Although developers may be hesitant to embrace this out of fear of Google eventually killing it off, an upshot is that if you develop an XR app with Unity (and its XR Interaction Toolkit library), it ends up being quite portable across different XR devices / operating systems (e.g. Meta Quest, Pico VR, HTC Vive).
I haven't upgraded to iOS 26 because of Liquid Glass, mostly because I've read that it causes performance degradation on older devices (I use an iPhone 13 Mini because I have zero interest in using a larger phone). So, it looks like I'll be using iOS 18 for the foreseeable future.
I made the mistake of upgrading (13 Mini) and it is very clear that the new UI was not tested at all on smaller screens. The rounded buttons take up so much extra margin that actual usable space is greatly diminished.
Same here - on a 12 Mini. My wife and my mother have the same phone, and I have recommended that they hold back on upgrading.
I really hope Apple will address this in a dot-upgrade later this year, but I am afraid that the market share of the 12 and 13 models are too low for them to justify this.
I have the standard iPhone 13 (not mini) and the battery longevity is probably the best of any phone I've ever owned. At over 3.5 years old it still reports 89% battery health and lasts much longer than I need. Previous iPhones I owned were all pretty much on their last legs by that age.
I haven't upgraded it to iOS 26 / Liquid Glass, though, and given what I'm seeing/hearing, I don't plan to.
I just replaced it before the 26 upgrade. It was at 76% by then. With the new battery, I haven’t faced any issues. It lasts a whole day easily, unless I do things like tethering etc.
I regret upgrading my 13 Mini so much. Performance is terrible and it's chugging power.
Yesterday, for the first time since I bought the phone, it died on me before 18:00 with regular usage. I used to charge everyday when I go to bed with around 15-25% left, now I can't even finish the work day.
I have an iphone 13 pro max. On many screens, the UI now stutters when it was smooth before. I have a very strong dislike for the new transparency changes. It absolutely makes things harder to read. And it comes at a cost of making the UI stutter. For example I just scrolled down the notifications, they are all a little harder to read because the the phone is trying to show the background through the notification area?
On iPhone 12 mini, the battery life is incredibly worse. I was charging once a day, 30 → 70% usually, and now I’m charging all the time I have a chance. I’m not very active user, but each session of screen time reduces the battery significantly. Before that I felt that despite the small battery, the device works forever. Now, I’m back into my iPhone 4S times, when I upgraded to iOS 7.
For what it’s worth, I upgraded to 26 on a 3rd gen SE and perf is totally fine. I do hate most of the UI changes though. I really hope they do a dot release that lets me turn off the “safari viewport is big but we draw crap on top of it” stuff. I keep cursing at the title bar and url bar obscuring important things.
I actually feel a warm computer now, something that I have never experienced in five years of having this M1 MacBook.
This takes amazing hardware and degrades it to Windows laptop slop.
In the Jobs days, at least one VP head would roll for this, and Apple would be far better off for it. I don't think Tim Cook is strong enough for that though.
I just think that Apple should go down to biannual phone updates and major OS versions. I really don’t understand the urgency behind forcing this kind of velocity for such a mature system. It seems perpetually rushed.
This removes drop shadows on Chromium / Electron, and removes an autofill overlay that people reported heavy battery use on. I took this from somewhere on the internet.
It was running well on my 13 pro as in there was no lag on anything, but I can’t speak for battery life. It was bad before and it was still bad after, but maybe it got worse?
iOS .0 releases tend to be this way, even on brand new devices. I noticed some big perf improvements on the 26.0.1 release. If I were you I'd wait til 26.1 or 26.2 and reassess then. It still may not be optimal for a mini tho for non-perf reasons, as iOS26 assumes a larger average device size.
It's functionally tolerable when you disable transparency and increase contrast in accessibility settings.
Of course it makes everything look dull and primitive. Crammed and misaligned controls are even more obvious when elements have borders. You still have unhelpful animations.
As humble as Michigan City is, it's also a popular vacation destination for Hoosiers seeking an inexpensive summer getaway. I grew up in Indiana and have many fond memories of going to Michigan City in the summer: swimming at the beach, walking to the lighthouse and zoo, and looking at Chicago's skyline from across the lake. As a kid, I thought the power plant tower was cool, too.
Clarification: Unity's "Industry" license is only for non-gaming and non-entertainment applications (e.g. automotive, architecture, etc.). So this doesn't impact developers developing games with Unity.
Until it's an established payment model for one product category, after which it fill feel more natural to extend it to others.
The worst part of it isn't even that devs would get their wallets shaken out but that it's really just surveillance in disguise. Those apps would “““have to””” spy on me as an end-user in order for them to know what to charge.
I switched to unreal several years ago because Unity had written hundreds of gigabytes of log files complaining that it could not phone home and filled up my hard drive
Now thinking about it, its so valid point, how would that even work though if I am being honest
like I am pretty sure that the only way that they can do this is via giving it internet access and if that's the case, I wonder how much spying it does on our computer before sending it to unity headquarters in the name of this industry fees
Please, someone create a #usegodot or some twitter thing to just get it trending. We need to use goodot (I tried typing godot but I wrote goodot TWICE which is so funny and ironical so I am keeping it here)
Unity knows what project you're building and if you've built it under a paid license before. If they notice you using a free license, they'll go after you.
That sounds well and good, but Unity forced my last company into the more expensive license unilaterally and with no discussion. They doubled our costs just because they can.
At this point, we should all treat Unity like we do Broadcom. Utterly toxic and should be avoided at all costs because they will shake you down and leave you with a lesser product for no reason other than blind greed.
Nothing Unity does will ever recover the goodwill they nuked for money
We did not. Most of our contracts were integrating our stack into the customer's existing Unity project.
Plus we'd have to either re-train our Unity devs (more than half the software team) or find new developers.
The extravagant cost of a Unity seat meant we couldn't afford to give anyone except the Unity devs a license. The rest of the software team can no longer tweak the Unity project, and instead must file a ticket for one of the Unity devs to make the change and upload a build. For the same reason, we couldn't set up a build server in our CI system.
It was an absolute nightmare. At the end, I had to resort to ripping apart old copies of our android apps to inject new libraries into them. We couldn't afford Unity at all by that point, so it was the only option to get things working right now.
So glad that my new job has nothing to do with Unity or desktop software at all.
Thank you. I really do not understand why anyone trusts Unity to keep this for only non-entertainment if it proves successful. They only backed off before because the backlash was so bad. Assuming that means they won't try to find ways to slowly bring it back in the future is dangerous to me.
It does, though, because it means you don't have the freedom to pivot to other industries, or to fork for use in industry, which is a thing that can happen. It's definitely a reason to consider avoiding Unity.
Same with my 13 mini. Small size + lightweight is a killer feature. I want the 5x camera zoom of the iPhone 16 Pro, but it's not worth the tradeoff. And none of the other new features matter to me.
Am I the only one who laments this trend of using a common first name as a product name? When I see this, my first reaction is that the company lacks any empathy for people who have the name they're co-opting.
Not sure about the “rude” part. It really depends on the person. But yes, it can get annoying rally fast. Therefore “shitty” indeed. But yeah, I do think it is very cheezy and lazy when companies do this. When I talked to someone that worked there, I guess it was because of the hard constant “X” -it would make a better Hollywood movie if they said Artificial. Language. Expanded. Xenomorphic. Amplified. A. L. E. X. A.
Devin comes from "dev in chat", a common phrase in livestream chat rooms to signal that the developer of the game or product being showcased was present.
The short version of my name is one letter away from "Alexa". You can imagine how many comments and jokes about Amazon's AI assistant I've been party to for the past decade. Although it may be hard for you to believe I actually don't really care, much as you probably don't care about the hot dogs bearing your name that you see when you walk down the cold aisle in the grocery store. Should they instead call the anthropomorphized AI assistant something like "W'rkncacnter" to preclude the possibility of name collisions (chaotic entities imprisoned in alien stars notwithstanding)?
My Japanese mom always thought it was weird to put peoples names to destructive forces like hurricanes. I think she said in Japan use some numbering system (might be as simple as incrementing, I don't remember).
The US did this for a long time -- only numbering storms. In 1953 they switched to a list of names, female only. Then 25 years later to male and female names. It is kinda weird, and if they're destructive enough the name is retired. I think the idea is that people would pay more attention to human names in the warning process as the hurricanes approach land.
When I was 7, my family's Japanese foreign exchange student was being introduced to me.
She bursted out laughing saying my nick name Dev Dev sounded like "fart fart" or "fat fart".
Had the nickname fart fart until my sister moved out of the house.
Maybe you could confirm, but ChatGPT tells me in Japanese Debu colloquially and offensively means "fat" or "chubby", and Bu is an onomotapoeia for a fart noise, like "prrt" in English.
It appears your name is Alex, so I'm not surprised that the Alexa product name doesn't bother you. I suspect you would feel different if your name was Alexa. If the product was named Nate, it would bother me. There are plethora of other options for product names that companies can use besides common first names.
I think it's different when the product is an tool you call by name to use vs just the name of the tool. E.g. the article is about "Alexa" and I'm not sure most people even realize there are ways to use it without saying "Hey Alexa" every time. Without that type of callback association it's not a very serious concern.
I don't care about it potentially being a real name, because I doubt it would be a household item, but somehow the name itself for this particular product seems offputting.
If it had to be a name for a product, it seems like to give me some sort of cheap male grooming or AXE body spray product vibes.
