iOS 26 Impressions & Review! Worth the hype?

0:00 Hey, how's it going? I'm Josh from 911 Tech and with WWDC25, we've seen the iOS 26 developer beta drop, I've installed it on a few iPhones, uh, this iPhone 12, an iPhone 11, and an iPhone SE 2 second generation. And today, I'd like to take some time to discuss the event and what's new, how the update performs on older iPhones, and sort of my overall thoughts and impressions of iOS 26 as a whole. Keep in mind this is literally the day one developer beta that I'm using. So I've seen a good few bugs and glitches and performance issues and we'll probably see the vast vast majority of that clear up by the time this officially launches this fall. Also, big disclaimer. If you want to give iOS 26 a shot, the beta is pretty straightforward to install, but do not do this on your main driver. If you have an old iPhone or something lying around,

0:47 absolutely go for it. It's fun. But installing a beta on a phone that you actually use every day is a terrible idea. particularly these really early developer betas, they're generally going to be very unstable, often slow and inconsistent. So, if you are going to go for it, in the very least, back up your phone so you can roll it back if need be. And the good news here is that iOS 26 is coming to almost every iPhone that runs iOS 18 with the exception of the iPhone XR, 10S, and XS Max. So, when this does officially come out, you'll probably will be able to get it, unless you're on one of those phones, in which case maybe it is time for an upgrade. Although, if it's working for you, hey, I mean, fair enough. This is one of those updates that's probably going to get a lot of buzz around it, probably more so than the last few years. Uh because number one, yeah, the name is iOS 26, not iOS 19. This was done so Apple could unify their naming scheme across all of their software platforms.

1:33 And while it is kind of amusing that we've skipped iOS 19 through to 25, I do think this was a smart move from Apple since it could be a bit annoying to remember each individual version for all of their different platforms. I mean, you had like Mac OS 15, watch OS 11, iOS 18. kind of hard to keep them straight and uh it's definitely easier just to have them named after the year. So, that's number one. Number two, my initial impressions upon watching the WWDC event with the boys over on the Discord server. Shout out to them. Make sure you come join the community if you haven't already, by the way. I was thoroughly wellelmed. Not overwhelmed, not underwhelmed, just wellelmed. Things started off very strong with Craig's hair, and then it all kind of sort of slowly went downhill from there. But it still started very strong, especially with this allnew redesign

2:19 said to be the biggest since iOS 7. Pretty high bar. And does it live up to the hype? Well, sort of. I think uh I'm kind of mixed on it. It's all going to be very subjective, of course. And I like it, but I don't really love it. And it starts with an entirely new expressive material we call liquid glass. Across all of Apple's software, we've got this new liquid glass look to everything. Taking cues from Vision OS, we're finally moving on from the much flatter look that we've seen for many years. We've got translucency everywhere from the widgets to the icons, notifications, basically any and every element of the UI. It gives this depth and sort of a 3D look to the software that I do think adds some character that was missing. Someone on the Discord I heard compared this to like Microsoft's

3:04 Windows 7, what they were doing with that and all the transparency. And I agree, it is kind of like that. You know, it's something different and I kind of dig it. Like why not, right? Might as well change things up. And uh we'll look at the design a bit closer shortly. As for other big iOS 26 features, as I said, the events kind of uh started on a high and then just went down from there. The phone app and FaceTime app are getting for the first time an actual redesign. Seriously, if you look at the first iPhone and compare it to the current phone app on iOS 18, it's almost identical. Like the UI has been refreshed. You know, it's more minimalist now, like flatter, more modern, but it looks like almost identical. So, they're finally changing that. And hey, I mean, there's a reason they hadn't really had to change it, right? It was very functional. It was easy to understand and use, but this new update looks pretty all right to me. I I don't have any issues with it, so sure,

3:49 why not? It's probably about time after uh well, close to two decades now. That's crazy. So, yeah, they just modernized things a bit with both the phone app and FaceTime. We're also finally getting proper uh call screening, which is something Google has had for quite a while, but I'm I'm really glad we're getting that, as well as a hold assist feature for when you're on hold. So, that's nice. iMessage has some additions like you can change the background of your messages and there's polls for group chats finally as well as indicators to show when someone in a group is typing again finally and there's even a screening feature for spam texts which is nice to have and a lot of this you know it's stuff that should have been there but I guess better late than never right there's lots of little AI things of course um some live translation features quite a few of those that are being integrated throughout iOS Apple Maps learns your routine and can suggest new routes dependent on like traffic or road

4:35 closures or whatever ever. Plus, it can record your visited places, which is nice. There's a new dedicated games app, which uh yeah, some people play games on their phone. It's crazy, but now there's an app for it. You guys remember Game Center? It It's still there. It never left. Just no one uses it. So, I guess Apple's trying to combat that. Now, you can combine multiple emojis together with Genoji. We're all just ecstatic about this addition. And chat GBT has been added to Image Playground. Again, extremely exciting. I am so thrilled. Uh the music app has an automix feature. We've also got like the lyric translations now, right? another translation feature. There's a digital ID in the wallet app. The camera app has gone like super minimalist. You got to swipe for more settings. And I'm not sure how I feel about this one to be honest. Now, the photos app uh also seems to have been improved after the absolute disaster that was the iOS 18 photos app update. It confused a lot of

5:22 people. It's not It was bad, and now it seems a little more simple and straightforward, and that's good. There are some more minor things. There's lots of minor things, but honestly, the biggest change really does come down to the user interface and uh liquid glass. Uh the lock screen changes. I haven't mentioned those. Those seem fun with the time able to dynamically adapt to the photo that you have for your wallpaper as it kind of moves the subject and there's this 3D effect as you move your phone as well. If you get a notification, everything kind of just adapts to it and it's cool. Credit to Apple for attention to detail here. I think this is kind of neat. And note, this is a feature only available on the um iPhone 12 and better. I'm guessing it's too intensive for the older phones, I guess. Uh naturally, a lot of the Apple intelligence stuff is only going to be on the iPhone 15 Pro and the 16 line at the moment as well. But yeah, the rest of the update really boils down to uh mostly just those minor changes

6:08 that come with the UI. And calling the minor seems harsh because it is kind of everywhere, but a UI change. It's a UI change. For the most part, iOS still feels like iOS to me. For the rest of the event, CarPlay is getting better. There's the new watch OS, Mac OS, Tahoe, there's iPad OS, Vision OS, Apple TV. Nothing that really stood out to me that I want to talk about. I've always been more of an iPhone guy after all. Heck, uh even my Apple Watch here is the Series 5, so the new update stuff does not apply to me. And uh I didn't even get the last major update, I don't think. So I got to upgrade this thing. It does work fine, but the battery is kind of starting to feel it. So yeah, I'll probably upgrade this year. The windowing system on iPad OS kind of seemed neat to me. But I honestly I feel like Apple should just give it full-blown Mac OS at this point cuz until they do, I just can't take iPad seriously as like a computer replacement, which I think is what Apple

6:54 wants it to be. But it's like it's not going to be there until you give it Mac OS and all the freedom that comes with that. But iOS 26, my impressions actually using it. Uh, I have iOS 26 here on a few different phones from the iPhone 12, iPhone 11, and iPhone SE 2 generation. The 11, 11 Pro, and SE2 are the oldest iPhones running iOS 26. And again, they're missing the new lock screen features. I'm very curious to see how iOS 26 performs on those devices and we'll talk about that. Particularly the SE2 since it only has 3 GB of RAM whereas every other iPhone including the 11 and of course the 11 Pro has at least 4 gigs of RAM. So this phone technically isn't the oldest iPhone that can run it, but it is like the lowest tier iPhone at this point. It's also like 50 bucks on eBay, by the way. So lowkey like maybe a

7:40 super good deal for somebody who just needs a phone for like the absolute basics. But I digress. If you hear little noises, by the way, my my dog is on my desk. She uh she had to be involved. Watching Apple introduced this, I definitely had some flashbacks to how iOS 7 brutalized basically every iPhone than the iPhone 5 when it came out in 2013 with all its transparency and UI stuff and animations and everything. Uh it just slowed those old phones down big time. And I have faith Apple's not doing that again this time. I think they learned their lesson. And of course, phones these days are not nearly as hindered by the old hardware as they used to be. still all these translucent liquid glass UI elements. I was a little worried. You've got to imagine it'll ramp up the amount of strain on these older phones compared to iOS 18 and earlier. And so far, my experience uh well, first I tried the

8:26 iPhone 12 and it was really slow when I first uh got it started. But once I used it for a bit, it did speed up quite a lot. And now it it's pretty fine. Uh it kind of just needed to like get warmed up, I guess. You can see it was delayed there. These are I mean that that's pretty typical when you first boot up a phone. Anyways, lag wasn't infrequent when opening apps or just swiping around the UI, but this is a beta, so some of that is probably just typical beta jank. Anyways, overall, iPhone 12 performance at least seemed okay. As for the other phones, we'll talk about those in a minute. In terms of the UI, we've got some new options here when we customize things. You've got the default look, the light and dark modes, of course, the tinted icons have been updated, and now we also have this clear option, which gives this like clear glass kind of look to all the icons, which, you know, cool. Sure. It kind of reminds me of like old jailbreaking themes or something you would do on like iOS 9 back in the day.

9:13 I don't mind it. It's nice and I'm not really sure if I would use the clear option specifically myself, but versus like the tinted option. Still very cool. And I really do appreciate how in the last couple years here uh Apple's really been working on the customizability of their software cuz for a long time basically every iPhone, no matter the individual user, they all kind of looked the same. And that is no longer the case if you know how to customize it to begin with, which a lot of users probably will never do. But still, the options there. Those of us watching this video probably will, right? So, I'm glad Apple's kind of adding some of these options, and it just spices things up a little bit. As for bugs, I've had plenty of them. Uh, I had this fun one on my iPhone 11 where while attempting to customize the home screen, the entire display just kind of went blank. It did come back after a bit. Uh, but then when trying to customize it again or even just add a

9:58 widget, nothing was happening. So, this is the beta. This kind of thing is the norm. One thing I don't really like uh but might get changed is when you use the clear icons and then you go to the settings app, every icon in the settings has this very boring basic gray icon. I don't like this because it makes it a little bit more difficult to immediately differentiate each setting to know exactly where you need to go. Like if you want to go to the battery, the battery is going to be green normally versus, you know, everything's gray. The same issue happens if you use tinted icons. It's just whatever color you chose. But it bothers me more with the clear for whatever reason. Uh, I think just because gray is really boring, but also I don't think it would be the biggest problem if they were all still kind of colorcoded in settings. I don't know. Just something I thought I'd mention. You know, I wasn't huge on that with iOS 18 as well. Doing that with the tinted icons, it makes it just a little harder sometimes to navigate settings.

10:44 Just like just that slight half second where it takes you got to find what you're looking for. Also, I don't know if this is an oversight or if it's going to stay like this, but the the camera icon in settings is still the old one. They haven't updated it to look like the new camera icon. So, I don't know. Maybe that's intentional. I I have no no clue. But let's talk about some of those new icons. Uh first off, my favorite absolutely is the new camera icon. Um it feels like a real throwback to old iOS and it brings some skuorphism back to iPhone for the first time in I don't know how long really. I really don't have that much to say. The icons mostly aren't massively different from the same general look that we've had for a very long time, just with a bit more depth to it. You know, this glass effect. The clock app has a white border to it now. And this is very interesting because it is the first time the clock app has ever really changed. Uh even going from like

11:31 old iOS to iOS 7. It still looked very similar and now it's different. The times they are changing. Quick shout out to the iOS 6:00 icon for the iPad. Yeah, this was a thing. There is a shocking amount of history behind that icon. Apple paid a lot to use it. But anyways, let's keep going here. The liquid glass stuff applies to pretty much any floating UI element in the software. That's all kind of changed like in the music app or Safari or wherever else. Pop-ups look different now. Buttons have this glassy depth to them and it's on the whole fine. Again, I'm kind of just welmed. Uh Apple, I feel like, is really trying to hype this up as a big new redesign, the biggest since iOS 7, but it still just doesn't feel that different to me. I do appreciate how we are moving away from that flat, boring kind of look that has plagued user

12:16 interfaces for over a decade. I think Windows 8 is one of the earliest examples of just that that the tile like just basic colors flat look that we've seen everywhere and gradients and all that and like it can look really nice but I don't know just changing things up a little bit it it doesn't hurt right even if it is just you know change for the sake of change but yeah while I like some of this stuff it's not so amazing that I'm going to rush to download the new update on my main driver anytime soon when it officially releases then I'll get the update but until then I'm plenty happy on iOS 18 myself So, performance overall on the iPhone 12, it felt slow initially, but sped up with a few minutes of usage. I didn't experience any huge bugs on this phone specifically, just a bit of jank here and there, but again, it's the beta, so crashes, bugs, you're going to see it happen, and I did see it happen on both

13:03 the SE and the iPhone 11. And as for those phones, I was much more interested to see how the performance would be. And like with the iPhone 12, they were very slow initially. It does this thing with the icons. Uh, I've noticed it a few times. There's definitely some jank here and it's it doesn't feel fast or fluid to me, but it's not like super slow either. Overall, this phone and the SE, they both seem to run fine. Now, these are devices I have dedicated for review, so they're not anywhere close full for storage. And if they were, they might be a lot slower. That's a common thing with these phones. If the storage is nearly full, they tend to slow down. Also, if you have a bad battery, it could slow down. I can't speak quite yet to how this update might affect battery life, so we'll have to see what people say there. But when it comes to the basics, the phones seemed all right to me. Uh I'm positive to report that we're not seeing another iPhone 4 on iOS 7 sort of

13:49 situation, or heaven forbid, the iPhone 4S on iOS 9. Uh the worst ever iPhone experience, I would say. So yeah, these phones are getting pretty old. The iPhone 11 and 11 Pro are 6 years old now, or almost 6 years old, and the 2020 SE2 has the same chip as them, plus less RAM. So it's in an even worse spot. I would be absolutely shocked if any of these phones get iOS 27. And if you're using any of them right now, I would be pretty tempted at this point to upgrade soon. Uh not really so much because of the updates situation as the fact that these are just older phones. Like uh hey, if you can get die on an old phone, props to you. I don't have enough patience for it and you would probably need a lot of patience to use some of these phones on the daily. Not that they're terrible, they're just not fast either and that would drive me nuts. Also, good chance with a phone this old

14:35 your battery could be shot. So, that's another reason to potentially upgrade soon. I'll link my iPhone buying guide in the description below if you're curious as to maybe what you should upgrade to. But again, for those of you who are doing just fine on these, hey, might as well get as much life out of your phone as you can, or even maybe wait for the iPhone 17 line later this year. Also, when you do lose major iOS updates, it's not like your device is suddenly obsolete and dead. So, those of you maybe still on the 10R or the 10S, you don't need to like panic or anything just because you're losing major support later this year. uh you're still going to be able to download the vast majority of apps on the App Store for a few years. And Apple's also really good with providing security updates and things. Uh for example, the iPhone 6S is stock on iOS 15, but it had an update as recently as March 31st, 2025. That's amazing, honestly. Like, that's a 10-year-old phone at this point, just

15:21 about. So, to sum up my thoughts here, I'll say it once again. I am thoroughly whelmed. Is this a major new redesign on par with what we got in iOS 7 like 12 years ago? No, it's not. Not even remotely close, but it does still somewhat shake up the iOS experience in a pretty noticeable fashion, possibly to the greatest extent that we've seen since iOS 7. Like, it might be the biggest update since iOS 7 in terms of the design. It's just nowhere near as big as iOS 7 was. It still feels like iOS just with a new layer of paint. And I think that's fine. I think that's good. Drastically changing up the experience isn't always a good thing. Like, it can really leave people confused and unsure of how to actually use their device. We get new major iOS versions every single year, and Apple's only going to change so much at a time. So, overall, you know, I'm pretty

16:07 content with this update, and I'm very glad they're finally adding some features like call screening. It's about darn time. I don't think this update is so exciting. It's worth installing the beta on your main driver. Don't do that, please. Like, you're going to regret it. In the very least, back up your phone first, but like, just don't do it. It's not worth it. Especially these early betas. Like, it's bad. Like, these things are so buggy. But if you do have a spare iPhone lying around that can run the update, then hey, why not, right? It's kind of fun. Otherwise, you're not missing out too much until it officially drops this fall. So, what do you all think of iOS 26? Do you like the new look with this whole liquid glass thing? Are you excited for the update, or is Apple overhyping it? What do you think? Let us know in the comments down below. Hopefully, you found this video interesting or helpful. And if so, please hit that like button and consider subscribing for more tech content. Huge shout out to the channel members. Thank you guys so much for your support and

16:53 helping me feed my dog. And we do have a Discord server if you'd like to come join the community over there. And yeah, thank you all for watching. I'm Josh from 911 Tech. This is Cola from 91. And we will see you all next time. [Music]