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Apps like Dictionary and Keychain have tabs below the top bar, in a separate row, using a smaller font : 

In my mind, “Apple” as a brand used to be synonymous with “attention to detail” but sadly, over the course of the last 8 – 10 years, their choices have become anything but detail oriented. 

I’d rather write less and show you more. So let’s go through a couple of examples that made me feel heartbroken and eventually made me stop using some Apple products.

I thought perhaps if I update Mac OS X this would go away, but I was wrong. Not only that popup’s here to stay, this time I was interrupted with the most ironic notification:

The talented folks in Cupertino can’t seem to decide where to put the search bar in their apps. So if you’re trying to search for something, you first have to search for the search bar itself.

Apps like Dictionary and Keychain have tabs below the top bar, in a separate row, using a smaller font :  

Apps like Calendar, Activity Monitor and TV show tabs in the header or title bar, each with a different tab design.

By now you must be rightfully thinking “but John these are all old screenshots, updates to Mac OS X and iOS must have addressed these issues… right?”, dear reader allow me to introduce you to the UI/UX hell that is Mac OS 26 and iOS 26 that not only did not fix these issues, but introduced much worse design choices.

I dare say, wouldn’t it be rather logical to expect that an app called ‘Finder’—whose entire existence hinges upon the concept of finding things—might offer a search bar that doesn’t require a bloody archaeology degree to unearth? Apparently not.

Here’s the iOS 26 Files app in dark mode, and light mode side by side. Notice anything missing? Like the folder name or the barely visible down arrow? It’s almost as if they haven’t tested iOS 26 in dark mode at all.

Immediately after updating to iOS 26, I took screen captures of all the broken things, and wanted to share them with a bunch of friends to warn them not to update. I pressed share, and this is what the app icons in the share sheet looked like :  

Already off to a great start, I thought perhaps enabling / disabling the “reduced transparency” accessibility mode would solve things — just in case if liquid glass itself is the issue. 

Feeling frustrated beyond measure, I enabled “reduced transparency” mode, which fixed the icons but broke other things even further. See the black bar at the bottom behind the search bubble? 

Not a huge deal when you have a massive search bar at the bottom of the screen, but it’s still fugly. I thought I’d add this to my running list in the reminders app as well. So then I fired up reminders …

Immediately upon starting the app I noticed a very large black bar at the bottom of the screen that just wouldn’t go away no matter what I did.

Alright perhaps reduced transparency broke some things… Let’s turn it off, put the phone down, and switch to the iPad. That’s gotta be better right? 

So I grabbed my iPad, and hovered my mouse over a bunch of folders. You know, it’s literally the first thing you do. Immediately noticed that the liquid glass effect wouldn’t go away after a while, and I was left with shiny liquid glass folders. 

I thought to myself: “perhaps I’m holding it wrong, let me fire up a browser and see if others have similar problems”. 

Let’s start with a simple task shall we? Let’s fire up Google using my favorite browser Vivaldi, and type literally anything into the search bar:

The autofill bar jumps with every keystroke. And if you’re thinking “John but that’s just Vivaldi” — it’s not. (BTW the talented folks at Vivaldi fixed this and many other WebKit related bugs right away and it’s my absolute favorite browser, you should give it a try) There’s a broader issue with how Apple’s webkit wants to deal with viewports in iOS 26. Let’s take a look at other browsers, say for example, Apple’s own steaming hot mess of a browser, Safari.

0:00 — 0:01Why are all the bottom bar buttons flashing like they’re sending out an SOS? (I’m guessing they’re supposed to behave like the address bar but for whatever reason they don’t?)

0:02 — 0:04Content scrolls behind the buttons and the address bar, so the bottom part of the browser is a complete mess

0:00 — 0:07The darker backdrop of Google’s consent popup is cut off above the address bar.This is because the viewport is royally fucked up in iOS 26, causing all sorts of other issues.

Remember how I mentioned the viewport is fucked up? It expands below the bottom UI on scroll, and makes fixed elements below inaccessible.

By now you must be thinking, “John, stop it—you’re not that good at aligning things yourself either.” Yep, but I’m also not a $3 trillion company trying to sell essentially the same $1000 phone year after year, this time with a horrible design update. So yeah, I suck at consistently aligning things myself, but I also don’t need to align things as well as they do.

First off Signal is awesome, it’s cross platform, it’s free, and you should use it with all your friends! I personally don’t use iMessages, but some people do for whatever reason. Many of my friends in the U.S. seem to have some sort of unhealthy obsession with the color of their chat bubbles. Is it green or is it blue?

Can’t afford a shitty $1000 iPhone? Too bad, your messages will be green, and your friends will shame you into social isolation until you buy yourself an iPhone because green bubbles are carcinogenic.

Don’t get me wrong, I do like trillion dollar tech companies to be transparent, but this right here is certainly not what I meant when I said : “Apple needs to be more transparent”. I would love to —at the very least— be able to see the icons of the apps. Sometimes they show up, sometimes they don’t. Even the pigeons outside my window are more reliable than the app icons in the library.

Apple’s design language now accurately reflects their anti-competitive shittiness. Liquid glass is like a black widow’s red hourglass. Nature’s way of screaming ‘stay the fuck away,’ but for Apple products.

Liquid glass and iOS 26 are so badly broken that I can’t even possibly list all the issues I have with it. So this blog post is by no means meant to be an inclusive list, and there are at least 100 other problems.

Apps like Dictionary and Keychain have tabs below the top bar, in a separate row, using a smaller font :  

Would you like to take a break from notifications? Click this ironic notification popup. 

In Finder and Notes, the search box is at the top right :

In Maps, Stocks, and Reminders the search box is at the top left : 

For some reason, Mac OS X doesn’t have a standard and consistent design for tabs. 

Take a look at the Search Bar (if one can still call it that) in Finder

So I fired up Settings to disable transparency, and none of the icons showed up there at first.

Let’s count all the issues in this single 20 second long video shall we? 

0:00 — 0:01Buttons are white, address bar is black!

0:02 — 0:04See buttons strangely flashing in the bottom? They’re screaming for help.

0:02 — 0:04Content scrolls behind the clock, so the top part of the browser is a complete mess

So many nauseating flashy elements for no real reason.

“Texts are green and imessages are blue, Apple loves to manipulate you!”

Executives at Apple LOVE this game of social pressure.