flash and turn the flashlight off. It should remember the state of the flashlight before it flashes but it doesn't and turns it off each time. This is not a new regression.

I guess I write this comment because we have these large companies lots of resources, some unique divisions like Google's Project Zero; but are there any non-project tied teams inside these companies that deal specifically with 'tech debt' and company internal interoperability issues and can pad resumes with that? We knew US gov had 18F, thinking of a division that fixes issues between the teams that might not usually talk.

The most dysfunctional large company at this time seems to be Microsoft and I could write a whole series on how the most basic things are broken (stuff like Share icon for photos only trying to share using Windows Mail and not Outlook). Or the fact that IMAP was broken on the Android Outlook client from August until the past week (it's almost fixed can delete mail again, just can't move it automatically to trash, has to be permanently deleted). And you just feel the different divisions across platforms don't talk to each other and the consumer slop is separate from the paying business stuff and that's split between the Outlook and chromium Outlook, and that's all a totally different thing than the Sharepoint/Teams stuff. But also the mandate of god says Copilot must be everywhere and if you are using classic outlook on monthly channel you must accept your lord and savior Copilot into your Outlook life and there's not a current way to turn it off (officially).

With Apple and quality: They do appear to still be doing 'the good stuff under the hood' most don't pay attention to. I look at their Air, people confused as to who it's made for, fashion item or whatever I heard in another thread. But I am laser focused on connectivity/modem stuff, before I had the RCS issue the last time I walked into an Apple store was to look at the 16e, not to buy it (I have a 15 pro) but because I'm happy to see another modem vendor on the market that might know what they are doing. The Air is an evolution of this, it will eventually go into flagships when it's ready. This is the good stuff under the hood, besides the increased margin for Apple at not having to pay Qualcomm... there is room for improvement. I guess sub-6 performance is looking much better. I know something that was noticed awhile back is Mediatek seems to have much better latency than Qualcomm modems, but they don't really have flagship modems in handsets in the US market, just in AP stuff like the T-Mobile Home Internet (where I've had units with both Qualcomm and Mediatek and can say the latter wins). Would really want to know how Apple compares to it.

I sure hope that is true.

side note, but have you guys tried using the AI feature in Xcode? its the biggest piece of trash i have ever used in my life. its unreal.