Apple leaves Liquid Glass free: iOS 26 & Co available for download

If the iPhone suddenly looks very different: Apple’s new liquid glass design faces a multimillion audience with the publication of iOS 26. After a three-month beta phase, the operating system upgrade has been available for the general public since Monday evening. In parallel, upgrades are available for iPados, macos, watchos, tvos and visionos, all of them are uniformly the version number 26.

Liquid Glass: Problems with readability

The biggest and immediately caught innovation is a new user interface based on the “Liquid Glass” design-and contains in all systems. The large redesign announced in June relies on transparent controls, through which background content shines through. Overall, the system is designed to be much airier, buttons emphasizes Apple more clearly.

Especially with iPhone and iPad, the manufacturer allows even more personalization, for example on the lock screen and in the app icons, which can now be displayed uniformly and colorless in a glass look. Liquid Glass already caused countless heated discussions during the beta. There were many complaints, especially with regard to readability. The group improved several times and should make further adjustments in the coming weeks and months. Several developers have used the summer to adapt their apps to Liquid Glass – numerous updates have already been published, many more are likely to follow.

Many new functions

Apple delivers a number of new functions for system and its own apps. This year IPADOS 26 particularly benefits, which now comes up with a free window system and takes over trusted Mac elements such as the menu bar. In MacOS 26 Taoe, the Spotlight search was significantly expanded and serves as a command center, among other things, to carry out short commands and app campaigns. Apps can also use Apple’s local AI model for the first time, which is installed on devices with Apple Intelligence. And iPhone users are able to have screenshots analyzed by Apple’s AI models, Chatgpt or Google Lens.

For telephone and news app, the company delivers extended spam filters and translation functions. At the same time, Apple also unlocked new health functions on Monday: the Health app now creates a sleep index and, if desired, reminds you to measure the blood pressure. Newer Apple Watches (from Series 9, Ultra 2 and SE 3) can warn if the wearer may have high blood pressure.

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IOS 26 & Co run on these devices

The iPhone 11 is the new minimum requirement for iOS 26, the update cannot be installed on iPhone XS (Max) and iPhone XR. Among the iPads that support iPados 18, this time only the iPad 7 (2019) is left out.

At Intel-MAC, the manufacturer continues to sort out: the MacBook Air (early 2020), the MacBook Pro 13 “with two ports (2018, 2019 and early 2020), the MacBook Pro 15” (2018, 2019), the Mac Mini 2018, IMAC 2019 and the IMAC Pro can not install MacOS 26 TAHO. Watchos 26 runs – just like the predecessor Watchos 11 – on all Apple Watches from Series 6 and SE 2.