My Family Has Always Been Luddites. This New iOS Update Proved They Were Right
My family tree is rooted in generations of dyed-in-the-wool Luddites. My grandmother even special-ordered her Toyota Camry with manual crank windows, convinced one fewer powered feature meant one fewer thing that could break. My dad refused to upgrade our old 6-disc car stereo long after the eject button stopped working, leaving it permanently stuck on the first CD he ever loaded. For a full decade, Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1 was the default soundtrack to every one of our family dinners. As for me, I didn’t switch to a smartphone until 2013, when repairing my beat-up flip phone cost roughly the same as buying a new smartphone outright.
These days, I’m no different from anyone reading this. My phone is both my plaything and my workhorse: it’s the first thing I grab when I wake up, the filler for every empty spare minute in my day, and the silent co-conspirator in our shared little lie—that it works for me, not the other way around. For the most part, I’ve made peace with this arrangement. But after Apple rolled out its latest iOS update last week, I’m ready to revolt.
Tech companies are used to a fair amount of public outcry after shoving untested new interfaces down their users’ throats. You can’t please everyone all the time, after all—especially when your global user base counts in the billions. But ask any of your friends, or scroll through Google, Reddit, Bluesky, or even ChatGPT about this update, and you’ll be flooded with unfiltered rage. Author and musician John Darnielle put it best on Bluesky, replying to a user who agreed with his original take on the terrible new photo-cropping tool: “This is foundationally bad.” One viral Reddit thread was even headlined “New iPhone update made me so overwhelmed I threw my phone.” The original poster never clarified who they threw it at or where it landed, but I’ve got a few good guesses for the target.
It makes you wonder: at what point does a company’s relentless push for planned obsolescence turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy? Stop and ask yourself: is this actually good for the phones people paid hundreds, even thousands of dollars for? Normally, I’d be curious about what Silicon Valley’s internal data says about this level of backlash, at what point widespread frustration gets flagged as a problem worth fixing. But right now, I’ve got my own headaches to deal with.
I downloaded Apple’s new iOS 26.2 last week, because like most users, I’m basically a trained circus seal that’ll press any pop-up button put in front of me. I stumbled home late from a holiday party, tapped “agree” to the update almost on autopilot, and woke up to a completely unrecognizable device. Any new operating system has that unsettling, something-is-wrong vibe, but this time around, the complaints—things I’ve seen others deal with, and problems I’ve hit myself—are off the charts. Let me run down a partial list: glacial speed (every single action takes twice as long as it used to), clunky awkward text bubble animations, a touchscreen that’s simultaneously over-sensitive and randomly unresponsive, swipes that lead nowhere, endless trouble posting downloaded photos, the fact that almost every tool I use regularly—search bars, saved files—has been moved to a hidden new location, unprompted battery life updates that pop up uninvited (things like “24 minutes until you hit 80%”), poor visual contrast that makes text hard to parse, fussy over-complicated screenshot editing, and turning off the new “Liquid Glass” transparency effect is so needlessly convoluted, you’d think you had to drive up to a Long Island mansion and whisper “Fidelio” into a secret keyhole to disable it. Let’s be real: it’s pretty ironic that a big tech company is shoving a “transparency feature” down our throats, right?
Coming from my family’s Luddite background, I usually assume any tech snafu is my fault, not the product’s. I’ve tweaked every setting I can to fix the worst issues with this update, holding out hope that my frustration will fade eventually. Ideally, I won’t have to mentally reclassify this thousand-dollar device as just a fancy brick that only works like a flip phone. But for now, seeing how angry everyone else is about this mess has given me a weird, unexpected sense of camaraderie.
Take the whole battery life fiasco, for example. I work from home, which means I have the luxury of keeping my phone plugged in basically all day. Even so, I’ve noticed my battery drains way faster than it did before the update. The new iOS even seems obsessed with saving power: my lock screen photo fades to gray by default now, just to squeeze a few extra minutes of charge. If I want to look at a clear, bright photo of my kids like I used to, I have to dig through three layers of settings just to turn the default fade off.
And like just about everyone on Reddit, I’m sick of the go-to “fix” everyone suggests: just turn your phone off and back on again. (As if that’s some brilliant trick no one’s thought of yet.) Or they tell me to check my storage. Please. I have a year-old phone with enough storage to choke a horse. That’s not because I’m editing full-length indie films on it—it’s because I like keeping my photos and old text messages accessible, just like I like my martinis: close at hand, ready when I am. I’m a writer; two of my favorite things in the whole world are having transcripts ready when I need them, and being proven right on the spot.
Sadly, my once-trusty pocket research assistant doesn’t feel nearly as reliable these days. This new iOS is like getting a birthday gift from the relative who knows nothing about you—except it’s worse, because your phone knows every little thing about you. So when it shoves a touchscreen version of a badly sized, itchy, ugly sweater in your face and says “I saw this and thought of you,” it leaves you feeling nothing but revulsion and frustration. People don’t want to hand over hundreds of dollars and all their personal data just to get constant annoyance, and end up sounding like old-fashioned Luddites for complaining.
For the record, the original Luddites were 19th-century textile workers who rejected new industrial machinery, in large part because it threatened their livelihoods—they’ve since become the go-to symbol for pointless resistance to progress. But is this actually progress? It sure doesn’t feel like it. Trust me, there’s no glory in being seen as someone who can’t figure out new tech. The modern Luddite is just as impatient as any other person, just as eager for tools that work well, even work better than they used to.
That makes me rethink my grandmother’s choice of car windows. I’m pretty sure she knew how to press a power window button just fine. She didn’t order crank windows because it was one less thing she had to learn how to use—she ordered them because it was one less thing the machine could mess up. She just picked whatever option was guaranteed to work. All she ever wanted was for her damn windows to open when she needed them to.
What Do You Think?
Share your thoughts about this article in the comments below. Alternatively, you can submit a letter to the editor at [email protected].
My Family Has Always Been Luddites. This New iOS Update Proved They Were Right
