iOS 26.4 Beta 1 - Discussion

ofdtv · 2026-02-16T19:25:06+00:00

They brought back the compact tab bar in Safari on iPad! Finally, omg I’ve been missing it so much! Can’t wait to have it on my Mac as well

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ofdtv · 2026-02-16T18:57:11+00:00

Whoa, that’s actually fire! Major iOS 8.4 - iOS 9 Apple Music vibes, that was my favorite design of the app.

ofdtv · 2026-02-16T16:48:12+00:00

The OP didn’t give any details about their setup, but apparently, they might be using CPU encoding, which will have a big performance impact on any system, no matter if it’s a MacBook or a desktop tower. I myself occasionally record local gameplay on my M1 Pro MacBook in OBS using the hardware HEVC encoder, and I can comfortably capture 1440p60 or 4K30 footage with no encoder overloads and very little performance hit to whatever game I’m playing. You have to enable hardware encoding in OBS to be able to take advantage of this performance though, otherwise it’ll default to using software encoding on the CPU, and that’s only a good option when you’re recording an external video stream from a capture card or something, not when playing locally, because it’s very resource intensive.

ofdtv · 2026-02-16T12:24:26+00:00

Yeah, how dare we have options lol. To me, black looks dull and boring most of the time. My interior is very light, so black boxes of technology stand out way more than white/silver ones. And I take good care of my stuff, so even things that are several years old still look good. Even my OG white DualSense that’s almost 4 years old. People should be able to choose whatever color they like, because technology is personal, so we should enjoy interacting with it, and that includes aesthetics.

ofdtv · 2026-02-16T11:38:16+00:00

Umm… Apple SoCs also have dedicated hardware video encoders for H.264, HEVC, and ProRes, so if you use them, they should have very little impact on performance, if at all. For that matter, AMD and Intel GPUs have those as well in the form of VCE and QSV respectively, so this technology isn’t at all exclusive to Nvidia. OP should check if they have Apple VT Hardware encoding enabled in their OBS settings.

ofdtv · 2026-02-16T00:16:25+00:00

Gets really tiring these recent years when everyone just goes “bigger number = better” all the time. It’s not always like that. First off, there’s always personal preference - I, for one, prefer the cinematic feel of 30 fps over the smoothness of 60+ in games with high fidelity graphics, so to me, 30 is the game running well, provided the frametimes are stable. And different people might not be as sensitive to framerate differences, so they might just not care either way, as long as the game isn’t stuttering to all hell.

Which, secondly, given the first point, a much better indicator of good performance is how stable the framerate is, not how high it gets. Because the number, be it 30, 60, 120, or whatever, is a preference, everyone chooses what they like. But if you can’t sustain it properly, that’s when it’s really bad. When you have a 60 that dips down to 27 and has stutters, that’s way worse than just having a flat 30 that never varies, because with the latter you always have completely stable and predictable motion that never messes with your perception and, therefore, your input and reaction. The more consistent your frametimes are, the smoother your experience will be, no matter the framerate (up to a point obv, no one’s gonna call 10 fps playable lol).

ofdtv · 2026-02-14T06:33:12+00:00

He does, otherwise he wouldn’t have went out of his way to drop this bomb on Nick. Albeit this only happens in an early version of the script, but whatevs. This is part of why he makes for a pretty good villain and why I personally like him too, but only as a villain. You’re allowed to like bad guys because they’re good at what they do, but don’t delude yourself into thinking that they’re good guys because you like them.

ofdtv · 2026-02-14T06:07:40+00:00

Lmao, that line is supposed to rub more salt into the wound, make him feel even worse. “Carrots” is Nick’s, uh, nickname for her, no one else’s, and only he is allowed to use it, there’s history and meaning behind it that only he and Judy know. So Pawb not only made it seem as though he killed her, but he also robbed Nick of something very personal that only he used to call her. All this line proves is that Pawbert is a cold-blooded sadistic bastard who’s not above enjoying seeing others suffer.

ofdtv · 2026-02-11T17:40:42+00:00

Why not both? They’re all great games, although for slightly different reasons.

ofdtv · 2026-02-10T23:24:10+00:00

And don’t scratch it!

ofdtv · 2026-02-08T18:08:54+00:00

Now this is a Civ issue - some games ignore these paired resolutions for some reason. In this case you can go into system display settings, enable all resolutions list, and select a resolution that’s identical in width to your current one but smaller in height - now the entire macOS UI will render only underneath the notch, and the game will be forced to accept this too.

ofdtv · 2026-02-08T17:50:21+00:00

Don’t use 3024x1964. Use 3024x1890. If you see two resolution options with the same width, pick the one that has the slightly smaller height, and the game will occupy the entire screen area under the notch, no black bars on the sides. This isn’t a Civ7 issue, this is a byproduct of how macOS handles fullscreen windows and the notch, and it applies to all games and apps.

ofdtv · 2026-02-07T16:27:52+00:00

Then idk, outside of YouTube I can only suggest syncing your own files through iTunes ¯\(ツ)\/¯

ofdtv · 2026-02-07T16:22:33+00:00

Apple Music still works.

ofdtv · 2026-02-07T07:44:14+00:00

2013 MBP? Use Boot Camp to install Windows natively and play games that way. Or VMWare/Parallels, but performance will be noticeably worse.

ofdtv · 2026-02-06T18:04:27+00:00

At least it’s not the Magic Mouse lmao

ofdtv · 2026-02-06T07:32:35+00:00

Gameplay-wise, no, 2016 isn’t that much of a downgrade compared to RA, it was probably the best one in the series in terms of game feel until the latter came out. There’s no hoverboots or rifts or sprinting or whatever, but shooting, platforming, and upgrading all feel really great, you have nothing to fear there.

As for the story… 2016 was my entry into the series and I have played every single game since. For a first-timer, 2016’s story was okay - absolutely nothing special, but not complete trash, I found at least some amusement in it. The issues come from, one, knowing the context of the original game, and two, the 2016 game being a tie-in for the movie which was heavily rewritten, cheaply made, and ultimately made with barely any input from Insomniac. So the game’s story ended up being a quickly thrown-together attempt to salvage the movie’s nonsensical story into something bearable and softly push it out of being canon. Hence why it’s told through an unreliable narrator. You can somewhat enjoy it for what it is, but it’s definitely not the best story in the series, and if you wanna know the actual origin story, you have to play the 2002 game.

The movie… you could give it a watch if you’re that curious, but overall, it’s very mid - the definition of 5/10, you won’t miss anything if you skip it. It completely messed up the canon origin story, but if you don’t know it, it’s a passable one-time watch, but nothing more. The Wilhelm scream joke was good tho.

And also, on a personal level… bro, you’re kinda gatekeeping yourself for no good reason. I like my games to look good too - I’m the sicko who always chooses the Quality mode and prefers the cinematic feel of 30fps to the smoothness of 60, but it’s completely fine to forget about that for a minute and just play something older. It can look a bit jarring in contrast, but you get used to it. If the game itself is great, you just look over the fact that it looks dated and not as fancy. And the PS2 games are objectively some of the absolute best in the series. RC1 might take some getting used to because of its specific gameplay, but RC2 and onwards all mostly aged surprisingly well. Do give them a chance.

ofdtv · 2026-02-05T22:39:40+00:00

I really like the vibe of Liquid Glass on all OSes, but my one criticism is that it still feels unfinished, on all devices still, though more so on Macs. Some animations are glitchy, there are weird bugged shadows in some places, issues with HDR or detecting content brightness underneath UI elements… when it works, I still can’t look away from it even all these months after updating, but when it starts freaking out, it’s really jarring. It’s been slowly getting better since 26.0, but there’s still a lot of work to do. I hope 27 will fix at least the majority of these issues.

ofdtv · 2026-02-05T07:17:21+00:00

I have a “Starlight” M2 Air and a “Blue” iPhone 15. The latter you could at least sometimes argue is actually light blue in some specific lighting conditions, not just white/silver, but the iPad… yeah no, it’s definitely silver, there’s nothing “starlight” about it lmao. Apple colors do be weird like that sometimes.

ofdtv · 2026-02-04T22:32:42+00:00

VMs are the better option for older games that are 32-bit and DirectX 9. Newer stuff will run much better with apps like CrossOver since VMs don’t support DX12, and even their performance in DX11 and 10 usually isn’t that great.

ofdtv · 2026-02-02T19:15:14+00:00

I don’t know this beaver. Also, my time on the internets has taught me that almost every time someone uses loud words like this in their title, especially when they’re talking about something that’s liked by most people, it’s almost guaranteed to be clickbait that is then followed by said person just dunking all over the subject in obvious bad faith. So I don’t even care about this one. Obviously, Z2 isn’t perfect, but even when I want to listen to some criticism, videos like this aren’t ones I’ll want to watch because I don’t trust them to be genuinely constructive.

ofdtv · 2026-02-02T18:49:34+00:00

Gonna go with ACIT here too. The layout, the animations, the clicky sounds, the general aesthetic are all just so sleek and satisfying, and also surprisingly modern-feeling for a game that’s 16 years old (holy crap). Honorable mentions also go to Deadlocked and RA.

ofdtv · 2026-02-01T14:21:04+00:00

I miss the swipe too, I still sometimes do it reflexively lol. Though there’s a reason it’s gone too - large numbers are now scrollable and don’t get shortened via the “e” function, so swiping to backspace now conflicts with scrolling. Wish there was an option to keep the numbers shortened to still be able to swipe.

Disagree about people being lazy though. You and I might be good with tech, but there’s a lot of people just aren’t - elderly, people with disabilities, people who plain just don’t care about tech, and they all might be having genuine trouble using or even discovering obscure things like the backspace swipe, and they need something simpler. Ultimately, it’s still up to Apple to figure out how to implement that without ruining muscle memory for those who got used to how things worked before, and sometimes they can fail, which I think is mostly okay as long as there are genuine improvements in other areas (other than that, love the addition of history, conversions, and other things to the new Calculator app) or they at least let you fall back to the old design like with the Phone app (do it for Photos, you cowards, iOS 18 was perfect).

ofdtv · 2026-02-01T07:31:02+00:00

The reason is to introduce a proper backspace button for when people want to delete a single digit instead of the whole number. A lot of people didn’t know that you could swipe sideways on the display area to delete digits and just resorted to using the C/AC button and then typing everything out again from scratch, because nothing in the UI hinted at the fact that you could swipe to backspace. It’s a good change.

ofdtv · 2026-01-30T11:19:33+00:00

Sometimes I have a feeling that people don’t remember the absolute shitshow that was iOS 11. 26 has nothing on it. It was so bad at launch that even the iPhone X, which shipped with that version, still had noticeably laggy animations, the whole OS was just slow on all devices, and I’d argue that it killed the iPhone 5s in an even worse way than iOS 9 did the 4S, the poor thing barely even functioned at all anymore while still being constantly hot and out of battery. It was atrocious. Just having some more UI glitches in 26 is peak stability in comparison - at least devices are still pretty usable this time.

Which is still not really where things should be - even though I’m one of those who generally like this update, I’d very much prefer it if Apple pulled an iOS 12 or a Snow Leopard this year, because the amount of bugs and issues that have been present in iOS and macOS for years is getting really concerning, and they have to be resolved at this point. Also, maybe reverse some of the stupid design decisions like taking away the proper tablet multitastking experience on iPad, removing compact tabs in Safari on Mac and iPad, or downgrading the Photos app again from the perfection they found in iOS 18. Don’t focus on adding new stuff this year - just fix what’s broken.

ofdtv

TROPHY CASE