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).
smcleod 2 hours ago [-]
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.
rcarmo 49 minutes ago [-]
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.
rvrb 38 minutes ago [-]
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.
And I run a macOS-like GNOME theme that is pretty great.
awesome_dude 31 minutes ago [-]
Are you using Fedora on the Mac (via Asahi)?
Or are you using Fedora on an Intel/AMD laptop?
lysace 45 minutes ago [-]
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.
reactordev 39 minutes ago [-]
Making the world a better place by rounding off all the hard edges including those edge cases…
If 12px won’t do, try 42
etempleton 2 hours ago [-]
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.
FabHK 45 minutes ago [-]
> 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.)
dsego 1 hours ago [-]
Looking at the Slack icon right now, and it just looks blurry and low resolution, same for Calendar and some others, it's awful.
etempleton 1 hours ago [-]
The maps icon is the most egregious. It makes my head hurt.
rvrb 2 hours ago [-]
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.
lynndotpy 1 hours ago [-]
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.
827a 18 minutes ago [-]
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.
rick_dalton 2 hours ago [-]
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.
cmckn 2 hours ago [-]
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.
rick_dalton 1 hours ago [-]
Haha I'm subscribed but haven't listened to that episode, I took the squircle jail term from the arstechnica tahoe review.
00deadbeef 2 hours ago [-]
Everything I've seen of it looks a disaster. I'll wait for macOS 27.
lysace 55 minutes ago [-]
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.
stevage 25 minutes ago [-]
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.
sgarland 35 minutes ago [-]
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.
bradgessler 57 minutes ago [-]
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.
rcarmo 47 minutes ago [-]
Yeah, 4 different corner radius sizes is where I’m at too. Won’t be surprised if there are more.
runjake 2 hours ago [-]
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.
goalieca 57 minutes ago [-]
Try running console with tmux. The window menu just floats there instead of being snugly fit against the bottom from end to end.
coldtea 36 minutes ago [-]
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.
msk-lywenn 2 hours ago [-]
Did you notice any impact on battery life?
llm_nerd 54 minutes ago [-]
> 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).
wilg 1 hours ago [-]
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.
spoaceman7777 1 hours ago [-]
of course, given the average user, they are correct. kde gang
diffrinse 2 hours ago [-]
So the Gnome 3 gang were ahead of their time?
betaby 1 hours ago [-]
Indeed, gives old Gnome vibe.
OGEnthusiast 1 hours ago [-]
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.
fridder 1 hours ago [-]
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
christophilus 1 hours ago [-]
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…
llm_nerd 51 minutes ago [-]
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.
OGEnthusiast 19 minutes ago [-]
It's not just Tahoe though, there have been more and more UX papercuts over the years.
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.
bitmasher9 1 hours ago [-]
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.
spudlyo 1 hours ago [-]
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.
Yeah me too. I think I liked Mavericks or Yosemite or something and have pretty much hated every upgrade since.
dsego 57 minutes ago [-]
Oh, apple would have to do much worse for windows 11 to look good.
OGEnthusiast 1 hours ago [-]
Possibly, although I definitely don't recall the macOS Big Sur re-design being as disruptive UI-wise as Tahoe is.
12_throw_away 4 hours ago [-]
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.
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...
mrandish 2 hours ago [-]
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").
christophilus 2 hours ago [-]
Wow. I know I’m not the first to say it, but it really does give me Windows Vista vibes. No bueno.
dijit 23 minutes ago [-]
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.
lwhi 7 minutes ago [-]
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.
heavyset_go 2 hours ago [-]
Windows Aero is back
sylens 20 minutes ago [-]
Aero was peak HCI compared to this
Crontab 2 hours ago [-]
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.
dsego 1 hours ago [-]
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 had the same issue on first start, the icons had to load while I was scrolling.
crinkly 48 minutes ago [-]
Think something is borked there. Mine doesn't do that.
cyberpunk 2 hours ago [-]
I absolutely hate it. I guess we’ll probably get used to it but until then… gah ugliest MacOS ever?
throw-the-towel 7 minutes ago [-]
Don't think of it as the ugliest MacOS ever, think of it as the most beautiful MacOS of the rest of your life.
rick_dalton 2 hours ago [-]
Hoping the next update is the iOS 8 to the iOS 7 redesign and then it'll be fine.
self_awareness 2 hours ago [-]
You'll get used to it.
Hamuko 2 hours ago [-]
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.
asadotzler 2 hours ago [-]
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.
smileson2 2 hours ago [-]
You're just old, kids love this shit
rcleveng 2 hours ago [-]
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.
> 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.
stevage 19 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
Ecco 2 hours ago [-]
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.
OGEnthusiast 55 minutes ago [-]
Without knowing your specific workloads, I'd imagine an M2 Pro Mac mini (which is supported by Asahi) is still plenty fast.
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?
dsego 2 hours ago [-]
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.
mhuffman 2 minutes ago [-]
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.
dsego 1 hours ago [-]
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.
markdog12 2 hours ago [-]
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.
bayindirh 2 hours ago [-]
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.
heavyset_go 2 hours ago [-]
If you use KDE Connect, your clipboard history immediately goes to your phone's clipboard :)
ubercow13 15 minutes ago [-]
More like, almost 3 decades.
60 minutes ago [-]
afandian 55 minutes ago [-]
Including passwords from password managers?
dsego 2 hours ago [-]
Does that mean that add-on clipboard managers like Maccy are obsolete now?
merrvk 2 hours ago [-]
Wow, didn't realise there was more than one tab
burnt-resistor 2 hours ago [-]
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.
asdhtjkujh 5 hours ago [-]
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...
thewebguyd 1 hours ago [-]
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
rramon 5 hours ago [-]
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.
sys_64738 4 hours ago [-]
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.
creddit 50 minutes ago [-]
> 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?
cosmic_cheese 5 hours 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.
bayindirh 2 hours ago [-]
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.
cosmic_cheese 2 hours ago [-]
I think KDE has the right spirit but its execution leaves something to be desired.
bayindirh 2 hours ago [-]
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.
cosmic_cheese 1 hours ago [-]
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.
christophilus 55 minutes ago [-]
Definitely the “be invisible” part.
simianparrot 2 hours ago [-]
It reminds me of the Wii U interface[1]. Except less playful. It really is a disaster.
totally agree, this is kind of an embarrassing look for supposed workstations
paulsmith 1 hours ago [-]
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. ... ?
asadotzler 2 hours ago [-]
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.
layer8 2 hours ago [-]
It might be more accurate to say that they are giving non-disabled people an experience akin to that of disabled people. ;)
nomel 51 minutes ago [-]
> Apple no longer cares about disabled people.
Did you enable the relevant accessibility options that are there for this purpose?
creddit 48 minutes ago [-]
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.
nomel 36 minutes ago [-]
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.
creddit 33 minutes ago [-]
My post is agreeing with you. It's sarcasm. Please try to parse it again.
nomel 10 minutes ago [-]
Text emojis were invented by the grey beards out of necessity, not cuteness. ;)
commandersaki 2 hours ago [-]
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.
o11c 50 minutes ago [-]
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 ...
2 hours ago [-]
burnt-resistor 2 hours ago [-]
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.
brailsafe 4 hours ago [-]
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.
smcleod 2 hours ago [-]
No, it's worse. Basically it's the same experience but with an uglier UI
lynndotpy 1 hours ago [-]
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.
joshstrange 5 hours ago [-]
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).
stouset 4 hours ago [-]
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…
joshstrange 2 hours ago [-]
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).
baq 2 hours ago [-]
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.
masklinn 2 hours ago [-]
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.
ksec 5 hours ago [-]
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.
dylan604 2 hours ago [-]
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.
ryandrake 5 hours ago [-]
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.
mrweasel 5 hours ago [-]
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.
p_ing 2 hours ago [-]
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.
ryandrake 5 hours ago [-]
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.
cosmic_cheese 5 hours ago [-]
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.
skydhash 5 hours ago [-]
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.
jmkni 5 hours ago [-]
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
ryandrake 5 hours ago [-]
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).
setopt 2 hours ago [-]
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.
ryandrake 1 hours ago [-]
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.
christophilus 51 minutes ago [-]
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.
cosmic_cheese 5 hours ago [-]
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.
theshrike79 2 hours ago [-]
When was the next Windows or Linux (distro) release that "excited" you?
It's all slow incremental updates pretty much.
christophilus 49 minutes ago [-]
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.
chatmasta 2 hours ago [-]
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.
rick_dalton 2 hours ago [-]
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.
kemayo 2 hours ago [-]
Even more importantly: there's a clipboard manager built into it now.
airstrike 2 hours ago [-]
Does "BetterDiscord" still show up as the first choice after you type "Disc"?
daveidol 5 hours ago [-]
I'm curious if it will get me to stop using Alfred
unsnap_biceps 5 hours ago [-]
Alfred leverages the spotlight indexes, so Alfred will also get the speed up
pants2 5 hours ago [-]
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.
nozzlegear 5 hours ago [-]
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?)
pants2 5 hours ago [-]
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.
nozzlegear 4 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
cosmic_cheese 5 hours ago [-]
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.
treetalker 4 hours ago [-]
+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!
cosmic_cheese 4 hours ago [-]
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!
timeon 1 hours ago [-]
Sure and QuickSilver had it even earlier. But it is nice that one can finally extend Spotlight with Services ehm I mean Shortcuts.
lukasb 5 hours ago [-]
Can it find my files now?
jpease 5 hours ago [-]
At a minimum, it can not find them faster!
alana314 14 minutes ago [-]
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)
Bondi_Blue 2 hours ago [-]
- 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
rcarmo 42 minutes ago [-]
Good catch on the terminal. I missed that, and it might get me off Ghostty (I prefer to have less apps installed in general).
tiltowait 5 hours ago [-]
Native container support is pretty exciting.
w10-1 2 hours ago [-]
ICYMI: Apple's new native containers start in ~100ms and have better security. I updated to Tahoe just for this.
The on-device foundation models framework is interesting to me. So far the responses have not been good but the potential is appealing.
NaomiLehman 4 hours ago [-]
I was in Beta since Beta 2, and I saw massive improvement in energy efficiency on my MacBook Air M2 and Pro Max M4
RomanPushkin 1 hours ago [-]
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.
CharlesW 1 hours ago [-]
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.
flenserboy 1 hours ago [-]
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?
thewebguyd 1 hours ago [-]
> 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.
Angostura 1 hours ago [-]
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
tkiolp4 1 hours ago [-]
The new UI is horrible. That’s it. No need to deep analysis.
bergfest 1 hours ago [-]
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.
coneonthefloor 38 minutes ago [-]
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.
jaredklewis 32 minutes ago [-]
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.
robinhood 47 minutes ago [-]
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.
BruceEel 5 hours ago [-]
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?
kemayo 49 minutes ago [-]
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.
downrightmike 5 hours ago [-]
I think we'll have to wait for benchmarks to see if this is a leopard or a snow leopard
hermitcrab 1 hours ago [-]
Does anyone know what Qt 5 or Qt 6 applications look like on macOS Tahoe?
rcarmo 38 minutes ago [-]
OpenSCAD and others look like they did even before Sequoia, with a small corner radius and older control spacing.
AHTERIX5000 1 hours ago [-]
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.
CharlesW 49 minutes ago [-]
Accessibility hasn't changed at all, and it remains trivial to turn off visual effects that present a problem. https://imgur.com/a/Vw55f8V
proee 55 minutes ago [-]
The juxtaposition in the marketing speak is ridiculous.
"...all with a whole lot less effort."
Seriously Apple, a whole lot less?
GrumpyGoblin 2 hours ago [-]
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
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.
gigatexal 49 minutes ago [-]
Ios26 isn’t bad. Installing it on my non work MacBook.
losvedir 2 hours ago [-]
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.
kemayo 2 hours ago [-]
That's new in the 26 OSes.
pacifika 5 hours ago [-]
First macOS version I’m holding off on. Just too unusable.
karlgkk 5 hours ago [-]
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.
xnx 5 hours ago [-]
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.
mikestew 5 hours ago [-]
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.
w10-1 2 hours ago [-]
does not support 2018 Mac mini
tom_ 2 hours ago [-]
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.
robin_reala 5 hours ago [-]
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.
buraktamturk 2 hours ago [-]
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.
asadotzler 2 hours ago [-]
We're all disabled now. Thanks, Apple.
cyberpunk 2 hours ago [-]
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 :)
everdrive 5 hours ago [-]
Back on Sequoia, but this is great advice, thank you!
coldtea 33 minutes ago [-]
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.
WorldPeas 5 hours ago [-]
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
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.)
yogorenapan 1 hours ago [-]
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.
Aaronstotle 1 hours ago [-]
I wish Apple would skip yearly macOS releases, there is no need.
fair_enough 2 hours ago [-]
Shwiggity shwagg, the GA release hath come!
Can't wait to write a beamline control application for crystallography on this sumbitch!
pants2 5 hours ago [-]
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?
cosmic_cheese 5 hours ago [-]
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.
D13Fd 4 hours ago [-]
But that’s exactly how it is used, and them disappearing behind the notch feels like a bug.
EarthLaunch 5 hours ago [-]
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.
jedberg 2 hours ago [-]
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.
wrs 5 hours ago [-]
In case you don't know, at least there's a setting to help:
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.
hombre_fatal 5 hours ago [-]
And the apps that provide solutions for it, like Bartender, need screen reading permissions which I just can't bring myself to grant.
nozzlegear 5 hours ago [-]
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
iambateman 5 hours ago [-]
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.
It was great, but they had to quietly retire it when somebody pointed out it looked like a dick.
self_awareness 5 hours ago [-]
Apparently it's not important.
cyberax 2 hours ago [-]
They didn't even fix the horizontal resizing in the Settings app.
Sigh.
dsego 1 hours ago [-]
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.
vehemenz 41 minutes ago [-]
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
crinkly 2 hours ago [-]
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.
tkiolp4 55 minutes ago [-]
Never used spotlight. I have it disabled permanently. I don’t like the indexing.
rcarmo 35 minutes ago [-]
If you ever used Quicksilver, the new Spotlight feels a lot like it.
ddtaylor 5 hours ago [-]
This seems like a relatively minor update.
jsheard 5 hours ago [-]
This is the last ever version with Intel support, right? That's a milestone of sorts.
minimaxir 2 hours ago [-]
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.
jsheard 2 hours ago [-]
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.
omnimus 2 hours ago [-]
I mean the obvious other choice would be Linux. Wayland is pretty good with hidensity screens nowdays.
highwaylights 5 hours ago [-]
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).
nicbou 4 hours ago [-]
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.
jgbuddy 5 hours ago [-]
I really hope spotlight didn't just get ruined
theshrike79 2 hours ago [-]
"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 =)
highwaylights 5 hours ago [-]
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.
GuinansEyebrows 5 hours ago [-]
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.
triyambakam 5 hours ago [-]
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."
what is this grammar
Insanity 5 hours ago [-]
I think this is just 'sales writing'. As if written for a trailer video.
spandrew 4 hours ago [-]
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
wrs 5 hours ago [-]
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.
Klonoar 2 hours ago [-]
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.
5 hours ago [-]
IshKebab 2 hours ago [-]
Have they got any further on their roadmap to only allowing apps from the Mac store in this release?
cassianoleal 2 hours ago [-]
What evidence do you have that they are trying to do that?
IshKebab 1 hours ago [-]
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.
cassianoleal 8 minutes ago [-]
Ok, so no?
timeon 51 minutes ago [-]
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.
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).
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.
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.
Finding a laptop that works well is annoying, however.
And I run a macOS-like GNOME theme that is pretty great.
Or are you using Fedora on an Intel/AMD laptop?
If 12px won’t do, try 42
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.
Do you mean the Launchpad? (I've never used it; but always use Spotlight to launch apps.)
It's so bad that it's kind of fascinating. Unfortunately, even "Reduce Transparency" doesn't fix the LG update.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 recommend not overcomplicating your life and just staying on the latest macOS.
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.
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.
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.
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
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/09/macos-26-tahoe-the-a...
But I do not understand how the color-tinted UI/icons ever got shipped. They just look... bad...
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.
Maybe I'm going to jump back to Linux because of this update.
https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/tahoe...
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-...
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.
This statement describes pretty much every mouse Apple ever made, from the circular ones to the horrendous magic mouse with charging port underneath.
I really wish Asahi Linux had more support, I would have bought a couple M4 Minis.
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?
KDE also can encode entries as QR codes, so you can make URLs transferable to your phone or whatnot.
-- Sent from my MacBook Air.
It'll be one of the first things I turn off whenever I get around to installing it ~6+ months from now.
At this point I'm doubtful that these will be addressed in the 26.X updates, so the wait begins for 27.0...
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
"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?
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.
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 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.
[1] https://wiki.cemu.info/images/1/1a/Wii_U_Menu.png
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.
Did you enable the relevant accessibility options that are there for this purpose?
I've pretty much given up with submitting feedback though.
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 ...
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.
The search box did not work for a few minutes after updating, but I assume that was a temporary indexing bug.
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).
Windows, on the other hand…
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 won't ever touch a .0 macos release again.
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.
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.
Only thing I see on the Apple' what's new that looks interesting is Metal updates. Most of the rest is UI.
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).
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.
It’s less of a burden for corporate giants which is why you see much longer support timelines from e.g. Google.
It's all slow incremental updates pretty much.
But yeah, I agree with you.
https://imgur.com/a/6OeqJYQ
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.
Mad props and three cheers for the Alfred team!
- Terminal.app now supports 24-bit color and powerline glyphs
- Vehicle Motion Cues to reduce motion-sickness when in a moving vehicle
And it's open-source:
https://github.com/apple/container
It's not really supported before Tahoe, presumably due to required hypervisor support.
https://github.com/kata-containers/kata-containers/
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?
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.
Also these colors make my eyes bleed. And the border radius is ridiculous.
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.
This summary looks acceptable: https://www.computerworld.com/article/4041433/spotlight-is-m...
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.
All I hope is that the design language stays contained in Apple ecosystem and does not spread.
"...all with a whole lot less effort."
Seriously Apple, a whole lot less?
edit: replaced dock with icon, because it affects much more than just dock
I don’t think it’s that bad, nothing to get upset over - but yeah sort of like candy iMac aesthetic.
It's embarrassing that it took them that long but they have in fact fixed it.
(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.
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.
Everyone’s different I guess :)
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.)
Can't wait to write a beamline control application for crystallography on this sumbitch!
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.
The wrath of Steve was a real thing that people feared.
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
Apple…if you’re listening…please fix this.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_Strip
Solves this exact issue.
Sigh.
I might just leave it in perma-Windows Boot Camp.
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 =)
https://mrmacintosh.com/download-the-new-macos-tahoe-wallpap... has them at the bottom of the link
The internets suggests the following disables glass effects:
what is this grammar
IMO we're losing a lot of writing craftsmanship across many industries with Gen X'ers retiring
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.
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.