alt Hacker NewsiOS 26 made clear that apple completely lost their UX advantage they had in the past. A lot of things were changed to "look better", while completely ignoring that it made UX worse. I think they just lost the people and the know-how to design good UX. Just making it look "pretty" is not good UX.
Exactly, they lost all the attention to detail, all the pursuit of clarity, all that was abandoned.
IMHO it's far less "pretty" than before too, in addition to just being an outright mess. And that's when it's working as intended.
There's still loads of obvious bugs in dark mode, where there's completely incompatible outlines and rounded rectangles with incompatible radii and overlapping elements that are clearly not intended.
That's on top of how the individual UX elements were mangled to fit into poor categorization schemes, with unnecessary complexity. Two things that bite me every single day are the completely overcomplicated screenshot interface that slows interaction by a great deal, and navigating to Safari history, which requires tapping a "Bookmarks" button.
And on macOS, the pointless visual noise of icons by menu items, that are each indecipherable, incoherent, and inconsistent between apps.. It's just unprofessional all around. I'm not surprised that the VP responsible left that same year, but there's been no fix, which is awful.