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 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.
For me KDE, I can't deal with gnome especially 3. But yeah moving to KDE from Mac was a breath of fresh air. Finally options again to configure my computer the way I want it.
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".
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.
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.
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.
Apple Music has actually gone to "completely unusable" for my use.
I use it (or did, pre-Tahoe) to play iTunes-shared music over my network. Since Tahoe, it will play a couple (plus or minus a handful of songs) and then just stop rather than transitioning to the next song.
I've been listening to the actual radio for the past couple months because I haven't had the time to work out how to play my network-shared music.
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.
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 also accidentally upgraded due dark pattern of auto-selecting Sequoia instead of update for Sonoma. Now my external monitor won't wake up when waking my macbook from sleep (in clamshell mode, lid always closed). Nothing fixes it, beyond infuriating.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Readit News
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 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.
Glad I don't have to use it out of work.
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.
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 wiped my computer and reinstalled Sequoia last week.
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".
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.
I use it (or did, pre-Tahoe) to play iTunes-shared music over my network. Since Tahoe, it will play a couple (plus or minus a handful of songs) and then just stop rather than transitioning to the next song.
I've been listening to the actual radio for the past couple months because I haven't had the time to work out how to play my network-shared music.
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.
On an M4 Pro! Pure planned obsecelence. Noticed it regularly with major MacOS releases. Nothing will convince me otherwise.
Dead Comment
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.
https://support.apple.com/guide/deployment/software-update-p...
Do you think that new major OS versions introduce only fixes and not bugs?
I think version N-1 is a good balance between getting the fixes and avoiding the new bugs.
Would be good to clarify this in the README. So appreciate your work btw.
But I can't think of a single animation that added a delay to processing on MacOS.
Compare to say, Windows, at least.
Dead Comment
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).
Linux + KDE surpassed Windows many years ago, now I find I also prefer it to the Mac laptops, which are otherwise better only for portability.
Apple need to get their software act together. Such a shame because the hardware is awesome. A near perfect inversion of the era of Tiger on the G4.
For example, the ASUS TUF A14 is only one hour shorter on the real world office productivity test than the M5 MacBook Pro:
https://youtu.be/3Q837Uclwp8
(Battery life section)
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).
I setup a focus for do not disturb that runs from 12am to 11:59pm every Day.
Have not seen the popup on 4 weeks since I set it up
Blocking mobileassetd should stop that:
https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2026/1/6.html