I've been running it since the RC and am currently in the process of uninstalling it. The new UI is so incredibly ugly I honestly cannot understand how they thought it was acceptable to even released as a beta let alone an RC and now release.
There's SO much padding and wasted screen real estate, disjointed looking floating inner panels, window corners that are so rounded you see gaps in full screen apps, inconsistencies everywhere and - well, I could go on.
Basically the vibe I get from it is that they think their users are dumb - they won't care about things like this and that they want everything to look like a preschoolers tablet.
I count four different corner radius sizes currently on my screen, which is maddening.
Apple has a thing against people with OCD. Or taste.
The thing is horribly wasteful of screen real estate, and as someone who’s been writing a Mac blog for over two decades, I am so happy I started using Fedora two years ago—GNOME has its flaws, but it looks nicer than Tahoe.
Fedora Silverblue is the closest feeling to the macOS experience I fell in love with that I’ve had on Linux in, well, ever. Very happy with it on my desktop and laptop. It’s not perfect but it is less imperfect than modern macOS has become.
Finding a laptop that works well is annoying, however.
Do you happen to know any laptop that has a) equivalent screen quality (retina resolution), b) keyboard, c) trackpad but with full Linux support where all hardware pheripherals just work?
Silverblue is great but regular Fedora is worth a look too if you don't want to deal with the teething issues of managing all your dev-tools with Silverblue's immutable setup, granted that was 2 years ago when i tried so thing's might be better now.
Infuriatingly; I have a macbook because a couple years ago I wanted a laptop that just worked while keeping my familiar tools but it really feels like Linux is trending up in polish and macOS on the down with an intersect possibly happening in a couple years.
That's not possible. I saw a video yesterday where Greg Joswiak (SVP worldwide marketing at Apple) assured me that Apple has the best design team in the world.
I have been running the beta from the beginning and they have improved quite a bit, but I am actually shocked they didn't delay Mac OS 26, because the design is so rough around the edges. Some of the larger aesthetic changes, such as the menu bar and the dock look good, but there is so much more that looks objectively awful.
1. the way window UI elements float in bubbles on the top over a white background is horrible. It looks amateurish.
2. Icons look low detail and blurry. At first I thought they were using low resolution placeholder icons, but no, the layered diffused glass effect just kind of translates to blurriness on many app icons.
3. The side bar, such as on Finder, just kind of floats there. That is fine and looks kind of neat on the Maps app as you can see some of the maps behind it, but on the Finder it is just a white bubble over top of a white background, which... is a choice.
4. The app launcher is gone, and replaced by Spotlight, which is worse.
I could go on. The point is it is bad and Apple should be embarrassed. I say that as someone who likes Apple products alot.
The biggest surprise to me from this whole beta period is that a significant number of people used Launchpad. I have absolutely zero idea why when Spotlight has existed for more than 20 years. Why would you ever want to click and page through a giant iPhone screen on a desktop/laptop computer?
If you have multiple ways to do something on a computer/phone, some relatively large percentage of people will fumble around until they figure out a way to do it - and then do it that way forever.
So if someone accidentally triggered Launchpad and realized they could see their apps, they might use that forever (not knowing you can put your Applications folder in your Dock and use it as a start menu lol).
they've had a launch-pad-ey thing forever, I remember when our school lab had Mac IIs and Performas, and there was some simplified UI on top of finder which basically was all your apps in giant rectangular icons. I forget what it was called though.
Because I vaguely remember that one icon I use every other month, but can't recall the name. The icons are also ordered by installation time, so it's easy to jump to the most recent ones.
I use it rarely, but sometimes I'm happy it's there.
I always forget that Launchpad even exists. I guess it doesn't now. I suppose it might be helpful if you just know "I need that app that looks like X" and don't actually recall the first two letters of the app's name.
It was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me. After trying out the preview for a month, the writing was on the wall, and I began the process of switching to a Thinkpad with Linux. I am now fully off macOS for the first time in 20 years of being an Apple die hard. I could use a lot of emotionally loaded words to describe how I feel about this release, but the long and short of it is that I am no longer the target audience for Apple.
I try not to indulge in negativity and scorn, but I agree with these sentiments. This is resoundly a regression. Text overlapping on text, searchboxes that are broken and now just function as text boxes, increased latency throughout the operating system.
It's so bad that it's kind of fascinating. Unfortunately, even "Reduce Transparency" doesn't fix the LG update.
No idea on macOS, but turn on Reduce Transparency on iOS and there’s tons of padding most of the time, but then sometimes zero padding. And I mean zero. The edges of buttons and text are at the edge of the underlying background. It’s…embarrassing.
Yeah similar situation here. I've been running it since basically the day after WWDC, and I've just had this sinking feeling that its so bad, they wouldn't be able to fix it before release. Or, they don't even view it as something that needs fixing.
I'll begrudgingly get a couple more years out of this personal M2 Air, but my engineering team is prepping to do upgrades on some older M1 Pros we've had since launch, and after seeing Tahoe, the CTO and I formed a plan to give devs the option of getting either an M4 Pro or a Framework. We haven't launched yet, but I think a solid number of our engineers are going to opt for the Framework, hopefully as high as half.
Ugh I upgraded excitedly and can't stand the UI - there is no upside to any of it. Also for some reason things are also beachballing and VSCode keeps crashing - new M4 MBP. All the system log errors are present exactly as they were and my USB-C dock with Ethernet port still doesn't work.
I was on RC too, for a few days, and also uninstalled. I'm glad I did, the fresh Sequoia install feels much nicher. Even with reduce transparency on, the design was too ugly and the drab gray icon jails for non-squircle icons were downright offensive. First macOS version I'm gonna skip and I've been a day one updater since mountain lion, very sad.
It would be one thing if they excessively rounded and padded the windows, but they shipped with a bunch of different padding and border radii. So far I’ve counted 4 different borders, and I’m sure there’s more.
I just counted 5 different radii in Apple’s apps alone. I also discovered they space the window control buttons in all sorts of different spots to, so it’s even more insane than just multiple radii.
I made the mistake of updating my phone, and immediately regretted it. We tried Liquid Glass already, it was called mid-aughts Windows. It sucked then, and it sucks now.
I have a Mac M1 that's been on MacOS 14 Sonoma for a couple years at this point - I've not seen anything even remotely interesting in later releases that could incentivize me to roll the dice and upgrade.
My Mac is also on Sonoma. I'm sure there are some incremental features that I would appreciate, but I'm always worried about what's going to break or be worse with the next OS update.
I'll update my phone because iOS jumps are bigger in terms of functionality. But 14 years in, OSX just doesn't have a lot of new bells and whistles that I care about. The last time I updated, I was only excited about getting Sidecar functionality so I could dual-screen onto my iPad. When a minor feature like this is the most memorable, that's saying something.
I think the only thing that would get me to update would be notable AI improvements. But seeing what I've seen of AI on iOS, I'm in no rush.
Waiting an extra year to jump on new macOS releases has been the norm for sane people for quite some time now.
It sucks if you buy a new mac which isn't supported by older macOS releases though, so maybe don't do that for a year or so. I guess you sometimes just have to put your new Apple device in storage for a year until there's functional software.
For me I simply don't upgrade ever until I'm forced to, usually by an app that I want to use.
As someone without an iPhone and who doesn't really use included desktop apps, there are simply never any improvements in the OS for me, only regressions.
The Finder looks like shit. The sidebar is like badly retrofited from another program, perhaps from some crappy Gnome theme.
The Control Center (or however they call the drop down window with quick controls for volume, wifi, brigthness, etc) has floating isolated icons like crap.
Bring back Scott Forstall. Give him a big bonus. Let him fix this shit.
Otherwise, the code changes and actual features are probably fine.
I see grossly rounded corners in some apps, but I don't see the other stuff like gaps in window corners for full screen apps. I may have some config bit flipped that has disabled those.
Yeah, the new corner radius is ugly but by and large, it's not much different than before, from what I see so far.
> Basically the vibe I get from it is that they think their users are dumb
Your point would have been much more convincing had you refrained from this sort of pejorative assigning of motives. It wasn't necessary.
I've been running the betas to the final release and there are a number of basic affordances and system improvements that are definitely worthwhile. I will not be going back.
Having said that, while I know they had good intentions with this whole design, and probably really thought they were pursing a winner, what a massive, massive miss. This is such an aesthetic disaster that I'm just in awe. I feel like they had a huge push to do some seemingly substantial change, particularly on the mobile side, given the stumbles in the AI space, so they changed a lot of things maybe without quite enough thought.
Ugly as hell. More dead space. On the mobile side they released an update to iOS just today from the RC a few days ago that removes some of the particularly stupid animations (the app tray did some dumb thing where it expanded and shrank, and that and a few similar things are gone).
I decided to install this and the updated iOS today to see how I felt about it.
My very initial impressions on MacOS:
(1) I like the look of Safari better and the Mail app compared to the prior designs. They both look really nice to me and the Mail app especially looks like a huge improvement in terms of design unification with some of the features like summaries and unsubscribe options that looked bolted on in the past now blending in seamlessly.
(2) I really, really don't like the new icons! Especially so on iOS.
(3) On iOS the app group/folders look terrible to me with the way they distort my wallpaper. Not a fan.
(4) A lot of people are complaining about transparent icons. It's not a valid complaint and is strong evidence whoever is saying that hasn't used the new OS as that is a choice you can make if you want. The default is not transparent.
(5) The increased radii in some places doesn't seem to have any meaningful impact to my information density. A simple comparison of Chrome (old styling) and Safari (with the liquid glass design) shows that Safari has a few pixels fewer in height search + tab bar as a concrete example.
(6) Messages app in MacOS looks like shit. I hate almost everything about it.
(7) Spotlight search has marked improvements! UI is nicer and functionality has expanded greatly (eg clipboard search).
I swear I don't usually complain about UI styling updates, because it's usually not a big deal - but this looks really, really bad [1]. It's less functional with bizarre transparency choices destroying legibility, and big rounded corners taking up more dead space. And stylistically, the layouts just look unbalanced and amateurish (It reminds me of what happens when I attempt to do CSS layouts). Most Linux desktops unironically look better than this.
It's ironic that Apple makes screen size incredibly expensive for every millimeter - and then designs UI which proceeds to waste that pricey real-estate as well as user time by burying options (or worse, simply removing many advanced user options "because they don't fit").
It’s funny how different people saw things. UAC was hated back then but I was a Linux user primarily and when I bought my laptop I kept the Windows Vista while dual booting. UAC mostly made sense and worked like gksudo.
I remember saying so once and got flamed by people online because of course Microsoft didn’t copy this from Linux and of course gksudo was much better.
But the subjective experience I had was the same. IMHO the greatest victory with Electron has been that the OS wars have practically ended.
Have the tabs in Finder always been slow to appear? Right now there is a noticeable delay from when I press cmd+tab to when tab animates itself into existence, reminds me of lag in windows 11.
I do dislike how toy-like the user interface looks, but I really hate how illegible notifications are on iPadOS. I had to turn on the reduce transparency setting so I could read the notification text against my lock screen wallpaper.
The reason Liquid Glass on macOS specifically is getting so much blowback is that it isn't just updating the translucency effect with the new glass refraction effect - they've also increased the border radius of most windows, increased paddings in toolbars, sidebars, etc. and overall made the UI much less information-dense, which is wild for a desktop OS. If they had just changed the translucency effect, I think this would be much better received.
Personally, I'm sticking with macOS Sequoia for now, and if macOS 27 goes even more in the less-information-density direction, I'll probably fully move off of macOS, which is a shame as a 20-year Apple user.
I’m using one of the Lenovo Aura editions. It doesn’t match the MacBook, but I also don’t worry about battery at all any more and perf is just fine for my needs. I don’t miss Apple at all. Now, if only there was a Linux phone…
You'd jump ship because of the .0 release of Tahoe? Really? People get a little hysterical about things like this.
You know you don't have to upgrade to it, right? They'll support Sequoia for years, and you could even be running Sonoma if you wanted.
The response to this design is likely to be so overwhelmingly negative that we'll see a lot of subtle retreats in the point releases going forward, and when the macOS 7 version replaces TahoeVista, you can upgrade then.
It's not really hysterical to want to jump a ship that feels like is turning into a clown cruise. I can use Windows, Linux, and OSX equally well for work, even if I deploy to AWS in the end. However, I love the osx aesthetic and MacBook hardware, since around Snow Leopard, which is when I switched from Linux to OSX. Since then, OSX have gotten worse with every release since, and Tahoe is a very low new low. At some point, it becomes not worth it. Just like it's not worth staying on the previous release of OSX while random apps and extensions lose compatibility. It's not hysteria, it's just the straw that breaks the camels back. The only thing is, I really like the M4 speed. There is nothing that runs as fast, and as cool, that I am aware of. If I wasn't doing a bunch of processing right now, I would probably switch. Non-hysterically.
Sequoia is absolutely, undeniably better than Sonoma. Sonoma is undeniably better than Ventura. And so on. This notion that it's all downhill is just noisy nonsense as people wave their hands and have a tantrum that they don't like some change. And to be clear, every single macOS release yields this. It's incredibly boring.
Like, it's fun to whine about the imperfection of macOS...versus Windows or Linux? LOL, come on. And just like you and probably everyone else on here, I use macOS, Windows and Linux every single day. Pretending that a couple of aesthetic changes are the big "straw that broke the camel's back" is just so lame.
It is hysterical. It's noisy nonsense. This "fine this is it" tantrum that people pull is such a tired gimmick.
And personally I think the aesthetics of macOS/iOS/iPadOS 26 are terrible. They're inevitably going to start easing down the heinous translucency and will claw back on the stupid round corners. Aside from that the system has a lot of fundamental improvements that will benefit everyone.
But no, no one on Sequoia is going to suddenly be without apps or extensions. When apps start abandoning versions it's usually a couple of versions out.
Is cropping PDFs to rounded corners (without a way to disable it) enough to get someone to switch to another OS? Probably not, but it's still IMO a UI regression regardless.
I feel like every macOS update has been worse than the last, since like 2015-2018 or so. Still, their only real competition is Windows 11, which isn’t well received either.
I'm still on Sonoma on my Mac, but I've recently been splitting my time between macOS and Linux and I'm starting to be pretty happy with Linux.
The main problem I had with living in a Gnome desktop environment, is with the keyboard. I'm not willing to abandon my use of Emacs control+meta sequences for cursor and editing movements everywhere in the GUI. On macOS, this works because the command (super/Win on Linux/Windows) key is used for common shortcuts and the control key is free for editing shortcuts.
I spent a day or so hacking around with kanata[0], which is a kernel level keyboard remapping tool, that lets you define keyboard mapping layers in a similar way you might with QMK firmware. When I press the 'super/win/cmd' it activates a layer which maps certain sequences to their control equivalents, so I can create tabs, close windows, copy and paste (and many more) like my macOS muscle memory wants to do. Other super key sequences (like Super-L for lock desktop or Super-Tab for window cycling) are unchanged. Furthermore, when I hit the control or meta/alt/option key, it activates a layer where Emacs editing keys are emulated using the Gnome equivalents. For example, C-a and C-e are mapped to home/end, etc.
After doing this, and tweaking my Gnome setup for another day or so, I am just as comfortable on my Linux machine as I am on my Mac.
I feel like we’ve gone full circle. For decades Apple hardware sucked and was badly overpriced, but you paid the price to enjoy running Mac OS X. Now Apple makes amazing hardware (especially laptops) but the drawback is that you have to run macOS on them.
I really wish Asahi Linux had more support, I would have bought a couple M4 Minis.
If you don't need the battery life of a MacBook and you're happy getting a desktop device, there's plenty of machines running new AMD chips that are just as fast as an M series mac, if not faster. And they'll run Linux with no compromises. Check out Bee-Link (https://www.bee-link.com/) for some mac-inspired hardware.
(This about iOS, not Mac, but obviously a lot is similar.)
I might be in the minority on hn, but I’m using iOS 26 for the first time today and am pretty happy with the new design. For one, it’s a lot snappier and faster. I’m glad they finally did something about the slow-ass animations iOS had in a lot of places. Secondly, it has a lot more personality. I enjoy that. Thirdly, they finally moved more basic UI stuff close to the thumbs instead of literally 6 inches away at the top of the screen. Love that. Knowing app designers, my apps are about to get easier to use just by migrating to the new UX concepts Apple is pushing.
The glass look is mostly fine. iOS had contrast issues before, and I don’t think it’s any worse. If anything, it’s more adaptive to different types of backgrounds now.
There are some visual glitches and weird things, but they’re pretty minor and will be resolved with time. The glass panes for, say, folders look nice, and I like it more than the previous blur.
I always considered the butterfly keyboard[1] the point at which Apple's design system jumped the shark as it focused on it's own aesthetics vs. building quality and reliable products.
Funny enough, it's the only time period since 1999 that I was apple free for a while. My MBP broke. I've previously had a butterfly keyboard on my work mac, and it got replaced on a regular bases. While unfortunate for a work computer, this was not acceptable as my personal one with no spares)
Thankfully Apple returned to making great products that work, and I bought the next MBP.
Seeing that Apple's returning to it's "design roots"[2], I really hope they do not loose sight of building great products that work well for their customers.
> I always considered the butterfly keyboard[1] the point at which Apple's design system jumped the shark as it focused on it's own aesthetics vs. building quality and reliable products.
This statement describes pretty much every mouse Apple ever made, from the circular ones to the horrendous magic mouse with charging port underneath.
Ooh, the mouse myth! Love it when this one gets dragged out. Turns out it’s not really a problem - the battery life is measured in months, you’ll get several hours from plugging it in for thirty seconds, and days if you plug it in for a few minutes while getting coffee.
People love to hate it, but it’s never been a real problem. The ergonomics are bad. The charging isn’t.
This is true, but Apple mice have always been consistently bad. A laptop where getting a single grain of dirt under the keyboard meant you couldn't type was a very new thing in 2015.
> Funny enough, it's the only time period since 1999 that I was apple free for a while.
Same here. After the butterfly keyboard era, I spent about 5 years with Windows 10/11 and powershell, then WSL. There's still a lot of annoyance in the Windows space (NTFS is slow due to all the filesystem filters), but Linux package managers are much better than homebrew and WSL does make Windows a pretty reasonable developer system. I'm back on the MacOS now but I wouldn't hate a nice Windows machine.
Such a shame, it seems like Apple has lost its touch and now its gonna kill the mac.
Been off IOS for years due to the same problems with Apple design. It started with Ive taking over IOS design but turned into slaveish copy and paste of iOS on mac.
Dont take offense. If you had a product that made more money than the Beatles, you would probably stop listening to your staff as well.
Problem is Apple cant for all its "user centric" marketing(?) it cant get out of its own way because its just shoveling the same phone at users years in and year out since 2007 and no matter how bad it is users say: "Yes give me MORE master!"
Awful cheap UX, cartoonish style with huge padding, lack of structure and hierarchy. The spacing is inconsistent, everything is rounded. The app launcher stutters, the icons load one by one, it flickers each time I do the 4 finger gesture. Why does the volume bubble have tick marks but the one in the menu doesn't? The trash icon looks like the windows recycle bin or gnome theme from 20 years ago, not sure why it's flattened like that.
Oh boy, I opened the settings app to change the wallpaper, the scrollbar gets cut off by the right bottom rounded corner. The wallpapers can be scrolled horizontally and they show up under the side rail (blurred), looks like a glitch, and I still can't resize this window to see more of the wallpapers. They may have fixed the custom color bug though.
It really does look like ass on the laptop. Maybe it works on mobile, idk, but terrible on laptop. Also not a good sign since apple is not known for rolling back releases.
As a KDE Plasma dev, I always counted on us getting better, but I didn't expect the competition to get so much worse. We'd be flamed to high and heaven for shipping broken notification popups and rendering glitches like that in a prod release.
The rumor mill speculates that Apple needed to ship something big and flashy to distract people from calling them out on their failure to deliver on the AI features promised (and previewed!) more than a year ago.
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I have to say, is AI image generation really the job of an operating system? I've also seen this sort of stuff on Pixel Android, it's now built into mspaint on Windows 11 and there's also copilot everywhere. Does anyone even use this stuff? It requires constant updates and maintenance to support newer models, in my experience it gets stale and outdated much more quickly. I think it would be better served by the user just opening their web browser to go to ChatGPT (or other service) which receives latest model upgrades first. Am I going crazy or is this just a horrible idea?
I should know better, but I'm still surprised they're shipping this version of Liquid Glass. Performance is stable but there are so many UI bugs and inconsistencies that haven't been fixed from early betas, including low-hanging fruit that a second year design student would notice. I don't mind change or interface elements moving around but keynote-level UI overhauls should be fully implemented at launch, otherwise people are stuck using a broken OS for a year.
At this point I'm doubtful that these will be addressed in the 26.X updates, so the wait begins for 27.0...
Yeah I shouldn't be surprised this was allowed to launch today, but yet I am.
I ran the whole beta on all my devices. Every new beta I'd ask myself "Surely they fixed 'x' by now, right?" and we advanced, beta after beta, with the same bugs and performance regressions all the way up to launch.
The icons still need to redraw in the settings app and app library. It's overall sluggish. The drop shadows are huge in the finder and other apps top bar. If you turn on always show scrollbars they get cut off at a weird angle due to the excessive corner radius.
My iPhone 16 PM runs hot all the time, even on release now, vs. iOS 18.
I don't mind the transparency or glass effects. I actually like it in some areas. But man does it need some serious polish and bug fixing, and a lot of time and effort spent on consistency.
This should never have went live in this state. I consider .0 just another beta, really. Actual release will probably be .2 or .3
Whoa, you can now search clipboard history. Go to Spotlight Search, Command+4. You'll get a list of entries, each with a copy button, and is searchable. Even shows the app it was copied in.
Transparent UI, with controls sitting on top of arbitrary and changing content can NEVER be legible/discernible. Apple knows this, but fashion was more important than function and they decided, "who cares about disabled people, anyway."
Microsoft learned this lesson back in the Vista era but Apple's charging ahead with this terrible set of changes that will literally disable millions of users, people who will need to visit the accessibility settings to reduce the transparency.
It's a sad day when a company that has often lead in accessibility ships the least accessible OS in modern history. I guess it was a nice run having a Big Tech company to point to as a good example of doing various accessibility things well. Damn.
Changing toolbars to text-only is pretty bad. The button hotboxes are tiny
Generally I think the toolbar settings needed more testing, they can be wonky (e.g. in Automator for text+icon it causes the traffic lights to misalign, in Safari toggling the sidebar on and off is janky).
I'm sorry, but that's not a logical stance. If this were the method that anyone in the industry used (which absolutely nobody does) all interfaces would be high contrast 150pt font, no transparency, two color, because that's what my grandma needs.
I've been submitting endless feedback about how Liquid Arse breaks dark mode during the beta. I keep seeing dark text on dark backgrounds all over the place in both Tahoe and iOS 26, for example: https://imgur.com/a/R3DTcSd
I've pretty much given up with submitting feedback though.
You can turn off the transparency in the accessibility settings. Sure products could be 100% accessible out of the box but unless you had some sort of limit on that it would likely make the experience worse for the majority of users. I can’t imagine Helvetica Neue Extra Light was particularly accessible as the system font a decade ago - but there were accessibility settings.
This is what happens when designers are treated as royalty and are told that their new "clothes" are "awesome" all the time.
It's also a symptom of consumption addiction where there is demand/motivation for drastic, superficial changes that don't really offer any value except to those who are consumed by the need for constant change for change's sake.
Apple used to care more about disabled people because of how the Accessibility APIs worked and were required for most apps.
They went way too far with the corner radii and pill shapes imo, looks like a Fisher Price toy. Some inner buttons retained the old radii and don't match the outer window radii anymore.
It's truly hideous to look at. I really can't believe they went for these massively rounded corners. They're too stubborn to allow you to select an option for right angled corners again. They just tinker as there's no other real UI enhancements.
It’s a trend that’s visible in other designs too, like Material 3 Expressive.
I’m not a fan of Windows but I believe that probably the best modern UI design system for desktops right now is probably the flavor of Fluent used in Windows 11. It still retains somewhat desktop-like information density, doesn’t go overboard on radii, and has a touch of depth. I’d like to see more design languages exploring in its general direction.
I don't think "defaults to windows-like" is a bad choice for newcomers.
I don't customize it heavily either. Move tray, clock and menus to the top, a-la GNOME2, leave taskbar at the bottom, both auto-hidden and narrower than screen.
Add four desktops as a 2x2 grid, re-enable old CTRL+ALT+$ARROW keyboard shortcuts, add a couple of usability effects with custom key combinations and two active corners, and I'm done.
Some applications (Konsole, KATE) get custom fonts and themes, but everything else is bog standard. Setting it up takes 30-ish minutes, and it's the same config for decades now. Probably because of sharpening the same tool and optimizing without knowing.
Then, I can just concentrate and fly on that environment.
Also, they have improved a lot in the small areas where it was lacking. You can use your system without a terminal if you want, plus Baloo works really well.
I would argue that it actually doesn’t go far enough in windows-like-ness to be viable for a lot of people, and for those who prefer a mac-like setup the possible customization doesn’t take it far enough in that direction, either. It’s not Windows or macOS, it’s KDE, and that’s fine but I think there need to be environments more specifically aimed at people who are happy with their current commercial OS setups.
The part that I am so tired of is the ‘we are the best at this and this is amazing’ pitch that comes with every release. Never mind that this release’s design ‘language’ DIRECTLY conflicts with things they used to say ‘never do that’.
So what changed exactly? Change is understandable but this is a full 180.
- floating anything was verboten
- accessibility was paramount
- clarity was prioritized
Can anyone speak to whether the performance of the Settings app has been improved? In Seq and every version since they redid it in presumably SwiftUI, if you select one of the navigation panes and then hold either the up or down arrow keys to quickly navigate between them, something like a memory leak occurs due to (seemingly) launching all of the nested panes as separate apps (this is what appears to be the case in activity monitor) and the Settings app will start lagging until you fully quit and reopen.
I'm normally on about 1 year delay on upgrading macOS for a multitude of reasons. I might not wait the full year but something else will have to force me to upgrade within the first few months.
I'd heard from people who were running the betas that it's not ready and they are surprised Tahoe wasn't delayed.
No way I'm upgrading any time soon to Apple's least cared for OS with a change this big (and this untested).
I'll be honest, I hear this every single time. But I've never delayed upgrading, and I've never regretted it. That's not to say every upgrade has been a strict improvement, but going back to my first Mac at 10.4 (Tiger) I've never wished I had stayed on an older version. We'll see how I feel after going to Tahoe, maybe this will be the one that breaks the trend.
> But I've never delayed upgrading, and I've never regretted it.
I was the same way for until one of the upgrades, I forget which, broke resume from suspend about 10-20% of the time for my combination of laptop and monitor. Every morning I’d get a sense of dread when I tried to open the laptop to see if today was a day where I’d get to pick up where I left off or if I was in for a crash and reboot as soon as I tried to use the laptop.
I thought for sure it would be fixed with one of the point updates, but it went on for the better part of a year.
You always have to be moving forward and I'll never say "I'll just stay on Sequoia for forever" but delaying a bit does make life easier. I know I'll eventually upgrade but being there day 1 or even month 1 is not something I'm interested in. There are never new features that outweigh sending my development workflows into disarray or dealing with broken apps.
There aren't always huge issues or huge time sinks but I'm happy to let other people be on the bleeding edge and I'll upgrade once the Github issues, blog posts, etc have been created/fixed so that when I upgrade I can easily find solutions to any remaining issues I might run into. Especially with Tahoe, I've heard that some apps are just broken, period, unless the developer makes (sometimes significant) changes to get the same functionality working again (that was working fine in Sequoia).
I've grown so used to Apple shipping buggy software that I wait a year or more before upgrading my mac to a major version. I do all the minor releases and security patches, of course.
Any actual interesting changes under the hood other than UI changes? I cant remember the last time macOS release that actually brings any useful feature I use.
It's been so long since Apple has released anything in either iOS or macOS that excited me as a user. I don't seem to be their target customer anymore.
The only reason I even have to "upgrade" to a higher version number is how quickly app developers (including Apple themselves) drop support for older OS's. My iPhone which is stuck on iOS 15 runs just as well as the day I bought it, but every other app I download tells me (in essence) "LOL your phone is too old and our developers are too lazy to keep our software running on it. Upgrade your OS or get lost loser".
That's literally the only thing motivating me to upgrade anymore: The treadmill of software compatibility. Apple doesn't have to innovate--they just need to make sure the ecosystem is broken after ~5-10 years or so.
Isn't that true for pretty much every OS? The feature set we need to be able to do our jobs and computing hobbies have been available for two decades.
Operating systems like Debian is sufficiently boring that I can just upgrade and continue computing. macOS upgrades have become a small gamble, the stuff that I depend on may not continue to work, or at least it will take a good deal of work. There are however no reason to upgrade, so the risk isn't really worth the hassle of upgrading and breaking Java or Python.
You can still get software that installs and works perfectly on Windows 7 (released 16 years ago). Good luck finding software that even installs on Snow Leopard (released 16 years ago), let alone works well.
The flip side of this is that every attempt at advancing the Windows UI framework story beyond win32/MFC and WPF has failed and the platform itself is steeped neck deep in technical debt.
Sometimes it’s Apple and Google that are forcing developers. The system is perfectly capable of running the app (you’re not using any new API) but store policies force you to add the restriction anyway.
Yeah we are in this situation right now with an App, we literally can't update it unless we target a more modern version of the SDK, which introduces breaking changes
This problem could be mitigated by Apple making older versions of software available. Then you could continue to release updates, and users on older devices could continue to use earlier versions of your app on their devices.
Apple actually partially solves this: as a user, if I have EVER downloaded Older Version X of an app, and then go to download it again, they let me. However, if I have never downloaded the old version and go to download it, they just say “this app is not compatible with your device.” and don't give me the chance to get the older, compatible version. I don’t know why they make this distinction.
Worse are the third party apps where the old version still actually runs, but the developer deliberately blocks you with a full-screen “go away” dialog (I’m looking at you, FlightAware).
I got my first MacBook at Catalina, and still miss it. For a while, I downgraded my Intel Mac to Catalina again; I love the aesthetic compared to the newer releases, and it’s fast and snappy.
But the situation now is: No recent apps work on Catalina since it’s considered obsolete (except open-source apps you compile yourself). But Big Sur and higher are ridiculously slow on Intel hardware, to the point where it’s unusable. I now have an otherwise perfectly good 2019 Intel MacBook that has been gathering dust for the past years.
I’ve got a MacBook and Mac Mini stuck on Monterey (12), and an iMac stuck on Big Sur (11). I’m pretty much dead in the water when it comes to software compatibility, unless I want to put Linux on them. Even homebrew gives me a warning that they’ve stopped support and to expect everything to break. It’s a sad state of affairs.
Support rapidly being dropped happens mostly with smaller devs, because when resources are limited in the Apple platform world you can either adopt newer APIs and language features or you can support old OSes 3+ versions back. Trying to do both lands you in feature check conditional hell and requires a large matrix of test devices to ensure that nothing is being broken.
It’s less of a burden for corporate giants which is why you see much longer support timelines from e.g. Google.
Not Linux, but I still look forward to window managers and Neovim releases. The Cosmic desktop also looks promising, though I’m not using it until it has a scrolling window manager available for it.
Spotlight got a major upgrade. It’s notably faster and deeply integrates with Shortcuts (letting you specify input variables, for example) among other things.
I’ve got Spotlight configured to index nothing but my applications (which is surprisingly difficult to configure and breaks with every major OS upgrade). Disabling all its default indexing has alleviated 95% of unexplainable CPU spikes and autocomplete pollution, so now I can finally use it for what it’s meant to be: the most overengineered fuzzy finder application launcher.
I actually preferred the pre-tahoe spotlight. The information density was higher and while it did not always give me the most relevant result atleast it was consistent and I could scroll down to find it. New spotlight is less dense and jumbles everything together.
Anyone using Raycast has had these features forever. Nice to see some attention on Spotlight but it's still nowhere close to the functionality you get from Raycast.
I've been using Raycast for a couple months but I'm hoping I can uninstall it if Spotlight is responsive enough in Tahoe. What bothers me about Raycast is the monthly subscription for certain features. I don't mind paying for Mac software – I'm quite happy to do that – but I do mind paying monthly subscriptions for Mac software with seemingly no justification for it (i.e. what monthly resources does running a "window command" use on Raycast that justifies locking it behind a monthly subscription?)
I thought Pro was only for AI features as well (that's what it said when I installed Raycast), but this dialog is saying Pro is required for custom window layouts as well. I only discovered this today when I was trying to create a new command to paste the screenshot from my clipboard into Preview for OCR.
Raycast is interesting but I’m not going to touch it so long as VC funding is involved. Alfred has been doing the job well enough, only requires me to buy a new version a couple times per decade, and isn’t going to become enshittified because there’s no VCs to come knocking looking for a profit.
+1 for Alfred. I'm a proud Power Pack / lifetime-license holder from the beginning. Very few outfits anymore have the chops to both offer and make good on a single-payment, long-lasting product with frequent and excellent substantive updates.
It’s insanely tiny and efficient for what it does, too. One of the only apps that’s so small that updates are done downloading within a second or two of clicking “Download”, even on a mediocre connection!
The fact that so much of the page is devoted to this liquid glass feature pretty much tells you the answer is no. Plus the fact that the "And so much more" section lists 10 different updates in the same space as their poster with a link to a PDF instead of building out a larger webpage speaks volumes.
TextEdit has a styling toolbar now which I appreciate. The new spotlight has more functionality and seems faster (and less likely to pull up a website instead of the app I'm trying to launch)
What an ugly UI update. I usually don't mind too much about the changes in MacOS UI and visuals, but opening up Finder leaves me shocked that this actually got the green light. Who in their right mind looked at this and thought: "yep that's the future, it looks fantastic!".
For Finder I discovered that changing the Toolbar to Icon Only significantly improved it. Then I set the sidebar icons to small in the Appearance system setting. That helped a lot.
Most of the new UI is designed almost exclusively for icon only toolbars.
Maybe it's new and controversial, but I like it. Honestly, I think there is something more about it. Like another Apple product that we're going to see in the future, like Apple glasses would work perfectly with this UI.
I've been using it for ~6 weeks, and I'm also a bit confused by the hate since it's barely changed. I'm a fan of the improved UX harmonization across form factors. My intuition is that the minor and gradual "Duploization" of macOS in Sequoia and now Tahoe foreshadows touchscreen MacBooks.
i really wish they didn't give up on stage manager. every beta i would look if they fixed the opening behavior to open a new application in the same stage :/ but stage manager seems like it would have potential to fix window management on the mac without needing rectangle, yabai, alt tab etc
Open up the Calendar app on macOS Tahoe. Look in the upper right at the time zone selector. It is left justified to a fault, leaving a very awkward amount of space between it and the expand arrow/flyout arrows.
Apple had a chance to bring back taste when they got rid of Ive, but missed it entirely. The overly rounded windows, the weird amount of blank space, the lack of clarity in general — the only thing that makes sense is that middle managers brought this about.
edit: Things are even worse — they already made newer apps much more difficult to read, likely because they have been brought from mobile to desktop. Now fonts are even smaller in System Settings, for example. What are they even thinking?
> Now fonts are even smaller in System Settings, for example. What are they even thinking?
It's worse on the iPad. They apparently think an iPad is now also a mouse and cursor device because they made touch targets so small, and the fonts in menus shrunk down making them more difficult touch targets as well.
A small but important detail of Aqua was that the assumed light source was pointing straight down, whereas everybody else was usually using a 45 degrees angle. I wish Apple took a lesson from the old masters.
Also these colors make my eyes bleed. And the border radius is ridiculous.
It’s butt-ugly, but I find the usability better. Previously everything was so white that I found it difficult on occasion to distinguish between windows above and below. The heavier drop shadows and rounded corners are actually quite helpful
Just upgraded my wife’s laptop and my iPhone. It’s fine. I think her use (she lives in the browser) and my iPhone use (calls, camera, browser) don’t really reveal anything terrible. It’s kind of a dumb gimmick, but it’s mostly fine so far. It would annoy me if a UI that I frequently used “upgraded” to this, though.
This is the first time I've ever seen a macOS update and not seen a single feature worth bothering to upgrade over. Is there anything developer-facing? I don't use any Apple ecosystem stuff and this is all that AFAICT
First rule of MacOS upgrade: don't.
Second rule: wait for x.1 or x.2 releases, so it's more stable and most importantly, the dependencies you need get updated.
I'm not quite sure what to make of Liquid Glass, I developed an allergy of sorts to the term while listening to the keynote.
Any 'relevant' new features for power users / cmd line geeks that you know of?
The changes to Spotlight are fairly power-user focused. There's a lot of enhancements to make it quicker to set up shortcuts within it, and they've added a clipboard manager feature to it.
Not a direct response to your question but (I guess like you) I often find with these releases that the changes I actually care about aren’t flashy enough to even warrant a mention in the presentations or on the main web page.
There seems to be some expansion of screen time, finally, but I haven’t been able to figure out what it is yet based on the only *os 26 update I’ve done so far is the public beta on a single Apple TV.
The main selling point of a macbook is not a UI with transparency. It's hardware stuff (like ARM processors, battery life, aluminum frames, etc..) and a decent, stable, unix-ish software environment. No one is using macOS for the visual effects, so it is annoying that Apple is revamping the UI everyone is used to in order to add more visual effects.
Seems nuts to me, but I'll be curious to see how this all pans out.
Widget appearance is tied to *icon appearance. Grumble grumble. I want clear for my widgets but default for my dock and other icons. Too bad so sad me I guess.
edit: replaced dock with icon, because it affects much more than just dock
A reminder, if you dislike the liquid glass look, that going into System settings / Accessibility / Display and toggling “Increase contrast” gets you a properly nice design with actual borders and solid backgrounds. 100% recommended.
Is that call screening example a new feature or something I can do now that I didn't know about? That's something I've missed since switching from a Pixel to an iPhone last year.
Two of the latest Intel MacBooks, and the last Intel iMac, so technically, yes, there’s still some Intel support in there. My 2019 iMac is one version too old.
Apple have always seemed to drop support for hardware after 5-7 years, and then it's just a question of the last supported OS becoming itself unsupported too. My early 2015 Macbook Pro (new in April 2015) got as far as macOS Monterey (released October 2021) - and they stopped updating that in October 2024.
(I'm not digging through Wikipedia to double check but my previous 2 Macbooks Pro felt like they lasted about as long.)
It'll be interesting to see if they change this with the (presumably cleaner slate) Apple Silicon-based hardware.
Anytime a UI redesign comes with bullshit abstract designer justifications ("a translucent new material that reflects and refracts its surroundings", etc) you know it's bad.
Is there anywhere to find a comprehensive list of updates made "Under the hood"? Sure the new UI is cool and all, but what are they doing to make the OS better? In a previous life I was a mac administrator and every update, apple would remove some binary and suddenly we couldn't natively make calls to LDAP or something.
Thank you so much. I only need a Mac to compile/debug with Xcode (still can't get USB pass through with quickemu working) but Apple has been killing old versions such that projects wont build and home brew has no bottles and whatnot.
are they giving any hints that in high vis/accessibility modes this will be fully disabled? I've been largely insulated from changes like this for a while by that, if that were to change however, more drastic measures may be needed
I still need to use the Scroll Reverser because the scroll direction (aka natural scrolling) can only be turned on or off globally, not per pointing device. I love natural scrolling on the trackpad, but it doesn't make sense on the mouse scroll wheel.
I use a Shortcut for this because it cuts down on the unnecessary apps. Hammerspoon.app would work too though.
tell application "System Settings"
activate
end tell
delay 0.1
tell application "System Events"
tell process "System Settings"
click menu item "Trackpad" of menu "View" of menu bar 1
delay 0.25
click radio button 2 of tab group 1 of group 1 of group 2 of splitter group 1 of group 1 of window 1
click checkbox "Natural scrolling" of group 1 of scroll area 1 of group 1 of group 2 of splitter group 1 of group 1 of window 1
tell application "System Settings" to quit
end tell
end tell
Menu extras were never intended to be treated like Windows tray items. For the earlier portion of OS X’s life, there wasn’t even a public API to create them and required a hack and a private API, and the current API is intended for ephemeral menu extras that disappear when their host app isn’t running. In short, the menubar isn’t designed for users to collect menu extras like Pokémon.
I take it as a sign of typical increasing corporate dysfunction. Obvious problems, some even easy and uncontroversial, don't get fixed. Why?
The people who can fix them are not in control. The org must be very top-down. But Steve Jobs had a top down style, so what's the difference? Its: Using and caring about the product.
It's top down direction with the people at the top not using/caring about the product. Presumably they're concerned with other things like efficiency, stocks, clout.
Also if you had a majorly obvious bug, you could email steve@apple.com, which he would forward to a VP, who would be fired if it wasn't fixed ASAP. Knew a guy who lost his job that way, so it's not just a myth. Steve really was like that.
The wrath of Steve was a real thing that people feared.
I remember reading that he would roam the cubicles in the 80s when he came by some engineer who hadn't slept for 72 hours and who had been working on a difficult problem.
Steve didn't like his work and yelled "This is shit!" and then proceeded to pull the plug on his computer deleting all the work.
Classic Steve Jobs.
Today we have a soy boy CEO and the result shows in the product.
"The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste." — Steve Jobs
It used to be a checkbox, now there's only this command.
Eventually that will be gone too, and none will be the wiser except the old who remember the good old days.
I'm starting to think these settings are left there by rogue engineers who fight against the oppression while staying under the radar. It's like a secret cabal that works to maintain sanity while the plebs are left to suffer at the mercy of their own ignorance.
I think they kinda did? I'm not sure where to look for a link to this info, but I remember watching a YouTube video showing the ability to group and hide menu bar icons in Tahoe so they take up less space (and therefore encroach less toward the notch).
Maybe I'm misremembering the video though.
(edit) The linked page seems to hint at it:
> Personalized controls and menu bar. Your display feels even larger with the transparent menu bar. And you have more ways to customize the controls and layout in the menu bar and Control Center, even those from third parties
Notice how on the menu bar, when you click File and then the dropdown appears, you can move the mouse arrow to the right (without clicking) over Edit and now the Edit menu shows up. But the same doesn't work on the status menu icons, if I click on the volume icon and move the mouse, nothing happens, the volume menu stays open, even if hover over the battery indicator. So many little things like this that never worked consistently.
A lot of the focus here is on the design (obviously). It took me a while to get used to it. But there are a lot of really great improvements in this release that make it worth it. Spotlight gets big updates. Live activities and notifications syncing from your phone. Journal. Music app has been massively updated and redesigned. Phone app. And surprisingly it doesn’t feel like a launch release - definitely less buggy than previous efforts.
If you're up for a project, you can swap the guts of those 5K iMacs for an aftermarket controller board which turns it into a regular monitor. It's a bit janky but a hell of a lot cheaper than buying a new 5K monitor.
Which is a bit sad. There were some choices that didn’t pan out in the last Intel era (butterfly, touchbar), but part of me loved those changes (the keyboard and the touchbar felt super premium, until you tried to work with them for any amount of time).
I mean it’s gotten bad already, but I think people’s hope is that they fixed it that if I type in a file name I work with all the time it’ll be the first result. At least that’s what I’m hoping for.
that and some kind of weighted memory for search history. i use photoshop almost daily, photos once a month or so, and photo booth once a year, but they appear in reverse order based on alphabetization.
Disappointed with the background image. I was expecting a similar treatment like with Sequoia and previous versions with a beautiful and inspiring scene in nature. Instead it is vaguely inspired by water?
"Reimagined with Liquid Glass, macOS Tahoe is at once fresh and familiar. Apps bring more focus to your content. You can personalize your Mac like never before. And everything just flows into place."
Now imagine it being said by someone presenting and doing the same hand pyramid stance that they make every Apple employee in WWDC videos do.
All kidding aside, it’s weird to read. Ever since I was a kid, I was taught that beginning a sentence with “And” or “But” is not “correct”. Times change and all that, I get it - it’s just weird though.
All of the major commercial OS vendors are trying to do that. Apple started it with iOS. Google have gradually been tightening the net. Microsoft are furthest away but they have the longest legacy of freedom so they the furthest to go.
Obviously they aren't going to publicly say that's their intent, but you don't have to be a genius to read between the lines.
As for why... money and power are pretty big motivators.
I remember when there was option to run any application. With Sequoia there are only 2 options: App Store; App store + Known developers. Third option was removed. You can still run other apps but you need to manually approve them with ~3 popups where first option is "move to Bin". You need to do this after every OS or App update. I wonder when this option will be removed as well.
I've been running it since the RC and am currently in the process of uninstalling it. The new UI is so incredibly ugly I honestly cannot understand how they thought it was acceptable to even released as a beta let alone an RC and now release.
There's SO much padding and wasted screen real estate, disjointed looking floating inner panels, window corners that are so rounded you see gaps in full screen apps, inconsistencies everywhere and - well, I could go on.
Basically the vibe I get from it is that they think their users are dumb - they won't care about things like this and that they want everything to look like a preschoolers tablet.
I count four different corner radius sizes currently on my screen, which is maddening.
Apple has a thing against people with OCD. Or taste.
The thing is horribly wasteful of screen real estate, and as someone who’s been writing a Mac blog for over two decades, I am so happy I started using Fedora two years ago—GNOME has its flaws, but it looks nicer than Tahoe.
Fedora Silverblue is the closest feeling to the macOS experience I fell in love with that I’ve had on Linux in, well, ever. Very happy with it on my desktop and laptop. It’s not perfect but it is less imperfect than modern macOS has become.
Finding a laptop that works well is annoying, however.
> Finding a laptop that works well is annoying, however.
It doesn't exist at the moment. :\
I would pay 2x the price of a macbook for a linux laptop with the same hardware quality.
The battery life and power/efficiency of my m4 pro is insane. It's so good that it's really hard to justify using anything else right now.
It's sad that the best Linux laptop right now arguably is a M4 Mac virtualizing Linux.
Why not run it natively with Asahi Linux?
> The battery life and power/efficiency of my m4 pro is insane.
They're coming. Look for AMD Strix Halo chips. They're in the comparably comfortable efficiency range.
> AMD Strix Halo chips
Do you happen to know any laptop that has a) equivalent screen quality (retina resolution), b) keyboard, c) trackpad but with full Linux support where all hardware pheripherals just work?
The performance seems to rival Apple's Pro / Max chips but the battery life can only do that for light workloads or videos.
It's messed up TBH, the only laptops competitive on battery are Qualcomm which comes with a different set of sacrifices instead!
I have a couple that work quite well with it, including a very nice 10” one - https://taoofmac.com/space/reviews/2025/05/15/2230
And I run a macOS-like GNOME theme that is pretty great.
This looks great, but not for the US market!
https://store.chuwi.com/products/corebook-x-i3-1220p?#descs
Based on past experience, I wouldn't buy chuwi hardware unless you're willing to treat it as disposable
Silverblue is great but regular Fedora is worth a look too if you don't want to deal with the teething issues of managing all your dev-tools with Silverblue's immutable setup, granted that was 2 years ago when i tried so thing's might be better now.
Infuriatingly; I have a macbook because a couple years ago I wanted a laptop that just worked while keeping my familiar tools but it really feels like Linux is trending up in polish and macOS on the down with an intersect possibly happening in a couple years.
Are you using Fedora on the Mac (via Asahi)?
Or are you using Fedora on an Intel/AMD laptop?
That's not possible. I saw a video yesterday where Greg Joswiak (SVP worldwide marketing at Apple) assured me that Apple has the best design team in the world.
Making the world a better place by rounding off all the hard edges including those edge cases…
If 12px won’t do, try 42
I have been running the beta from the beginning and they have improved quite a bit, but I am actually shocked they didn't delay Mac OS 26, because the design is so rough around the edges. Some of the larger aesthetic changes, such as the menu bar and the dock look good, but there is so much more that looks objectively awful.
1. the way window UI elements float in bubbles on the top over a white background is horrible. It looks amateurish.
2. Icons look low detail and blurry. At first I thought they were using low resolution placeholder icons, but no, the layered diffused glass effect just kind of translates to blurriness on many app icons.
3. The side bar, such as on Finder, just kind of floats there. That is fine and looks kind of neat on the Maps app as you can see some of the maps behind it, but on the Finder it is just a white bubble over top of a white background, which... is a choice.
4. The app launcher is gone, and replaced by Spotlight, which is worse.
I could go on. The point is it is bad and Apple should be embarrassed. I say that as someone who likes Apple products alot.
> 4. The app launcher is gone, and replaced by Spotlight, which is worse.
Do you mean the Launchpad? (I've never used it; but always use Spotlight to launch apps.)
The biggest surprise to me from this whole beta period is that a significant number of people used Launchpad. I have absolutely zero idea why when Spotlight has existed for more than 20 years. Why would you ever want to click and page through a giant iPhone screen on a desktop/laptop computer?
If you have multiple ways to do something on a computer/phone, some relatively large percentage of people will fumble around until they figure out a way to do it - and then do it that way forever.
So if someone accidentally triggered Launchpad and realized they could see their apps, they might use that forever (not knowing you can put your Applications folder in your Dock and use it as a start menu lol).
they've had a launch-pad-ey thing forever, I remember when our school lab had Mac IIs and Performas, and there was some simplified UI on top of finder which basically was all your apps in giant rectangular icons. I forget what it was called though.
Because I vaguely remember that one icon I use every other month, but can't recall the name. The icons are also ordered by installation time, so it's easy to jump to the most recent ones.
I use it rarely, but sometimes I'm happy it's there.
Exactly this. Most of the time I use spotlight like everyone else.
I always forget that Launchpad even exists. I guess it doesn't now. I suppose it might be helpful if you just know "I need that app that looks like X" and don't actually recall the first two letters of the app's name.
Shocking as it is, search based UIs are really despised by some people (me).
I greatly prefer visual/spatial browsing
Looking at the Slack icon right now, and it just looks blurry and low resolution, same for Calendar and some others, it's awful.
The maps icon is the most egregious. It makes my head hurt.
It was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me. After trying out the preview for a month, the writing was on the wall, and I began the process of switching to a Thinkpad with Linux. I am now fully off macOS for the first time in 20 years of being an Apple die hard. I could use a lot of emotionally loaded words to describe how I feel about this release, but the long and short of it is that I am no longer the target audience for Apple.
Just run linux with utm!
I try not to indulge in negativity and scorn, but I agree with these sentiments. This is resoundly a regression. Text overlapping on text, searchboxes that are broken and now just function as text boxes, increased latency throughout the operating system.
It's so bad that it's kind of fascinating. Unfortunately, even "Reduce Transparency" doesn't fix the LG update.
> SO much padding
No idea on macOS, but turn on Reduce Transparency on iOS and there’s tons of padding most of the time, but then sometimes zero padding. And I mean zero. The edges of buttons and text are at the edge of the underlying background. It’s…embarrassing.
Yeah similar situation here. I've been running it since basically the day after WWDC, and I've just had this sinking feeling that its so bad, they wouldn't be able to fix it before release. Or, they don't even view it as something that needs fixing.
I'll begrudgingly get a couple more years out of this personal M2 Air, but my engineering team is prepping to do upgrades on some older M1 Pros we've had since launch, and after seeing Tahoe, the CTO and I formed a plan to give devs the option of getting either an M4 Pro or a Framework. We haven't launched yet, but I think a solid number of our engineers are going to opt for the Framework, hopefully as high as half.
Ugh I upgraded excitedly and can't stand the UI - there is no upside to any of it. Also for some reason things are also beachballing and VSCode keeps crashing - new M4 MBP. All the system log errors are present exactly as they were and my USB-C dock with Ethernet port still doesn't work.
I was on RC too, for a few days, and also uninstalled. I'm glad I did, the fresh Sequoia install feels much nicher. Even with reduce transparency on, the design was too ugly and the drab gray icon jails for non-squircle icons were downright offensive. First macOS version I'm gonna skip and I've been a day one updater since mountain lion, very sad.
lol are you an ATP listener?
I don’t think the icon situation is enough to keep me off the release, but agree that the design is just kind of a mess and not my taste.
ATP was enough to convince me to tell people at work not to upgrade right away.
Last time I did this was ... the version that removed 32bit compatibility, I think?
Haha I'm subscribed but haven't listened to that episode, I took the squircle jail term from the arstechnica tahoe review.
It would be one thing if they excessively rounded and padded the windows, but they shipped with a bunch of different padding and border radii. So far I’ve counted 4 different borders, and I’m sure there’s more.
Yeah, 4 different corner radius sizes is where I’m at too. Won’t be surprised if there are more.
I just counted 5 different radii in Apple’s apps alone. I also discovered they space the window control buttons in all sorts of different spots to, so it’s even more insane than just multiple radii.
I made the mistake of updating my phone, and immediately regretted it. We tried Liquid Glass already, it was called mid-aughts Windows. It sucked then, and it sucks now.
Everything I've seen of it looks a disaster. I'll wait for macOS 27.
I have a Mac M1 that's been on MacOS 14 Sonoma for a couple years at this point - I've not seen anything even remotely interesting in later releases that could incentivize me to roll the dice and upgrade.
My Mac is also on Sonoma. I'm sure there are some incremental features that I would appreciate, but I'm always worried about what's going to break or be worse with the next OS update.
I'll update my phone because iOS jumps are bigger in terms of functionality. But 14 years in, OSX just doesn't have a lot of new bells and whistles that I care about. The last time I updated, I was only excited about getting Sidecar functionality so I could dual-screen onto my iPad. When a minor feature like this is the most memorable, that's saying something.
I think the only thing that would get me to update would be notable AI improvements. But seeing what I've seen of AI on iOS, I'm in no rush.
Waiting an extra year to jump on new macOS releases has been the norm for sane people for quite some time now.
It sucks if you buy a new mac which isn't supported by older macOS releases though, so maybe don't do that for a year or so. I guess you sometimes just have to put your new Apple device in storage for a year until there's functional software.
For me I simply don't upgrade ever until I'm forced to, usually by an app that I want to use.
As someone without an iPhone and who doesn't really use included desktop apps, there are simply never any improvements in the OS for me, only regressions.
The Finder looks like shit. The sidebar is like badly retrofited from another program, perhaps from some crappy Gnome theme.
The Control Center (or however they call the drop down window with quick controls for volume, wifi, brigthness, etc) has floating isolated icons like crap.
Bring back Scott Forstall. Give him a big bonus. Let him fix this shit.
Otherwise, the code changes and actual features are probably fine.
I’m glad to see another member of Club Forstall here. My biggest wish for Apple is to bring back Forstall. Letting him go was their biggest mistake.
Can you post screenshots of what you mean?
I see grossly rounded corners in some apps, but I don't see the other stuff like gaps in window corners for full screen apps. I may have some config bit flipped that has disabled those.
Yeah, the new corner radius is ugly but by and large, it's not much different than before, from what I see so far.
https://imgur.com/a/jLPM9oV
this is what I'm seeing with Safari, WhatsApp and Chrome all maximized but with various radius on each corner.
Try running console with tmux. The window menu just floats there instead of being snugly fit against the bottom from end to end.
Training/preparing users for upcoming AR glasses interfaces?
Did you notice any impact on battery life?
> Basically the vibe I get from it is that they think their users are dumb
Your point would have been much more convincing had you refrained from this sort of pejorative assigning of motives. It wasn't necessary.
I've been running the betas to the final release and there are a number of basic affordances and system improvements that are definitely worthwhile. I will not be going back.
Having said that, while I know they had good intentions with this whole design, and probably really thought they were pursing a winner, what a massive, massive miss. This is such an aesthetic disaster that I'm just in awe. I feel like they had a huge push to do some seemingly substantial change, particularly on the mobile side, given the stumbles in the AI space, so they changed a lot of things maybe without quite enough thought.
Ugly as hell. More dead space. On the mobile side they released an update to iOS just today from the RC a few days ago that removes some of the particularly stupid animations (the app tray did some dumb thing where it expanded and shrank, and that and a few similar things are gone).
I've been running the RC and I have had no issues. Some of the design choices (sidebars particularly) are strange, but it's generally fine.
I recommend not overcomplicating your life and just staying on the latest macOS.
So the Gnome 3 gang were ahead of their time?
Indeed, gives old Gnome vibe.
I decided to install this and the updated iOS today to see how I felt about it.
My very initial impressions on MacOS:
(1) I like the look of Safari better and the Mail app compared to the prior designs. They both look really nice to me and the Mail app especially looks like a huge improvement in terms of design unification with some of the features like summaries and unsubscribe options that looked bolted on in the past now blending in seamlessly.
(2) I really, really don't like the new icons! Especially so on iOS.
(3) On iOS the app group/folders look terrible to me with the way they distort my wallpaper. Not a fan.
(4) A lot of people are complaining about transparent icons. It's not a valid complaint and is strong evidence whoever is saying that hasn't used the new OS as that is a choice you can make if you want. The default is not transparent.
(5) The increased radii in some places doesn't seem to have any meaningful impact to my information density. A simple comparison of Chrome (old styling) and Safari (with the liquid glass design) shows that Safari has a few pixels fewer in height search + tab bar as a concrete example.
(6) Messages app in MacOS looks like shit. I hate almost everything about it.
(7) Spotlight search has marked improvements! UI is nicer and functionality has expanded greatly (eg clipboard search).
I really like the Apps change. Instead of opening up the icons full screen, it opens in a spotlight search window.
What I find weird: you can have light icons with color, dark icons with color, but not clear (and/or tinted) icons with color.
It’s a strange omission.
No more *poof* animation when you drag a control out of the toolbar during customization.
I weirdly like the clear apps on iOS. Less visually stimulating.
I swear I don't usually complain about UI styling updates, because it's usually not a big deal - but this looks really, really bad [1]. It's less functional with bizarre transparency choices destroying legibility, and big rounded corners taking up more dead space. And stylistically, the layouts just look unbalanced and amateurish (It reminds me of what happens when I attempt to do CSS layouts). Most Linux desktops unironically look better than this.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/09/macos-26-tahoe-the-a...
It's ironic that Apple makes screen size incredibly expensive for every millimeter - and then designs UI which proceeds to waste that pricey real-estate as well as user time by burying options (or worse, simply removing many advanced user options "because they don't fit").
Wow. I know I’m not the first to say it, but it really does give me Windows Vista vibes. No bueno.
vista was pretty nice looking tbh (or, it was to me, especially the black ultimate edition with the frosted glass).
It just chugged like madness, the UAC dialogs were slow to fade in (and numerous) and the widgets and moving wallpaper was about 10y too early.
I was distinctly not happy with the control panel changes, but hindsight tells me that I should have been.
Vista made me jump ship to Linux on 2006, where I remained for a good 17 years.
Maybe I'm going to jump back to Linux because of this update.
It’s funny how different people saw things. UAC was hated back then but I was a Linux user primarily and when I bought my laptop I kept the Windows Vista while dual booting. UAC mostly made sense and worked like gksudo.
I remember saying so once and got flamed by people online because of course Microsoft didn’t copy this from Linux and of course gksudo was much better.
But the subjective experience I had was the same. IMHO the greatest victory with Electron has been that the OS wars have practically ended.
I'll give it a try, I installed the iOS and iPadOS betas and I actually like some of the changes.
But I do not understand how the color-tinted UI/icons ever got shipped. They just look... bad...
Windows Aero is back
Aero was peak HCI compared to this
Imagine if Steve saw this...
https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/tahoe...
I had the same issue on first start, the icons had to load while I was scrolling.
Think something is borked there. Mine doesn't do that.
So far the only thing bothering me so far is the way the tabs look (in Finder and Safari). And I did turn on the menu bar background.
Have the tabs in Finder always been slow to appear? Right now there is a noticeable delay from when I press cmd+tab to when tab animates itself into existence, reminds me of lag in windows 11.
It seems instant to me?
I absolutely hate it. I guess we’ll probably get used to it but until then… gah ugliest MacOS ever?
What's not to love about macOS Vista?
Don't think of it as the ugliest MacOS ever, think of it as the most beautiful MacOS of the rest of your life.
Hoping the next update is the iOS 8 to the iOS 7 redesign and then it'll be fine.
You'll get used to it.
I do dislike how toy-like the user interface looks, but I really hate how illegible notifications are on iPadOS. I had to turn on the reduce transparency setting so I could read the notification text against my lock screen wallpaper.
You've been disabled by Apple. There's no other way to characterize your (and my) need for an accessibility setting to make the OS usable.
You're just old, kids love this shit
The reason Liquid Glass on macOS specifically is getting so much blowback is that it isn't just updating the translucency effect with the new glass refraction effect - they've also increased the border radius of most windows, increased paddings in toolbars, sidebars, etc. and overall made the UI much less information-dense, which is wild for a desktop OS. If they had just changed the translucency effect, I think this would be much better received.
Personally, I'm sticking with macOS Sequoia for now, and if macOS 27 goes even more in the less-information-density direction, I'll probably fully move off of macOS, which is a shame as a 20-year Apple user.
Border radius on everything on Apple devices has been progressively increasing, eventually I expect everything to be circular. No rectangles allowed.
If there is an alternative to the m-series that lets me keep the battery life I'd jump ship. The m-series chips are just so good though
I’m using one of the Lenovo Aura editions. It doesn’t match the MacBook, but I also don’t worry about battery at all any more and perf is just fine for my needs. I don’t miss Apple at all. Now, if only there was a Linux phone…
You'd jump ship because of the .0 release of Tahoe? Really? People get a little hysterical about things like this.
You know you don't have to upgrade to it, right? They'll support Sequoia for years, and you could even be running Sonoma if you wanted.
The response to this design is likely to be so overwhelmingly negative that we'll see a lot of subtle retreats in the point releases going forward, and when the macOS 7 version replaces TahoeVista, you can upgrade then.
It's not really hysterical to want to jump a ship that feels like is turning into a clown cruise. I can use Windows, Linux, and OSX equally well for work, even if I deploy to AWS in the end. However, I love the osx aesthetic and MacBook hardware, since around Snow Leopard, which is when I switched from Linux to OSX. Since then, OSX have gotten worse with every release since, and Tahoe is a very low new low. At some point, it becomes not worth it. Just like it's not worth staying on the previous release of OSX while random apps and extensions lose compatibility. It's not hysteria, it's just the straw that breaks the camels back. The only thing is, I really like the M4 speed. There is nothing that runs as fast, and as cool, that I am aware of. If I wasn't doing a bunch of processing right now, I would probably switch. Non-hysterically.
Sequoia is absolutely, undeniably better than Sonoma. Sonoma is undeniably better than Ventura. And so on. This notion that it's all downhill is just noisy nonsense as people wave their hands and have a tantrum that they don't like some change. And to be clear, every single macOS release yields this. It's incredibly boring.
Like, it's fun to whine about the imperfection of macOS...versus Windows or Linux? LOL, come on. And just like you and probably everyone else on here, I use macOS, Windows and Linux every single day. Pretending that a couple of aesthetic changes are the big "straw that broke the camel's back" is just so lame.
It is hysterical. It's noisy nonsense. This "fine this is it" tantrum that people pull is such a tired gimmick.
And personally I think the aesthetics of macOS/iOS/iPadOS 26 are terrible. They're inevitably going to start easing down the heinous translucency and will claw back on the stupid round corners. Aside from that the system has a lot of fundamental improvements that will benefit everyone.
But no, no one on Sequoia is going to suddenly be without apps or extensions. When apps start abandoning versions it's usually a couple of versions out.
It's not just Tahoe though, there have been more and more UX papercuts over the years.
Here's an example of one such UI regression, that started with Big Sur and now got slightly worse in Tahoe (written by someone who is very knowledgeable about macOS): https://eclecticlight.co/2025/06/15/last-week-on-my-mac-fide...
Is cropping PDFs to rounded corners (without a way to disable it) enough to get someone to switch to another OS? Probably not, but it's still IMO a UI regression regardless.
> They'll support Sequoia for years, and you could even be running Sonoma if you wanted.
Unless the app you want doesn't support them anymore. Or the corporate policy forces an upgrade.
I feel like every macOS update has been worse than the last, since like 2015-2018 or so. Still, their only real competition is Windows 11, which isn’t well received either.
I'm still on Sonoma on my Mac, but I've recently been splitting my time between macOS and Linux and I'm starting to be pretty happy with Linux.
The main problem I had with living in a Gnome desktop environment, is with the keyboard. I'm not willing to abandon my use of Emacs control+meta sequences for cursor and editing movements everywhere in the GUI. On macOS, this works because the command (super/Win on Linux/Windows) key is used for common shortcuts and the control key is free for editing shortcuts.
I spent a day or so hacking around with kanata[0], which is a kernel level keyboard remapping tool, that lets you define keyboard mapping layers in a similar way you might with QMK firmware. When I press the 'super/win/cmd' it activates a layer which maps certain sequences to their control equivalents, so I can create tabs, close windows, copy and paste (and many more) like my macOS muscle memory wants to do. Other super key sequences (like Super-L for lock desktop or Super-Tab for window cycling) are unchanged. Furthermore, when I hit the control or meta/alt/option key, it activates a layer where Emacs editing keys are emulated using the Gnome equivalents. For example, C-a and C-e are mapped to home/end, etc.
After doing this, and tweaking my Gnome setup for another day or so, I am just as comfortable on my Linux machine as I am on my Mac.
[0]: https://github.com/jtroo/kanata
Oh, apple would have to do much worse for windows 11 to look good.
Yeah me too. I think I liked Mavericks or Yosemite or something and have pretty much hated every upgrade since.
Possibly, although I definitely don't recall the macOS Big Sur re-design being as disruptive UI-wise as Tahoe is.
I feel like we’ve gone full circle. For decades Apple hardware sucked and was badly overpriced, but you paid the price to enjoy running Mac OS X. Now Apple makes amazing hardware (especially laptops) but the drawback is that you have to run macOS on them.
I really wish Asahi Linux had more support, I would have bought a couple M4 Minis.
Without knowing your specific workloads, I'd imagine an M2 Pro Mac mini (which is supported by Asahi) is still plenty fast.
If you don't need the battery life of a MacBook and you're happy getting a desktop device, there's plenty of machines running new AMD chips that are just as fast as an M series mac, if not faster. And they'll run Linux with no compromises. Check out Bee-Link (https://www.bee-link.com/) for some mac-inspired hardware.
(This about iOS, not Mac, but obviously a lot is similar.)
I might be in the minority on hn, but I’m using iOS 26 for the first time today and am pretty happy with the new design. For one, it’s a lot snappier and faster. I’m glad they finally did something about the slow-ass animations iOS had in a lot of places. Secondly, it has a lot more personality. I enjoy that. Thirdly, they finally moved more basic UI stuff close to the thumbs instead of literally 6 inches away at the top of the screen. Love that. Knowing app designers, my apps are about to get easier to use just by migrating to the new UX concepts Apple is pushing.
The glass look is mostly fine. iOS had contrast issues before, and I don’t think it’s any worse. If anything, it’s more adaptive to different types of backgrounds now.
There are some visual glitches and weird things, but they’re pretty minor and will be resolved with time. The glass panes for, say, folders look nice, and I like it more than the previous blur.
I always considered the butterfly keyboard[1] the point at which Apple's design system jumped the shark as it focused on it's own aesthetics vs. building quality and reliable products.
Funny enough, it's the only time period since 1999 that I was apple free for a while. My MBP broke. I've previously had a butterfly keyboard on my work mac, and it got replaced on a regular bases. While unfortunate for a work computer, this was not acceptable as my personal one with no spares)
Thankfully Apple returned to making great products that work, and I bought the next MBP.
Seeing that Apple's returning to it's "design roots"[2], I really hope they do not loose sight of building great products that work well for their customers.
[1] https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Butterfly_keyboard
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-09-14/apple-...
> Seeing that Apple's returning to it's "design roots"
There's a very important and relevant design quote from Steve Jobs that keeps popping up in my head:
https://mastodon.world/@lensco/115184866965741757
When Steve died, so did the Apple we all knew and loved.
I worked at Apple in the years shortly after his death, and was trying to convince myself this wasn't true, but it is.
Tim should find someone smart and willing to take a real look at the company and ceed power to the next generation.
> I always considered the butterfly keyboard[1] the point at which Apple's design system jumped the shark as it focused on it's own aesthetics vs. building quality and reliable products.
This statement describes pretty much every mouse Apple ever made, from the circular ones to the horrendous magic mouse with charging port underneath.
Ooh, the mouse myth! Love it when this one gets dragged out. Turns out it’s not really a problem - the battery life is measured in months, you’ll get several hours from plugging it in for thirty seconds, and days if you plug it in for a few minutes while getting coffee.
People love to hate it, but it’s never been a real problem. The ergonomics are bad. The charging isn’t.
This is true, but Apple mice have always been consistently bad. A laptop where getting a single grain of dirt under the keyboard meant you couldn't type was a very new thing in 2015.
> Funny enough, it's the only time period since 1999 that I was apple free for a while.
Same here. After the butterfly keyboard era, I spent about 5 years with Windows 10/11 and powershell, then WSL. There's still a lot of annoyance in the Windows space (NTFS is slow due to all the filesystem filters), but Linux package managers are much better than homebrew and WSL does make Windows a pretty reasonable developer system. I'm back on the MacOS now but I wouldn't hate a nice Windows machine.
Such a shame, it seems like Apple has lost its touch and now its gonna kill the mac.
Been off IOS for years due to the same problems with Apple design. It started with Ive taking over IOS design but turned into slaveish copy and paste of iOS on mac.
Dont take offense. If you had a product that made more money than the Beatles, you would probably stop listening to your staff as well.
Problem is Apple cant for all its "user centric" marketing(?) it cant get out of its own way because its just shoveling the same phone at users years in and year out since 2007 and no matter how bad it is users say: "Yes give me MORE master!"
Do you blame them?
Awful cheap UX, cartoonish style with huge padding, lack of structure and hierarchy. The spacing is inconsistent, everything is rounded. The app launcher stutters, the icons load one by one, it flickers each time I do the 4 finger gesture. Why does the volume bubble have tick marks but the one in the menu doesn't? The trash icon looks like the windows recycle bin or gnome theme from 20 years ago, not sure why it's flattened like that.
Oh boy, I opened the settings app to change the wallpaper, the scrollbar gets cut off by the right bottom rounded corner. The wallpapers can be scrolled horizontally and they show up under the side rail (blurred), looks like a glitch, and I still can't resize this window to see more of the wallpapers. They may have fixed the custom color bug though.
It really does look like ass on the laptop. Maybe it works on mobile, idk, but terrible on laptop. Also not a good sign since apple is not known for rolling back releases.
Whew. Those screenshots: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/09/macos-26-tahoe-the-a...
As a KDE Plasma dev, I always counted on us getting better, but I didn't expect the competition to get so much worse. We'd be flamed to high and heaven for shipping broken notification popups and rendering glitches like that in a prod release.
What happened internally to cause this, I wonder?
The rumor mill speculates that Apple needed to ship something big and flashy to distract people from calling them out on their failure to deliver on the AI features promised (and previewed!) more than a year ago.
My guess is organizational inertia around dependency chains
I should know better, but I'm still surprised they're shipping this version of Liquid Glass. Performance is stable but there are so many UI bugs and inconsistencies that haven't been fixed from early betas, including low-hanging fruit that a second year design student would notice. I don't mind change or interface elements moving around but keynote-level UI overhauls should be fully implemented at launch, otherwise people are stuck using a broken OS for a year.
At this point I'm doubtful that these will be addressed in the 26.X updates, so the wait begins for 27.0...
Yeah I shouldn't be surprised this was allowed to launch today, but yet I am.
I ran the whole beta on all my devices. Every new beta I'd ask myself "Surely they fixed 'x' by now, right?" and we advanced, beta after beta, with the same bugs and performance regressions all the way up to launch.
The icons still need to redraw in the settings app and app library. It's overall sluggish. The drop shadows are huge in the finder and other apps top bar. If you turn on always show scrollbars they get cut off at a weird angle due to the excessive corner radius.
My iPhone 16 PM runs hot all the time, even on release now, vs. iOS 18.
I don't mind the transparency or glass effects. I actually like it in some areas. But man does it need some serious polish and bug fixing, and a lot of time and effort spent on consistency.
This should never have went live in this state. I consider .0 just another beta, really. Actual release will probably be .2 or .3
Whoa, you can now search clipboard history. Go to Spotlight Search, Command+4. You'll get a list of entries, each with a copy button, and is searchable. Even shows the app it was copied in.
At last Apple implemented a decent clipboard history. KDE has this thing for a decade now, I guess...
KDE also can encode entries as QR codes, so you can make URLs transferable to your phone or whatnot.
-- Sent from my MacBook Air.
If you use KDE Connect, your clipboard history immediately goes to your phone's clipboard :)
macOS/ios can also share clipboards for awhile now.
For KDE Connect, does the phone have to be an Android or ?
KDE Connect exists on both iOS and Android, though some functions like text messages aren't available on iOS.
KDE Connect works on macOS, Windows, Linux, Android and iOS
More like, almost 3 decades.
Windows has this with Win+V for those wondering.
Including passwords from password managers?
Does that mean that add-on clipboard managers like Maccy are obsolete now?
Wow, didn't realise there was more than one tab
There were already a zillion and one apps (Maccy, ClipMenu, Jumpcut, Flycut, Alfred, ...) that provided this.
It'll be one of the first things I turn off whenever I get around to installing it ~6+ months from now.
Apple no longer cares about disabled people.
Transparent UI, with controls sitting on top of arbitrary and changing content can NEVER be legible/discernible. Apple knows this, but fashion was more important than function and they decided, "who cares about disabled people, anyway."
Microsoft learned this lesson back in the Vista era but Apple's charging ahead with this terrible set of changes that will literally disable millions of users, people who will need to visit the accessibility settings to reduce the transparency.
It's a sad day when a company that has often lead in accessibility ships the least accessible OS in modern history. I guess it was a nice run having a Big Tech company to point to as a good example of doing various accessibility things well. Damn.
Changing toolbars to text-only is pretty bad. The button hotboxes are tiny
Generally I think the toolbar settings needed more testing, they can be wonky (e.g. in Automator for text+icon it causes the traffic lights to misalign, in Safari toggling the sidebar on and off is janky).
It might be more accurate to say that they are giving non-disabled people an experience akin to that of disabled people. ;)
> Apple no longer cares about disabled people.
Did you enable the relevant accessibility options that are there for this purpose?
Why do that? If they did any investigation into the accessibility options whatsoever then they wouldn't be able to treat us to Kanye style analysis.
I'm sorry, but that's not a logical stance. If this were the method that anyone in the industry used (which absolutely nobody does) all interfaces would be high contrast 150pt font, no transparency, two color, because that's what my grandma needs.
My post is agreeing with you. It's sarcasm. Please try to parse it again.
Text emojis were invented by the grey beards out of necessity, not cuteness. ;)
> literally disable millions of users, people who will need to visit the accessibility settings to reduce the transparency.
I'm confused. You're condemning them for not accommodating the disabled, yet admitting they provide an accommodation in the same sentence.
I've been submitting endless feedback about how Liquid Arse breaks dark mode during the beta. I keep seeing dark text on dark backgrounds all over the place in both Tahoe and iOS 26, for example: https://imgur.com/a/R3DTcSd
I've pretty much given up with submitting feedback though.
Much the same on Linux with Wayland.
I haven't touched Windows for over a decade, does it still have a decent story for disabilities? They've certainly regressed in other areas ...
You can turn off the transparency in the accessibility settings. Sure products could be 100% accessible out of the box but unless you had some sort of limit on that it would likely make the experience worse for the majority of users. I can’t imagine Helvetica Neue Extra Light was particularly accessible as the system font a decade ago - but there were accessibility settings.
This is what happens when designers are treated as royalty and are told that their new "clothes" are "awesome" all the time.
It's also a symptom of consumption addiction where there is demand/motivation for drastic, superficial changes that don't really offer any value except to those who are consumed by the need for constant change for change's sake.
Apple used to care more about disabled people because of how the Accessibility APIs worked and were required for most apps.
They went way too far with the corner radii and pill shapes imo, looks like a Fisher Price toy. Some inner buttons retained the old radii and don't match the outer window radii anymore.
It's truly hideous to look at. I really can't believe they went for these massively rounded corners. They're too stubborn to allow you to select an option for right angled corners again. They just tinker as there's no other real UI enhancements.
> They're too stubborn to allow you to select an option for right angled corners again.
"right angled corners again"
I have a feeling you aren't and haven't been a Mac user for a long time. When was the last time Macs had right angled corners!? 30+ years ago?
It’s a trend that’s visible in other designs too, like Material 3 Expressive.
I’m not a fan of Windows but I believe that probably the best modern UI design system for desktops right now is probably the flavor of Fluent used in Windows 11. It still retains somewhat desktop-like information density, doesn’t go overboard on radii, and has a touch of depth. I’d like to see more design languages exploring in its general direction.
I still find KDE superior in productivity, information density and "useful effects" category.
Apple still has the best "get out of the way, be invisible" UI.
Both are valid ways to approach to a problem, but I like KDE's batteries included, infinitely customizable way better.
I think KDE has the right spirit but its execution leaves something to be desired.
I don't think "defaults to windows-like" is a bad choice for newcomers.
I don't customize it heavily either. Move tray, clock and menus to the top, a-la GNOME2, leave taskbar at the bottom, both auto-hidden and narrower than screen.
Add four desktops as a 2x2 grid, re-enable old CTRL+ALT+$ARROW keyboard shortcuts, add a couple of usability effects with custom key combinations and two active corners, and I'm done.
Some applications (Konsole, KATE) get custom fonts and themes, but everything else is bog standard. Setting it up takes 30-ish minutes, and it's the same config for decades now. Probably because of sharpening the same tool and optimizing without knowing.
Then, I can just concentrate and fly on that environment.
Also, they have improved a lot in the small areas where it was lacking. You can use your system without a terminal if you want, plus Baloo works really well.
I would argue that it actually doesn’t go far enough in windows-like-ness to be viable for a lot of people, and for those who prefer a mac-like setup the possible customization doesn’t take it far enough in that direction, either. It’s not Windows or macOS, it’s KDE, and that’s fine but I think there need to be environments more specifically aimed at people who are happy with their current commercial OS setups.
Definitely the “be invisible” part.
It reminds me of the Wii U interface[1]. Except less playful. It really is a disaster.
[1] https://wiki.cemu.info/images/1/1a/Wii_U_Menu.png
totally agree, this is kind of an embarrassing look for supposed workstations
The humiliation " " "
The part that I am so tired of is the ‘we are the best at this and this is amazing’ pitch that comes with every release. Never mind that this release’s design ‘language’ DIRECTLY conflicts with things they used to say ‘never do that’.
So what changed exactly? Change is understandable but this is a full 180. - floating anything was verboten - accessibility was paramount - clarity was prioritized
How did this release come about??
Can anyone speak to whether the performance of the Settings app has been improved? In Seq and every version since they redid it in presumably SwiftUI, if you select one of the navigation panes and then hold either the up or down arrow keys to quickly navigate between them, something like a memory leak occurs due to (seemingly) launching all of the nested panes as separate apps (this is what appears to be the case in activity monitor) and the Settings app will start lagging until you fully quit and reopen.
No, it's worse. Basically it's the same experience but with an uglier UI
The search textbox overlaps with text which scrolls underneath.
The search box did not work for a few minutes after updating, but I assume that was a temporary indexing bug.
I'm normally on about 1 year delay on upgrading macOS for a multitude of reasons. I might not wait the full year but something else will have to force me to upgrade within the first few months.
I'd heard from people who were running the betas that it's not ready and they are surprised Tahoe wasn't delayed.
No way I'm upgrading any time soon to Apple's least cared for OS with a change this big (and this untested).
I'll be honest, I hear this every single time. But I've never delayed upgrading, and I've never regretted it. That's not to say every upgrade has been a strict improvement, but going back to my first Mac at 10.4 (Tiger) I've never wished I had stayed on an older version. We'll see how I feel after going to Tahoe, maybe this will be the one that breaks the trend.
Windows, on the other hand…
> But I've never delayed upgrading, and I've never regretted it.
I was the same way for until one of the upgrades, I forget which, broke resume from suspend about 10-20% of the time for my combination of laptop and monitor. Every morning I’d get a sense of dread when I tried to open the laptop to see if today was a day where I’d get to pick up where I left off or if I was in for a crash and reboot as soon as I tried to use the laptop.
I thought for sure it would be fixed with one of the point updates, but it went on for the better part of a year.
You always have to be moving forward and I'll never say "I'll just stay on Sequoia for forever" but delaying a bit does make life easier. I know I'll eventually upgrade but being there day 1 or even month 1 is not something I'm interested in. There are never new features that outweigh sending my development workflows into disarray or dealing with broken apps.
There aren't always huge issues or huge time sinks but I'm happy to let other people be on the bleeding edge and I'll upgrade once the Github issues, blog posts, etc have been created/fixed so that when I upgrade I can easily find solutions to any remaining issues I might run into. Especially with Tahoe, I've heard that some apps are just broken, period, unless the developer makes (sometimes significant) changes to get the same functionality working again (that was working fine in Sequoia).
You obviously haven't had firewall issues with EDR software a couple years ago or so.
I won't ever touch a .0 macos release again.
That’s from the old lore and I’m surprised so many have forgotten it. I learned that back when we had to buy upgrades on physical media, .0 is .no.
I don't wait a full _year_, but I definitly give it many months before upgrading. This one I might wait longer...
I've grown so used to Apple shipping buggy software that I wait a year or more before upgrading my mac to a major version. I do all the minor releases and security patches, of course.
Aside from the Liquid Glass stuff, has anyone detailed the changes to the Unix bits of the OS? What's new, deprecated, moved, locked-down, etc. ... ?
Any actual interesting changes under the hood other than UI changes? I cant remember the last time macOS release that actually brings any useful feature I use.
It's been so long since Apple has released anything in either iOS or macOS that excited me as a user. I don't seem to be their target customer anymore.
The only reason I even have to "upgrade" to a higher version number is how quickly app developers (including Apple themselves) drop support for older OS's. My iPhone which is stuck on iOS 15 runs just as well as the day I bought it, but every other app I download tells me (in essence) "LOL your phone is too old and our developers are too lazy to keep our software running on it. Upgrade your OS or get lost loser".
That's literally the only thing motivating me to upgrade anymore: The treadmill of software compatibility. Apple doesn't have to innovate--they just need to make sure the ecosystem is broken after ~5-10 years or so.
Isn't that true for pretty much every OS? The feature set we need to be able to do our jobs and computing hobbies have been available for two decades.
Operating systems like Debian is sufficiently boring that I can just upgrade and continue computing. macOS upgrades have become a small gamble, the stuff that I depend on may not continue to work, or at least it will take a good deal of work. There are however no reason to upgrade, so the risk isn't really worth the hassle of upgrading and breaking Java or Python.
Microsoft still manages to do 'cool stuff' at the kernel level; IO Rings, VBS, Rust, etc.
Only thing I see on the Apple' what's new that looks interesting is Metal updates. Most of the rest is UI.
You can still get software that installs and works perfectly on Windows 7 (released 16 years ago). Good luck finding software that even installs on Snow Leopard (released 16 years ago), let alone works well.
The flip side of this is that every attempt at advancing the Windows UI framework story beyond win32/MFC and WPF has failed and the platform itself is steeped neck deep in technical debt.
Sometimes it’s Apple and Google that are forcing developers. The system is perfectly capable of running the app (you’re not using any new API) but store policies force you to add the restriction anyway.
Yeah we are in this situation right now with an App, we literally can't update it unless we target a more modern version of the SDK, which introduces breaking changes
This problem could be mitigated by Apple making older versions of software available. Then you could continue to release updates, and users on older devices could continue to use earlier versions of your app on their devices.
Apple actually partially solves this: as a user, if I have EVER downloaded Older Version X of an app, and then go to download it again, they let me. However, if I have never downloaded the old version and go to download it, they just say “this app is not compatible with your device.” and don't give me the chance to get the older, compatible version. I don’t know why they make this distinction.
Worse are the third party apps where the old version still actually runs, but the developer deliberately blocks you with a full-screen “go away” dialog (I’m looking at you, FlightAware).
I got my first MacBook at Catalina, and still miss it. For a while, I downgraded my Intel Mac to Catalina again; I love the aesthetic compared to the newer releases, and it’s fast and snappy.
But the situation now is: No recent apps work on Catalina since it’s considered obsolete (except open-source apps you compile yourself). But Big Sur and higher are ridiculously slow on Intel hardware, to the point where it’s unusable. I now have an otherwise perfectly good 2019 Intel MacBook that has been gathering dust for the past years.
I’ve got a MacBook and Mac Mini stuck on Monterey (12), and an iMac stuck on Big Sur (11). I’m pretty much dead in the water when it comes to software compatibility, unless I want to put Linux on them. Even homebrew gives me a warning that they’ve stopped support and to expect everything to break. It’s a sad state of affairs.
Linux runs fine on my wife’s old (2013) MacBook. It’s more than fine, actually. I have Arch and Niri on there, and it makes a great SNES emulator.
Support rapidly being dropped happens mostly with smaller devs, because when resources are limited in the Apple platform world you can either adopt newer APIs and language features or you can support old OSes 3+ versions back. Trying to do both lands you in feature check conditional hell and requires a large matrix of test devices to ensure that nothing is being broken.
It’s less of a burden for corporate giants which is why you see much longer support timelines from e.g. Google.
When was the next Windows or Linux (distro) release that "excited" you?
It's all slow incremental updates pretty much.
Not Linux, but I still look forward to window managers and Neovim releases. The Cosmic desktop also looks promising, though I’m not using it until it has a scrolling window manager available for it.
https://xkcd.com/2224/
But yeah, I agree with you.
Spotlight got a major upgrade. It’s notably faster and deeply integrates with Shortcuts (letting you specify input variables, for example) among other things.
I’ve got Spotlight configured to index nothing but my applications (which is surprisingly difficult to configure and breaks with every major OS upgrade). Disabling all its default indexing has alleviated 95% of unexplainable CPU spikes and autocomplete pollution, so now I can finally use it for what it’s meant to be: the most overengineered fuzzy finder application launcher.
I actually preferred the pre-tahoe spotlight. The information density was higher and while it did not always give me the most relevant result atleast it was consistent and I could scroll down to find it. New spotlight is less dense and jumbles everything together.
Even more importantly: there's a clipboard manager built into it now.
Does "BetterDiscord" still show up as the first choice after you type "Disc"?
I'm curious if it will get me to stop using Alfred
Alfred leverages the spotlight indexes, so Alfred will also get the speed up
Anyone using Raycast has had these features forever. Nice to see some attention on Spotlight but it's still nowhere close to the functionality you get from Raycast.
I've been using Raycast for a couple months but I'm hoping I can uninstall it if Spotlight is responsive enough in Tahoe. What bothers me about Raycast is the monthly subscription for certain features. I don't mind paying for Mac software – I'm quite happy to do that – but I do mind paying monthly subscriptions for Mac software with seemingly no justification for it (i.e. what monthly resources does running a "window command" use on Raycast that justifies locking it behind a monthly subscription?)
What's the window command? I'm able to use things like "Top Left Sixth" on the free plain. AFAIK you only the pro for the AI features.
I thought Pro was only for AI features as well (that's what it said when I installed Raycast), but this dialog is saying Pro is required for custom window layouts as well. I only discovered this today when I was trying to create a new command to paste the screenshot from my clipboard into Preview for OCR.
https://imgur.com/a/6OeqJYQ
I wrote my own window management with Hammerspoon, mostly duplicating what Rectangle et al do, but with specific tweaks just for me.
The most useful feature is the fact it uses my display layout + wifi name to figure out where I am and adjusts window locations accordingly.
Raycast is interesting but I’m not going to touch it so long as VC funding is involved. Alfred has been doing the job well enough, only requires me to buy a new version a couple times per decade, and isn’t going to become enshittified because there’s no VCs to come knocking looking for a profit.
+1 for Alfred. I'm a proud Power Pack / lifetime-license holder from the beginning. Very few outfits anymore have the chops to both offer and make good on a single-payment, long-lasting product with frequent and excellent substantive updates.
Mad props and three cheers for the Alfred team!
It’s insanely tiny and efficient for what it does, too. One of the only apps that’s so small that updates are done downloading within a second or two of clicking “Download”, even on a mediocre connection!
Sure and QuickSilver had it even earlier. But it is nice that one can finally extend Spotlight with Services ehm I mean Shortcuts.
Can it find my files now?
At a minimum, it can not find them faster!
The fact that so much of the page is devoted to this liquid glass feature pretty much tells you the answer is no. Plus the fact that the "And so much more" section lists 10 different updates in the same space as their poster with a link to a PDF instead of building out a larger webpage speaks volumes.
- Apple Sparse Image Format allows you to create virtualized disk images with a virtualized file format that can be formatted to any kind of file
- Terminal.app now supports 24-bit color and powerline glyphs
- Vehicle Motion Cues to reduce motion-sickness when in a moving vehicle
Good catch on the terminal. I missed that, and it might get me off Ghostty (I prefer to have less apps installed in general).
Native container support is pretty exciting.
ICYMI: Apple's new native containers start in ~100ms and have better security. I updated to Tahoe just for this.
And it's open-source:
https://github.com/apple/container
It's not really supported before Tahoe, presumably due to required hypervisor support.
Interesting to see this utilizes kata-containers project alongside virtualization.framework. Cool project.
https://github.com/kata-containers/kata-containers/
Does this mean I can dump Docker Desktop for good?
Linux containers, not Darwin containers.
TextEdit has a styling toolbar now which I appreciate. The new spotlight has more functionality and seems faster (and less likely to pull up a website instead of the app I'm trying to launch)
The on-device foundation models framework is interesting to me. So far the responses have not been good but the potential is appealing.
I was in Beta since Beta 2, and I saw massive improvement in energy efficiency on my MacBook Air M2 and Pro Max M4
What an ugly UI update. I usually don't mind too much about the changes in MacOS UI and visuals, but opening up Finder leaves me shocked that this actually got the green light. Who in their right mind looked at this and thought: "yep that's the future, it looks fantastic!".
For Finder I discovered that changing the Toolbar to Icon Only significantly improved it. Then I set the sidebar icons to small in the Appearance system setting. That helped a lot.
Most of the new UI is designed almost exclusively for icon only toolbars.
they need to bring Scott Forstall or someone Bertrand Serlet-esque back, and a designer who isn't Alan Dye
https://www.apple.com/v/os/c/images/macos/highlights/mac_pho...
Two different fonts (Mac vs iOS) for the same data display?
And replacing all humans by AI avatars, to make it easier for spambots to impersonation people?
Maybe it's new and controversial, but I like it. Honestly, I think there is something more about it. Like another Apple product that we're going to see in the future, like Apple glasses would work perfectly with this UI.
I've been using it for ~6 weeks, and I'm also a bit confused by the hate since it's barely changed. I'm a fan of the improved UX harmonization across form factors. My intuition is that the minor and gradual "Duploization" of macOS in Sequoia and now Tahoe foreshadows touchscreen MacBooks.
The new UI is horrible. That’s it. No need to deep analysis.
i really wish they didn't give up on stage manager. every beta i would look if they fixed the opening behavior to open a new application in the same stage :/ but stage manager seems like it would have potential to fix window management on the mac without needing rectangle, yabai, alt tab etc
Open up the Calendar app on macOS Tahoe. Look in the upper right at the time zone selector. It is left justified to a fault, leaving a very awkward amount of space between it and the expand arrow/flyout arrows.
That looks so bad :D
Apple had a chance to bring back taste when they got rid of Ive, but missed it entirely. The overly rounded windows, the weird amount of blank space, the lack of clarity in general — the only thing that makes sense is that middle managers brought this about.
edit: Things are even worse — they already made newer apps much more difficult to read, likely because they have been brought from mobile to desktop. Now fonts are even smaller in System Settings, for example. What are they even thinking?
> Now fonts are even smaller in System Settings, for example. What are they even thinking?
It's worse on the iPad. They apparently think an iPad is now also a mouse and cursor device because they made touch targets so small, and the fonts in menus shrunk down making them more difficult touch targets as well.
The pixel above the menu bar Weather widget isn't clickable. Sound, wifi, battery, Control Center, clock are just fine.
Let that one get under your skin.
A small but important detail of Aqua was that the assumed light source was pointing straight down, whereas everybody else was usually using a 45 degrees angle. I wish Apple took a lesson from the old masters.
Also these colors make my eyes bleed. And the border radius is ridiculous.
It’s butt-ugly, but I find the usability better. Previously everything was so white that I found it difficult on occasion to distinguish between windows above and below. The heavier drop shadows and rounded corners are actually quite helpful
Just upgraded my wife’s laptop and my iPhone. It’s fine. I think her use (she lives in the browser) and my iPhone use (calls, camera, browser) don’t really reveal anything terrible. It’s kind of a dumb gimmick, but it’s mostly fine so far. It would annoy me if a UI that I frequently used “upgraded” to this, though.
This is the first time I've ever seen a macOS update and not seen a single feature worth bothering to upgrade over. Is there anything developer-facing? I don't use any Apple ecosystem stuff and this is all that AFAICT
First rule of MacOS upgrade: don't. Second rule: wait for x.1 or x.2 releases, so it's more stable and most importantly, the dependencies you need get updated.
Does anyone know what Qt 5 or Qt 6 applications look like on macOS Tahoe?
OpenSCAD and others look like they did even before Sequoia, with a small corner radius and older control spacing.
It looks like you can make your Qt app look like it did for previous OSes:
https://www.qt.io/blog/qt-on-macos-26-tahoe
That might be a useful stop gap.
For a more granular features list: https://www.apple.com/os/pdf/All_New_Features_macOS_Tahoe_Se...
I'm not quite sure what to make of Liquid Glass, I developed an allergy of sorts to the term while listening to the keynote. Any 'relevant' new features for power users / cmd line geeks that you know of?
https://github.com/apple/container is supported from macOS 26
The changes to Spotlight are fairly power-user focused. There's a lot of enhancements to make it quicker to set up shortcuts within it, and they've added a clipboard manager feature to it.
This summary looks acceptable: https://www.computerworld.com/article/4041433/spotlight-is-m...
Not a direct response to your question but (I guess like you) I often find with these releases that the changes I actually care about aren’t flashy enough to even warrant a mention in the presentations or on the main web page.
There seems to be some expansion of screen time, finally, but I haven’t been able to figure out what it is yet based on the only *os 26 update I’ve done so far is the public beta on a single Apple TV.
I think we'll have to wait for benchmarks to see if this is a leopard or a snow leopard
The GUI of an OS has never concerned me. Seems like a red flag when the main selling point is a slight bit of transparency.
Well, that's why there is a lot of complaints.
The main selling point of a macbook is not a UI with transparency. It's hardware stuff (like ARM processors, battery life, aluminum frames, etc..) and a decent, stable, unix-ish software environment. No one is using macOS for the visual effects, so it is annoying that Apple is revamping the UI everyone is used to in order to add more visual effects.
Seems nuts to me, but I'll be curious to see how this all pans out.
I usually wait a couple weeks for the bugs to be worked out before installing.
I feel like Joey Tribbiani with Rachel’s Traditional English Trifle, because I like it. iOS, macOS, ipadOS, tvOS.
I like the new feature in tvOS to see incoming calls on the tv.
First macOS version I’m holding off on. Just too unusable.
Windows XP had Theme Settings. I never used them, but at least they allowed you to choose.
Looks horrible on non-hdpi monitors
Widget appearance is tied to *icon appearance. Grumble grumble. I want clear for my widgets but default for my dock and other icons. Too bad so sad me I guess.
edit: replaced dock with icon, because it affects much more than just dock
It's not as bad as the first previews but ugly nonetheless and overall accessibility nightmare.
All I hope is that the design language stays contained in Apple ecosystem and does not spread.
Accessibility hasn't changed at all, and it remains trivial to turn off visual effects that present a problem. https://imgur.com/a/Vw55f8V
A reminder, if you dislike the liquid glass look, that going into System settings / Accessibility / Display and toggling “Increase contrast” gets you a properly nice design with actual borders and solid backgrounds. 100% recommended.
This settings turns reduce transparency and it turns makes the menu bar gray, which looks horrible on a display on notch.
Is there any way to make it black? Like it appears on full screen applications? (apart from enabling the transparency together with a black wallpaper)
Currently even on dark mode it doesn't have a black background while reduce transparency is toggled on.
We're all disabled now. Thanks, Apple.
Weirdly, I had that enabled pre-Tahoe and have had to turn it off as it was even worse with it on for me.
Everyone’s different I guess :)
Back on Sequoia, but this is great advice, thank you!
Is that call screening example a new feature or something I can do now that I didn't know about? That's something I've missed since switching from a Pixel to an iPhone last year.
That's new in the 26 OSes.
I had thought Tahoe was the first version to drop Intel CPU support, but it looks like it will be the last version to still support Intel Macs.
Two of the latest Intel MacBooks, and the last Intel iMac, so technically, yes, there’s still some Intel support in there. My 2019 iMac is one version too old.
does not support 2018 Mac mini
Apple have always seemed to drop support for hardware after 5-7 years, and then it's just a question of the last supported OS becoming itself unsupported too. My early 2015 Macbook Pro (new in April 2015) got as far as macOS Monterey (released October 2021) - and they stopped updating that in October 2024.
(I'm not digging through Wikipedia to double check but my previous 2 Macbooks Pro felt like they lasted about as long.)
It'll be interesting to see if they change this with the (presumably cleaner slate) Apple Silicon-based hardware.
I'm on the beta right now and a "<<" icon has appeared.
It's embarrassing that it took them that long but they have in fact fixed it.
Looks like they're putting an AR UI in a Desktop
The key question - now that Liquid Glass is a reality, will Tim Cook lose his job like Ballmer did over Windows 8 metro design?
The juxtaposition in the marketing speak is ridiculous.
"...all with a whole lot less effort."
Seriously Apple, a whole lot less?
Anytime a UI redesign comes with bullshit abstract designer justifications ("a translucent new material that reflects and refracts its surroundings", etc) you know it's bad.
Am I the only one here who thinks liquid glass is pretty? I like it.
More than that, I love the new Spotlight features, and the ability to remove apps from the menu bar without installing Ice (or the legacy Bartender).
Is there anywhere to find a comprehensive list of updates made "Under the hood"? Sure the new UI is cool and all, but what are they doing to make the OS better? In a previous life I was a mac administrator and every update, apple would remove some binary and suddenly we couldn't natively make calls to LDAP or something.
Screenshots of this OS sure are...something. I'm gonna hold off on upgrading. Maybe they'll tone it down next year.
Reminder that if you have an old Mac, and you'd like to run more recent versions of macOS on it, you can do so with Dortania OpenCore (https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/).
They don't have Tahoe support yet, but almost certainly will in the coming months.
I highly recommend doing this instead of throwing away a 5 or 6 year old computer as ewaste!
(Windows and Linux also work on Intel Macs.)
Thank you so much. I only need a Mac to compile/debug with Xcode (still can't get USB pass through with quickemu working) but Apple has been killing old versions such that projects wont build and home brew has no bottles and whatnot.
are they giving any hints that in high vis/accessibility modes this will be fully disabled? I've been largely insulated from changes like this for a while by that, if that were to change however, more drastic measures may be needed
Ios26 isn’t bad. Installing it on my non work MacBook.
They didn't even fix the horizontal resizing in the Settings app.
Sigh.
I still need to use the Scroll Reverser because the scroll direction (aka natural scrolling) can only be turned on or off globally, not per pointing device. I love natural scrolling on the trackpad, but it doesn't make sense on the mouse scroll wheel.
I use a Shortcut for this because it cuts down on the unnecessary apps. Hammerspoon.app would work too though.
How has Apple still not addressed many basic UI issues, such as menu bar icons disappearing behind the notch with no way to see them?
Menu extras were never intended to be treated like Windows tray items. For the earlier portion of OS X’s life, there wasn’t even a public API to create them and required a hack and a private API, and the current API is intended for ephemeral menu extras that disappear when their host app isn’t running. In short, the menubar isn’t designed for users to collect menu extras like Pokémon.
But that’s exactly how it is used, and them disappearing behind the notch feels like a bug.
I take it as a sign of typical increasing corporate dysfunction. Obvious problems, some even easy and uncontroversial, don't get fixed. Why?
The people who can fix them are not in control. The org must be very top-down. But Steve Jobs had a top down style, so what's the difference? Its: Using and caring about the product.
It's top down direction with the people at the top not using/caring about the product. Presumably they're concerned with other things like efficiency, stocks, clout.
Also if you had a majorly obvious bug, you could email steve@apple.com, which he would forward to a VP, who would be fired if it wasn't fixed ASAP. Knew a guy who lost his job that way, so it's not just a myth. Steve really was like that.
The wrath of Steve was a real thing that people feared.
I remember reading that he would roam the cubicles in the 80s when he came by some engineer who hadn't slept for 72 hours and who had been working on a difficult problem.
Steve didn't like his work and yelled "This is shit!" and then proceeded to pull the plug on his computer deleting all the work.
Classic Steve Jobs.
Today we have a soy boy CEO and the result shows in the product.
"The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste." — Steve Jobs
https://youtu.be/3KdlJlHAAbQ
Oh, how the mighty have fallen…
In case you don't know, at least there's a setting to help:
I have collected a long list of these types of settings over the years, for example disable font smoothing:
It used to be a checkbox, now there's only this command.Eventually that will be gone too, and none will be the wiser except the old who remember the good old days.
I'm starting to think these settings are left there by rogue engineers who fight against the oppression while staying under the radar. It's like a secret cabal that works to maintain sanity while the plebs are left to suffer at the mercy of their own ignorance.
And the apps that provide solutions for it, like Bartender, need screen reading permissions which I just can't bring myself to grant.
I think they kinda did? I'm not sure where to look for a link to this info, but I remember watching a YouTube video showing the ability to group and hide menu bar icons in Tahoe so they take up less space (and therefore encroach less toward the notch).
Maybe I'm misremembering the video though.
(edit) The linked page seems to hint at it:
> Personalized controls and menu bar. Your display feels even larger with the transparent menu bar. And you have more ways to customize the controls and layout in the menu bar and Control Center, even those from third parties
Notice how on the menu bar, when you click File and then the dropdown appears, you can move the mouse arrow to the right (without clicking) over Edit and now the Edit menu shows up. But the same doesn't work on the status menu icons, if I click on the volume icon and move the mouse, nothing happens, the volume menu stays open, even if hover over the battery indicator. So many little things like this that never worked consistently.
I love my Mac and yes, this is easily the most absurd problem. It happens to me all the time and I can’t believe they haven’t fixed it.
Apple…if you’re listening…please fix this.
They need to bring back the control strip!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_Strip
Solves this exact issue.
It was great, but they had to quietly retire it when somebody pointed out it looked like a dick.
Apparently it's not important.
I love how when apple could offer nothing more, their ui became nothing, and a celebration of blankness
A lot of the focus here is on the design (obviously). It took me a while to get used to it. But there are a lot of really great improvements in this release that make it worth it. Spotlight gets big updates. Live activities and notifications syncing from your phone. Journal. Music app has been massively updated and redesigned. Phone app. And surprisingly it doesn’t feel like a launch release - definitely less buggy than previous efforts.
I wish Apple would skip yearly macOS releases, there is no need.
This seems like a relatively minor update.
This is the last ever version with Intel support, right? That's a milestone of sorts.
I'm not sure what I'm going to do with my 2020 iMac in a year. I really want to be able to repurpose that 5k screen but Apple does not make it easy.
I might just leave it in perma-Windows Boot Camp.
If you're up for a project, you can swap the guts of those 5K iMacs for an aftermarket controller board which turns it into a regular monitor. It's a bit janky but a hell of a lot cheaper than buying a new 5K monitor.
I mean the obvious other choice would be Linux. Wayland is pretty good with hidensity screens nowdays.
Which is a bit sad. There were some choices that didn’t pan out in the last Intel era (butterfly, touchbar), but part of me loved those changes (the keyboard and the touchbar felt super premium, until you tried to work with them for any amount of time).
Okay that seems pretty nice. A lot of small improvements to day-to-day use. This is what I want from a desktop OS update.
I really hope spotlight didn't just get ruined
"ruined"?
It hasn't been able to find anything in years.
It's faster to scroll down in Finder than use the search box to locate anything =)
I mean it’s gotten bad already, but I think people’s hope is that they fixed it that if I type in a file name I work with all the time it’ll be the first result. At least that’s what I’m hoping for.
that and some kind of weighted memory for search history. i use photoshop almost daily, photos once a month or so, and photo booth once a year, but they appear in reverse order based on alphabetization.
Disappointed with the background image. I was expecting a similar treatment like with Sequoia and previous versions with a beautiful and inspiring scene in nature. Instead it is vaguely inspired by water?
The Tahoe beach pictures are pretty nice.
https://mrmacintosh.com/download-the-new-macos-tahoe-wallpap... has them at the bottom of the link
Is there alternative backgrounds included? Often there are two or three.
There are four alternative Tahoe backgrounds/screensavers in Landscape. They're the same shot of the lake at different times of day.
To help highlight the new "Liquid Glass" UI?
Or because Tahoe is a lake?
I, for one, am going to wait a much longer while before installing this.
The internets suggests the following disables glass effects:
Running it already. Seems pretty solid. No compatibility issues. UI changes are fairly ok. Glad they got rid of launcher and merged it into spotlight.
Never used spotlight. I have it disabled permanently. I don’t like the indexing.
If you ever used Quicksilver, the new Spotlight feels a lot like it.
"Reimagined with Liquid Glass, macOS Tahoe is at once fresh and familiar. Apps bring more focus to your content. You can personalize your Mac like never before. And everything just flows into place."
what is this grammar
I think this is just 'sales writing'. As if written for a trailer video.
Apple used to be like... the standard for how to do this.
IMO we're losing a lot of writing craftsmanship across many industries with Gen X'ers retiring
It's Apple house style. Marketing writes in tiny sentences. Even fragments. Makes the copy more punchy. And it's been like this for decades.
Now imagine it being said by someone presenting and doing the same hand pyramid stance that they make every Apple employee in WWDC videos do.
All kidding aside, it’s weird to read. Ever since I was a kid, I was taught that beginning a sentence with “And” or “But” is not “correct”. Times change and all that, I get it - it’s just weird though.
The hand pyramid stance. Yes! I find it quite off putting. It feels overly choreographed and fake.
Shwiggity shwagg, the GA release hath come!
Can't wait to write a beamline control application for crystallography on this sumbitch!
Looks like a niche Gnome theme that’s trying to clone a MacOS look.
I don’t think it’s that bad, nothing to get upset over - but yeah sort of like candy iMac aesthetic.
Have they got any further on their roadmap to only allowing apps from the Mac store in this release?
What evidence do you have that they are trying to do that?
All of the major commercial OS vendors are trying to do that. Apple started it with iOS. Google have gradually been tightening the net. Microsoft are furthest away but they have the longest legacy of freedom so they the furthest to go.
Obviously they aren't going to publicly say that's their intent, but you don't have to be a genius to read between the lines.
As for why... money and power are pretty big motivators.
Ok, so no?
I remember when there was option to run any application. With Sequoia there are only 2 options: App Store; App store + Known developers. Third option was removed. You can still run other apps but you need to manually approve them with ~3 popups where first option is "move to Bin". You need to do this after every OS or App update. I wonder when this option will be removed as well.
It's been missing since at least Big Sur, so if they're going to go any further they do seem to be taking their time over it.