macOS Tahoe
(apple.com)342 points by Wingy 12 hours ago
342 points by Wingy 12 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.
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.
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.
This[1] worked well to upgrade old Macs that were stuck on old versions of macOS for me, if you're not choosing to stay on older versions for other reasons.
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.
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.
Alfred leverages the spotlight indexes, so Alfred will also get the speed up
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?)
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.
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.
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.
Does this mean I can dump Docker Desktop for good?
- 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
I was in Beta since Beta 2, and I saw massive improvement in energy efficiency on my MacBook Air M2 and Pro Max M4
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 agree with you. It really hasn't changed all that much. It's a bit more cartooney, but as long as it doesn't get in the way of my work, I don't care.
It looks like a lot of the hate flowing on HN is just people looking at worst-case screenshots on blogs and piling on. They haven't even used it.
There are a few things I'm not wild about, but for the most part it's a bunch of shoulder-shrugs. This isn't the end-of-the-world scenario that people are making it out to be.
I have a regular non-techie person in the family with a Mac who I think will like the changes. Those are the people who Apple is targeting. Not the tech bros and the wannabe posers who are desperately clutching their 10-year-old iPhones out of some kind of righteous indignation.
More ways to express yourself with images.
Mix emoji and descriptions to make something brand-new. In Image Playground, discover additional ChatGPT styles. And have even more control when making images inspired by family and friends using Genmoji and Image Playground.
It always seemed quite cringe to me. A use it once and "Ehh I guess it works and is cool, sure" and then never touch it again sort of feature.
Other than old people that always send gifs on Facebook and children who this is probably one of the only AI art things they have access too, idk who else uses this.
If one tech giant has it then they need to too for feature parity. Not a whole lot of use cases for generative AI for the masses, so if someone comes up with one, gotta copy!
Writing this comment from my FrameWork laptop with AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, 96GB Ram, 4TB Storage, that I got for $4k. Running Fedora with KDE. How much would I need to pay Apple to get a laptop with this much ram?
The day I got my only Apple device, an ipad, only to know they will kill my browser download as soon as I switch to a different app, it became my last. I don't want to pay a company only to be subject to their decision of what I can and cannot run on my machine.
If I vote for that with my wallet, I deserve it.
You can get a 128GB MacBook for around $4300. With a 4TB SSD it'll be around $5k I think.
https://www.apple.com/shop/product/G1FW7LL/A/Refurbished-16-...
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.
I've run every version of macOS since Mac OS X Public Beta. I'm pretty sure I'm going to skip Tahoe. macOS 15 Sequoia is great; why would I switch to something profoundly ugly and unpolished if everything will keep running on my current OS and Apple's liable to make macOS 27 look tolerable?
If Apple stopped at the over-saturated/rounded-corners, it would have been a decent iteration on something established (and very much not broken). I realise the transparent icons are optional - but it now looks like a budget Android theme.
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.
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
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.
For a more granular features list: https://www.apple.com/os/pdf/All_New_Features_macOS_Tahoe_Se...
Does anyone know what Qt 5 or Qt 6 applications look like on macOS Tahoe?
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.
I still hurting from the crappy System Settings. Please Apple, make System Settings better... It's a mess
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
I think I’m going to stick with the previous version of macOS on my work laptop until I’m forced to upgrade.
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.
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??
New people in design roles that no longer care about old rules.
Declining institutional taste and no one at the helm who appreciates or enforces old rules when necessary.
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.
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.
I initially tried that and thought it improved some things, but it increased contrast across the OS, such that some webpages, including stock HN became too blinding. I instead switched to "Reduce Transparency," but that has its own issues.
Overall not pleased. I really did not want to care about the UI changes at all. But having experienced it now, I'm so annoyed I upgraded to iOS 26 and I'm having trouble focusing on the screen. I want WebGPU support, but I'm very hesitant to upgrade to macOS 26 (which is required for WebGPU in Safari).
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.
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.
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
I usually wait a couple weeks for the bugs to be worked out before installing.
Windows XP had Theme Settings. I never used them, but at least they allowed you to choose.
I hate to say it, but Windows is much more productive than MacOS for the usually tasks you perform on an OS (with GUI, both have CLIs, but I'm not talking about them). I'm using both at work all day long switching between them. When reflecting why, I think it comes down to windows management and the file explorer (vs finder).
I disagree on this.
I’ve used both interchangeably for decades and can swap between them without slowing. So much of this comes down to knowledge of and experiences with the quick/er ways for getting around.
For quite sometime using search tools is vastly more efficient for navigation and file movement than Explorer or Finder anyway.
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.)
I'm so bummed that the workarounds to keep a 5k iMac in commission all seem to be really likely to piss off your corporate IT department.
Patching the bootloader in memory seems like a big op-sec no-no.
Last time this came up on Hacker News, someone pointed out that there are new display boards you can buy from China to reuse a 5K's panel as an external display.
I think we're only allowed to run Linux at work on blessed devices. Last I looked, the 5K panel in the iMac was actually presented to the firmware as two smaller displays, which were glued back together in software. Apple does that magic to support its own hardware, but it sounded like Linux doesn't.
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.
They openly fucked DP 1.4 to make the ProDisplay XDR work.
Catalina, sure, you can drive a DP 1.4 monitor at 144Hz in HDR10. Big Sur, coinciding with the ProDisplay...? No, that will get you 60Hz HDR10 or 95Hz SDR.
So stupidly that downgrading my monitor (mine would allow you to select advertised support) to DP 1.2 would increase your refresh and HDR options.
And it was never fixed, not in Big Sur, Monterey or Ventura, when I had switched monitors.
People were wondering how Apple made the math work. Simple, by "Fuck you if your monitor isn't our $6,000 flagship".
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 tellHow has Apple still not addressed many basic UI issues, such as menu bar icons disappearing behind the notch with no way to see them?
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
Oh, how the mighty have fallen…
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 have collected a long list of these types of settings over the years, for example disable font smoothing:
defaults -currentHost write -g AppleFontSmoothing -int 0
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
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.
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.
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.
Screenshots of this OS sure are...something. I'm gonna hold off on upgrading. Maybe they'll tone it down next year.
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.
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.
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.
That’s why I miss the old Ars Technica reviews.
The closest I’ve seen is this Apple PDF and I’m not sure it’s what you’re after: https://www.apple.com/os/pdf/All_New_Features_macOS_Tahoe_Se...
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 wish Apple would skip yearly macOS releases, there is no need.
"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.
I, for one, am going to wait a much longer while before installing this.
The internets suggests the following disables glass effects:
defaults write com.apple.universalaccess reduceTransparency 1Disappointed 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
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?
"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
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!
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.
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.
This is tiresome. You cannot lock down development machines. If you pay attention you'll see that OSes made for development work will be the only ones not locked down. Android was a holdout but Google is now tightening the screws. MacOS, Linux, BSD, and Windows are the only OSes that can't be locked down. Microsoft tried but they abandoned that.
Good point, but it is entirely possible for Apple/Microsoft to lock down "consumer" versions of their operating systems, effectively turning the common man's computer into a glorified phone and a new cash cow. Add to that a requirement for an online account, age verification, and other malware.
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.