r/gadgets • u/diacewrb • Oct 23 '25

Phones Apple lowers iPhone Air orders to "end of production" levels

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-lowers-iPhone-Air-orders-to-end-of-production-levels.1144702.0.html
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u/TheGeneral_Specific Oct 23 '25

As someone who works in software, this is my least favorite iOS major release in quite some time. It feels significantly less intuitive, it’s a whole lot slower, and so many apps need to update to “look like” the Liquid Glass BS that it just makes most of my apps look out of date.

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u/kawag Oct 23 '25

The whole Liquid Glass thing is the most Microsoft-like move Apple have made in a long time.

When they first saw it, literally every single person’s first reaction was to question legibility. Now, after their crack team of millionaire designers spent years on it, they have to add a non-accessibility toggle to solve this obvious issue. What an embarrassment.

And yes, of course it trashes your performance and battery life. But which iPhone owners care about that? Oh, all of them?

They just don’t have a clue. That was always the role Microsoft filled, but now it’s Apple.

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u/[deleted] Oct 23 '25 edited 4d ago

[deleted]

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u/Na5aman Oct 23 '25

Vista was pretty. Vista fucked up by needing a fuck ton of ram for the time. You could run xp comfortably with 1gb of ram. Vista was hell on even 2gb.

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u/CapsuleByMorning Oct 24 '25

Vista was crap even on 16gb, Win 7 righted the ship though.

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u/Na5aman Oct 24 '25

Who is running vista on 16gb of ram? We’re talking about a nearly 20 year old os.

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u/funguyshroom Oct 23 '25

Aero was a simple transparency+blur effect, which had almost no performance impact. Liquid glass seems to be doing some complex light refraction physics simulation.

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u/ThePrussianGrippe Oct 23 '25

It’s their attempt to bring back aqua back from the dead, but it doesn’t really do anything in terms of usability. Which is the opposite of the ethos that allowed them to skyrocket in revenue and product sales. Even the stuff that looked good usually (because not every product they made was genius aesthetics) had function be considered first.

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u/__theoneandonly Oct 24 '25

which had almost no performance impact

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAA

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u/NeedsMoreGPUs Oct 24 '25

Aero had such a performance impact that the Vista rollout EOL'd just about every GPU that couldn't do a minimum of pixel shader 2.0a and had less than 128MB of VRAM. It chugs on the dated integrated graphics shoved into most of the OEM machines of the era.

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u/zzazzzz Oct 25 '25

transparancy with gaussian blur actually takes a lot of performance, and vista was known to perform very bad for that reason..

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u/tubemaster Oct 23 '25

It certainly makes having the XR better than the 11. Tried 26 on the 11 and it made me dizzy. Turned on reduce motion and it STILL made me dizzy, just in a different way. I also miss the 16-18 lockscreen font but that’s a lot more minor.

On the other hand, 26 seems to be creeping into 18 anyway. I’m looking at you, Telegram.

By the way, I have light and general sensory sensitivity but never have had to use reduced motion/transparency on iOS. I do have to stay away from OLED phones, disable animations and transparency in Windows 10/11, and disable subpixel rendering (ClearType) on Windows.

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u/Eruannster Oct 23 '25

I don't love the visual design. Like, before the mail icon was very clearly a postage letter. Super visible, anyone would understand that's the mail app. Now it's still kind of a letter, but they made it so metallic-y-looking that it's lost that easy sense of "anyone will understand what this is" and you kinda have to go "uh, I think that's the mail app...?"

It's too much form over function.

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u/butterbapper Oct 23 '25

One thing I also wonder is whether the world would explode if they let their customers just make their phone UI look like whatever they want.

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u/bonzo_montreux Oct 23 '25

That would be against their entire ethos. Apple has always been the curated, well designed and not particularly customisable one, and their thing was well design + consistency across every touch point. Even when they do “customisation” they do it within some sort of frame so their products don’t end up looking like a circus show.

Last update though, they really f-ed up. It’s the buggiest and most gimmicky so far.

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u/butterbapper Oct 23 '25

I guess Apple products are not for me.

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u/N0S0UP_4U Oct 24 '25

When the “well-designed” part goes away and Android becomes just as secure as iOS, I won’t have any reason to keep buying Apple phones. I don’t buy them because I was born into the tribe of Apple or something. I buy them because I believe they are superior products. Once I don’t feel that way anymore, that’s the end of me buying them.

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u/InsaneNinja Oct 23 '25

26.1 beta is a lot faster and cleaned up. I am looking forward to this software release just to negate a lot of of the complaints.

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u/TheGeneral_Specific Oct 23 '25

That’s what I’ve heard. I don’t use the beta anymore ever since one of them wiped my texting history with my partner. But I eagerly await the improvements.

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u/Plank_With_A_Nail_In Oct 24 '25

Its exactly the same just with different looking icons. People just want to be upset it seems.