Slow Liquid

This is a post from Robin Sloan’s lab blog & notebook. You can visit the blog’s homepage, or learn more about me.

After updating to iOS 26, I will add my voice to the chorus of dismay: this thing makes my phone run like shit! I recognize that mine isn’t the latest and greatest, but it’s only four years old — an iPhone 13 mini — and the pre­vious iOS ran perfectly: snappy and practical.

I hope Apple can (literally) smooth things out. I realize there’s always an under­cur­rent to these releases of “maybe you should get a new phone … ” but in this case the per­for­mance hit feels either (1) shock­ingly delinquent, or (2) hilar­i­ously malevolent, true planned obsolescence.

(I haven’t updated my laptop to macOS 26; on the desktop I have, for a few years, been com­mitted to a strategy of “don’t update until you absolutely must”.)