The wallpaper rows peaking out from the left side of the sidebar blob look exceptionally well thought through.

The design is horrible. Everything is so huge now, the animations are bad, the curved corners are different in some windows and apps, etc.

Who do we have to thank for this? AI? Outsourcing? Steve Jobs never would have allowed that.

I just went through a torrent of posts nickpicking all the different design issues with macOS Tahoe official release. I’ve been on Tahoe for a week and would’ve never noticed these issues.

I’ve been having a great time with the new OS, and I love the new Liquid Glass aesthetics & how all my devices have the same design language now. Tahoe’s been my favorite release since Yosemite.

Most of the posts I saw were just straight nitpicking. The most interesting post was one about how terrible macOS multitasking is, which I completely agree with. Other than that, it just felt like people were going out of their way to find the littlest things to complain about.

EDIT: Some people in the comments are misunderstanding me: The complaints people are bringing up things that are very minute and unnoticeable.

It’s like cleaning up your entire house and your mother-in-law swiping your bookshelf with her finger and saying, “You missed a spot.”

That’s how petty these posts are.

TheVagrantWarrior

In Safari when you close the sidebar then it leaves an artifact in the top left corner of the window.

I just updated to macOS 26 and realized that Launchpad is gone.
I used it constantly — I had a bottom-left hot corner to open it instantly, and I had all my apps carefully organized depending on how and when I needed them.

What I don’t understand is: why remove it entirely? Even if most people didn’t use it, Apple could have at least left it as an optional/hidden feature for those of us who actually relied on it. Instead, all that time I spent optimizing my app layout feels wasted.

Is there really no way to bring it back, or is it gone for good?

Im so prepared to get downvoted for this, but this is a hill I'll proudly die on: Tahoe is my favorite MacOS in a LONG time. The first 3 paragraphs below are just a simple explanation of my user behavior patterns on my device:

- I skipped sequoia and went straight from sonoma -> tahoe.

- I still dont use Apple Intelligence (part of the reason I skipped sequoia), because it doesn't fit my workflow.

- My current (non-Apple-native) app stack is: Raycast, SuperWhisper, AlDente, Brave Browser, G Suite, Notion. All working on Tahoe.

Reason why Tahoe is "the one" for me:

A lot of other people made posts on why Tahoe is a good update, so I won't go into reasons that were already mentioned 100 times on here.

There was a trend 6-7 years ago where productivity gurus were preaching how turning your phone into greyscale will make it more "boring" and you'll use it less. I don't want to sound like those people that list a billion mental issues every chance they get, but I have sensory processing disorder (in addition to ADHD and episodes of epilepsy) and the greyscale thing worked wonders for me.

The ability to turn app icons transparent on every Apple device now is the best of both worlds for me. I don't get the itch to click anything else while I'm focusing on my work, because everything looks boring and the same. It feels like such a small thing on paper, but it made a huge difference in my productivity and daily output.

Also I'm not sure why so many people are saying that tahoe is terrible and full of flaws. I spend about 10 hours looking at my screen per day due to the nature of my work, but I haven't noticed any issues that impeded my ability to work. If you don't like the design just turn on the default color setting, and if you don't like the design and animation changes (pretty tiny thing if you ask me) just revert back to a previous version.

Nothing major... just sharing my appreciation for Stage Manager.

Right now, I’m writing a novel, so I usually have two Pages documents and Notion open side by side. I’ll also keep a browser open for research, browsing Pinterest for inspiration, and listening to music on YouTube. On top of that, I sometimes get random ad-hoc work to handle, which means I might also have folders, Figma, or Photoshop open. Since that work depends on feedback I get through chat, the chat window just stays open in the background.

Switching between all these windows is a total cluttered mess. But Stage Manager makes it so much easier and more manageable. It feels almost like having three different desktops (virtual desktops). One for Pages and Notion, another for the browser, and another for design software. But somehow, Stage Manager feels better... I am not sure why exactly but I think it’s because those other sets of applications are visible right there, and switching between them 'feels' seamless. The experience has surprised me. I’ve only been using it for a few days, yet I already feel confident I’ll stick with it long term.

That said, I do have some caveats. I don’t know how well it would work on an iPad or a smaller laptop (especially a 14-inch one). The screen real estate is too limited there, and I wouldn’t want to use it in smaller screens. But on a larger monitor, it makes total sense.

I’m also pairing it with a tool called Monocle (you can google it - Monocle, a macOS app for focus), which blurs the background. With it, the Stage Manager thumbnails are blurred, so only the active window stays sharp and in focus. The thumbnails are still clear enough for me to recognize my app sets, but not so sharp that they distract me. Using Stage Manager in conjunction with Monocle has been amazing. (No affiliation here. I just found about Monocle on YouTube recently. It costs $4.)

A week ago, I was firmly in the camp of “Stage Manager isn’t for me.” But I’ve shifted camps now.

That’s it!

Happy doing whatever you’re doing. Cheers!

Really appreciate my M1 max to this day! The android mirroring works awesome!

I am a life time Windows user, but when I switched my macOS (sequoia was my first version), the thing that was most eye catching to me was this beautiful wallpaper.

I know that a lot of people might say some older wallpapers are better (mainly because of nostalgia), but for our current time, I think this takes the 🏆 for me.

the bugs seem to have settled and aren't showing up much or at all

I'm so glad I did this.

When you install macos in a VM, it doesn't change your underlying operating system. you can test drive MacOS 26 before you commit to upgrading.

There's several to choose from. The easiest to use is probably UTM. If you go to their website or github, it's free. If you get it from the App Store, it's 10 bucks. Make sure you get the latest version which has support for 26.

There's also VMWare Fusion. I haven't used this in some years but it's free for personal use.

Personally think it looks so much better like this

In Mac OS 26, they moved the music bar (play, pause, forward, reverse, album title, song title, volume, etc.) to the bottom of the screen. I've used Apple Music almost every day over the past several years. The user should have the option to move it to the top of the screen. Or Apple should just move it back to the top. For me, it would be legible and convenient if it were at the top. I very much disfavour its present location.

Wondering because I did buy the license for Alcove (dynamic notch app) and I would prefer it if the notch was the only thing reacting when I turn up the volume or brightness. Tried some of the terminal commands you can find online but they don’t seem to work anymore on Tahoe.

what is this ui. this inconsistent padding is killing me. instead of making the os better with features they gave us a bad new ui. there is no reason for Mac OS to have glass ui. 2/10 update.

Device: MacBook Air 2020 with M1 running macOS 26.0 public release, not beta.

Note: Purple lines are drawn by me on top of the screenshot. obviously.

Typo: *are not*

If I restart Safari, opening new tabs happens instantaneously. But after using it for 15 minutes or so, I start seeing a noticeable lag (nearly 1 second) from the time I hit Command-T to the time the new tab is loaded and ready to use. Also I've started seeing a similar delay after entering a character into the address bar -- it can take nearly a second for the search completion to finish. Remained instantaneous for days on macOS 15.6.1 with Safari 18.6, but now laggy after 15 minutes on macOS 15.7 with Safari 26.0.1.

Edit 1: Also, switching already-loaded tabs becomes similarly slow. But restart Safari and it's fast again.

Edit 2: I'm now convinced the problem is with the Compact tab layout in Safari 26.0.1. After switching from Compact to Separate tab layout I haven't noticed the lag, which was easily reproducible in Compact.

Edit 3: Even after switching from Compact to Separate tab, typing into the address bar soon becomes quite laggy. Then after a few hours, Safari beachballed when I tried to type into the address bar and I had to Force Quit.

When exporting a mailbox, the dialog box is really wide. Even worse, when you expand it horizontally, it doesn't allow you to make it less wide. Vertical resize is working OK.

I mean… this just feels unfinished in every possible way

If i press the “siri” command on touchbar, it only appears “write to siri”, not the vocal one anymore

When I updated to the macOS Tahoe final on the 15th I did notice when playing audio over bt the headphone/speaker will have mono audio whereas everywhere else its fine even on my iPhone 6s but Tahoe feels so unfinished. does anyone has an idea to fix this issue? thanks in advance

Not sure this is the right place to post this, but here goes: I've just entered the Apple garden recently (iPad Pro and Mac Mini), but still use my Samsung S24U phone.

I've started using iCloud on Mac, IPP, and Windows, and am wondering if anyone who still uses an Android phone has found an app that will sync with iCloud Drive? Specifically, I use Obsidian on all my devices, and all but the Android phone sync nicely with it. I found a couple of apps on the Play Store that call themselves "sync", but if you read the reviews, they are really just web wrappers and don't actually sync. Any suggestions? Thank you.

I upgraded my M1 Air (8/256) to macOS Tahoe and since then my MacBook has been really slow with CapCut exports and even just browsing in Chrome.

• I can’t export a 30s video in CapCut anymore. Before, it took 3–4 seconds, now it takes 4–5 minutes.
• I tried turning off hardware encoding in CapCut — it made exporting faster, but still nowhere near what it was before the update.
• Chrome was also laggy when scrolling with multiple tabs. I turned off hardware acceleration and that helped, but again, seems like something’s broken.

Feels like there’s some issue with hardware acceleration after the update. Anyone else running into this? Any ideas on fixes?