[HN Gopher] iOS 26.3 and macOS 26.3 Fix Dozens of Vulnerabilitie...
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iOS 26.3 and macOS 26.3 Fix Dozens of Vulnerabilities, Including
Zero-Day
Author : akyuu
Score : 94 points
Date : 2026-02-11 19:30 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.macrumors.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.macrumors.com)
| tailnode wrote:
| Why couldn't Apple patch the zero-day using their new Background
| Security Improvements pipeline?
|
| https://support.apple.com/en-us/102657
| jajuuka wrote:
| I imagine scheduling lined up for the 26.3 release and it
| wasn't considered dangerous enough. They did this with 26.2 as
| well including a fix for a zero day. I wonder if they are
| leveraging that to get people to update sooner. Imagine some
| people might be turned off of updating with the bugs and visual
| changes in 26. It's not like 26.2 or 26.3 have any major
| changes that are enticing.
| jiehong wrote:
| Their previous security updates feature was mostly unused.
|
| I suppose it's not really working, or is the product of a team
| and no other internal team actually use it.
| ProfessorLayton wrote:
| While I'm really glad they've fixed a bunch of important security
| vulnerabilities, I'm _really_ hoping they fixed the screen
| flickering issue [1] they introduced in macos 26. It has been
| driving me insane and even impacts my Studio Display. My work
| computer is locked to 15.7.3 and has no such issues with either
| the internal or external display (The same display flickers in
| 26).
|
| Really wish Apple would get their software quality up from the
| gutter.
|
| [1] https://www.macrumors.com/2025/12/18/macos-tahoe-studio-
| disp...
| ErneX wrote:
| A similar issue happens with Apple Silicon macs and external
| monitors since long time ago. A fix I found online [1] is to
| disable GPU dithering using the Better Display app.
|
| The flickering was so bad in my case that the pixels got stuck
| for some minutes when it happened.
|
| [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/s/TDOa9Lb5rP
| ProfessorLayton wrote:
| I tried that and many other things like changing the default
| color profile and it and it didn't work. A reboot fixes it
| for a few days before returning, so it definitely seems like
| a bug rather than a hardware issue. Both my work MBP (No
| issues, macos 15) and personal Air (macos26) are apple
| silicon.
| ErneX wrote:
| Dang, it worked for me, but my monitor is a 4K BenQ not a
| Studio Display, must be something else with those then.
| FarmerPotato wrote:
| iOS also flickers every time I exit an app back to the Home
| Screen.
|
| Weird green tints for no reason.. bubbles that take so long to
| inflate, you think your tap was dropped. Round edges that no
| longer fit the text content. Stupid ellipses at the edges of
| wrapped text. And all the functions that now take two taps when
| one used to do it. Text rendered on top of text for crying out
| loud! Whole view panes clobberin* each other. WebKit is a mess
| of wasted black bars where menus were hidden. Multiple flashes
| of white and black between content changes. It hits Apple apps
| as well as trashing third party layout.
|
| Too many defects to list.
|
| Headline: Apple celebrates 50th anniversary by burning down 40
| years of human interface knowledge.
| copperx wrote:
| Is this related to the 'Screen Mirroring' problem?
|
| When I connect my laptop to a projector, I can select an
| individual window, or at least I used to be able to select a
| window and just project that. However, now when I try to select
| the window, as soon as the mouse cursor gets near the selection
| button, the button disappears!!! It has been driving me
| absolutely insane.
| Aloisius wrote:
| I see flickering like crazy when I adjust the screen brightness
| on my M5 Macbook Pro on Tahoe.
|
| But it's _especially_ obvious when it dims itself based on
| ambient room brightness, I can actually see the vertical
| refresh happening as I move from a fully bright room to a dim
| one.
| vondur wrote:
| Wow, I have an M4 MacMini with a Studio Display and haven't
| seen that. Hope I don't Jinx it when I get home to use it...
| pikhq wrote:
| I hope they release a version of these fixes on iOS 18 in a form
| installable on an iPhone 14; I've been trying to stay away from
| Liquid Glass until it's actually usable. I really don't want to
| be forced to upgrade, since Apple seems to have replaced UX
| testing with "just ship it," as has become standard in the
| industry.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| Liquid Glass looks pretty from a distance, but my biggest gripe
| with the design language is just how difficult so many things
| become to read or interact with. Given that the whole raison
| d'etre of liquid glass is transparent effects, the options to
| limit that or otherwise increase contrast simply do not go far
| enough. I also balk at how much extra computing power is needed
| to generate effects I find no value in and would prefer to
| disable.
|
| My hope was that Apple would be forced to course correct in
| subsequent releases but that doesn't seem to be happening.
| tailnode wrote:
| They almost certainly will course-correct in the next release
| now that the culprit responsible for Liquid Glass is no
| longer at the company. But they won't chuck it out wholesale;
| it will be a gradual evolution back to sanity.
| dylan604 wrote:
| They reacted pretty quickly to the butterfly keyboard
| fiasco. By the time users received the shipping products of
| the first gen, the second gen were already in the pipeline
| so there was a slightly modified with only a dust cover
| being added. There was no third gen.
|
| Hopefully iOS 26.x releases will continue to correct Liquid
| Glass, but I'm guessing iOS 27 is well down the path with
| it still integrated. Maybe iOS 28 will see sanity return???
| procaryote wrote:
| Second gen butterfly keyboard broke a lot too. And then
| there was the no-esc touch bar, and the removal of
| inverted-T arrow keys... It took a few years of no good
| mac laptops before they backpedalled enough to get back
| to where they started
| zer0zzz wrote:
| I'm pretty sure butterfly keyboard was made worse when it
| came to the hotter rubbing higher power Mac's. I rarely
| saw folks with the original 12" low power model having
| issues.
|
| It was not an entirely bad concept for the device it was
| conceived for, but Apple has a habit of unifying their
| technologies to all their products and sometimes, like
| with Liquid Glass, that seriously doesn't work.
| derefr wrote:
| > I also balk at how much extra computing power is needed to
| generate effects I find no value in and would prefer to
| disable.
|
| I mean, "computing power" in a literal sense maybe, but does
| that matter if it doesn't translate to either "workload
| contention" or "electrical power"?
|
| I think the Liquid Glass effects, similar to smooth
| scrolling, are mostly just running as pixel shaders on a
| spare tile of one of the SoC's GPU's Streaming Processors --
| a tile that likely likely would have been idle-but-burning-
| power-anyway, given that GPU power management occurs on the
| level of entire SPs. It's the same reason that ProMotion
| "smooth viewport scrolling" doesn't really cost anything.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Workload contention. My iPhone 17 visibly struggles to
| render components with evident lagging - this is user-
| noticeable, if it were all done by an otherwise spare core
| I wouldn't notice these things.
| procaryote wrote:
| And even if they reserved a core, that would be a waste
| of a perfectly good core
| derefr wrote:
| AFAICT, the _steady-state_ Liquid Glass effects (think:
| the address bar in Safari, staying static itself while
| you scroll the page under it) cost nothing. That 's what
| I meant above.
|
| _Animating_ the Liquid Glass widgets (i.e. changing
| their position or shape), on the other hand, does seem to
| cost a lot / produce lag.
|
| I get the impression that this is down to the UI toolkit
| not being optimized for whatever Liquid Glass is doing in
| terms of recalculating constraints during animations.
| (When the GPU overruns its time budget while computing
| shaders for the compositor, the visual effect is of
| [double-buffered] texture buffers dropping/repeating
| frames, not slowdown. Actual "lag" in a GPU-composited UI
| is either from CPU work, or from one-shot CUDA-type GPU
| "prerender jobs".)
|
| I get the sense that Apple rushed out some shitty code
| that has some of these components re-evaluating a bunch
| of their placement and sizing constraints on every non-
| static animation frame (rather than just giving the
| Liquid Glass shaders the ability to do declarative
| tweens.)
|
| Or maybe the shaders already _do_ declarative tweens, but
| Apple are doing tons of redundant on-CPU per-frame
| recalculations, to re-do any constraint-based layout for
| everything _around_ the component during the animation,
| that _might_ be impacted by the component 's current
| tweened state. I dunno.
|
| Either way, it's definitely silly, and could be re-
| engineered to work a lot better.
|
| But it's also not really "Liquid Glass's fault" (i.e.
| something inherent to the _visual design_ ); it's just
| (AFAICT) bad implementation engineering, rushed to give
| Apple something to talk about besides its failure to
| launch Apple Intelligence.
| astrange wrote:
| It's a very complicated system. Performance issues are
| bad but they're not necessarily caused by how the UI
| looks.
|
| You can report an issue by typing applefeedback:// into
| Safari if you want.
| rdtsc wrote:
| > I also balk at how much extra computing power is needed to
| generate effects I find no value in and would prefer to
| disable
|
| Sounds like you need to spend some money for a new Apple
| device! /s
| Reason077 wrote:
| > _"My hope was that Apple would be forced to course correct
| in subsequent releases but that doesn 't seem to be
| happening."_
|
| I'm optimistic that they _will_ eventually course correct on
| Liquid Glass, but we'll have to wait until iOS /macOS 27, or
| perhaps longer.
|
| There are parallels to Apple's butterfly keyboard fiasco on
| the hardware side. Sleek looking on the surface but an
| objective step backwards in usability. Unfortunately it took
| Apple several years to reverse course on that one.
| kergonath wrote:
| > There are parallels to Apple's butterfly keyboard fiasco
| on the hardware side.
|
| There are also parallels with the original pinstripes-and-
| transparency-everywhere aqua UI. I am also optimistic that
| it will be toned down over time but retaining the
| responsiveness.
| ibejoeb wrote:
| The Windows ME/Fisher Price look. I can get past the drag
| handle problem. It's like every window is now the damn ios
| simulator.
| bs7280 wrote:
| My biggest frustrations with it aren't even related to the
| look of things, its the all around disregard for user
| experience. The new screenshot UX on iOS is an insanely bad
| downgrade.
| SchemaLoad wrote:
| I think it makes sense. They refocused it on sharing or
| extracting information from screenshots. Which is what
| people want more than saving them to the camera roll. Being
| able to copy text or translate the text in a screenshot is
| super useful.
| jimsmart wrote:
| Just go to Settings > General > Screen Capture, and turn
| off Full-Screen Previews - which fully restores the
| previous behaviour.
|
| Personally I prefer the new behaviour.
|
| But eitherways: it's just an option.
| layer8 wrote:
| They won't, it already didn't happen for 18.7.4 and 18.7.3
| (only via beta channel for the latter), and the present fixes
| are being released as 18.7.5 for the iPhone XS/XR. Still I
| think that staying on iOS 18 is the lesser evil.
| Cider9986 wrote:
| I recommend installing liquid glass on iOS. It actually has
| been looking good on there since 26.2. Macs have been godawful
| with liquid glass.
| sillywalk wrote:
| Doesn't look like it. It looks like it's only iPhone XS, iPhone
| XS Max, iPhone XR
|
| https://support.apple.com/en-us/126347
| aydyn wrote:
| > I've been trying to stay away from Liquid Glass until it's
| actually usable.
|
| This sounds overly dramatic. You may not like the design but
| its 100% usable.
| dewey wrote:
| Indeed, based on all the "look at that, you can't even read
| xyz" screenshots around release time I thought it will be
| really bad. Upgraded and...it's fine. After a week you don't
| notice anything and the old OS will look dated. Just like
| every design change and any product that causes a lot of
| noise in the first week.
|
| On the Mac it's much rougher than on iOS.
| JoeBOFH wrote:
| I am a newer iPhone user (2 years now) and I am of the same
| opinion as you. I see so many people crying foul, that their
| phone is now unusable, but I'm just hear going "eh it's
| uglier" and continuing. Curious what OP thinks is
| fundamentally broken.
|
| Now I have heard about issues on MacOS and things but not
| really anything around the phone.
| icedchai wrote:
| It's usable. It is also noticeably slower on my iPhone 13,
| even after turning on "reduce transparency."
| piskov wrote:
| Reduce motion, that will help
| epistasis wrote:
| It's about 60% as usable. Weird and distracting jiggling
| makes it hard to target where the button will be.
|
| Also the placement of buttons and functionality is completely
| scattered around the UIs, which severely reduces usability.
| What do all the mystery meat buttons do now? One has to
| relearn all the UX. There's a ton of improvement needed, it's
| about first-draft level quality.
|
| Dark mode UI elements are almost invisible too, frequently.
|
| It has a "my first redesign project" feel everywhere. On
| macOS I upgraded right away and it was a huge downgrade on
| performance. On iPhone I waited until 26.2, and merely had to
| suffer far lower usability.
| Aloha wrote:
| Now if they'd only fix the CarPlay issues, I really miss working
| navigation in my car.
|
| I have called and opened tickets, and I keep hearing it'll be
| fixed real soon now.
| pier25 wrote:
| Were Sequoia and iOS 18 affected?
| bayesnet wrote:
| Is there any word on whether these vulnerabilities were
| exploitable on devices with MIE[0]?
|
| [0]: https://security.apple.com/blog/memory-integrity-
| enforcement...
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| macOS was so buggy for me a few days ago that I updated my
| computer to the public beta. Boom, problem solved. So bizarre.
| copperx wrote:
| Do you feel an improvement in speed? My 32GB RAM M5 MBP is slow
| as molasses in Tahoe. My M1 MBA feels much faster (I haven't
| updated yet).
| seanieb wrote:
| Careful if you're still on MacOS Sequoia, Apple has hidden Tahoe
| as a default under updates. If you click updated now it
| automatically upgrade you to Tahoe.
| fainpul wrote:
| If that's true, that would be new:
|
| https://daringfireball.net/2025/11/software_update_tahoe_con...
| seanieb wrote:
| I believe it is new. I've never seen them: - put a upgrade os
| version under "updates" - then select the upgrade os version
| instead the current version when there are multiple updates (
| os patch, safari or xcode)
| altern8 wrote:
| Now if they'd only fix--meaning remove--Liquid Glass and other
| nonsense that they've added, I could stop sticking to Sequoia..?
| an-allen wrote:
| This one - I have seen some shit folks. This one is not good.
| ost-ing wrote:
| Maybe they can fix Messages from bugging out all the time. Apple
| software has gone down the drain. I don't want a million new
| features I just want the ones that make a phone a phone actually
| work 99.5% of the time
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| No problems with Messages here.
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(page generated 2026-02-11 23:00 UTC)