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Five New iPhone Features Rumored for iOS 27
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Yeah, this talk is great, I hadn’t listened to it before so thank you for sharing.
You know what? Despite being an avid Apple user, mostly because it’s ease of use, how pretty does it look, and how private and secure they claim it to be, many of the statements of Stallman resonate with me. We deserve freedom.
And on the Apple operating systems that allow it, such as macOS, I try to choose and run open software, supported by a community.
However, I reached a point of the talk, near the first third of the talk, where he says we have to, quite often, make a choice between freedom and convenience. And that’s when I recall the whole year I spent using Linux alone, as my main desktop operating system, 15 years ago.
It was a little nightmare to just make the Internet connection run… it was a harsh experience as some of the time, I spent it fixing things via the command terminal. And that was enough for me, and after a whole year with Ubuntu, I switched to OSX, namely Snow Leopard, in the year 2010. And never looked back.
Well, actually, I’m starting to look back to be honest. I’m not sure if GNU/Linux is still a compromise between usability, convenience, and freedom and privacy… maybe that has changed in the last 15 years!
But yeah, more and more, I feel like we need to keep that freedom alive, and make it “usable” for the human beings, including those that don’t code or know how to use a terminal. Because we’re most certainly being surveyed by this big corporations, but it’s getting even worse with all the AI thing getting access to more and more private data.
I’m talking about Windows 11, yes, and how they are enforcing us to update to newer versions that have more and more intrusive integration with the cloud and copilot. Where they blatantly admit to take screenshots of our computers and send it to their servers.
Honestly I know Apple is not completely private either, but at least it seems more worried about it. And it seems the route they want to take in the AI field is of local models whenever it is possible, or an optional call to a “private” cloud. Let’s cross our fingers for them to continue to work towards local LLM tools, even if that means getting an M4 computer or newer…
But the main point I wanted to make, before I resume the video, is that I agree with Stallman in the needs. We need an alternative to iOS / Android. We need an alternative to macOS / Windows. And that alternative is probably the GNU project, but sadly, it needs to be also convenient (that’s what Stallman doesn’t seem to understand), stable, with no need of previous knowledge, intuitive… otherwise it won’t ever be accessible to most human beings, while iOS and Android are. Heck, I think there isn’t even a convenient smartphone running free software! And even if it did, many people will require you to install proprietary apps such as WhatsApp to be able to communicate with them and have a social life.
It’s… complicated, especially if we have to give up on convenience and ease of use. That’s why I’ll probably keep running iOS/iPadOS on my mobile devices, using as little apps as possible (better they come from a known trustable developer), and disabling many location, microphone and camera settings, while on desktop I’ll keep using macOS with mostly open sourced apps, and a few from the Mac App Store (just because the MAS version is sandboxed).
But mind you, I recently bought a micro-PC (smaller than the palm of my hand, a tiny cube with an N100 intel SoC), and after reading and experiencing how invasive Windows 11 has become, I’m seriously considering giving GNU/Linux another chance, to see if, 15 years later, it’s a more convenient, and less troublesome operating system to use.
They need to bring Launchpad back. Or at least the option. This entire software cycle felt like "let's punish those with vision issues."
A Snow Leopard style release will be most welcome.
Liquid glass, whisper it, isn't all bad. In fact it's pretty good. Whenever I change to the tinted look for Liquid Glass, I end up changing it back again, even if Liquid Glass obviously needs a lot of finessing and optimising.
However, macOS's implementation seems only half baked. And let's remove 90% of the menu item icons too. And could we please have a more intuitive way of making Notification Centre slide in from the right, instead of having to click the clock?
It's not like there will not be new features - there is presumably a lot of work to be done with hooking the rumoured Google Gemini Siri into app intents and throughout the system, plus the proactive Siri that was promised at WWDC.
Thankfully though, these should not result in loads of new UI and Apple can really focus on fixing what we already have - and hopefully keep on replacing the amount of older code in its platforms with Swift implementations.
Liquid glass, whisper it, isn't all bad. In fact it's pretty good. Whenever I change to the tinted look for Liquid Glass, I end up changing it back again, even if Liquid Glass obviously needs a lot of finessing and optimising.
However, macOS's implementation seems only half baked. And let's remove 90% of the menu item icons too. And could we please have a more intuitive way of making Notification Centre slide in from the right, instead of having to click the clock?
It's not like there will not be new features - there is presumably a lot of work to be done with hooking the rumoured Google Gemini Siri into app intents and throughout the system, plus the proactive Siri that was promised at WWDC.
Thankfully though, these should not result in loads of new UI and Apple can really focus on fixing what we already have - and hopefully keep on replacing the amount of older code in its platforms with Swift implementations.
Maybe the complete removal of Forstall’s fabric and leather textures from OSX in Macericks was one of the reasons why this version of OSX felt so snappy and fresh to use, even with my Core2Duo MacBook Pro.
Well, that, the introduction of memory compression, and other refinements under the hood that came with Mavericks…
I still remember reading people on the forums that wanted a more opaque Liquid Glass, and those who wanted a more transparent experience. I actually didn’t know what I preferred until I’ve been using iOS 26 for a few weeks, and I personally would make the Liquid Glass UI a tad more transparent.
And this feeling became stronger when I compared my LCD iPhone SE 3 display to an iPhone 16 from a friend. I don’t know if it’s my imagination, but I would swear that on my friend’s iPhone 16 the Liquid Glass is more transparent than on my iPhone SE. Maybe it’s a reduction to keep the efficiency on the device, something that I appreciate, as I prefer having good battery life vs a more transparent and GPU taxing interface. Similarly to how on my iPhone SE 3 the Home Screen icons’ border reflections don’t move with the movement sensor, they all look static.
Maybe that slider for the clocks transparency is a proof of concept, and we’re getting a slider for the whole system transparency in iOS 27…
Completely agree. Whenever I try the tinted option I go back to the translucent one, because I prefer the transparency. However, when I think of a possible refinement of Liquid Glass, I think of a less “thick” and more liquid Liquid Glass, if you get what I mean.
Buttons could show less distortion, especially at the borders, animations could look more fluid… it could be a subtle change in favor of a thinner, more elegant interface. But I wouldn’t change it a lot honestly.
Strawman. I for one defend Tim Cook, while also complaining that iOS 26 is buggy (and Siri sucks, I hate the UI change they did on the watch, their AI push is laughable, and don’t get me started on politics). Not every issue you have needs to be followed with the stupid “FIRE THE CEO!!!” rhetoric.
I used Tinted in the beginning because it really was bad, but changed it at 26.1. I’m perfectly happy to accept a rough year for progress. If iOS 27 is still rough, then I’ll start to get worried. Guess I have more patience than most here.
My guess, at least for macOS 27, is that being the first macOS that doesn’t support Intel machines anymore, all that legacy code will be removed from the operating system and, hopefully, they will use that opportunity to optimize the OS further for the Apple Silicon architecture.
No idea how this could be done on iOS, maybe if they ditch the A13 devices completely they can optimize iOS and iPadOS for A14 SoC and upwards. That would give them the opportunity of truly optimizing all Apple operating systems (iOS, iPadOS, macOS, visionOS, not sure about tvOS) for the architecture of A14/M1 chips upwards…
You see beautiful, I see old nostalgia. I far prefer the current aesthetic over skeumorphism. Not necessarily the current implementation - but the style.
It is intrinsically bad that one of the most valuable companies in the world - with huge amounts of resources - and an allegedly core competency in UX manages to flub the implementation of its new UI though.
I hope they can make an option to NOT USE Liquid glAss. I will stay on iOS 18 until that junk is improved.
Smarter version of Siri? First I'm hearing of this. Pretty cool they are getting this to market so quickly.
It’s not new though. People act like Apple in the past could do no wrong, and that this is some sort of “canary in the coal mine” for some bigger issue. The truth is, people have - at least for the two decades I have followed Apple - been screaming about things like this frequently, and then over time Apple has smoothed it out. I don’t see the big difference between the iOS 7 reaction and the iOS 26 reaction.
I think that if nothing falls in the water, they didn’t rock the boat hard enough.
I agree. That's one reason Liquid Glass is a great change from the flat everything we've had for years. It's the closest thing we've had to the Aqua and derivatives look of the 2000s since then.
Transparancy really means "I prioritize being able to see my wallpaper more than anything else."
What's the point of fantastic hardware if the OS draggs is down. Apple's OS team has lost the plot.