Am I just a muddled old baby boomer who remembers everything about the past whether it happened or not? Or did Apple used to issue major software updates only when they had a major software update to issue? Not, you know, annually, whether it’s needed or not.
Harumph. Kids these days . . .
Apple have trapped themselves in this one year cycle. It’s their own fault, but boy, are they suffering for it this time around. First they mess up the AI side of things (all those promises, very little actually delivered, and what they did deliver is far behind their peers), and now this.
I get that they want to ship hardware, that’s how they make money, but they tripped and fell over their own feet and have been playing catch-up on AI side of things, followed by an OS release that feels very marketing-driven, “Shiny Hardware with Shiny New OS!”.
Now to break my own metafor, I still think macOS is miles ahead of Windows in most other respects.
Indeed, as with cameras, wouldn’t it be interesting if we could get a “Manual” mode setting for MacOS someday (other than diving into Terminal)?
I think that’s just called Linux.
The 26.0.1 update fixed an issue created in 26 where Apple Pages crashed on even small documents. Usually, Pages is rock solid and snappy, even on novel-length documents loaded with comments.
So far, Pages has returned to a solid word processor. Knock wood.
I’m no fan of the rounded corners. The GUI feels a bit like a child’s toy.
This is exactly the problem as I see it. By moving to a one-year cycle, they put pressure on themselves to come up with the stuff of press releases while letting important back-end stuff slide. (Example: Apple announced TextKit 2 in 2021 as the replacement for TextKit 1, which Scrivener uses. Four years on and TextKit 2 still hasn’t received support for tables, printing, or multiple pages. TextKit is a fundamental tool for developers creating apps with editable text, but few people - other than me - are going to get excited about it in a keynote.)
I actually like quite a lot about Liquid Glass, but I’m not a fan of restarting my Mac Studio every few hours because it’s slowed to a crawl.
I don’t mind the rounded corners in general. Adding them to pages in Preview, however, is a crime that can never be forgiven:
(Is there a word for the opposite of skeuomorphism?)
Talking of Pages (the app), I note that Apple hasn’t yet got around to releasing a Pages update for macOS 26 and Liquid Glass. There’s usually an update on the day of an OS release - it’s as though Apple took Apple by surprise. 
(Let’s hope they don’t add rounded corners to the pages of Pages.)
The only thing I found is “flat design.” I couldn’t find a fancy word for it.
I did run across another fancy design term: What Is Neumorphism UI: The Future of Design Trends?
That doesn’t sound like Apple. They’re going to sell iPrinters that automatically cut off the corners.
I’m thinking too much about this. I asked my ChatGPT:
Hi! If the word “skeuomorphic” comes from the Greek word ‘skeuos’ (meaning vessel or implement) + the English word ‘morph’ (meaning to ‘perform’ or ‘achieve’) what would be a similar word derived from the Greek word for ‘flat’ + the English word 'morph.?"
And Chatty replied:
Hi Paul! Great question — and I think there’s a little twist in the etymology here.
The word skeuomorphic is from:
- Greek σκεῦος (skeuos) = vessel, tool, implement
- Greek μορφή (morphē) = shape, form
So morph here comes from μορφή, meaning form/shape, not from the English verb morph (“transform”).
Now, if we take the Greek for flat + morphē (“form”), we could coin a parallel term.
The Greek root for flat is:
- πλατύς (platys) = broad, flat
That’s where we get words like plateau, platypus (“flat-foot”), platyhelminth (“flatworm”), etc.
So a coined word would be:
Platymorphic = “flat-form”
It would follow the same construction as skeuomorphic.
If you meant “flat” in the sense of two-dimensional (as in flat design, vs skeuomorphic design), then platymorphicwould be the natural Greek-English hybrid.
Ah, the Battlestar Galactica look
@paulcoholic Yeah, the funny thing is… I had those papers and screens (some having an angular bezel, others have the corners added in the UI) in mind. Pretty iconic look. Probably closer to Apple’s motivation than the esoteric shapes in nature blah blah.
I know that the internet thinks “flat design” is the opposite but that’s because it’s the trend that Apple used to replace skeuomorphism rather than an actual opposite.
The true opposite would be abstract design. It’s pretty awkward slammed into Greek (afirimenimorphism), but that’s okay because if you really want to be the opposite you should either not turn this one into Greek or turn it into Latin instead.
Luckily, “abstract” already is Latin so you can do both.
Abstract comes from abstrahare (itself from ab + trahare) — literally “to remove from” — and used when realistic visual cues are deliberately stripped from a representative work.
So, yeah… the opposite of skeuomorphism is “abstract”.
Blink twice if Apple executives are holding you against your will.
That’s not a reasonable price to pay for an OS.
That was my first thought too - and of course I wouldn’t object so much if the pages were hexagonal like that.
Eh? Because it can’t be that I have a different opinion of the Liquid Glass design from you? (My original design for our upcoming writing app had buttons that floated over the text at the top of the window, buttons whose backgrounds blurred as the text went under them, to achieve a more full-window, immersive text appearance. But I couldn’t get it working because there was no good way to get blurring over text like that work quite as I wanted, so I had to abandon it. So yes, I like that this is now possible in Liquid Glass, even though right now Liquid Glass and macOS 26 especially are way too buggy, need refinement, and should not have been released yet. The awful slowdowns certainly are not a reasonable price to pay for an OS - I didn’t say they were.)
No, obviously not; because of the OS slowdown thing. Your pairing of “I like the look” with “but this crippling slowdown I do not care for” was funny (in a good way - don’t go all Joe Pesci on me), so I riffed on it.
(Unless you spent the last 8 years convincing Apple to try out Liquid Glass and then personally oversaw the design and implementation…) maybe give me a break for having an opinion on the aesthetic that is different from yours?
(Especially as I’m not sure my opinion on the OS aesthetic is actually that different from yours — I don’t hate the glass, it’s okay and I imagine will no pun intended become transparent once people have spent time with it. I don’t like the rounded corners in things like preview; I think they’re okay on app windows although they look weird in the corners against a rectangle screen for someone who generally likes to fill the screen with a single app edge-to-edge.) ↩︎
Naturally, developers have taken up arms:
Or rather “abstractism”?
I guess they took up the wrong arms. I need an app that disables all the unrelated bugs, but keeps Liquid Glass. 
Good question. Abstraction?
It has to be an ism. Makes it easier to be against it.
FWIW—I’m a 30-year Mac user, running macOS 26.0.1 and am having NO ISSUES using numerous apps: Scrivener, Dropbox, Lightroom Classic, Lightroom, Mail, DxO PhotoLab 9, DXO PureRAW 5, Notes, Pages, Keynote, Affinity Photo, DuckDuckGo, Safari, Chrome . . .
The transition to iPadOS 26 has ben equally uneventful.
It would be helpful for reporters of issues to be more explicit about the issues being faced, rather than making blanket statement. That way, we could be aware of similar behaviour. and perhaps avoid it until a fix is available.
