iOS 26 beta 2 changes, Liquid Glass on Apple Watch, Apple feature availability

Mayo, we both branched outside of the happy hour universe this week. I had the pleasure of once again joining John Gruber on the talk show. And the episode is not live yet, but I think it should be live this afternoon. And we talked about the OpenAI, Johnny Ive, IYO, that whole lawsuit thing that's going on. total mess of that and then some more post WWDC impressions so that'll hopefully be out today I think or hopefully by tomorrow at the latest but you also made it a guest appearance

On another podcast. Yes, I was on Magic Razor Light talking about the F1 film because Sigmund and me and... Jonathan went to go and see it at IMAX. And we'll talk a bit more on this show in the plus segment at the end. But we also talked about a bit more detail in that Magic Razorlight segment, which you can find on Mac Stories.

I have not listened to it yet, but I can only imagine you and Sigmund on a podcast talking about Apple TV together. Hey, there was one we did an episode a couple of years ago. Oh, that's right. I do remember that.

And since then, I think they've been putting about zero of our feedback, but that's how it goes. Then you also have an anecdote to share about some confusion with your Apple Watch working with your iPhone or something? Yeah, so about... End of last week, my watch was like acting weirdly. So you know how like on...

If you're using your iPhone, the notification only pops up on your iPhone. It doesn't pop on your, it doesn't vibrate your wrist, right? So it kind of knows what device you're currently using. And similarly, if you like look at a message on your watch, it will mark it as read on the phone. That just kind of wasn't...

working properly and i was a bit confused and at that point none of my main devices were on the 26 beta train they were on the 18.5 betas right from from the previous cycle but i was like oh whatever you know there's some oddness and then it kept going on and then on Monday I was like what is going on with this and it turned out the um you know when you open control center and it has the little status indicators at the top it said my phone was disconnected

Oh, the dreaded red phone icon? Yeah, so since this had started happening, it hadn't been connected to my phone at all. And the only reason I hadn't really fully noticed is because the watch was talking to over Wi-Fi and I hadn't really been out much. So I was still getting messages to the watch over Wi-Fi. I was still getting like notifications and stuff. But the actual...

proper communication to the phone just hadn't been working for days and i was super confused i reset the phone i like restarted the phone restarted the watch i couldn't work out what was going on eventually i figured out that my phone was still on ios 18.5 right My watch was on 11.6. Oh, that's not supposed to happen. That's what I thought, right? So I thought the watch shouldn't update to 11.6 until the phone updates to 18.6.

And obviously I hadn't bothered updating to 18.6 because I knew I was going to install iOS 26 soon and there was nothing 18.6 that I needed to care about. But automatically my watch updated to 11.6 and therefore it got communication incompatible.

So I had the watch 11.6 and the phone was on 18.5 still. And I was like, oh, I guess this is what happened. I mean, it didn't say anywhere specifically that it was incompatible software or anything, but I just kind of deduced it eventually. Then I updated the... the phone to 18.6 and it was all fine. And everything went back to normal. But I just thought that wasn't meant to happen, right? No, I don't think so. Surely the watch and auto update beyond the phone OS.

But it works now that you updated your phone to 18.6? Yeah, so when they were both on the 0.6s, it was fine again. Yeah, that's weird. I mean, obviously it is a beta, right? So maybe they just hadn't marked it. in like the metadata correctly on the software update side to like not wait the watch until the thing was updated i don't know if real customers are experiencing this but if they are that's that's pretty bad because it was a very unclear scenario um

And it took me a lot. It took me multiple days to actually figure out what was going on. But then they were both on the .6s and it was all fine again. But yeah, that was just, I've never had that happen before. No. While we're talking about watchOS complaints.

I've been having a bug and I think other people are too. So maybe I should write about it at some point. But I use the sleep focus mode every night, right? And I usually sleep with my Apple Watch on. So phone and watch are both in sleep focus. Then the next morning, my phone automatically goes out of focus, goes out of the sleep focus at like 6.30 a.m. or whatever. And usually, or what's supposed to happen is the watch also mirrors the focus of the iPhone, right? Yeah.

out of the sleep focus into just no focus mode for a bit. Lately, the Apple Watch just gets stuck in sleep focus mode. And the primary reason that's so annoying is that when your watch is in sleep focus mode, It does that thing where like the always on display is off and it just shows you the time. Like you can't actually see anything on the watch without long pressing the digital crown. And the solution to this is some weird combination of rebooting the phone.

rebooting the watch, going into the Apple Watch app on your iPhone, disabling and re-enabling the mirror focus setting from your phone. Then you turn on a random focus mode on your phone. And that seems to kick everything into gear. What? Yeah. You can't just like manually turn the sleep mode off on the watch and then... Nope. Goes right back on. Oh. Because I've had it occasionally where...

The iPhone will be out of sleep mode and the watch will be stuck on sleep mode, but I can just then click the focus mode off on the watch and the next day it just carries on like normal. So it reapplies the focus mode? Fully stuck, yep. Okay, that is a major issue.

But I have not personally had that. Then we also got some feedback this week from Michael, and he had a question wondering why so many Apple features are not available worldwide. His specific example was the new mail app with the categories that was introduced in iOS 18. And he says that's still not available in Sweden. This is a broader topic that I think we touch on on a regular basis.

specifically when something's available in the United States but not the United Kingdom where you live, Mayo. But once you get even outside of the UK, it's like a bigger set of features. that's not available in a lot of countries. Yeah, I mean, you have the inner circle, which is the United States, which is obviously where Apple's located, and they get everything. Then you have the slightly wider circle, which typically seems to include Canada, the UK.

And maybe like China, right? Australia is usually in that group. Australia is some, yeah, I guess English-speaking countries. But, I mean, there are other English-speaking countries in the world that don't get that inner circle. But that seems to be like the inner bracket. And then you have everything else across Europe and... you know asia and everything and the pace and speed at which some of these features go to those countries is slow if it happens at all

And obviously we talk about it on this show when it affects me, but there are definitely other regions in the world where it's even more exaggerated. And the reasons for it, I think it's very complicated and it varies per feature. Some of it is... licensing restrictions some of it's like deals related where especially the content services if i think the obvious case is like apple news plus audio is us only despite

You know, I could listen to English people talk even with an American accent, but they just won't refuse to give News Plus Audio to the UK. And News Plus Audio includes Apple News today, which is the podcast thing, but it also has all those like... subscription transcripts read out by people. And I think they must have some sort of deal with the publishers that they're reading out with and they've got to get new deals to make it international. Interestingly, on iOS 26 Beta 2...

The News Plus Audio tab does appear in the News app for me in the UK, but it's completely empty. There's no content inside it. So I'm not always a bug or if they're about to launch it, but that'd be cool. But some of it's license restrictions. Then you've got other stuff, which is like regulations.

And this comes under more the umbrella of like Apple Card and Apple Cash, why they're US only and nowhere else. Financial regulations are complicated and messy and you need to make deals with local banks. So Apple hasn't done any of that and it's a US only service, whether you're talking about the...

the credit card or just the you know pay through apple pay to friends then you have the ai features which i think are predominantly trained on english first and then they're also audited english first apple is the most resources for english so that's why it comes to

there first you also have the regulation overlap right which we saw with the apple intelligence delay in europe where it didn't come at launch because of some thing to do with the digital markets act that we're still not entirely sure about but then it basically came in intact in april but still six months late

um there's also like the safety concerns of the ai staff where obviously you need to have the teams of people that check a load of requests to the to the models and see what their answers are make sure they're not telling people to like throw themselves off bridges and stuff so all of that safety stuff has to be done in every language and every locale for every language even i mean even for me apple intelligence was a us-only launch in the october and it didn't come to the uk

locale until December so all this stuff has big staggers and then some of it is just laziness might be a bit too mean but like The team that is doing these features shipped it for the US and these countries two years ago. They're now...

overwhelmed working on the features for the next year release. I don't think they necessarily always have the staff available which they're solely there to focus on getting the stuff done for other regions because the team that shipped the feature would also be the team that has to make the feature available in more markets.

You know, whether that's just getting translations done for the UI or whatever else. And they're already working on... i was 27 right and so stuff that comes out and like i just think apple's a bit strained on people on on that and they just don't have the employees to do it which is unfortunate because then you get in these situations where features that could be done and the only

limiting factor is you know headcount you don't really feel like a three trillion dollar company should have those problems but here we are um and so there's a lot of factors some of it's laziness some of it's regulation

Some of it's licensing. I think a lot of these things are a mixture of all of the above. And even in places where you feel like apple would be prioritizing they still are quite hesitant like even on tv plus they launched in 100 plus countries which is quite a big debut but then the countries that aren't in that 100 they haven't basically expanded at all they added like

Korea I think but there's other countries that I see people come up with maybe it's like Bulgaria or something and or Belarus and they just They just can't access Apple Originals in any capacity. And I see people like, I want to watch this, but I'm literally in a country that doesn't support it. So your only option is to pirate it online. There's no official channel for that. And so I think on those services, partly it's local laws and they have to get age ratings done.

But I also think partly it's like once you get to the, you know, across the hundred big country and territories. everything smaller is like so few people in the scheme of things they just have bigger fish to fry and that's unfortunate because you know that still represents millions of people around the world that just get completely locked out of these things

It is funny lately watching people in the United States kind of experience this for the first time with the DMA stuff and App Store changes in other countries where in other countries, for better or for worse, iPhone users have a broader.

set of options to install apps from other sources right like you had epic games released fortnight back in the eu before they made it available in the united states which just happened a couple weeks ago it's the first time i've ever seen Apple customers in the United States get frustrated that features are available in other countries, but not in the United States.

Blood oxygen sensor on the Apple Watch is another example. We don't have that here, but in every other country around the world, or most other countries around the world, your watch can read your blood oxygen level. It's very, it's not often that that happens.

Because again, the United States, like you said, is always number one on that rollout list. Then the other, I think this one is pretty inexplicable, but the Apple Sports app too is still only available in the UK, the US, and Canada.

And it's funny that we got this feedback the same week that Apple pushed a pretty big update to the Apple Sports app that you wrote about on the site, Mayo. Yeah, and I actually had a briefing on this and I asked them about...

availability in terms of geographies because i was wondering if this was a licensing problem with the data right where wherever they get all these live scores from maybe they're only allowed to you know whatever they paid for it only supports certain areas and regions the response obviously

The response from the Apple person is always very vague, but they kind of implied that there wasn't licensing restrictions and they were just focused on adding more sports before they worried about further expansion, whether that be languages or device types, right? Because it's also still iPhone only. And they've added a lot of sports since its debut a year and a half ago. I think it came out in February 24. But obviously there's still more to do. And this week they added tennis, which is nice.

and they've got this which I think is obviously if you like tennis it's nice that they've got that sports in they've got that listing in there and you can kind of follow along with Wimbledon which is about to start and they have these I love the sports app because it has these little details like

The background, when you click on a tennis match, will reflect the kind of court surface that it's being played on. So for Wimbledon, it'll be grass, turf. If you have like the French shape, it'll be clay in orange. And those little details, I really think, make the sports app stand out. And you get the live activities.

right so you get the the live notification updates um and in this update too they've reorganized the home screen so a complaint i've seen a few people make about the sports app before is that you could add like disparate sports so you could have baseball and basketball and football and soccer but the main home screen would put them all in date order

It wouldn't separate them by the sport. So you'd have an MLB listing directly followed by an NFL listing or whatever. Well, with this update, they've changed that. So now they are sectioned by league.

um on them on the main screens so you have your favorites at the top and then per league it lists the upcoming games for today or or upcoming and you can reorder the list which is nice so if you've got fate you've got preferred leagues or one things on at the moment you're more interested in you can

and rearrange it and move it up and down. But now it is actually sectioned appropriately by the sport. So I think that should make a lot of people happy. And I like tennis, so it's cool that I added that as well. One big feature that isn't in the sports app...

which seems like a weird omission is widgets right so they do live activities and the live activity designs could almost be transplanted as widgets on the home screen right because they're you know they're nicely made but the sports app doesn't offer them and I think I have a kind of like, you know, conspiracy theory on why this hasn't happened yet.

And it's relating to a feature that's actually coming for developers now as 26. So when the sports app launched last February, it didn't have live activities, right? It launched just as a sports app. You opened it, it refreshed, and they would update live while you're in the app, but you couldn't get notifications.

They added notifications near the end of the year when iOS 18 came out because iOS 18 added a new type of push notification service for live activities which would allow... it was like a they called it like channels so in the old system of the apple push notification service the device would have to register individually for every single device um

i'm going to be on the server so basically if you send a notification to a thousand people you have to send a thousand different payloads out right and obviously if you have millions and millions of users all getting the same notification about an updating score that's a lot of You know, it doesn't scale very well. And so what they added at the end of last year, which all developers can use, but clearly it was done with the sports app in mind, is that instead the sports app can say...

I'm the sports app, right? So there's only one identifier on the server and the server just sends one notification to sports. And then the Apple service backend actually worries about distributing it to all the devices. So rather than like the sports server having to send out...

10 million notifications for everybody subscribed to the nfl it only sends one alert to the nfl channel and then the apple service actually handles giving sending that to the actual devices so basically it's a lot more efficient um Something very similar to that is coming for widgets in iOS 26 because right now with widgets, you can only refresh widgets if the app is open or on a periodic schedule, right? So by default, widgets don't update.

very often you know a few times a day but what's happening in ios 26 is they're adding push notification triggers for widget updates so i am expecting that they're going to announce the apple sports app will add widgets when iOS 26 comes out because they're going to use this facility and obviously sports scores update all the time so you really want them to be live updating.

And this actually provides a facility to do that. So when iOS 26 comes out, I'm presuming they're going to announce an Apple Sports update that takes advantage of that capability. And you'll have widgets on the home screen that can have continuously updating sports scores.

because they basically did the same playbook last year for live activities they needed a technical improvement they rolled out the technical improvement immediately the sports app was ready for it this time around you know they haven't announced anything officially but

I see the parallels where it's like, okay, if they want to do widgets, they probably need this capability. This capability is coming to the OS. So I presume the sports team requested it and now it's being implemented. So I think we might get widgets for the sports app nearer the end of the year. I didn't know that. That's clever. And I didn't even know that the channel's live activity thing, that's something I had never considered. I just assumed it was.

Apple's laziness as to why they didn't have live activities with the Apple Sports app at first. But then there was such a correlation between them announcing this new feature and then this actually shipping. And I think someone even like inspected the code and they can even see like...

it subscribes to the sports channel rather than individual device that it identifies. So they definitely take advantage of it. But the other two things that the Apple Sports app is lacking is an iPad app and a Mac app. I'm less... upset about the lack of a Mac app now that in Mac OS 26 your Mac can mirror live activities from your iPhone in the menu bar and then you can click on those live activities and it opens iPhone mirroring right away.

But the lack of an iPad app is pretty – the iPad is like, at least for me, like the couch computer. It is what I'm using when I'm sitting on the couch. And in the evening, I have sports live activities and sports alerts and everything on my phone. But I can't see any of it on the iPad. So I really hope, in addition to which, that an update for iPad support is on the way as well. I think they're working on it, but...

their number one priority is adding more sports and expanding the data that shows for those sports. That was the impression I got from the briefing. And so... What they're announcing this week is tennis rather than iPad support. But they'll definitely be working iPad support. I mean, the journal app didn't have it at launch either, right? It took 18 years for the weather app to come to the iPad.

or the calculator calculator yeah and it was like 16 years for the weather app um the sports app is built with swift ui and it does do some pretty custom things with its presentation so i wonder if that's a bit of a like a technical block where maybe they're also waiting for swift ui framework changes to be able to do it well on the ipad

But I just think it's on the list of stuff to do. But their number one priority is expanding data. And I think at some point they need to get the sports app pre-installed. Because it's weird that it's like a free download from the app store. And I think it's a pretty good app.

it's great yeah it's still quite hard to discover if you're just a layperson because how are you going to know to go to the store and then search specifically for apple sports like sports is such a generic keyword it's not going to pop up that much and so i don't know what their plan is their long term but

I have to assume at some point they're going to make it a pre-installed app. It can still be distributed through the App Store, but do it like Pages, Keynote and Numbers where it just comes pre-installed to start with so you get some visibility for it and then people can delete it or wherever if they want to.

I mean, I think it's pretty obvious why they aren't doing that, right? It's anti-competitive regulatory stuff. Because if you pre-install the sports app on iPhone, you're instantly going to have... You're going to hear from ESPN and Sports Alerts and MLB and all the other apps that provide similar functionality on the App Store but don't have the advantage of being able to be pre-installed on everyone's iPhone. So Apple's never going to pre-install an app ever again.

I honestly think that that's probably correct. Yeah. Okay. What about the preview app? Well, the preview app is different, I think. I bet there's loads of PDF editors that are mad on the App Store at the moment. That's true. Yeah. I don't know. Yeah. I don't know either. Is there an argument to be made about an app being core to the iPhone or iPad functionality, where a PDF editor, PDF viewer, is pretty core to the iPhone or iPad functionality? Sports app, not so much. It's an ancillary thing.

Yeah, I mean, the fight over what's allowed to be preinstalled and what isn't is like a huge point of contention with the EU and everyone, right? And it's hard to know where you actually do draw the line. I'm currently hoping that it isn't a regulatory thing and it's more like they're just still working on adding more and more sports before they're ready to roll this out as a mainstream thing.

because say what you want about the sports app they've delivered a lot of updates to it i mean it came out february 24 and it's had like significant updates multiple times throughout the year i mean this is like the they added f1 right like two months ago and now they just added tennis so of all the random like

Apple apps that aren't the main ones it gets pretty frequent updates and that is because Eddie Q is a huge sports fan I'm sure I'm sure it is and maybe Eddie Q's like campaign to get it pre-installed too but the team's like look just cater for more people first and then we'll do it But it is a great app. I use it every day. It's amazing. I still cannot believe how fast the live activities update. It is when you're watching at home, like you're watching a baseball game at home on the TV.

It updates so fast that you have to turn off the live activities because it updates before your stream. That's the feature request I've seen people ask for. I've made that feature request on this podcast. It's so funny that Apple was like, we're going to introduce the fastest updating sports goal app in the world. And then now one of the leading feature requests is let's put a delay on it so it gets spoiled when you're watching live.

Oh, it's kind of sad. And like I go to these Orioles games in person and I still have the live activity on my phone. And it's literally like 10 or 15 seconds after like the Orioles score. My watch vibrates because that's how fast it updates. It is so impressive. And I would love to know where they're getting the data from because you remember that anecdote when they initially launched the sports app about how Eddie Q would go.

to a golden state warriors game and like be on the phone with whoever was working with apple on the sports app and be like it's not updating fast enough it's not updating fast enough like where how are they doing this that it's so fast it's faster than mlb than the MLB app updates. They must have to have deals with the leagues, right? It's crazy, yeah. I mean, for tennis, there's like, what, 10 courts playing Wimbledon simultaneously?

And they're going to have live points for... They're only doing singles. So I guess that is a restriction. They're doing men's and women's singles. But that's still a lot of games happening simultaneously that they're going to track and have live points for. And you can get updates straight on your lock screen for.

Yeah, it's a great app and I'm glad to see it. This new home screen is really good. It makes it so much easier to see things at a glance. You don't just see one unidentifiable list of your teams and your sports. The headers are great. Because the interface was kind of confusing when it first launched just because they made it so simple. The focus was so central to just giving you the scores and not really anything else.

But as they've evolved and made this interface easier to read, I think it's probably the best sports app you can get for the iPhone. Yeah, I mean, it's still predominantly about sports scores, but they're slowly adding more metadata around everything. including rosters and things. But they still don't show draft information for ongoing leagues and stuff. But I kind of get the impression that they're...

That's on the list too of stuff that they're going to get around to doing. And I think it's pretty telling that the app was called like Apple Sports and not called like Sports Scores. Scores are just the center from where they like, we can do this first and make sure it's really, really fast. But I think they kind of want to build a fully fledged sports things out of it because they also have all the like news coverage stuff they have in the news app, right? They have the sports tab.

I have to assume at some point they're going to kind of like merge these things together. And so you have like a one-stop shop for sports stuff. And hopefully eventually you'll be able to like watch the content directly in it too. because at the moment they've kind of like weird in between thing which is like you can open in another app and it has like a little link to it but

Even for MLS or Friday Night Baseball, I feel like they should let you just watch it directly from the sports app or something. But again, they've obviously got a long list of things to do and I think their number one priority right now is just adding more and more sports and adding more and more leagues in.

and then everything else is further down. But I get the sense they're working hard on it. Happy Hour This Week is sponsored by IDOU. Check them out at idou.com slash happyhour. Perhaps you're feeling overwhelmed by all the recent... AI hype going around you can see that it's a technology that's important but maybe you're feeling a little left behind on how to actually use AI to help your productivity

So why not try their AI and design thinking programs? They show you how to combine AI tools with human-centered design to boost creativity and to solve problems in new ways. You can learn practical, repeatable frameworks from IDEO to help your team innovate with confidence and be prepared for what's next.

I tried it out and what's really nice is they set out exact time windows for how to follow along. It isn't just this uncurated, endless pile of material. There's a set structure, so the course runs from this date to this date. And if you're doing it with a team of people, they have plenty of plans and worksheets to follow along and organise your learning. And everything is designed to seamlessly transition from theory into practice so you can apply your new skills right away.

Class starts soon, so enroll today. For a limited time, IDOU is offering our listeners 15% off site-wide. Go to idou.com slash happyhour. That's I-D-E-O-U dot com.

Thanks to IDOU for sponsoring the show. Happy This Week is also sponsored by Shopify. Check them out at shopify.com slash happy hour. The idea of starting your own business can be daunting. There's so much suddenly on your plate that you have to deal with beyond just having that great product. When we sold wallpapers through 9to5Mac, even though we had a website,

Offering a store and checkout system was another ordeal altogether. Doing everything our own was a non-starter. Instead, we used Shopify and it made everything so easy. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world. and powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States. Get started with your own design studio. There's hundreds of ready-to-use templates helping you build a beautiful online store to match your brand's style.

And Shopify has helpful AI tools so you can write product descriptions, headlines and even enhance your product photography. You can also use Shopify to easily create email and social media marketing campaigns. Shopify really is your commerce expert. They have world-class expertise in everything from managing inventory to international shipping to processing returns and so much more. So if you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify.

Turn your big business idea into sales with Shopify on your side. Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash happy hour. Go to shopify.com slash happy hour, all lowercase. Thanks to Shopify for sponsoring the show.

I think the biggest thing and the one that everybody noticed right off the bat is that they've improved the legibility of Control Center. So in iOS 26 Beta 1, the Control Center was just a... bit too transparent i think it was hard to see the icons in control center is hard to read text and in beta 2 they've really cranked up the blur you can still see through

Control Center into whatever's behind Control Center. Which you could do on iOS 18, of course. Right. I think anybody who thought that what was in Beta 1 would ship was just... Like there was no way they were going to shift. It was so bad. It was like almost obviously a bug, you know, like you look at some of Apple's press materials as well. Some parts were pretty contrast problematic, but the control center, I feel like always kind of replicated a blur that the beta one just didn't have.

And actually on the talk show, Gruber told me something he'd heard from people inside Apple, which was that in the lead up to the iOS 26 launch, the redesign and everything about iOS 26 was actually working.

relatively good and was relatively stable but about three weeks before wwdc i guess they pushed some changes to the builds that everybody was using and they just broke so much stuff So there was a mad dash to fix things and get things right for that first developer beta, which based on historical timelines. was probably locked in two weeks before wwdc so that last that one week gap between everything breaking and needing to lock in the first beta was just kind of like okay we have to

Throw a bunch of stuff out the window for right now and just get this at least stable enough for a beta one, which explains probably how some of these weird two glassy elements ended up shipping. But we'll see them tweak more throughout the beta testing process, I think.

and address some of the other legibility and navigation concerns that we've talked about. But fixing Control Center was kind of step one in that process, I think. Yeah, I mean, that was the easy example that could go viral as being stupid.

what do you do you just literally swipe down in one place and immediately see it right there's still contrast issues in various apps under certain certain circumstances conditional on the content that's behind the navigation right they have plenty of levers to adjust that stuff

And I'm sure they will. I mean, because people think it's just like, oh, you just make the glass frosty or less frosty. But they have other stuff they can do too. Like the glass cooperates with like the... the edge effects you know like the the gradient blurs they have at the edges of the scrolling at the top and bottom like

Depending on the content that's below that, it can change the amount of blur on the gradient. It can change the color of the gradient. You can see this. If you scroll really slowly, sometimes the gradient fall off gets harsher. Sometimes it's softer. They have loads of different...

levers that kind of cooperate with each other and work in different ways then you've got to account for light mode and dark mode there's a lot of different scenarios and i'm not going to pretend that they might get everything right for september but they can get well along that line and then obviously continue with further updates

But even on Beta 2, it feels a lot more locked down than on Beta 1. Control Center is the easiest place to see it, but there's other places too where I feel like they have actually changed the behavior a little bit. So here's a question for you.

when you pull down to go to notification center, do you see how it's super, it's basically see-through until you get all the way to the bottom and then your wallpaper kicks in and you can actually read the notifications?

Do you think that's a bug or is that an intended behavior? Because it looks funky as it is right now in beta 1 and beta 2. I have to presume there's a bit of bugging still there. With iOS 18... if you have your phone locked right so it's fully locked and then you go to swipe up once you got to about halfway the icons would fly in whereas on 26 the icons don't fly until you let go so like if your finger stays on the screen

Like it has to go all the way to the top of the screen before the icons start appearing. Whereas if you do it on iOS 18, it's kind of like halfway. So like you kind of see the home screen come in. So I feel like that transition is still very much...

in development because it just feels weird that the icons don't appear in a tool until you let go until you let go which is which isn't how it worked on 18 i know they changed the animation of how the icons move but still it kind of makes sense that the icons start appearing like halfway up the screen which it doesn't do right now and also

the lock screen has a very very custom glass effect on it because it has that really exaggerated prism at the bottom you know like if you go really slowly you can kind of see the the morphing of the icons like that effect isn't on every glass element it's like a specific lock screen thing so i think the lock screen probably still has some more changes to come yeah because especially in beta one you'd see sometimes where the notification

platters would be a lot blurrier or they'd be a lot more darkened and in other cases they were like pretty transparent so I kind of still put that in the kind of like buggy zone But what about when you're in an app? You've already unlocked your phone, you're somewhere in an app and you pull down to notification center. Do you see how the wallpaper doesn't kick in until the very end? Right, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So that's kind of what I'm saying with the icons too. So it doesn't react until you almost let go, right? So that has to be, especially if you're in an app and you let go halfway. There's no, like, fade or anything, right? Like, the app just kind of disappears almost, and then the wallpaper's there. That has to be a bug, I think. That's just unfinished. Also in beta 2.

Live radio widget for Apple Music. So just a new Apple Music widget that you can add to your home screen that includes live radio stations from Apple Music, like the Apple Music One, Apple Music Hits, Apple Music Country, all of those various things. Tap on one of them and it starts playing instantly. Good for CarPlay too now, right? Yeah, that's what a lot of people pointed out, I think, is that now that CarPlay has widgets, easier access to things like RadioR is kind of important and useful.

Some changes to the Safari interface too. Mayo, can you tell us about this one? Yeah, so when you're in the new compact mode option, which is the new default, right, where it just has one row of... controls on beta one you only ever had a back button on the left hand side now if you go to a new page so you've gone like you've gone forward and then you go back it will put a forward button back on there so if you want to quickly go

It's kind of like dynamically appears, which is nice and contextual. But obviously, now you've got two buttons on screen, the actual address bar gets even thinner, run even more squished in that middle section. I have my... main iPhone 14 Pro on iOS 26 now. And the amount of truncation you get on the address bar in compact mode is pretty extreme. It's not as bad on the iPhone 16 Plus, which obviously has a much bigger display.

But still, there isn't many websites you can visit on the 14 Pro size, which is not that much different to the current 6.3 inch size, right? The default iPhone 16 Pro. There's not many domains that fit. in that bar without having to have some sort of like gradient truncation um so i still don't really like the compact mode the the double row bottom mode is just way nicer i think

I don't think I realized that people actually really still use the forward and back buttons in Safari. Don't people just swipe forward and backwards just from the left and right side of the screen? By the way, on beta 2, you can now swipe from the middle of the screen as well on Safari. Oh, yeah, you can. You can go back and forward. Because they're trying to roll that out in most places. If you're in the settings app, the navigation stack there, you can also...

like, sloppily swipe from the middle of the screen. You have to go to the screen edge on 26. I think a lot more people use buttons than maybe us, like, nerds appreciate. Than we think, yeah. We swipe. but a lot of people don't i think if there's a button on the screen that probably gets way more usage than a gesture in almost every case because buttons are just immediately visible and so people want to go forward they want to see a forward button they don't even like

I'm sure some people think to try the screen edge swiping. Some people don't think at all. Some people have done it before, but then they forget and they just see a button and they do that, right? Like a quicker way, here's a good example. A quicker way to get to the tab grid is to swipe up on the address bar, right? so you can even in the comp even in compact yeah oh wow i did not know see i didn't see they're more hidden but they're more like power it's like keyboard shortcuts isn't it like

people don't use keyboard shortcuts anywhere near as much as pressing the actual buttons and i don't use keyboard shortcuts very much at all um and i'm i would call myself a pretty advanced user but i use probably what like a handful of keyboard shortcuts on the mac and everything else i go to the menu bar for or i do like

buttons on the screen. So I think the same kind of applies to multi-touch gestures. The tab grid thing, yeah, you can swipe up from the address bar to get it. Or what everybody does up to now is they just press the tab button.

The only reason now you have to think about maybe using the swipe gesture is because they got rid of the tab button, the all tab button on the compact mode, right? If you're on bottom mode, there's one single button for it, which is another reason to like it. But if you're on compact mode...

You kind of have to use the gesture if you want to get there. They have also updated the layout in the tab grid view too, which is way better now because on beta one, like the new tab button was at the very top of the screen.

Now in beta 2, they have this kind of new control at the bottom, and the plus button's on the bottom left-hand side, so it's way more close to your thumb. So, some good change in Safari, but bottom mode is still better than compact, I think. Now that I know that you can swipe up on the... the the tab bar to get to the tab view i think i'm fully committed to compact because that was my biggest complaint was having that extra tap to get to the tab view

Because I didn't know that that gesture existed. But now that I know... Yeah, but do you want to rely on a gesture all the time to do that rather than a button? I mean, I don't have a problem with the gesture. It seems to work. I'm doing it right now. All I would say on that gesture is...

if you're a bit imprecise it tries to close safari right because it's quite close to the to the bottom of the screen so you do have to kind of like aim at your thumb a little bit to actually do it effectively i think Yeah, I'm running the beta on my backup phone, which is a Pro Max, so it has the bigger screen. So when I install it on my main phone, which is just a 16 Pro, we'll see if the closeness of those two gestures gets in the way more than on a phone with a bigger screen.

At least as it stands right now, I'm a big compact guy. Yeah, I mean, don't get me wrong. I can do it and, you know, I can swipe in the right place. But I'm thinking more, you know, regular person. Swiping there versus swiping 10 pixels down to accidentally go to the home screen is... You shouldn't underestimate how much more people don't have that just subconscious muscle memory for this stuff. And buttons are a lot easier. Wait, so that gesture has been there.

For years. I'm just now real. Oh, yeah. I had no idea that that was a thing. Well, there you go. So you're the one saying about people who don't just swipe left and right. Well, you could have been swiping up and down all this time. You can also pinch out with two fingers.

I did know that, but that's an awkward. That's more awkward. Yeah, obviously that's more awkward, but you can do that. But yeah, so they basically replicate because you can, you know, you can like swipe left and right on that address bar as well. Yeah, that's, yeah. Yeah, so they basically replicate swiping between apps, but on the address bar in Safari. And I think that's been there since the controversial redesign of iOS 15. Wow.

Learn something new every day. There's what I think is a bug and I hope is a bug. But now if you don't have four icons in the dock of your iPhone home screen. they're left aligned. So if you have three icons in the dock, they just sit in the first, second and third position. Whereas before they would be center aligned. So you'd have a little gap on either side and the three icons would be centered. This has got to be a bug, right? You've got to hope so.

There's no way. There's no way. I mean, the only doubt in my mind is obviously they left the line all the alerts in iOS 26. So they're not centered anymore. They are left aligned. I guess you could say it's harmonizing with that, but I just think it just looks so stupid. So it has to be a glitch. Or anyone saying just has four icons in the dock. Yeah, that's what I was going to say. I don't know why you would have three in the dock. I mean...

It's not the majority, but I've definitely seen people in the wild with three icons in the dock. And I've got a really good story for Plus that we'll talk about having someone having no icons in the dock. 9to5mac.com slash join. Then...

In the code for iOS 26 Beta 2, there is what I think is the first reference to potential confirmation of the iPhone 17 Air, in particular its display resolution. so they've added a new version of the clownfish wallpaper for your lock screen your home screen with a resolution of 1260 by 2736 which aligns perfectly for the expected resolution of the six point one inch display of or sorry the 6.6 inch display yeah it's in between yeah of the iphone 17 air yeah the the base pro is 6.3 the max is 6.9

and they're going to slot in this air at 6.6. And the resolution is directly in between two, so it lines up perfectly. Nothing else really to discern from that other than... Yeah, the iPhone 17 Air is scumming. Yeah, I mean, the iPhone 17 lineup is so well documented at this point, so you don't really need leaks. But it's nice confirmation. What do you think about...

26 beta 2 in terms of stability since you're now running it on your your main carry phone it feels worse on the 14 pro than it does on the 16 plus yeah Just feels laggier. App icon animations, like when you open them from the home screen, there's some frame drops. On both devices, the liquid glass rendering definitely still has glitches where like...

Sometimes the stuff that's inside the glass platter just completely disappears. And then it comes back. Or you see weird artifacting of... random like tv you know like a tv antenna signal noise on the old broadcast tvs that kind of happens in multicolor sometimes on some elements and then it goes away these are obviously just bugs that they're working their way through um

But the one that I noticed the most, and I don't know if you see this too, if you have a folder, when you click on an icon, like so you open a folder on the home screen, then launch the app. As soon as you launch the app, everything in the folder disappears. Oh, I don't see that.

Oh, wait, yes, I do. There it is. Yeah, it's subtle, but I was like, this looks wrong immediately. Yeah, that's like a glitch in the animation. Yeah, so it just... And if you do the thing where you... So open the app from the folder and then slowly...

move your finger up to make it go away, you'll see it like pop in when you let go. Oh, yeah. Yep. Yeah. I hadn't noticed that. So there's something to do with when there's multiple glass elements like laid on top of each other. Sometimes it glitches out.

which you also see in other places, but that's where I feel like you can reproduce it the most consistently. That also might be related to the lock screen thing, right? You know, where there's weird layering. It's definitely still in progress. The battery life on the phone is also...

considerably worse now, but of course, it's the beta. I've had multiple people ask me if they should install beta 2. They held off for beta 1 and they're wondering if beta 2 is significantly better. It's definitely significantly better. Yeah, but the bar was on the floor. Kind of for that. Yeah. If you want to do it, but if you all have any hesitation, I would wait. By the way, I don't get the adaptive power battery mode on my phone. It's 15.

15 Pro, I think. 15 Pro, yeah. Because it's technically an Apple Intelligence feature, but I don't think they brand it Apple Intelligence, but I guess it uses the same kind of system. Yeah, but I have not installed... ios 26 on my main phone yet i probably will next week but we're moving this weekend and i don't want to deal with bad battery life and

bugs and glitches while I'm doing something that's already a very sucky process to begin with, so I need a stable phone for that. Then I'll probably update once we get settled next week. Then macOS Tahoe Beta 2.

The two changes here that are worth mentioning. The Finder icon has been redesigned again. So in beta, one had a very controversial decision where basically the face of the Finder icon has always been. Blue on the left-hand side. White or gray on the right-hand side. Tahoe Beta 1 flipped it for...

Whatever reason, they made the left side of the face in Beta 1 was the whitish grayish, and the right side of the face in Beta 1 was the blue color. Order has been restored in Beta 2, so the blue is on the left, the white is on the right.

This change did not bother me all that much, but it certainly made some longtime Mac users upset. Yeah, I didn't really care about the order of the colors. I just kind of thought it looked bad before. It looks better with the blue being the predominant color, you know. Yeah, because the problem, I guess, with the white and the new design of the Finder icon is like the bezel of the icon was white, which just looked weird. And now it's just more consistently blue. So it does look better.

And I know some people are mad that they've like inset the face on the right-hand side because obviously on the shipping OSs, it's like it fills the rectangle, right? You have the two faces filling the frame. On this one, the white face is like inset on the edges.

This isn't just them like, this is them doing it on purpose because they want to accentuate the specular highlights of the glass layer, right? So by inserting it, you get more glass edges. This is very consistent across all of their icons now.

they like doing the layering thing and if you put it on the edge you'd have less chances to get the nice little light reflections so i'm not necessarily it looks aesthetically better right i do kind of probably still pick the old icon where it filled the frame but i know why they've done it and it looks

perfectly fine i would say on beta 2 beta 1 was a bit offensive but the beta 2 design is fine although i will say have you seen the dark mode version of the finder icon that's not very good that's a bit weird yeah don't love that You don't have to use dark mode icons. I don't use dark mode on the Mac or anything of the sort. There you go. I won't have to look that up. Just put the clear icons on, then you don't need to complain about what color it is. That is true. Then another one of the...

Big changes to the Mac and the liquid glassification of the Mac in Tahoe was they made the menu bar completely transparent, I guess you could say, or they just removed the menu bar altogether. Beta 2, there's now a toggle in system settings to add back that menu bar. This is the course of the beta season, right? Yeah. They go for the most extreme version in the first couple of seeds. Then they...

see how many people are mad about it and they put the necessary toggles and switches and dials and they they reduce it slightly so people wanted a boulder around the menu bar you've got it back i do think even when it is in the the you know the default state of not having a background that it has some sort of like heuristic to put a little black gradient to darken it slightly but it's mostly just transparent yeah I think it depends this is one where it depends on your wallpaper right because

some wallpapers are super busy at the top other wallpapers just have like a smooth gradient and so it doesn't really matter so I can see why they added a setting for this and maybe they were planning to add a setting the whole time but I'm sure the feedback from the day one feedback was definitely heard yeah And you're not running Tahoe on your main Mac yet? Correct, yeah. I'm running Tahoe in a virtual machine. Same. But I have iOS now on my main phone.

And as we'll talk about in a second, I have it on the watch too now. Watch was 26.

Happy Hour This Week is sponsored by Backblaze. Everyone needs to back up their stuff. Whether you're an individual or business, everyone needs to make sure they have backups. If you're running your business without timely backups, your business data is simply at risk.

Perhaps you're a growing startup, supporting a remote team, or managing a complex environment. Use Backblaze computer backup to automatically keep your files safe. Backblaze has no storage limits and no file type restrictions. It's unlimited, hassle-free backups.

Just set it up once and Backblaze backs up everything without disrupting your workflow or your team's productivity. And then you can recover your files anytime, anywhere, easily restore files from the cloud and you can even get them to ship a physical drive to you. for bigger data recovery and backblaze isn't just mac compatible it's built for apple platforms first it is light on your disk and works seamlessly with mac plus it has enterprise-grade security

with comprehensive coverage and one year of version history included. Join customers like PagerDuty, SharkNinja and half a million additional customers using Backblaze to back up their data. So here's an exclusive deal. for 9to5Mac listeners. Use promo code 9to5HH at checkout for 10% off. Just go to backblaze.com slash buy to purchase now or backblaze.com slash 9to5Mac to create a trial account. That's promo code 9. Thanks to Backblaze for sponsoring the show.

And you should do fun things and enjoy yourself when it's lovely and warm outside. And one way to help make that happen is to spend less time shopping and less time doing meal prep in the kitchen. Make your summer both enjoyable and delicious by getting the number one meal kit as voted by USA Today readers.

And that's HelloFresh. HelloFresh lets you pick your favourite recipes and have all the ingredients delivered to you. They're always curating delicious meals to choose from like panko crusted, chimichurri barramundi or sun-dried tomato grilled cheese sandoes. And the seasonal fresh produce and proteins travel from the farm to your doorstep, along with their easy to follow recipe cards.

And this summer, they're making it even easy to enjoy delicious, healthy and homemade quality meals with their new ready-made meal options. Ready in just three minutes. You just need to heat and eat. You've tried HelloFresh, right Chance? I have. I've tried HelloFresh many times.

And the last batch that we got included one of our favorites, which was a sausage tortellini. And like you said, Mayo, HelloFresh really does just let you spend less time planning and thinking about what you want to have for dinner at the end of each day. Because Emily and I both work full-time jobs and sometimes at the end of the day, you just want something that you know, you have all of the ingredients for, you have clear instructions on how to make it.

So there's very little planning involved on your end. And you never hit that point when you're cooking something and you realize you're out of a crucial ingredient. You don't know whether to continue with a meal, go to the store or whatever. You never have that problem with HelloFresh. You get everything you need in the box with clear instructions. So for me and Emily, HelloFresh is one of our favorite things to have for dinner, and it gets a big thumbs up from us.

So make your summer enjoyable and delicious by signing up for HelloFresh at hellofresh.com slash happyhour10fm and get 10 free meals with a free item for life. That's hellofresh.com slash happyhour10 for 10 free meals and a free item in every box hellofresh.com slash happy hour 10 fm one per box with active subscription free meals are applied as a discount on the first box new subscribers only varies by plan

Thanks to HelloFresh for sponsoring the show. So as you teased, Mayo, you're now running watchOS 26 on your Apple Watch. Is that right? That is correct. And my battery life is suffering. That's honestly the biggest reason I don't typically run major watchOS betas because I just don't like thinking about having to charge my Apple Watch any more than I already do. But this year...

There's some pretty good stuff, I think, that makes it a tempting beta to install. Yeah, I mean, it's smaller scale than the other OSs, I think, to be fair. But still enough there that...

I'm enjoying it, if that makes sense. One of the things that doesn't really fit into any category is I feel like they've changed the animation of when you get a notification. So, you know, like you get that kind of brief period where it just shows the icon and the little line of text. Yeah. That kind of... shows up but it sweeps away a lot quicker now so like if you send me a message I can actually just like read the message a lot faster oh that's good because I don't like that animation yeah

They made a big deal about it in like the original Apple Watch software. They called it like the short look and the long look, right? And I think it was meant to be like a privacy thing where it would show you just the icon in the name. And then if you kept looking, it would then show you everything. But the other...

conflicting thing with the apple watch is you want interactions to be as fast as possible and so i kind of feel like they've dialed that back slowly over the last 10 years and now in 26 it really feels like the icon appears and immediately it starts scaling down to show you actually what the message is

um so that's an improvement that doesn't really have a you know a name or any particular label to it but i noticed that immediately i was like that is really nice um the liquid glass application is a bit like tvos right where

A lot of the elements don't get any liquid glass changes at all, but then some things do. And so it gives a nice little visual flair in places. It comes up in control center. It comes up in...

The SmartStack, like all the widgets in the SmartStack have this more glassy appearance and you get the specular highlights. And then if you're in apps, it generally seems to be like the top... buttons so the back button in the top left and like the action button in the top right they get the like elevated glass appearance um and everything else just kind of looks like the older version which is fine by me i think

Some complaints you can make about Liquid Glass on iOS and Mac is they've kind of done it everywhere and done it too indiscriminately and they probably should be a bit more selective at where they use it. So on the watch, it feels more restrained. I don't know if that's a design choice or whether they just know the watch like...

GPU is less powerful so they can just put less effects on the screen at one time. But either way, I think it looks nice. It still feels fresh and modern. If you use the photo face, you get the glassy clock thing like you do on the iPhone lock screen. But... you know smaller look in terms of uh the overall like liquid glass applying you do get the new icons so like all the icons match the iphone which is nice because the watch os pre 26 had like its own completely separate icon set right like

The icons were completely different. Now they're much more aligned with the iPhone. So like the settings icon on watchOS 18 or watchOS 11 was just like... grey and white right it was just like a symbol of white on a grey gradient now it matches the iPhone one where you have like the two gears and everything and they actually changed the

um the grid you know like they have that uh they kind of show this in some of the developer sessions and like when they introduce the new icons they have that kind of like wireframe outline of like circles and lines

where they kind of suggest you this is where you should put your objects on the thing to like make it all align with every other icon so the circles for instance have a circle cut out and that's where you're meant to put like a circular element to make it match all the circular elements on on the home screen, where they actually changed that grid a bit and then they made it so that...

Now the Apple Watch is like a bigger circular cutout of the grid, which helps people make one icon for all platforms instead of having to think about the circular cutout shape being different to the rounded rectangle. So they've actually accommodated for it because obviously now they have...

the circular icons on watchOS and visionOS to worry about. So they're trying to make it unified across the board. So they're not random rectangle icons, but they still make them as close as possible to match with iPhone, iPad and Mac. And I think it looks a lot nicer that way around.

The big redesign that I've noticed so far is to the workout app. So before it was like this list of little cards and you could like scroll through them and pick one. Now they've made it so every single workout... card is full screen and it's more like the weather app where you have to use like the digital crown you scroll and it goes page by page by page you can swipe your finger but you know what i mean like it's like a full screen page and it kind of goes down if you

Use a lot of workouts, different workout types. It probably takes you longer to navigate because it's a lot quicker to scroll a free-throwing list than this page by page by page thing. But I think most people just have like... two workouts that they use. So as long as you edit the workout list to only show the ones that you actually use, this is probably a much better design. The other criticism I say visually is that now every...

On the old design, if you had like a 30-minute indoor walk workout, it would be yellow because it would like reflect the fact that it was a timer and then the open goal ones were all green. On the new fitness app, the new workout app, it doesn't really... like everything's an open goal so everything's all green and then you have to kind of click the corner buttons if you want to do the time restrictions or the lapping or the pacing stuff so

I think it's a lot easier to find the options for the time workouts or the pace workouts, which are pretty buried before, but visually everything's green now. So I feel like they should...

maybe just make each workout its own distinct color just to make it slightly easier to pick out because the little icons they have of the walking and the running are quite similar. So you kind of have to squint and read text to work out which one is which. Again, if you're only doing the same workout over and over again, I guess it doesn't really matter.

But it just felt like a slight usability regression. And I wish you could pin a workout with a go already set. So when I'm on my fitness routine stuff, I kind of do like an indoor... 30 minute run a lot and so on the old design you could set 30 minute run as like a default option and that would be the that would be what's in there every single time so you open the fitness app and you'd have a yellow indoor run

tile you tap that it starts a 30 minute run as far as i can tell on the 26 design you can't like make it remember that you always want to do a 30 minute run it just always resets to open goal metric and then you have to click on the timer in the top right and then you click 30 minutes So it's a couple more taps. They probably have data that shows that most people do open goal workouts.

Because this was a trend they've been kind of on the path for for a few years. Because the original workout app was much more insistent on like, choose your particular goal metric for this workout. And that would be what we remember. An open goal was like a third option. And then a few years ago, they changed it. It's like open goal is like the new default for everything.

And the other stuff got more hidden. And now it's like the open goal is like the only option by default for everything. It probably reflects how actual users use it. But for me, I did think it was kind of annoying and they should maybe let you like pin. you know make it so you have to go in a few screens so you can pin one to the home screen you actually want to use i also don't think it's very clear how you edit the list so if if it defaults to showing them all

and then you have to, like, cut all the ones you don't use. I feel like a lot of people aren't going to do that because right now it's not very clear. You have to scroll all the way down, you click the edit workout button, and then you have to scroll another list of all the workouts and swipe to the left. You know how you, like, do...

swiping mail right to delete a message or mark it as unread you have to do that and it's really not very obvious on the watch that that's what you're meant to do but that's how you do it hopefully in the next couple of days they'll just clean that up slightly or just reduce the number of workouts that are shown by default because

I think most people only use two. You know, like walk and run is probably by far the most common options. The new control center, which is customizable now with custom controls. It is really nice because I speculate this on our WWC episode. I wanted to put home widgets in there and you can indeed do that. So I have little lights in there for my different rooms in my house.

I can speak to the HomePod or I can just click one button on my wrist and tap one more button and the lights turn on off, which is really nice. As always. like Apple's given this customization to us and now you immediately want more customization. So I'd love to make it so like my control center could change based on location because if I'm at home, I really want to see the light toggles, but...

If I'm out and about, I don't really care about the light toggles so much. So you know how you can do focus modes on the iPhone where you can change which home screens are visible? Kind of would be cool to do that, but for the control center on the watch.

And maybe even control center on the iPhone too. So you could have different layouts depending on context or automations or something. But that's not possible. What we have this year is just the ability to put more controls on the screen that you could never do before, which I do appreciate. Obviously, there's no real like...

I guess it does some third-party controls, but you've got to wait to the full to really get that benefit. I think they'll let you put your Ford car unlocking control on there, for instance. which would be kind of cool for you, I think. Does it automatically let you choose controls that you can add to the lock screen and put those in? How is it deciding what controls are?

I think it's a subset of controls that appear in Control Center on the iPhone, if that makes sense. Okay, because it depends on the size of them too. Yes, that's what I mean. So I don't think it supports all sizes or all variants.

The iPhone app or the watch app has to expose controls that use WidgetKit, right? Of the specific sizes and families that the watch supports. Offhand, I can't tell you which ones they are, but it's obviously like the basic kind of like toggle ones or the ones that open the app. but it does include ones from the iPhone if they're illegible, right, in the right format. I will say each of these little platters in Control Center do get liquid glass effects.

It might be a bit overboard. And this is where I refer you to this image I sent you. You kind of get refractions on every edge. Yeah, that's what I was going to say. In the picture you sent, which I'll make the chapter art, you have the Wi-Fi icon at the bottom and it's like...

Bright blue and it's reflecting on to the one above and to the right. You have this focus mode icon and it's reflecting in the middle and it's reflecting up, down and left. It's a lot for sure. Especially on a smaller watch size screen.

it's quite compact and there's quite a lot of like visual noise um and i was trying to be charitable with that example because i could have made it look a lot worse if i got all the ones that lie up a color and put them all together next to each other you get like a disco pie but um

Yeah, so I don't know. Maybe my eyes will get used to it, but it doesn't feel... Like, at a glance, it just feels a bit weird, right? Where you have, like, the battery percentage be slightly blue and slightly green. And I feel like if you look on Control Center on the iPhone, it doesn't really do that, where the... adjacent controls kind of bleed over to each other I think just because there's more space between them there's more padding whereas on the watch it's all tightly next to each other

So I think probably I would recommend them to ease that off a bit. You don't really need those reflections there. And they don't move with your device motion like they do on the iPhone. So it feels a lot more static and just a bit odd.

But that's the only real place where I've found the liquid glass treatment to be a bit overwhelming on the watch, at least. The hints thing, which is where if there's stuff on the smart stack that's at the top that it thinks is super relevant to you, it shows it on the clock face. There's a little circle. Oh, yeah.

How's that? So far, I've only been able to get that to trigger for the camera remote, right? So if you open camera on the iPhone, the remote icon appears on the watch face. Works reliably. It happens. It shows up. You can do your double tap gesture to open the hint if you want, or you can tap on it with your finger. The only issue I'd say with this is that I've had so far, the circle for the hint appears dead center.

At the bottom, right? So middle of the bottom of the screen. And that is directly the same place where my central circular widget is on the modular face. Do you know the modular face has those three complication slots on the bottom? That's the one I use. Yep.

The middle circle gets completely covered by the hint. And... because it's only popped up for camera remote it's fine because like contextually i'm just using the camera on the phone right i'm probably not looking at my watch face so it hasn't it hasn't actually interrupted me in real life but presumably at some point it's going to start hinting all sorts of stuff at me and if there's a hint that i don't want

it's kind of annoying because it covers my central middle widget, which, you know, your central middle bottom complication is kind of where I put my most important one, right? Because it feels like the most prominent place to put it. So now that kind of gets covered over by the hint thing. And you can dismiss the hints, but you have to do like this quite precise downward swipe gesture on them to make them go away.

Less than ideal, I would say. I don't know where else they'd put them on the screen. I guess they'd put them at the bottom because they're trying to imply you swipe up to get to the smart stack, right? But maybe they should put them where the red dot...

notification dot thing goes at the top because at least that's like empty space on all the watch faces already rather than like overlapping with complications if you have other watch faces it's going to be less of an issue right but on this one it literally directly overlaps with the middle central complication

on the modular face the wrist flick gesture that's new too right where if a notification comes in and you don't want to like do the active gesture which is the double tap you can just make it dismissed by flicking your wrist away It does work, and I probably will use it, but it does require a fair amount of force. To flail your arm, kind of? You do have to go like, quite exaggerated to make it do it.

It kind of reminds me of, you know, the original watch, which obviously didn't have always on display. Sometimes you'd like turn your wrist around and it wouldn't light up and you'd have to like do that motion with your arm to make you be able to see the time.

Kind of feels like you've gone back to that era a little bit where it's like, go away. Okay, it's gone away. But the amount of energy you have to exert to make it happen, maybe it's more comfortable just to like... flick it with my finger on my other hand but if you're doing it as a one-handed gesture of course it's a good option um so yeah i'll definitely use it but if you're talking especially if you're talking to someone right and you're like oh i'll just glance my watch face

Okay, I want to dismiss that, but I'm also talking to someone, so I don't want to look like an idiot. I feel like the amount of movement you've got to do with your arm to make it actually go away is quite a lot. So I'd probably just leave it there and put my arm down and deal with it later.

I mean, I guess you could just do the thing where you, you know how you just cover the display with your hand and it turns it off, hides the notification. I guess that is the same, kind of the same as this, except you just. But then you're using two hands. I think the point is it's meant to be a one hand.

thing like double tap is um but yeah i'll definitely use it in places but it's not subtle i would say and then finally and i don't care about this one iota but i just thought it was funny the phone app got redesigned

So it's just like the phone app on the iPhone. But you know on the iPhone on iOS 26, they give you the option. So it's like... And I don't think it's even the default because when I updated my 14 Pro, it asked me, do you want to try the new design in the phone app? And you opt into it and it... puts that unified view of calls with voicemail and stuff and favorites the big posters at the top yeah yeah and with the posters at the top on the watch they've done that but there's no option to go back

So on the watch, they don't care about backwards compatibility. They're just like, everyone can have the new design. But I don't really care. I don't really use the phone app on the watch anyway. Do you get those posters on the watch? Is there enough screen space for that? So it makes it like multiple pages. So the first page is posters.

And then you keep scrolling down and it shows the history. That makes sense, I guess. Yeah, I mean, it aligns it with the watch, with the phone. I just thought it was funny that it made such a big deal on the phone a bit like, you can choose either design. And then the watch that, nah, new design only. But overall, you think it's a smaller but good, so far anyway, update for Apple Watch? Yeah, it feels pretty stable, but the battery life isn't good, I would say.

But again, I've only had it for like a day or two, so maybe it will stabilize a little bit. But right now, the battery life is noticeably worse. The other big feature for WatchOS this year is the workout buddy thing. I was just about to ask, have you tried it yet? I can't. Oh, it's US only, isn't it? And also, doesn't it require Apple intelligence phone? Oh, I think so. I think you're right, yeah. So I'm down on two counts on that one. So I'm down on that.

It requires an Apple intelligence enabled iPhone nearby and Bluetooth headphones with device and Siri language set to English. So maybe I could do it if I had a 15 Pro paired with my watch. You could jump through the hoops and connect it to your 16 plus, but I don't recommend.

Yeah, that's a lot of hoops. That's a lot of hoops. Yeah. But yeah, overall, I like it. And you also pointed out to me that at least in the current beta, the backgrounds and messages are broken. Yeah, they don't show up. So you're meant to be able to have...

the background effects which I don't think I would ever use seriously in a conversation because they're just so distracting but I tell you what regular people every group chat I'm in they love setting the background to a random picture so I'm sure the iMessage feature is going to be popular and that's meant to propagate onto the watch as well

but on this current beta it just doesn't it's still black the other thing i'm sorry i've forgotten to mention the notes app oh yeah finally the notes app is brand new and you asked me who's going to use the notes app on the watch in our wwc episode and i said i do because i put my shopping list in the notes app

And it actually works really nicely. So it reformats it so that it has like the full width tiles, right? The full width buttons for each item in the checklist. And so it's almost like the reminders app, but in a note.

And so you just have a permanent note with to-dos and you can tap them off and go and scroll up and down. So it lets you check them off or uncheck them. So I was like, oh, this is great. So am I shopping this note? Yeah, I can perfectly use it. If you want to use it for any other kind of note...

you can't edit the text. I don't know if it's just unfinished, but right now that you can make a new note, right? So you can dictate a note or type, but as soon as you press done, it saves it. And all you can do is delete it. Oh, so you can't even add to a note?

Not that I can see. There is no buttons on the screen. Huh. Now that's weird. And I thought at first, oh, it's because I opened a note that I made on the iPhone. So maybe there's like formatting requirements. But I literally made a plain text note using the notes app on the watch. And as soon as I press done.

You can't do anything but delete the note. Yeah, that's weird. Surely that's a bug. Maybe they're going to change that so you can at least just re-edit the text. You can check and uncheck lists, but anything else... is completely static and then there's some things like if you have a table on a note it just doesn't render on the watch at all it says view the table on the iphone but for the basics of like i opened our show notes

Which is quite a complicated bulleted list, you'd say, right? Yeah, multiple layers deep. Yeah, you can read it all. You have to do a lot of scrolling, but you can all read it. I can scroll away to the bottom. I can read every item. If you make changes, it synchronizes and updates. Can you tap on the links? Can you click on links? Yeah. I'm doing it right now. I opened the web browser. So yeah, you can open the links, but I just can't edit on the watch.

I wouldn't really expect to be able to edit the show notes document on the watch. But if I've made a note myself, you know, if I've dictated three sentences and I need to edit it afterwards, I feel like you should be able to edit it. But at least on beta two, there's no editing.

All right, I think that does it for this week. You can find us on Apple Podcasts where you can leave a rating and a review. Find an ad-free version of the show with bonus content each and every week at 9to5mac.com slash join. Send us feedback, happyhour at 9to5back.com. I am on threads and elsewhere at Chance H. Miller. And Mayo, what about you? At BZA Mayo. All right. Thanks, Mayo. Bye-bye.