APPLE
Mom, All the Other Kids Installed the Betas
I’ve installed Beta 1 of macOS 26, iOS 26, and watchOS 26
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Oh, my. I’ve put the betas on everything but my iPad and our Apple TV. I so want to put iPadOS 26 on, but my iPad is what I use the most and therefore where I can least afford a screwup, so that will wait until public betas. I can’t do tvOS because my wife would be very angry if I munged that up.
I wouldn’t have had to do my phone and watch except that my Mac Mini isn’t using an Apple screen and I wanted to see what Liquid Glass really looks like. So… I had no choice.
This is what I’ve looked at so far.
Liquid Glass
To my complete surprise, I like it. Not the Clear setting, though as Dave from Mac Geek Gab said, that might be useful when doing a presentation where you don’t want apps on the screen distracting your audience. Not Tinted either because why would you want everything the same color?
Uggh.
However, I think it needs some tuning. The weather widget on my watch is sometimes hard to see in a dark room, particularly the high and low temperatures for the day. When will Apple learn not to put gray on gray?
You can’t see that in a screenshot because Apple sharpens it all up.
The Lock Screen
I like the look of this. At first, my existing lock screens were not dynamic and did not show any spatial effect — I just needed to recreate them and choose to do this. It’s hardly necessary, but nice looking. I like the ability to change the Lock Screen controls, but the camera and flashlight it still comes with is what I want.
The Lock Screen can also make notification text hard to read. You can’t see that in a screenshot either.
Photos
I don’t like the Photos app. I’ve never liked it in any version going all the way back to my first iPhone. I have no specific gripes, only that it has always been and likely always will be clumsy and cluttered.
The clutter is, of course, the photos themselves, so I doubt there is any solution beyond it somehow reading my mind so that it will only show me what I want to see without my having to search for it.
Speaking of search, I was able to successfully search in Photos for “Black & white photo of house with children”. It found one of the photos I was looking for and, in fairness, it’s pretty hard to see the children in the other one. It’s a really blurry old photo shot at some distance; in that photo, my two sisters and I might be mistaken for ornamental plants.
That search wouldn’t work well at all in the current app.
Phone App
I never disliked the old phone app; it did its job. This new look is fine and I assume it will do the same things. I did turn on the call screening feature, but haven’t yet had a call that could test it. When I’m able to have it on my iPad, I’ll like that.
Files
Some seem very excited by the more Mac-like features now in the Files app. I dunno; I might use emojis on a few folders. The rest of it? Shrug.
Workout Buddy
As I expected, it’s obnoxious. It applauded me for a two minute walk! I turned it off instantly.
MacOS Spotlight
I was a big fan of the Unix command line. Apple wiped out having to memorize commands and their behavior-changing switches with their first Macintosh. Now we suddenly have mnemonics (Quick Keys, Apple says) in Spotlight to memorize or create ourselves. I had to laugh, really. The command line returns!
Except — no. Anything you type gets matched against apps, files, web results, Shortcuts, actions, and system commands. This is simply an expansion of what Spotlight used to match. You can narrow the search if you like.
Clipboard Manager
It’s great that Spotlight gets a clipboard manager, albeit a clumsy one: you have to have Spotlight up on your screen first, then hit CMD-4 to get a list of things you have copied. Also it only stores clips for 8 hours; there are plenty of really nice Mac clipboard tools that are much easier to use and can store more.
Why CMD-4? Because 1–3 do different things (or use the right arrow to cycle through these choices):
What I don’t like about this is why isn’t it on iPad too? That clipboard manager and the rest of Spotlight are tilting me toward the Mac again. There are iPad apps for keeping copied text, but they are all clumsy to use.
Decision: Mac with no touch screen or iPad with no clipboard manager?
It’s a tough call. Maybe I should install the iPadOS 26 Beta? The new windowing might make up for the lack of a clipboard stack.
Dammit!
