I accidentally hit the wrong button a few weeks ago and upgraded to Tahoe. I didn't think it was that big a deal at the time, I'd just been putting it off.
But having used it for a few weeks now I can confirm it is a strict downgrade over Sequoia for me. I use none of the new features it has introduced, and the changes to existing features are just worse.
Some UI animations are slow and jittery - and this is on an M4 Pro. The Finder has gone from fine to janky once again, especially with horizontal scroll. The window corners and mouse interactions are indeed annoying (I'd assumed the many complaints were at least slight hyperbole). Left-aligned window titles are unbalanced and ugly. I've had weird (visual) app duplication issues with the Application smart-folder in the Dock. Cross-device copy-paste SEEMS to be more flaky than usual. And most petty of all I really don't like the new icons - especially the Trash icon for some reason.
I don't know, I started using a Mac only 3 years ago when joining my current job. The UX always felt so wrong on every matter to me. I don't get where the reputation came from, maybe from an era that was already only mere memory when I started to use it.
I would pick a default bare gnome 3 agaisnt any Mac os version UX without any hesitation.
With a lot of tools from third parties, it puts back the level to supportable, but that's the highest satisfaction level it ever procured to me. Rectangle and some alternative window switcher plus brew are the minimum to survive without going crazy after 2 minutes of exposition. Having finder always present in window switcher and no way to close/hide it? What a monstrosity!
I'm still looking for a working solution to select and paste with middle click.
> I would pick a default bare gnome 3 agaisnt any Mac os version UX without any hesitation.
Yeah it's a head scratcher for me too.
So many devs only want to work on a Mac yet they build software that runs on NOT Mac. Then they have to jump through hoops like architecture mismatch and docker having to run a Linux vm anyway.
I prefer Linux as well just to get the same tools and architecture like you said. But at work everything corporate is configured for mac by default. So running Linux is a battle to having to keep up with VPN and other stuff they have.
> I don't get where the reputation came from, maybe from an era that was already only mere memory when I started to use it.
Peak Mac design was 20 years ago, before iPhone. That was where the reputation came from.
Since iPhone became Apple's darling, and especially since Steve Jobs died, the Mac UI has been systematically wrecked, year by year. iPhone design has also been systematically wrecked since Jobs died. Tim Cook clearly had no idea what he was doing when he put hardware designer Jony Ive in charge of software with iOS 7, something that Jobs never did with Ive.
I did the same mistake a few weeks ago ; my company enforces security updates and I picked the Tahoe update instead of the security one. I told myself, what the hell, might as well give it a try!
I wiped my computer and reinstalled Sequoia last week.
You’re lucky that you had a choice. The security policy in my company forces our laptop to be up to date no matter what. You can resist to update for some time but then they’ll force update through management system and sometime it happens in the middle of out meeting
Some UI animations are slow and jittery - and this is on an M4 Pro.
It's clear that no one at Apple (or any other big tech company these days) has ever watched old demoscene productions, then contemplated their performance against the available computing power of their current products and the experience thereof, and thought "something is very wrong".
The fact that in the miniplayer you can't display both the album art and the track information at the same time unless the cursor is hovering over the window absolutely boggles my mind. If I'm listening to a station, I want to glance over and see what I'm listening to. And I like the album art showing. This worked until Tahoe.
View menu > Hide Large Artwork will show the track info, but you of course lose the album art.
Of course it's not a major issue, it doesn't make the system unusable, but it was a nice little experience thing.
You have to give Apple credit where credit is due. They have managed to make first iTunes and now Music worse with every release. Which is truly amazing.
I've lowered my expectations over the years, but there's this single stupidity that drives me crazy: When you search for a keyword and play a song from the results, playback continues with the rest of the search results. Why the hell would I want to play all of the songs with similar names? iOS Music, on the other hand, does the expected and creates a station from the first played search result.
Good to know. My dad recently asked and I didn't know the pros/cons. I haven't upgraded but that's because I don't have a need to. He has a new Mac mini, and I thought it might make sense for him. But it sounds like it's not an upgrade, and is possibly a downgrade, especially if it will make things harder to find.
I've also had a proper Thunderbolt display freak out where the entire desktop just suddenly decides to ultra-saturate/ultra-contrast. Happened twice, across restarts. After the second restart it stopped, but I can't explain it and nothing like it has happened before/since/with other machines I connect to the screen with the same cable.
Not sure about "harder to find" but the sheer number of unexplainable glitches and slowness means I wouldn't otherwise have upgraded had I known. Waiting for a higher 26.X release might be worthwhile.
I have Tahoe on my work laptop and Sequoia on my personal desktop, and the thing that keeps me the most rooted on Sequoia is the padding. Everything on Tahoe is padded to hell and back. And the new tab design sucks so much. iTerm2 tabs look fucking terrible in it.
they have really tried hard to make the entire OS less usable. I'm not an "iToddler", I paid for a Unix workstation and will not have lower information density forced onto me.
No ability to search the scroll back buffer.
Stuck on the latest 1.2 release, there shall be no more, even though important bug fixes like memory leaks when using Claude are not backported. That’s a wild “go F yourself” decision. Ghostty crashed the other day for me, I have zero expectations that crash will be fixed for me until the 1.3 release. And when that release happens, the cycle of ridiculousness will restart. All the windows are gone when it crashes. I’m not ready to run Ghostty nightlies, last thing I need is the increased chance of crashing or bugs.
About to switch to native Terminal.app since it now supports truecolor. Or back to iTerm2.
I got an M5 and it unfortunately had Tahoe preinstalled. Out of the box, Quicklook is choppy. My non-Tahoe M1 is buttery smooth. I don't know how Apple managed to ruin a feature that's been running smoothly for decades.
Just wanted to comment to see if I can help answer any questions as well as mentioning that we improved the instructions in the README based on some of the points Rob made a few weeks back.
There really are a large number of us out there that know Tahoe would be a downgrade to their current setup
If you have any ideas on how to improve the resilience of the workarounds, please connect on the GitHub, or just starring the repo would help, as the project would get more attention and hopefully more solutions offered as a result.
It's frustrating to feel like your computer isn't.. yours anymore when you're pushed so insistently like with this "upgrade". Hopefully we can figure out some sustainable ways to get some autonomy back.
I just wanted to thank you for this work. I wouldn’t have known where to start. Reading about all the hoops to jump through I can’t help but think that macOS is getting ever closer to being malware, just like Windows. An OS you have to fight to stay productive. I’ve been a Mac user since 1995, but the way this has been going over so many years now, I can’t imagine my next computer to be yet another Mac any more. I have been forced to view Linux as the last refuge. It was nice while it lasted, but eventually Stallman was right the whole time.
If you can deal with known vulnerabilities and cross-reference all of Apple's CVE notes, more power to you. I can't say I have that much free time (Liquid Glass sucks, though).
You’ll be disappointed to learn that the deferral is 90 days from the release of the major OS version, not 90 days from when the configuration is set. There appears to be a bug in the delay logic in 15.7.3, but you really shouldn’t be running that — there are some important security fixes in 15.7.4.
Dear Apple, no latency from brain to action is the greatest design you can possibly have. We want to feel one with the machine. That's the greatest joy and difference between a Mac and a Windows machine. Adding latency to the fastest machine possible is criminal. Please STOP DOING IT with unnecessary animations.
I think you're in the wrong ecosystem if you don't like animations. Over the top animations have been at the core of Apple, I still remember the "drop in the water" animation of OS X Tiger's Dashboard. 20 years ago.
> no latency from brain to action is the greatest design you can possibly have. We want to feel one with the machine.
But... I used Windows growing up before switching to Linux, and I've been using a Macbook in recent years. Both Windows and Linux can be configured to run with no animation lag, but AFAIK this is just not possible in MacOS. I can't imagine doing anything serious on MacOS with animation log completely interrupting my train of thought or flow state.
I'm no Windows fan, but at least circa 2019, I know Windows 10 could be configured to be similarly snappy and free of laggy animations.
The greatest sin in MacOS is the immense lag when switching desktops ("Spaces"). It's a baffling design decision, I can't believe it's intentional.
I was really nervous about the update to Liquid Glass based on comments like this but my experience has been really positive. I love the new contextual tooltip menu when I try to select text and other thoughtful details. Maybe there’s things I’m not bumping into?
I honestly don’t understand why Liquid Glass provokes so strong reactions. To me it’s not that radically different from the old design. I don’t love it, and I don’t hate it. There is nothing new that in any way impacts how I use or experience my iPhone, my iPad or my Mac. My reaction to Liquid Glass was pretty much a neutral “looks a little bit different, I guess” before forgetting about it.
For me it was (or is) funny. After update I had a lot of controls in the same color as background. Wondering why I can’t do some actions I took my friends phone and built in apps looked different than mine.
Photos didn’t even show the top bar. Rebooted - I have it! Then photos started crashing every few days and I’m not heavy user.
Currently I’m fed up, because Camera starts up once per 20-30 runs for more than 10 seconds (I wait to see if it will start in the end).
I was hater of Apple, then switched around 2018 to be happy user until 2025. Looking for Android brand that allows loading clean system to not get bad experience after few months like with Shitsung.
Switching desktops on MacOS is a >1 second long animation that blocks input which can't be disabled. It can only be replaced with a fade in/out which is just as long.
A few weeks ago Apple had a tiny (<10MB) update for media codecs ready to install on my MBP. I expanded the details for that software update and saw that if I had run it, it would also have downloaded and installed Tahoe. Apple is burning so much trust right now with these dark patterns.
I just don't get the resistance to Tahoe, and I speak as a macOS power user through a couple decades.
Been on Tahoe now for a few weeks. The new rounded corners bug me a bit, but aside from that it's been rock stable. The trick with macOS is of course not to immediately upgrade. Give it a few weeks before you go to a new release.
I've been through all the releases since Jaguar in 2003. There's been some ups and downs, and a lot of complaints, but I'd say it still remains the most rock solid UNIX™ desktop OS out there.
I'm not a huge fan of Tahoe's aesthetics, but the response has been near hysterical. It's fine. Apple has done much worse (iOS 7 - present).
I wish some of the anger being directed at rounded corners would be redirected at the rapidly accumulating list of long-standing bugs in macOS instead.
Upgrading to Sequoia was a mistake, and so was upgrading to Tahoe.
I like new and shiny software, but these two releases aren't great. Outside of a good amount of bugs. It is wild to me that Apple can't even get their own UI consistent.
Apples own apps are pretty much the only things you can't close. Finder: can't quit. System settings, somehow doesn't expand horizontally (are we still in the 2000s apple?) I haven't felt the liquid glass or whatever too much on the laptop, but I just used one of my family members Iphone today, and man it was distracting, it seems crazy that contrast has gone out the window.
But especially the bugs. Apple should really take a release that is just bug fixing. I had to switch out Spotlight because it kept trying to want to index my entire system, which is hard when you work in both Rust and typescript projects (lots of small files).
Apple is and always has been a hardware company. I would like to use the Linux ecosystem, however there’s simply no laptop other than Mac that is light and powerful and runs 15 hours in battery.
It also lasts longer than the M4 Pro MacBook Pro 14”.
Bonus points: it has replaceable, upgradable, DUAL full size SSD slots and replaceable WiFi card.
You’re also getting a better discrete graphics chip that you can use for higher performance applications, or go on still-good integrated graphics to get that great battery life.
Intel Panther Lake systems are rolling out and they have graphics performance slightly exceeding the M5 MacBook Pro along with excellent power efficiency.
Macs still win out on certain CPU benchmarks and certainly on creative benchmarks like video editing, but the truth of the matter is unless you’re making money editing videos, that doesn’t matter. It’s not like Apple chips are so far ahead that buying something else will make you sit in purgatory waiting for builds to complete.
I took the plunge recently and got off Mac. I was pleasantly surprised that, yes, other hardware is fine. Much of it is good, actually.
There are even PC laptops with haptic trackpads, but also, you really don’t need that. macOS has made itself require it by designing around it unnecessarily, presumably to sell more $150 external trackpads (e.g., a three finger swipe is really not easier to accomplish than a keyboard shortcut, it’s just overengineering).
Even if you can’t get the same battery life…that’s something a $50 external battery can solve, and I would suggest that anything above ~8 hours of battery is more of a nice to have than a necessity.
Is it 100% as good in every respect? No. But if you’d rather use Linux and the hardware is the only thing in your way, I’d start actually looking at other laptops to find one that works for you rather than assuming MacBooks as the best. (One of the challenges is that there are so many options once you leave Mac-land).
Where the hell do people go that they are away from power for 15 hours and are on the computer the whole time? Are they video editing while in the middle of a safari?
And besides, every time I see comments like this, all I can think is that they never have even tried to find a PC laptop that is small, fast and has good battery life. Believe it or not they exist.
Long running batteries would have been useful when I first was on safari in 2002. But last year I was on safari again, and at camp there was power and wifi in the tents. It actually kind of killed some of the romance.
I'm a KDE user who is currently on his second stint using a Mac - the last was in 2017. I'm trying to be as objective as possible, but my list of "it works better on Linux" is far longer than the "it works better on Mac" list. I'd love to know your arguments.
Aestheticly to each his own. Maybe I'm used to KDE aesthetics. But KDE-on-Linux far outshines the Mac for window management, copy-paste via highlight, Always-on-top, mobile phone integration (KDE connect), keyboard control, accessibility (especially Sticky Keys), keyboard language switching options, click handling in background windows, proper readline support in bash and zsh, integration with third party software such as Emacs (I practically live in Org mode), proper handling of multiple users on a single machine, and so many other things that I just can't think of right now.
Could you elaborate? I see no glaring typography problems on KDE (while there are quite a few on macOS, IMO). Iconography – IDK, fairly consistent on the default theme, but it is a bit of a peculiar look.
One thing I really like about macOS is the shortcuts. You can fairly easily get 90% there on KDE, though. The last 10% is tricky regardless of the WM you choose: some apps just don’t want you to mess with the shortsuts in this way (looking at you, Mozilla).
Apart from that, honestly? With global menu, KDE is nearly indistinguishable from how I use macOS.
Started with kde2, then openbox (2000s), then i3 (2010s), these days I got so used to gnome, anything else feels like a downgrade. So probably it is just what you're used to.
The biggest annoyance for me is the removal of Firewire support with Tahoe. That’s why I keep Sequoia for the time being. I’ll probably create a new APFS volume and dual boot with Sequoia for the foreseeable future for Firewire support.
What mac hardware still has Firewire ports? My exposure to their hardware is mostly limited to the Macbooks of coworkers and family members, but I didn't realize there was any overlap between Tahoe support (seems to only go back to hardware released around 2020) and Firewire ports (seems to only go forward to hardware released around 2012).
There were times when we couldn't await to upgrade to the next Mac OS version. Tahoe is not one of those versions.
Already iOS 26 made me consider switching to Android, and now I've pondered returning to Linux after 26 years on Mac OS. Bizarrely, right now it's the quality of the hardware alone holding me at Mac OS. Wouldn't have expected that 6 or 7 years ago.
Sick of the forced UI refreshes and "modern" designs. Will Apple understand again this is where I work and basically live in and not some kind of entertainment system where I need design refreshes so it feels all shiny and new?
so we're all going to hold onto sequoia like we did snow leopard. only reason i'm not buying a new mac at the moment is because it would force me to upgrade.
the situation is absurd ..
fwiw switching to the sequoia beta channel in system settings killed the nag notifications for me (I believe the profile as defined in OP will stop all updates - which you probably don't want)
I’ve used Little Snitch to block the installation of Tahoe. I get a notification every few days, it when I click on it there’s a message that it can’t download the update. Massive stress reducer knowing I can’t accidentally upgrade to Tahoe.
I'm curious about what updates will get pushed through that channel. Is it just RTM updates, or will it also include beta updates? It's currently offering 15.7.5 through that channel.
Depends on what one is looking for. I'm considering upgrading to an M5 model because while the M6 redesign might come with some nicer specs, it's also going to be coming with some teething pains by virtue of having a new design. The M5 generation is probably going to be a speed bump with a chassis and screen that's a known quantity and has had the kinks smoothed out.
I skipped the touchbar/buttery era, but before that the GPU/ballgate disaster plagued the MacBookPro lineup — pushed me away from Apple hardware for over decade!
My vision has since gotten bad enough that I can't really use laptops/phones well, anymore — but recently got a 15" MacBookAir, M3 pre-Tahoe (for bedtime youtubies).
The hardware is exceptional, battery life even more so... and I'll never update the operating system.
> As a rule of thumb, Macs will not run any version of macOS older than the one they shipped with when they launched. Apple provides security updates for older versions of macOS, but it doesn’t bother backporting drivers and other hardware support from newer versions to older ones.
So the answer is “no”, they probably won’t be able to downgrade on the models that are about to be released.
It's possible if you do a wipe and do a fresh install. You essentially boot into the Sequoia installer. I'm also looking at possibly picking up a M5 MBP and was the first things I looked into.
Comments here paints Tahoe very poorly, and I trust comments here on this topic. This is very bad for Apple as OS from new Macs can not be downgraded and customers like myself will either delay purchases til hopefully next OS fix these issues (not having high hopes) or buy in the 2nd hand market for older OS.
> Run the script as described in the project's Read Me
I don’t think this warrants a whole installer script – if you replace UUIDs by hand, you can as well read through the .mobileconfig file and make sure you understand what the profile does, then double click it to install :)
Note that you might also want to remove some other entries from the profile, as, from a glance, those might still delay minor updates by 30 days. (Or does `forceDelayedSoftwareUpdates=false` make these harmless?)
I’ve been a pretty die hard Mac user for 25-odd years now (I own a HomePod, for fuck sake), but this is the first time I’ve taken pains to _not_ update to the latest OS. The Tahoe UI/UX is really just inexcusable, and nothing else I’ve heard or seen makes me willing to put up with it. I’m very much hoping they course correct soon, but as sits, my Linux box is suddenly starting to look like the future.
I'm the guy who installs OS betas on their main/only devices (going back to Windows Vista beta) and I don’t think I'll be installing this OS anytime soon. I'm more hoping that they get their act together by September 2026's release.
I got a work computer that was on Sonoma and had to update. Was prepared to be angry, especially after the time spent updating, and then it's eh, fine. The picture of Lake Tahoe makes me happy.
Might as well just rip off the band aid and learn to suck it up. Fixing Windows and MacOS with these fucking shitty hacks and doesn't work forever. You will be upgraded, like it or not, or be harassed the rest of your life to do so.
Adding my opinion: Sequoia was fine and so is Tahoe on a base M2. Can't say I've noticed a usability difference. I also prefer using a trackpad over a mouse and I don't know very many keyboard shortcuts, and I only use one monitor.
Still on Sonoma, don't plan to upgrade, I'm sick of upgrades that break everything or change the UI for the worse. Does anyone know how to block the "there is a new version" popup for Pages etc?
The constant, exhausting, and frankly pointless changes to macos is really driving me back to rolling my own desktop on freebsd or linux. At least under that environment nothing changes unless I change it.
Thank you. I own several Macs. One is on Tahoe. It feels the worst. More than myself, though, I need to give my less technical family members a respite from the tricky traps that lead to inadvertently installing it.
As bad as it is, I don't think it is bad in ways that non technical users are likely to notice unfortunately. Mostly because I think years of horrible software have trained people to not have expectations.
Tahoe is still a breath of fresh air compared to Windows, and iOS 26 is still great compared to Android (as I've unfortunately learned from a failed switch attempt).
What makes you say that about Android? I’m a iOS user, but was under the impression that Android was already quite polished, especially the stock experience (as it is with pixel phones)
It comes down mostly to app quality. The apps that are present are not as polished in ways that I found intolerable:
- myNetDiary: seemingly equivalent features, but was super stuttery on Android - like 20fps just scrolling and interacting. It also didn't feel native at all
- Transit: the app was extremely glitch when trying to scroll. Seizure inducing.
- Wire guard supports on demand tunnel on iOS and macOS. No such option on Android. Inconceivable.
- If you want a polished experience, you have to install the Pixel/Google equivalents of apps, and it is hard to use them in ways that aren't associated with your Google account. The built-in messages app is horrible so you need to install Google Messages. If you're logged into Play you're logged into Google Messages; no choice in the matter. If you want a good camera you need to install Pixel camera, and they leverage that to lock you into Google Photos. iOS is no better, but the trade off with Android is less polish for more choice, not less polish for the same strong arm lock in tactics.
- the OS hijack navigation in ways that are horrible for day to day browsing. In particular, there are no forward gestures because android insists on making swipe left from the right edge go back. I was told android is customizable but there is no option here. Consequence: no draggable scrollbar, no forward navigation in browsers.
- the built-in calendar (Google calendar) doesn't support drag and drop for adjusting event times. It made the calendar app excruciating to use - everything takes many more taps than iOS. Also, no support for CalDAV and CardDAV out of the box means Android is a bad choice if you self host. I tried DAVx5 but found it unreliable.
- Google Calendar won't show local calendar entries on open until you navigate to a different app then go back.
- The back gesture works differently more or less at random. Sometimes an app screen is part of the navigation stack, sometimes it isn't. Because android apps assume you will have a back button, they don't provide any back option, but it is always ambiguous what back will do - close the keyboard, close the app, close the menu, navigate back within the app. On iOS the options are different but more clearly presented and overall far more consistent than android.
- copy and paste is less consistent than iOS. Sometimes it for some reason makes me do a detour through a full screen text editor. Not really sure why.
- app design is inconsistent - a mix of pre-material, material 1, and material 3/you.
- doesn't have basic features I've come to rely on. Like on iOS I can make an app require biometrics to open. No such option with stock android launcher. Similarly, basic android doesn't seem to have the photo slides how option for backgrounds, which I love on my iPhone.
- Android has poor support for RCS. RCS just worked on my iPhone, but it failed to set up after a day of trying on the Pixel.
- Health Connect does a bad job deduplicating data. On iOS my watch, phone, earphones, etc all contribute data. IOS can handle this without eg double counting steps. Health Connect cannot. There are also fewer options for visualizing the data, since Health Connect is very new, whereas HealthKit is well over a decade old.
There are parts of android that are polished. I think the basic launcher experience is overall better if you turn off the Google Now stuff. I like that the animations are faster. Material You, although underrealized, looks great where it is implemented, far better than liquid glass.
But having used it for a few weeks now I can confirm it is a strict downgrade over Sequoia for me. I use none of the new features it has introduced, and the changes to existing features are just worse.
Some UI animations are slow and jittery - and this is on an M4 Pro. The Finder has gone from fine to janky once again, especially with horizontal scroll. The window corners and mouse interactions are indeed annoying (I'd assumed the many complaints were at least slight hyperbole). Left-aligned window titles are unbalanced and ugly. I've had weird (visual) app duplication issues with the Application smart-folder in the Dock. Cross-device copy-paste SEEMS to be more flaky than usual. And most petty of all I really don't like the new icons - especially the Trash icon for some reason.
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