So many of the rough edges disappear when "Reduce Transparency" is enabled I've theorized that setting must be pretty popular around Apple's offices.

My browser has a half-inch white bar at the bottom constantly, presumably because of this setting.

Cannot reproduce on 26.2 with either Safari or Chrome with the setting on. That would infuriate me.

When first scrolling, the bottom page controls disappear. But they leave their container blocking the page content.

Using that option suddenly nerfed all my themes in Edge, forcing the window title bars to all be gray instead of the bold colors I use to differentiate the different profiles I use for work. I wish there was a “Reduce bullshit” toggle on MacOS and iOS, and also that it would skip all the increasingly stupid animations. No, reduce motion sucks because it just uses an equally-slow crossfade. Just STFU and let me move to the next task and stop animating everything. Good for you, you have a good GPU, I don’t care.

iPadOS 26 is an even bigger F-up than macOS 26, though

It's hugely embarrassing how they've had to perform a screeching U-turn in bringing back Slide Over and dock-launchable Split View with the .1 and .2 updates - lest graphic artists and others who depended upon these features left their platform in droves. This is essentially an admission that iPadOS 26's touch-based UX had precisely zero thought put into it. They do not have a clue what they're doing

There are still many, many more nonsensical UX degradations and bugs that need ironing out

For years I was begging to get better multitasking and more powerful apps, especially after they introduced the magic keyboard. They can take it all back now. I'd rather they stick with 0 multitasking, if this is the best they can do.

It would not matter if they dogfooded it, the decision makers higher up in the chain are getting paid more to make a visible change and/or increase revenue, not to make a better user experience.

I think this goes both ways.

Famously, Jobs' demands pushed engineers to think and work harder to achieve what they think was impossible, which resulted in many of the most iconic designs of personal electronic devices in history.

On the other hand, we have butterfly keyboard and this.

Jobs did not run on a fixed annual schedule like Tim Cook does.

Mac OS X 10.3, 10.4, 10.5, 10.6, and 10.7 all took over 12 months to develop, sometimes much more, and 10.5 was famously delayed out to 30 months.

Jobs may have pushed engineers, but he was more careful about what he pushed out the door to consumers.

Doesn't sound very agile..............

agile is no silver bullet...

Ironically that would be a new kind of dogfooding.