Let’s start with the things I like.
My favourite Tahoe features:
- Group chats now sport animated backgrounds. Yes, it’s a small touch that can make Messages feel livelier… but more importantly, I hope to never send a group a message that I meant for an individual again.
- Safari’s reader mode automatically summarizes the article you’re reading in the right rail, sometimes giving you the article headings.
- Control centre and menu bar extras got another pass. It’s an improvement.
- Spotlight’s new UI now has a dedicated app search, which I’ll use a lot. Spotlight also gains a clipboard history, which I hope I remember to use. But probably not.
- Apple’s Journal app makes its macOS debut for those who like to capture daily reflections.
- I feel that Xcode 26 is a big improvement in many little ways, although I didn’t do much Mac development during Sequoia’s tenure. I may be appreciating two years of changes here! The AI assistant is great at offering code changes, though you need to watch what you ask it and watch it really carefully.
Not everything is great, though.
- The new volume and brightness HUDs are easy to miss, and I expect to overlook them entirely most of the time
- Some of Apple’s own apps still do menu bar extras the old way.
- While Spotlight is improved, I had to force it to re-index—a maintenance chore that should be automatic.
I want to mention Launchpad here. Personally, I just use Spotlight. But others seem to be really missing it.
Then there’s the downright ugly.
- Most of the interface looks muddled unless you turn on “Reduce Transparency,” which defeats the point of Tahoe’s glossy new design.
- Off by one (and more) errors abound in the UI.
- The so-called Icon Jail just adds unnecessary ugliness.
- The menu bar intentionally vanishes into invisibility.
- The alert popups look like they were designed by two different people who didn’t talk. The text is left aligned, which is fine. The icon is also left aligned, which is also fine. But the icon sits above the text, giving it a horrible look overall.
I’m going to continue to use Tahoe, because I like Xcode 26. And oddly, I trust macOS 26 with my data. In the past, it’s felt sometimes like Apple has half executed on a plan and missed as a result. Here, it feels like they locked in their plan early and made very few changes during Tahoe’s development. It was just an ugly and inconsistent design.
I have a couple apps planned for the new feature that I’d planned to release on iPhone, iPad and Mac. I want to use 2026 SDK features, so I’d planned to release them as iOS 26, iPadOS 26 and macOS 26 only. As of today, I’m delaying the macOS version until I’m more comfortable telling people they can update to the new macOS. Part of this is just practical, as I expect to have to re-test the Mac app when some future update to macOS 26 comes out due to a tweaked visual layout.
If you don’t have to use Tahoe, I think you should wait a little to see if the reported inconsistencies are going to bother you. I’ll take the new features and the inconsistencies together, but it’s a trade off you might not need to make.