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.

Saying 27 is an improvement over 26 is a different statement to the one you’re making about the general trend of macOS.

Nor does it mean that people shouldn’t welcome improvements even if those improvements don’t bring the overall quality back to that of what it used to be.

But I do also agree with you that we shouldn’t be ignoring the fact that Apple have generally been on a downward spiral in terms of software quality for a number of years.

I'm still on Sequoia and waiting for things to get better. Thankfully I don't do dev work for Apple platforms anymore.

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’ve been experiencing much of the same as well. There seems to be some kind of oversight over keeping previously stabilized affordances intact through each upgrade, at least in the past couple of years. It’s my theory that it’s likely to do with some kind of newly introduced AI steps in their process which doesn’t care so much about small nuanced ui spots like this but check plenty of other boxes.

Another instance in watch os is the total removal of access to the app switcher And quick jump to precious app. It’s been driving me nuts.

I use Spaces very heavily and it is amazing how much they borked it up. Even 27.0.1 is not helping it.

Spaces really needs some attention. It makes me much more productive overall, but it really feels like it's been forgotten. Beyond just making it less buggy, some simple things would make a huge difference, like being able to rename spaces, and not only showing the name of the space when you hover over it.

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

Generally speaking, same. I haven't noticed any major bugs at all.

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

I do the same thing, except I usually run a version for two-three years and skip some OS releases in-between.

My recent upgrade was from Ventura to Sequoia, and I will likely move to Golden Gate at some point next summer right before Sequoia's support period expires (this happens in July or August). Over years it meant that I avoided some of the famous bugs like the discoveryd fiasco in Yosemite (I went from Maverics to El Capitan).

The one downside is that I sometimes have a to go through a huge app redesigns or big feature changes that have been accumulating over several versions. I ignore most of them and probably don't get as much value from the OS as I could have.

The golden rule is becoming, never update. But then, I used Snow Leopard until El Capitan, and could no longer get software updates I needed.

The new golden rule is just don't upgrade. I didn't upgrade to Tahoe, and I won't upgrade to Golden Gate

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.

Linux world hasn't even settled on what display system to use.

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.

I cant drag and drop any more in finder somehow. it was working fine, now it works and then i have to restart or it is not working at all. what a mess

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 big problem, just slight downgrades.

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.

Well, even ignoring Claude’s capabilities, you would expect human testers (whether Apple employees or external beta testers) to be creating bug reports for all these things. It’s embarrassing if your self-proclaimed bug-fix/stability release is buggy and unstable. If the bugs are filed, then Claude should be able to help fix them.

Mac OS has become an absolute travesty of an OS

It's the worst desktop OS there is.. except for all the others.

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

I think those clicks and pops are a Chromium issue. The Spotify desktop app uses Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF). I use to hear those all the time when using Chrome and they've mostly disappeared now that I mostly use FF.

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 have bugs. On top of that, I cannot reproduce a lot of these issues. It's clear the OP is using multiple third party utilities to manage things like the menubar. Try turn them off and complaining.

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 reversed many of Tahoe's regressions and further updates will continue to do so.

  > This one just irks me. Show me one oval camera lens anywhere in the world. I'm waiting.

Well, OP, today is the day you learn about anamorphic lenses

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.

What does the NS prefix mean?

Firefox UI bugs are crazy. For example, on Tahoe 26.5, you can select disabled control menu items: https://imgur.com/a/7VUHzLK

Anywhere else on macOS, you can't do that. Even better, you can activate them with Enter.

I've noticed some mini AI icon that's sometimes shows up when I select some text on Safari - I've no Siri enabled - and when I click on it nothing happens (when I'm able to click, I need to be fast like Sonic to catch it!!)

Upgraded and now audio won't play out of my HDMI monitor. I wouldn't think this would count as a very niche use case, but what do I know.

It still isn't apparent to me why Apple decided to take their otherwise logical and fine UI, and create Liquid Glass. I guess somebody got a nice new title and bonus, though?

Did they fix the bug where the toolbar of applications would either get stuck open or disappear while in full screen mode, requiring them to be moved to the desktop before returned to fullscreen?

happy i've waited

This, this this the gripe list for macOS 27? I guess I'll add on, then:

They've completely broken every experience around minimized windows:

- App Expose doesn't show minimized windows at all

- Cmd-` iterating doesn't iterate through minimized windows.

- I've had times where Cmd-`-ing to another Terminal yanked it from it's workspace onto my current one.

- It will just stop rendering the Mission Control thumbnails. 90% of the time it just shows empty workspaces

- It seems to be doing some stupid optimization where it blanks out my Firefox window until the workspace switch animation has fully finished. Likely it's part of how they finally removed the janky animations from the past 3 releases. But, COME ON Wayland can run on my 5 year old x86_64-linux laptop with perfect animations with none of this jank and compromise.

- It regularly doesn't change focus from Firefox (on my second workspace) to Firefox Nightly (on my first workspace), when swiping. Or even swiping and clicking. Only if you swipe, move the cursor and then click does focus shift to the open, top app on the workspace.

It's hot f****king garbage. Maybe this is my foot peddle but it breaks every basic way I do window management and use the OS.

Breaking minimized windows. Only Apple could manage that.

I couldn't reproduce the Color Picker bug mentioned at the end.

Just one small thing to add about the Color Picker: I think it's a good example of how native UI apps have changed over the last decade.

The macOS Color Picker is nice. The idea is to have a single color picker for the whole system. It's extensible, so apps can add their own custom pickers (for example, an OKLCH picker), and you can reuse your palettes across applications.

Sounds great! But most of the applications where you might care about those features (customization, sharing your color schemes, etc.) don't work with the native Color Picker: Figma, Adobe apps, all Electron-based apps, and so on. So the Color Picker's features are useless. That component of the system is exactly the same as it was when I got my first Mac in 2007.

There are multiple nice native features that apps don't use; over time, they become forgotten and barely maintained.

I don't know what the solution is, but at some point, I think Apple should take frameworks like Tauri or Electron into account and build integrations for developers who use them. I know the integrations exists (they are the native APIs), and it's the developers' responsibility to use them, but that's not happening, and it ends up affecting the UX.

I’ve been having some weird issues since upgrading that I haven’t been able to pinpoint if it’s the apps or the OS.

New since upgrading:

- In telegram messages get stuck sending and the app has to be force quit - Discord doesn’t pick up audio device changes until the app is restarted - Soundsource has crashed a few times if I change my AirPods out. - Selecting a screenshot area is laggy when dragging the selection box

iOS 27 is in the same situation: a little bit less annoying than 26 overall but new bugs all over the place. If that is the Tim Cook farewell, it leaves a very bad impression.