obligatory disclaimer: apple sucks shit, for a variety of reasons, but most relevant here is that it is more of a designer company than it ever will be a tech company, which is already a low bar to clear. i’m slowly working to migrate out of their ecosystem.
i am, of my peers, perhaps the most “sure, i’ll try the new update” type among them; i like to be cautiously optimistic about technology. each update is a great opportunity to advance and improve on a previous iteration; it should be a good thing to see the major version number tick up! perhaps to a detriment i am the most willing to give grace and try to adapt to a redesigned layout or a novel workflow. there are small touches that do genuinely make my experience easier; a button to skip some rigamarole, moving the search bar down to where my thumbs sit naturally when holding a phone…
however (and i largely attribute this to the crushing profit-driven gears of capitalism) more and more it seems the next new thing, whether the big innovation on the horizon or a small UI update to a tool, does not actually materially improve anyone’s life. i joke that some UI redesigns especially exist primarily to a) keep some poor UI dev in a job and b) to fuck over the users’ muscle memories. jira i am looking at you.
and i’m sure everyone is very, very familiar with the concept of “AI fatigue” at this point. this fantastical new thing, dressed up to look like magic, constantly pushed and used as justification to lay off many workers, when it’s really little more than a stochastic parrot. (not to mention its propensity to soullessly devour creatives’ pieces to spin off derivative shitstains on the collective body of human work…) i miss cleverbot, dude.
instead, we get sloppification. it’s insidious; you have to dig through ten different generated websites full of SEO buzzword spam to find any genuine information (you know the ones, with the overly long and needless What Is The Thing You’re Looking For? summaries at the top and a table of contents). youtube is suddenly flooded with a generated voice reading off a text scrawl that was also generated, with a bunch of randomly selected and tangentially related images ken burnsing their way through the b-roll. everything and everything is flooded with it. job apps. hiring posts. porn bots. people posing as artists. no wonder we get fatigued. we arrived at the promised land following these prophets of crypto and all we’ve found is a big churning pit of mediocrity.
we should also be familiar with “enshittification,” really another extension of bullshit like planned obsolescence. the internet has been centralized onto a few big corporate platforms; your ways and means are no longer yours to control. the monopoly on your attention insists that you stomach every little downwards step until you are tied forever to a subpar product. throw away the old thing! buy the new one, exactly the same but with a bigger number! like the old thing? Too Fucking Bad! Upgrade Now!!!
all this to say that we’re all very disillusioned with the next big thing that will revolutionize our experience. and rightly so. hence i lament my willingness to have faith in these developers because inevitably that optimism is spat upon and trampled. perhaps i’m biased; i think i do still believe that innovation is not only generally geared towards the improvement of human life, but also that it is still possible despite the quite frankly toxic conditions in which tech now thrives.
so, i’ve been updated to ios26 for a little over a month and a half now. the irony of the new update attempting to return to the rose-tinted past of aero-frutiger design language in tech is not lost on me; i assume “liquid glass” is an attempt at cashing in on the burgeoning nostalgia for that freer, more open early net. more often than not new things nowadays are things we had access to that were revoked and now treated as some novel benefit. see: flip phones making a return. one of these days they’re going to add a headphone jack or an optical drive to the phones and laptops again and call it retro.
the main thing i’ve really enjoyed was the call screening. all unknown numbers get sent to a “please tell me your name and reason for calling” that i can watch happen before choosing to answer or call back, and it kills a lot of robocalls in their tracks. particularly helpful because those have grown frequent lately!
that’s honestly about it though. the new look is cute but eats battery life by admittedly not a huge amount, but enough to be noticeable. i hate “apple intelligence” with a burning passion. autopredict math results is nice but i don’t text people math equations enough for it to be relevant. i don’t care about the redesigns for phone apps, and i don’t view pdfs on my phone enough for the new dedicated app to mean anything to me. the gentrification of the game center (already a useless feature on ios) into the games app also means nothing to me.
what kills me the most is that in exchange for the one or two features i like, THEY BROKE THE FUCKING KEYBOARD.
not much more to say on that than that i fucking hate it. i make enough typos as is. i do NOT need your from-on-high help to make mistakes. FUCK APPLE!!!