I noticed the Quick Look animation (space bar on any file) is very sluggish, at least on my M2 Max.

These visual UI problems which are showing some sloppiness in the UI is much better than macOS 26 and honestly I really like Golden Gate for more efficiency and the fact that Siri actually works now and can replace a great deal of things I usually would have googled.

Can Golden Gate really be considered a fix release for Tahoe with its massive AI updates?

The main menu bar sometimes gets darker.

I had this happen after toggling the menu bar background / Liquid Glass transparency settings a couple times. I think a window (from Firefox) somehow got positioned slightly behind the menu bar, which was causing it to take its color from the window instead of my desktop background when it was on top.

Find the window, then Option + maximize button should fix it.

I've been running Golden Gate since the first beta was released in June. I've generally been very happy with it. I think it'll take a couple years to unwind the Alan Dye era, but Golden Gate is a significant improvement over macOS 26

We are seeing the benefits in real time in this release if those images mean anything lol

A friend who quit Apple a month or two ago left mostly because the whole company was utterly AI-pilled and they couldn’t take being a meat proxy talking to other meat proxies any more.

I sure ain’t upgrading my Mac any time soon if I can help it.

Maybe they should try replacing some of their product managers with AI

These are the benefits.

It looks like Tahoe is about to become the new Snow Leopard.

What I notice is that the entire OS feels very laggy. Many interactions just don’t feel as snappy anymore as before. The worst candidate for this is definitely Mission Control, it has become a total dumpster fire in my opinion. (BTW: running on an M4 Pro MBP)

Yes, IIRC System Preferences was fine (hopefully not rose-tinted glasses), it became the current piece of shit when it was reborn as iOS-sibling System Settings, in Ventura?

Maybe Apple ported the Spotlight algorithm over for the System Settings search? Spotlight has, well, unique properties that take extra effort to achieve in a search system.

same here, glad I didn't update to Golden Gate when it was released, even if I was tempted.

I haven't noticed any bigger bugs (Apart from search in System Settings still not working), the main annoyance is the Siri bubble showing up next to text fields.

At least Gnome doesn't have liquid glass

Are you crazy? libadwaita looks way, way more polished and consistent than anything I've seen on macos for the last at least 5 years. And only one of these is an open-source project with a limited budget.

TIL there’s a nice Linux clone of the Mac UI https://blogs.gnome.org/alicem/files/2023/09/header.png

It’s 25 years old at this point and got lapped by Gnome & kde at least 10 years ago.

It’s time for some apple internal honesty about the state of MacOS gui.

am I the only one not liking the black tint in Spotlight?

I'm sure there's plenty of actual bugs, but a list of places where alignment is off by a few pixels ain't it, chief.

Yes, fair.

MacOS has felt like AI slop since before there was AI. I'm a decades long mac user, and there's simply no excuse for how sloppy their releases have become

I was chatting with a friend about The Decline and Fall of Apple over the weekend. We both miss Steve Jobs.

For all that Steve was batshit he was willing to do hard things that were "bad for business." I heard so many legendary stories over the years of Steve Jobs holding up releases at the last minute because they weren't up to par. That takes guts in a corporate environment where there is so much pressure to go along and say "well, we have to ship something." No, you don't have to ship something. You can take your time to do it right and ship things that are high quality.

Apple shouldn't assume that just because they are the incumbent that they will be around forever. Today's Steve Jobs could already be alive and plotting...

It could be that those bugs are Claude or Codex works of art.

In the not so distant future we'll just ask Claude to rewrite the entire MacOS from scratch without those bugs :)

Have they fixed getting a name server over VPN?

macOS 15 is the last usable release.

Same. Will sell my Air when security updates stop for Sequoia

10.5 Leopard was my peak. 10.6 Snow Leopard improved on its stability but had a touch of visible regretion (in my opinion). After that, I haven't really been happy with any release. Obviously some things have improved but... 10.5 was branded Unix, the UI was beautiful. It felt solid.

Could be a long wait. Mail is the one app I care most about and it's been broken in different ways since Catalina, along with issues in Photos, Music, etc. Might as well go to Linux where it's at least possible to fix the high priority issues.

Yes, it is. How can’t you follow this logic? It is an upwards trajectory. Genuinely, what are you missing about this? Two things can be true at the same time. Nobody said that there had been a historical downward trajectory. Well, at least, in your description of what “gets you”. But I’ve never really seen many people arguing that macOS hasn’t degraded over the past ~10-15 years. The fact that’s “getting you” s still worth noting and not every online comment has to be a complete, comprehensive accounting of someone’s entire position. Some things are just left unsaid because there’s a shared understanding. At this point I think that “macOS had generally gotten worse” is easily one of those.

iMessage (Messages) doesn't work for me after upgrading. Downgrading to macOS 26 looks to be a chore so I guess I'm just SOL until it gets patched.

Yeah, I am quite sad that I am packing up and shipping off my nifty little Intel MacBook Pro and for the first time ever, I'm wondering if I can do without a Mac, not even really wanting one.... the one form factor which sort of appeals is a Wacom Movink 13 w/ a Mac Mini (but I hate that the screen is so low resolution and none of the Cintiq Pros use the same stylus as my other stylus devices (Kindle Coloursoft, Samsung Galaxy Note and Book)

There is no benefit for upgrading from Sequoia to Golden Gate. UI isn't better looking or faster. Siri AI is not great. More bugs, not less.

While generally happy with the speed improvements it brought, I can't back question the presence of testers on Apple side. Sure they are a small niche company (/s) but they can do better. Major example, desktop switching shortcuts are borked after device comes up from sleep! >https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1whtmc3/macos_27_mis...

The funny fact is that they didn't add any new feature to Mission Control, they just rewrote it and broke it in the process.

I also genuinely cannot believe how broken Mission Control is. I use it constantly and the flickering, black spaces, and other small issues lead to an overall frustrating experience I did not have in 26. I'm very surprised that these issues didn't come up on HN from all the beta users, many reporting that they're very happy with 27. Is Mission Control a feature that those likely to download the beta are disproportionately unlikely to use?

NeXTSTEP.

Objective-C doesn't have namespaces (like C), so people use two-letter prefixes on their types to prevent name clashes. The NS prefix is used by Apple's Foundation and AppKit frameworks, that originated from NeXTSTEP, hence NS.

Yes, but it's not like this is some hidden legacy stuff, that you're not supposed to encounter. This is part of the public macOS API: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/appkit/nstext

Every AppKit and Foundation type uses the NS prefix, and will keep doing so for any foreseeable future. New NS types are added to these frameworks each macOS release.

It is; in MacOS NSText is a Cocoa API which arrived and evolved from NeXTstep.

Seems like most people think the NS prefix stands for NeXTSTEP. What do you think?

codepoet80

there, just told you

It is.

Citation: I was a NeXTSTEP developer.

Maybe you should've googled this before you commented

Look at Apple's market cap and salary ranges before reading this article.

not to mention that the Music app that has been completely destroyed in macOS 26 is still completely unusable

some of the 'not centered' complaints are probably a little on the pedantic side. Often to visually 'center' something it's not actually centered.

Just AI it /s

Not my experience at all. Golden Gate runs smooth as butter with no issues except spotlight being as buns as it's always been.

I've been running the beta on my machines. Definitely a huge upgrade over Tahoe. Visually and performance-wise.

This is a usual crap Apple has turned to, other things are so fucked up, so I’d close my eyes on the former. E.g.:

Apple (iCloud) Data Recovery works only if you deleted files from Drive via GUI, which places them in Trash.

So you actually do have them. Whaat? Why would you need a recovery? Good question.

Now it gets really interesting: you’ve emptied the Trash and now wanna to recover some.

But they are no more. Gone. Can’t be recovered anymore.

And there is a reason of course: because fuck you, that’s why.

And it’s documented FYI, so it’s a feature.

Checkmate.

I had this naive assumption for years that MacOS was the most stable / workable *nix desktop available, but I’d been sleeping on modern Linux distros.

Been on Mac since the 90s, now a very happy Linux desktop user.

Thank you for this; this has been driving me nuts the past week and it never once occurred to me it might be a genuine issue with the new OS and not my double-click muscles beginning to fail.

watchOS 27 broke noise monitoring.

I've had a random annoying bug where a mysterious window with no controls and no menu bar presence appears on top of all of my apps with seemingly no origin, rhyme, or reason, and I can't do anything to get rid of it except restart. It looks suspiciously like one of the "do you want to allow this accessory to connect" dialog boxes but it doesn't have any text. It's really mystifying.

I hoped this update would've made my Mac more stable from the last release, and while maybe the performance is better, I feel like issues like this do randomly occur.

Yeah the iPhone liquid glass update made everything so glitchy and slow. Mac updates haven't been a problem.

This one really bugs me. Could be my setup (have a few Menu-bar utilities). Anyway... I do Finder Searches a lot to find files in the current directory or system-wide using either find by file name or file contains. Get a list of files fine in response. Then close the search, and my Finder window is blank. Have to click to another folder in the Sidebar, then back to my original folder to get the full folder contents to show. All previous OS versions returned back to list all the files.

Also not a bug, but a bad recession ihmo. I always used to have Finder>Show-Hidden-Files option on. Not it is always off, and one must Cmd+Shift+. to show hidden files each time one opens a directory. Why take that option away ??

If anyone has insights about what might be causing my blank "after search" window, and/or a way to make show hidden files the default please advise. Thx, NSC

Every time I read one of these types of posts, I never have any idea what the author is talking about.

Private deployed instances of Claude models at Apple has been reported written majority of their code. Perhaps these visual bugs are the manifest of Claude's weakness in vision in the past 6-12 months? Admittedly Claude's vision has gotten better this year.

Reports like this make it sound like there aren't serious flaws and bugs in MacOS. The things he's listing are trivialities.

I started writing a list of UX and software bugs in Mac OS, but honestly, I don't have the energy or time, there are so many. Mac OS has become an absolute travesty of an OS.

I hope that with Opus 5.5 they will be able to fix more bugs in the next version of macos, in the meantime I will stay on Sonoma. This is really disappointing since Golden Gate was supposed to be a bugfix update

The most glaring regression in macOS 27 for me is random audio popping/crackling in the Spotify client, otherwise it's mostly fine tbh.

It's such an obvious issue that I'm wondering whether I'm the only one experiencing it or whether Apple users just don't use Spotify or whether Spotify simply doesn't test on macOS (and as such I have no idea where even to write a ticket, the macOS Feedback app doesn't even have a category for problems in non-Apple applications).

Opens with a reference to Snow Leopard, I miss it to this day.

The Mac User Guide on the site was updated to Golden Gate on launch day. There were lingering server-side cache issues that would occasionally display the Tahoe version to some users.

These should have been fixed as of a couple weeks now.

Anyone still seeing Tahoe? If so, please reply with the URL you are visiting.

This is a bad faith article. The feel of a "buggy mess" is different from what the author described. Every OS is going to bugs.

I feel like the author wanted to write a post like one of those about Tahoe (menu bar, corner dragging), but the stuff they wrote about was all very "who cares"?

Golden Gate has in every part been a significant improvement over Tahoe.

I personally haven’t noticed any serious bugs yet, but I can’t help but notice how jittery the animations have become compared to just two versions before. It doesn’t feel “smooth” anymore even on new hardware.

I don't know, there are definitely some rough edges (particularly with the menu bar for some reason - big rewrite there?), but overall I'm quite happy with Golden Gate. "Buggy mess" is some serious hyperbole.

Of the issues they report:

- The centering bugs seem... not very important.

- The Mac User Guide looks fine to me. Shows "for macOS 27."

- Network app?

- Why are you looking at the Mission Control app icon at 20x zoom? And in any case, doesn't it seem reasonable to simplify the traffic light design to a flat circle for an icon that will be displayed very small 99.9% of the time?

- Firefox bugs are bugs in Firefox. (I also keep experiencing the stuck menu bug, but again, Firefox bug.)

- "You can find references to NeXTSTEP, the ancestor of macOS, in its UI!" No, that's not what that means.

- "I have a folder open in the Dock. If I click on another folder, shouldn't that then open?" Yes, and it does.

- The rest, sure.