Just saying. Today’s 18 is the best 18 Apple has ever released. It’s the fastest 18 ever. Drains less battery than ever. It’s the lightest 18 there will ever be. So, just stay on 18 for another month or..three. Let the sad mac os’ists deal with the bugs and the tears, just for a little while.
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Public Service Announcement: People, 18 is really REALLY stable now.
- Thread starter SebCohen
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One can only hope that this post will still be valid after iOS 18.7 that's being released soon (today?).
dont wanna sound rude but ios18 thrashed my iphone 15pro in such a massive way. it was constantly overheating and lagging which is not acceptable for a device which came out in 2023. i hope it gets better with ios26.
Apologies, I know iOS 26 is released today (15 September). In the past, the updates for Apple Watch, iPad and Macs have fallen on another date. Is that still the case, or are they all going to be released today?
Seems they are syncing these up. RCs have been mostly stable FWIW.
OS - macOS Tahoe
macOS Tahoe with a new design, more ways to work seamlessly across devices, and new features to turbocharge productivity every day.
www.apple.com
OS - iPadOS 26
iPadOS 26 delivers a fresh design, an intuitive new windowing system and a more helpful Apple Intelligence, so you can flow through work and play.
www.apple.com
OS - watchOS 26
watchOS 26 brings a new design, Workout Buddy, and a wrist flick to dismiss notifications on Apple Watch so you can breeze through your day.
www.apple.com
I always say iOS is always the most stable and bug free right before a new iOS is released. Then I update and have to deal with breaking bugs for 4 months because Apple can never release a major update without major bugs that they take months to fix. In iOS 17 they broke searching messages. In iOS 18 they broke imap email and Safari iCloud tabs. I’m not looking forward to discovering what they broke this year.
I usually wait for .1/.2 before putting on my main phone. Tahoe has been great on the m2, so will likely update the m4 tonight!
Same. Except for me its iPad OS 26/Mac OS 26. Will be waiting until November.
As far as iOS, my 17 PM/Watch 11 are scheduled for Friday, so, I have no choice but to use OS 26 Day 1.
iPad OS 26 has been pretty good on my M1, except for a lockscreen bug that has been present where if FaceID doesn't pick me up, the passcode won't appear and I have to go through control centre > wifi > wifi settings to 'trigger' it. Have been running it and seeing this since the first developer beta. Been great other than that, mind.
Which is why it continues to fascinate me that the new OS always ships on the new phones. Why put your worst foot forward when trying to show off new hardware? Maybe that will change soon now that the phones are reportedly getting split into two launch periods for 2026 and beyond. Ship the new phones with last year's OS and either break the annual OS design crunch culture or at least shift it to after the holidays (i.e. back to January Macworlds when new software used to come out).
iOS 18.7 may be the best iOS 18 so far, BUT is it also better than iOS 17.7.2?
Yes. I held off on 18 for a loooong time because of photos. Now it’s less buggy and actually faster! And whole os is much faster on my M1 than 17.7.2….
I’ve been running iOS 26 RC on my iPhone 11 since it was released last week. It’s honestly smoother than iOS 18.6.2 was and the battery life seems to be improved somewhat. It just took about half a day for everything to settle down, but after that it’s been great I’m very impressed so far.
Really?! 😮
Hmm, M1 means iPad, but how is 18 on the iPhone compared to 17.7.2. I'll keep an eye on that! 👍
I’d never do it on my main devices, was having a similar discussion earlier. I barely use my iPad and we needed a device to test some things on for work so it’s okay. I wouldn’t recc if you rely on your iPad!
Thanks for that "Tahoe has been great on the m2." My M2 is a mission-critical box, so I have been reluctant to load Tahoe.
Yes, but the experience is always markedly better on original iOS versions for those devices that were released with that iOS version.
iOS 26 on the regular iPhone 17 is most likely significantly better than iOS 26 on, say, the iPhone 14.
The issue is when devices aren’t too new. That’s when the experience gets markedly worse. I’m sure the iPhone 16 is fine. The iPhone 11 probably isn’t.
For what it's worth, I have an M4 Max I use for work that has not been updated, my M2 Pro has been retired for beta testing, travel and running Asahi Linux. No way am I putting a beta, even an RC on my main laptop! RC has felt fine and I did do a full days dev work on it with little no issues. I did have to manually update xcode / xcode command line tools to get some homebrew packages working, but it was fine other than that. I'd imagine things are fine now it is 'official', but I'm going to give it until the first revision regardless.
I don’t know if I just don’t push my devices hard enough, but I never know what people are talking about with all this. I’ve been using iOS since Dev Beta 1, and even put the Tahoe Public Betas on my MacBook Pro (my main work machine), and I’ve only ever had a couple of small, inconsequential bugs.
People complain about how awful these are, but I can’t see it.
People complain about how awful these are, but I can’t see it.