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iOS 26.3 and macOS 26.3 Fix Dozens of Vulnerabilities, Including Zero-Day

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Re: iOS 26.3 and macOS 26.3 Fix Dozens of Vulnerabilities, Including Zero-Day

#31

Post by derefr »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #18
derefr wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I also balk at how much extra computing power is needed to generate effects I find no value in and would prefer to disable. I mean, "computing power" in a literal sense maybe, but does that matter if it doesn't translate to either "workload contention" or "electrical power"? I think the Liquid Glass effects, similar to smooth scrolling, are mostly just running as pixel shaders on a spare tile of one of the SoC's GP…

Workload contention. My iPhone 17 visibly struggles to render components with evident lagging - this is user-noticeable, if it were all done by an otherwise spare core I wouldn’t notice these things.

AFAICT, the steady-state Liquid Glass effects (think: the address bar in Safari, staying static itself while you scroll the page under it) cost nothing. That's what I meant above.

Animating the Liquid Glass widgets (i.e. changing their position or shape), on the other hand, does seem to cost a lot / produce lag.

I get the impression that this is down to the UI toolkit not being optimized for whatever Liquid Glass is doing in terms of recalculating constraints during animations. (When the GPU overruns its time budget while computing shaders for the compositor, the visual effect is of [double-buffered] texture buffers dropping/repeating frames, not slowdown. Actual "lag" in a GPU-composited UI is either from CPU work, or from one-shot CUDA-type GPU "prerender jobs".)

I get the sense that Apple rushed out some shitty code that has some of these components re-evaluating a bunch of their placement and sizing constraints on every non-static animation frame (rather than just giving the Liquid Glass shaders the ability to do declarative tweens.)

Or maybe the shaders already do declarative tweens, but Apple are doing tons of redundant on-CPU per-frame recalculations, to re-do any constraint-based layout for everything around the component during the animation, that might be impacted by the component's current tweened state. I dunno.

Either way, it's definitely silly, and could be re-engineered to work a lot better.

But it's also not really "Liquid Glass's fault" (i.e. something inherent to the visual design); it's just (AFAICT) bad implementation engineering, rushed to give Apple something to talk about besides its failure to launch Apple Intelligence.

Re: iOS 26.3 and macOS 26.3 Fix Dozens of Vulnerabilities, Including Zero-Day

#32

Post by layer8 »

pikhq wrote: post #4

I hope they release a version of these fixes on iOS 18 in a form installable on an iPhone 14; I've been trying to stay away from Liquid Glass until it's actually usable. I really don't want to be forced to upgrade, since Apple seems to have replaced UX testing with "just ship it," as has become standard in the industry.

They won't, it already didn't happen for 18.7.4 and 18.7.3 (only via beta channel for the latter), and the present fixes are being released as 18.7.5 for the iPhone XS/XR. Still I think that staying on iOS 18 is the lesser evil.

Re: iOS 26.3 and macOS 26.3 Fix Dozens of Vulnerabilities, Including Zero-Day

#33

Post by zer0zzz »

procaryote wrote: post #25
dylan604 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They reacted pretty quickly to the butterfly keyboard fiasco. By the time users received the shipping products of the first gen, the second gen were already in the pipeline so there was a slightly modified with only a dust cover being added. There was no third gen. Hopefully iOS 26.x releases will continue to correct Liquid Glass, but I'm guessing iOS 27 is well down the path with it still integrated. Maybe iOS 28 wi…

Second gen butterfly keyboard broke a lot too. And then there was the no-esc touch bar, and the removal of inverted-T arrow keys... It took a few years of no good mac laptops before they backpedalled enough to get back to where they started

I’m pretty sure butterfly keyboard was made worse when it came to the hotter rubbing higher power Mac’s. I rarely saw folks with the original 12” low power model having issues.

It was not an entirely bad concept for the device it was conceived for, but Apple has a habit of unifying their technologies to all their products and sometimes, like with Liquid Glass, that seriously doesn’t work.

Re: iOS 26.3 and macOS 26.3 Fix Dozens of Vulnerabilities, Including Zero-Day

#34

Post by bs7280 »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #7
pikhq wrote: post #4

I hope they release a version of these fixes on iOS 18 in a form installable on an iPhone 14; I've been trying to stay away from Liquid Glass until it's actually usable. I really don't want to be forced to upgrade, since Apple seems to have replaced UX testing with "just ship it," as has become standard in the industry.

Liquid Glass looks pretty from a distance, but my biggest gripe with the design language is just how difficult so many things become to read or interact with. Given that the whole raison d'être of liquid glass is transparent effects, the options to limit that or otherwise increase contrast simply do not go far enough. I also balk at how much extra computing power is needed to generate effects I find no value in and w…

My biggest frustrations with it aren't even related to the look of things, its the all around disregard for user experience. The new screenshot UX on iOS is an insanely bad downgrade.

Re: iOS 26.3 and macOS 26.3 Fix Dozens of Vulnerabilities, Including Zero-Day

#35

Post by [deleted] »

ErneX wrote: post #9
ProfessorLayton wrote: post #3

While I'm really glad they've fixed a bunch of important security vulnerabilities, I'm really hoping they fixed the screen flickering issue [1] they introduced in macos 26. It has been driving me insane and even impacts my Studio Display. My work computer is locked to 15.7.3 and has no such issues with either the internal or external display (The same display flickers in 26). Really wish Apple would get their softwar…

A similar issue happens with Apple Silicon macs and external monitors since long time ago. A fix I found online [1] is to disable GPU dithering using the Better Display app. The flickering was so bad in my case that the pixels got stuck for some minutes when it happened. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/s/TDOa9Lb5rP

[deleted]

Re: iOS 26.3 and macOS 26.3 Fix Dozens of Vulnerabilities, Including Zero-Day

#36

Post by copperx »

ProfessorLayton wrote: post #3

While I'm really glad they've fixed a bunch of important security vulnerabilities, I'm really hoping they fixed the screen flickering issue [1] they introduced in macos 26. It has been driving me insane and even impacts my Studio Display. My work computer is locked to 15.7.3 and has no such issues with either the internal or external display (The same display flickers in 26). Really wish Apple would get their softwar…

Is this related to the 'Screen Mirroring' problem?

When I connect my laptop to a projector, I can select an individual window, or at least I used to be able to select a window and just project that. However, now when I try to select the window, as soon as the mouse cursor gets near the selection button, the button disappears!!! It has been driving me absolutely insane.

Re: iOS 26.3 and macOS 26.3 Fix Dozens of Vulnerabilities, Including Zero-Day

#37

Post by copperx »

NetOpWibby wrote: post #13

macOS was so buggy for me a few days ago that I updated my computer to the public beta. Boom, problem solved. So bizarre.

Do you feel an improvement in speed? My 32GB RAM M5 MBP is slow as molasses in Tahoe. My M1 MBA feels much faster (I haven't updated yet).

Re: iOS 26.3 and macOS 26.3 Fix Dozens of Vulnerabilities, Including Zero-Day

#38

Post by Cider9986 »

pikhq wrote: post #4

I hope they release a version of these fixes on iOS 18 in a form installable on an iPhone 14; I've been trying to stay away from Liquid Glass until it's actually usable. I really don't want to be forced to upgrade, since Apple seems to have replaced UX testing with "just ship it," as has become standard in the industry.

I recommend installing liquid glass on iOS. It actually has been looking good on there since 26.2. Macs have been godawful with liquid glass.

Re: iOS 26.3 and macOS 26.3 Fix Dozens of Vulnerabilities, Including Zero-Day

#39

Post by Aloisius »

ProfessorLayton wrote: post #3

While I'm really glad they've fixed a bunch of important security vulnerabilities, I'm really hoping they fixed the screen flickering issue [1] they introduced in macos 26. It has been driving me insane and even impacts my Studio Display. My work computer is locked to 15.7.3 and has no such issues with either the internal or external display (The same display flickers in 26). Really wish Apple would get their softwar…

I see flickering like crazy when I adjust the screen brightness on my M5 Macbook Pro on Tahoe.

But it's especially obvious when it dims itself based on ambient room brightness, I can actually see the vertical refresh happening as I move from a fully bright room to a dim one.

Re: iOS 26.3 and macOS 26.3 Fix Dozens of Vulnerabilities, Including Zero-Day

#40

Post by sillywalk »

pikhq wrote: post #4

I hope they release a version of these fixes on iOS 18 in a form installable on an iPhone 14; I've been trying to stay away from Liquid Glass until it's actually usable. I really don't want to be forced to upgrade, since Apple seems to have replaced UX testing with "just ship it," as has become standard in the industry.

Doesn't look like it. It looks like it's only iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, iPhone XR

https://support.apple.com/en-us/126347

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